Cardinal (Deadly) Sins and Blessings (Part I)
Sin is a very ambiguous concept. It is located on different levels of spiritual life, contaminating it. And each of these levels expresses itself differently, hence the sin that affects them has a different character. When we speak of sin, we most often think of sins as thoughts, words, or deeds that are transgressing God's law. We confess such things, and perhaps it seems to us that it exhausts our sinfulness. But sin is something much deeper. The Scriptures often speak of sin as a reality that exists beyond thoughts, words, or deeds. St. Paul wrote about sin, which maneuvers even the law of God, which is inspired by the Law, about sin "that dwells in me", adding that the evil that I do is no longer I, but precisely this sin that dwells in me.
All this sounds very mysterious, and I suppose that only few of us understand it. This ambiguity and mystery of the concept of "sin" can be seen in a special way in the case of the "cardinal or deadly sins". For cardinal sins are not in themselves concrete deeds. This is expressed in the tradition of Eastern Christianity, which does not call them sins, but uses the Greek word logismoi to indicate that it is not about sins like others. (Speaking of Eastern Christianity, it lists not seven, but eight of these logismoi.) The word logismos means to discuss, ponder, reason, argument, cause... In all dictionaries of classical Greek, we will not find the meaning of sin. This is very puzzling. Our brothers and sisters from the East make us break away from the practice typical of the West and look inwards, to see that underneath the concrete sins from which we confess, there is something else. We have probably heard that deadly sins are the cause of concrete sins, but on what basis?
The Seven Cardinal (Deadly) Sins
To understand the nature of the deadly sins, and especially the first and fundamental sin of pride, one must go back to the beginning and model of all sins, which is original sin described in `the third chapter of Genesis. In this first part meditation, we cannot enter into a thorough analysis of it, hence we will focus only on its very essence. It consists in the fact that man has been deceived by Satan, and this at the most sensitive point concerning the nature of God. Satan has convinced man that God is not love that He is a threat, a rival of man, and that if man breaks the deal with God and stands on his own two feet, he will be like God himself, he will decide for himself what is good and what is bad.
Behind original sin is the original lie of the one who was a liar from the beginning. Since this lie, which man has believed, concerns love, and the love of God is available only through faith, man has closed the way to the love of God, moreover, he has closed in his heart the way to God as love. Man, created out of love and for love, cannot live without it. The life of a man without love becomes absurd. The Word of God calls such a state of man - "death". It is simply impossible to live like this, a person must be loved. Therefore, after cutting himself off from the unconditional love of God, man states with horror that he can be unloved, that he can be unworthy of love. He loses ground under his feet, begins to feel threatened in what is most important to him. This is man's first reaction after sin. The Scriptures say, "they knew they were naked." Shame is born, which is essentially a fear for one's own dignity, ultimately for the dignity of being loved. Through this specific fear, man says: "They cannot deprive me of my dignity, my honor, the feeling that I am someone, they cannot reduce me to the rank of an animal."
In a certain sense, Satan's false promise is fulfilled here: through fear for himself and for his dignity, man becomes at the center of his world, he becomes for himself the highest, but at the same time threatened value. He acquires certain attributes of divinity, but they do not make him God, but an idol unto himself. The holy text goes on to say that "they made themselves loincloths then." This is where pride is born as a strategy of hiding what we fear in us and of gaining human love. Its basis is therefore the fear for one's own dignity, no longer guaranteed by the unconditional love of God and putting one's fearful and sore self at the center of one's world.
In fact, man after original sin has no choice. Whether he wants to or not, he must be proud, because he must be loved. Otherwise, his life becomes meaningless, it becomes vegetation... This basic fear leads him to use every means to maintain dignity, honor, to gain love, or at least some of its attributes. Pride is, in essence, the attitude of forcing others to behave in such a way that I feel loved, to be someone for others. And since man's heart satisfies only the unconditional love of God, which the other man cannot afford, hence this forcing of love, or its attributes, is a bottomless well. Still not enough. Here we can clearly see how pride is the source of other sins. They are nothing more than its strategies to achieve the main goal, which will always remain unattainable. The other man, because he bears God's likeness within himself, is a promise of boundless love, but a promise never fulfilled to the end. So, it is a source of hope and frustration at the same time. In this context, the famous phrase of the leading representative of twentieth-century atheistic existentialism J. P. Sartre becomes understandable: "Another man is hell."
Until Tomorrow
fr. george