Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Rebecca
It's irrational to choose a path of life that's self destructive.
Lee
That's Rebecca DeYoung, professor of ethics, history, and philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She's also the author of the award-winning book Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, in which she gives a potential reframe for some of the language of sin, that might just lead us to a happier and healthier life.
Rebecca
It's really helpful to ask, "what is the right thing to do?" That's a very helpful ethical question. But it's another layer of ethical questioning to ask yourself, "and if I did this over and over again, every day for the next month, well, what kind of person would I be headed toward becoming?"
Lee
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Sin.
It's a word seen by many as a religious word, one which evokes all manner of images, like maybe... well, Las Vegas or , or the temptation of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, or a man standing in a pulpit with a wagging finger and condemning tirade, threatening fire and brimstone.
My teenage years in church in Alabama were characterized by just such preaching. A capricious and mighty God who was looking for the slightest trivial misstep. A God who seemed to rather delight in catching us in some so-called sin, such that we might be cast into outer darkness and torment for an eternity.
The whole notion of sin has done a great deal of psychological damage to too many. I've seen tears of 50-year-olds, just [00:02:00] this week, still unable to shake the perverse construal of sin that was foisted upon them as tender-hearted children.
In light of such, to raise the notion of sin, especially in public spaces, is a fraught endeavor. But our guest today has studied what are traditionally referred to as the seven deadly sins.
She proposes that the medieval taxonomy of sin is actually quite relevant to our lives today, and that it can steer us away from destructive ways of life and toward habits, practices, dispositions which make possible a better way of life.
She raises for us profound questions like: what might sloth have to do with love? Or: what might greed have to do with why we might be so very restless?
In any case, if you've been hurt by the language of sin, or maybe you've never considered it seriously at all, I suspect you might find this interview [00:03:00] particularly worthwhile.
Here's our interview with Rebecca DeYoung.
Rebecca DeYoung is professor of ethics, history, and philosophy at Calvin College, holds a PhD from Notre Dame, and much of her research is focused on the seven deadly sins and virtue ethics, leading her to write the C. S. Lewis Prize winning book entitled Glittering Vices, A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, which we'll be discussing today, contributed various essays on philosophy and ethics to an array of academic journals, lives with her husband, Scott, in Grand Rapids on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Welcome, Rebecca.
Rebecca
It's a pleasure to be with you.
Lee
It's great to have you with us.
Rebecca and I have been reminiscing about Notre Dame days, so-- I don't recollect us meeting, but lots of fond memories of days there at Notre Dame.
Well, it's great to have you with us, and thanks so much for joining us.
So, a book on the seven deadly sins, entitled Glittering Vices, and I would imagine that a lot of people, in hearing that you've written a book about such, [00:04:00] must react to wondering why you would write about some medieval, perhaps irrelevant, sort of Dana Carvey, pietistic, self righteous, church lady, obsessive compulsive, moralistic disorder.
So, how in the world do you see this as practical for the world that we live in?
Rebecca
It's interesting, my colleagues, uh, love to nickname me the Queen of the Vices. Um, and when you write a book on sin, no one wants to be your friend anymore.
No, seriously, especially when you're coming from a tradition associated with Calvinism to say that you're working on sin... it's just like, you might as well show up, um, dressed as a grim reaper or something, because it's just sort of a heavy duty topic.
But the way I got into this material was actually through virtue ethics and spiritual formation lenses. Um, so it came from questions about character formation. How does moral transformation happen? And where do we start from? And where do we have to go?
And if you push this into the Christian tradition, the whole conversation gets [00:05:00] framed by love. So the picture is, you're stuck.
It's a little bit like, imagine an alcoholic coming into Alcoholics Anonymous and saying, "I am trapped in my own self destructive behavior and I cannot get out."
And then the community offering you practices and training and support for moving into a healthier, more spiritually whole way of life. And that invitation in the Christian tradition comes from God. But if you frame it just in terms of sort of reformation of character, that's really the lens through which I'm studying the topic.
Lee
And, how did you get into, uh, interest in the virtue traditions and the vices that we'll be talking about today?
Rebecca
You know, I started as an arcane academic, reading some medieval stuff and Thomas Aquinas. And I was reading through this, you know, dusty, dry Summa Theologiae, which I love, but most people don't love to read, um, and I was reading through the virtue and vice section and just [00:06:00] found my life that kept getting laid open.
So I kept feeling like the book was holding up a mirror of character to me and saying, "oh, you look like this, and that's called this vice or virtue." And so it was really an exercise in self examination to read through that material.
And I thought, oh, it's probably just me because I'm a medieval scholar and no one else will read this stuff. But I started teaching it in a virtue seminar, um, to my students, and my students had exactly the same reaction.
One of them said to me, "Wow, I feel like this course is like Virtue and Vice Formation 101. It's changing the way I see myself. It's changing the way I understand my life. It's changing my vision for the kind of person I want to become."
And so to think of it as an invitation to transformed character is a positive way to think about what motivates us to look back in history and find, you know, thousands of years of people living this out and thinking about this [00:07:00] reflectively and offering us wisdom that they've learned along the journey.
Lee
I resonate with that notion that, hearing from undergrads, that once they get a kind of a vision of-- uh, you know, we're earlier talking about Alasdair McIntyre, but kind of, you know, I use a lot of his kind of stuff on sketching out kind of how to think about the meaning of your life and untutored human nature to humankind as it could be if it realizes its essence of what it means to be human, and virtues as these habits and dispositions that constitute such a life.
And it's fascinating the way in which that simple vision of life has such a profound way of helping young people, I think, think about the very pursuit of their vocations and how they're going to go about, about living their lives.
But why do you, why do you think... how did we get to such a place that that sort of vision has been lost from... because, you know, the stuff that you're talking about, I assume, would have been very commonly known, talked about a lot in the medieval church, but most of us these days, unless you start taking a virtue ethics class in college or something, or reading some of the virtue ethicists, you don't learn this stuff, right? How [00:08:00] do we get to this kind of place?
Rebecca
It's interesting. One of the exercises I do with my students at the very beginning of class is to write a little eulogy for ourselves.
So imagine that you died and someone has to stand up at your funeral and give a eulogy. And what you find is that people focus on character at funerals, when they're looking back over their life as a whole and saying, what kind of person have I become? And then all of a sudden, the character language comes out.
And it's interesting how we lack vocabulary for that nowadays. People will be groping for language and have kind of lost touch with that virtue-vice vocabulary.
I think one of the historical reasons for that, especially in the Protestant tradition, is that there was a shift in the Reformation from virtue-vice talk to commandment talk.
So we went toward a sort of law-based ethic at that point, and that, of course, gets picked up by the culture, and we have sort of deontology and ethical oughts and what ought [00:09:00] I to do and what rules should I follow and what kinds of action should I do. It's very action focused now, very law-based, and that doesn't lend itself to virtue talk as well as the old system.
I think one of the reasons that historically, Protestantism moved away from the virtue talk is because it sounded too much like it would fall into works righteousness for them, sort of, cultivate virtues of Christlike character, you know, get your game on and work harder to be a good Christian. Now, I think there's good reasons to push back against that.
I think that's a... at least it's a temptation, but it's not necessarily the only way to run that program. But I do think this shift in Protestant ethics toward a law-based system and commandment language, because it was more... what should we say, explicitly biblical, is definitely one of the factors that led to the dropping out of a virtue based language for most of us.
Lee
Harkening back to something you said a moment ago, in your own experience, is this kind of laying your [00:10:00] own experience bare, laying your own soul bare, kind of a mirror to you. In the early part of your book, you talk about how the way to understand this tradition is that originally in the Desert Fathers and Mothers, it's a sort of pastoral counsel practice in looking at the so-called Seven Deadly Sins.
Is that kind of the way it operated at that time?
Rebecca
Yeah, it's... I think the most striking thing is to understand that the, the sins weren't meant to be sort of this expose of the worst things that you could do. It was really, emerged from practical counsel given to people actively trying to be intentional about the Christian life and they would-- kept stumbling over all these sort of common pitfalls and common obstacles.
And you could imagine this list as a kind of top ten list of things that everybody in the Christian life might struggle with at some point. And the desert community described this as a kind of diagnostic schematic. Here's a lens to name the things that people tend to struggle [00:11:00] with. And then once you've got the diagnosis, they would then bring people to Christ, the Physician of souls, for healing, spiritual rehabilitation, sanctification, and so on.
So that was the original intent, was not some sort of grand theoretical schema or the naming of the worst things that you could do. But, uh, kind of a, like a marriage counselor would give you a top ten list of the, the things most couples fight about, and then how to deal with those problems in your marriage.
It's the same kind of dynamic.
Lee
Almost a sort of checklist to kind of quickly figure out where you might be and things you might need to quickly pay attention to.
Rebecca
Yeah, and I think we need vocabulary for that. I mean, I don't know if you've ever had that where you were like, well, I kind of, I'm feeling this problem or the struggle is-- and someone gives you a name for it, and you're like, oh, that's what it is. That's the problem. Okay, now I can look for a remedy or move forward, but I needed a name for what I was struggling with.
Lee
Yeah.
Can you give us a brief commentary on why you prefer the language of capital vices as opposed [00:12:00] to the seven deadly sins, the seven capital vices versus the seven deadly sins?
Rebecca
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons is just historical, that's what they were first called, but 'vice' focuses on patterns in our behavior, in our character, attitudes, feelings, actions, the whole package, as that unfolds in our character over time. So, think of the vices as ruts that we get into, rather than a one off sinful action.
But the 'capital' versus 'deadly' is, again, 'deadly' is a much later label, which makes it sound like these are terrible send-you-straight-to-hell kind of problems, whereas the 'capital' label was really meant to signal that these were kind of idolatrous disordered loves that could take over the center of your life and send your whole lifestyle spinning around them as if in orbit.
So it's the centrality of the created goods that we build our lives around in a disordered way that the capital name is supposed to excavate. Why these seven? [00:13:00] Well, they're things that we use to make a happy life for ourselves as a substitute for receiving God's way of rightly ordering our lives and our loves.
So think of them as disordered loves. It's probably the best way to put it.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Rebecca DeYoung on her book, Glittering Vices.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, as well as a full transcript.
We would be delighted if you'd tell your friends about No Small Endeavor and invite them to join us on the podcast - helps us extend the reach of the beauty, truth, and goodness we're [00:14:00] seeking to sow in the world.
Coming up, Rebecca gives us practical advice on how to course correct all of the seven deadly sins.
Stay tuned.
Will you also do a little more commentary there on just the notion of what a vice entails or what it's pointing to?
So I think of it as the language of vice and the language of virtue are both pointing to kind of dispositions, deeply ingrained habits, tendencies of thinking that lead to acting. But how would you fill that out some?
Rebecca
Spiritually or ethically speaking, they're disordered attachments to things that are self-destructive, that end up undermining our happiness, our flourishing, our well-being. And so the, the trick is to understand how you sort of tumble into that rut, and then how to get back out of it.
But the disposition language is helpful because [00:15:00] a lot of times you cannot always infallibly identify a vice from the outside. So there will be characteristic symptoms, but sometimes those can be misleading. You know, it's like when you go to a doctor and you're like, okay, I've got this presenting set of symptoms. Well, now they have to run six different tests to figure out what exactly it is and to rule certain things out. And it's the same kind of process.
I think it's helpful in the sense that it pushes us away from a kind of behavioristic or legalistic tendency to think about disorder in our lives. Because a lot of us can fake being nice people pretty well when we have to, but that doesn't mean that our heart is in good order.
And so this, and it kind of encourages us to go deeper in the ethical life or the spiritual life. And I appreciate that aspect of, of ethics.
What I tell my students is, it's really helpful to ask, what is the right thing to do? That's a very helpful ethical question. But it's another whole light layer of ethical questioning to ask yourself, and if I did this over and over again, [00:16:00] every day for the next month, well, what kind of person would I be headed to, toward becoming? And that's more of a character question.
Lee
Yeah, and the sort of holistic nature of sets of questions that it's asking, I think, is very helpful, in that it's asking not just, what's the right thing to do and what kind of person will I become if I do this habitually, but it's asking, what's the right way or the the fullest way for me to do this well internally, right?
So it's a sort of-- I was recently-- and I don't know that I paid much attention to this language, but I was rereading some... I don't remember who it was recently in the last couple of months, but stumbled back across this language of continence and the encratic, um, which is--
Rebecca
Lee
Yeah, so it's a sort of, I have a power to check myself and not do X, but internally I'm really wanting to do X. That's the encratic, right? The continent one.
Uh, incontinence would be, I go on and do it. Continence is, I don't do it, I check myself, but [00:17:00] internally I wish I could do it, right?
Rebecca
Right, so you're, you're divided.
Lee
Right, so the virtuous one is, does the right thing, but does it as a sort of second nature, with joy even, and I love that kind of vision.
Rebecca
Yeah, I mean we're all-- would love to be well-integrated people in the sense that we have integrity. That's the word we usually use. Plato would call it internal harmony, um, or justice, in the sense that we're good through and through from the inside out. Our behavior matches our attitudes and intentions and vice versa. So we're fully integrated and we don't have parts of ourselves that are constantly rebelling or trying to undermine the best way of life. We just choose that wholeheartedly.
So it's-- when you have the full-fledged virtue, you're acting not just because you think you ought to do this, it's the right thing, but because you wholeheartedly endorse that as the right way to live and the best way to live.
Lee
I just remembered, it was Julia Annas's book, Intelligent Virtue, where she's talking about that. [00:18:00] And it also reminds me there of Josef Pieper, I guess it is, in his book on the four cardinal virtues, where he said something that really striking to me there that caught my attention.
And it was kind of a dig, I think, on Protestants, but he-- as a Catholic, but he said that one mark of realizing our loss of the wisdom of the virtue traditions is that we've tended to think that if something is harder, it's therefore more laudable.
Rebecca
Right, Kant will say the same thing.
Lee
Yeah, and he's getting at, I think the example maybe he used there is that, you know, we think of something like loving your enemies as the hardest thing to do, perhaps, in Christian discipleship.
But he said, clearly, if you think about that, you know, it's the person who can love their enemies and do it with a good spirit and with joy who's clearly more laudable than someone who does it because it's hard, right?
Rebecca
Well, there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with giving people credit for doing the hard thing when it's the right thing.
Um, but I think what Julia Annas would point out and Pieper would agree with, is that that's an immature stage of virtue development.
Lee
Rebecca
When you have to sort of [00:19:00] fight some residual disordered appetite in yourself in order to do the right thing anyway. I mean, it's doing the right thing over and over again, even against appetite, that retrains appetite to harmonize with our, all things considered, picture of the good.
I use the example in the book of a married couple. You'd much rather have a spouse who wholeheartedly loves you and never thinks twice about another person than the person who is fighting temptation every day but puts in the moral effort to be faithful anyway. It's like, oh no, I don't really want that.
So that picture, I think, reveals the fact that there's a moral immaturity in the, the continent person or the self-controlled person, which you do want to applaud - yay, you've done some self-controlled work, that's good.
Lee
Rebecca
You're on the road toward full wholehearted integrity and harmony of, of the person, but you're not there yet.
Lee
Yeah. You've mentioned the language of 'flourishing' a couple of times, but give us a little bit of commentary about... your whole approach is [00:20:00] not, we might say sin avoidance for the sake of sin avoidance, but to help train us towards alternative way of life, right? This kind of vision of flourishing and happiness.
Rebecca
You can take an Aristotelian angle on this. You can take a more Thomistic or Christian angle on this. I mean, in the Aristotelian sense, Aristotle will say things like, the vicious person cannot even be a friend to themselves.
So, in the sense that you're regretting your own actions, you're destroying your own life, you're becoming the kind of person who isn't lovable by others or yourself, that's a self-destructive pattern in your life.
You're heading away from flourishing as a human and you're heading away from the kind of right relationships to all the goods in your life and all the people in your life and to your own flourishing. There's a kind of perverseness or almost irrationality involved in those kinds of choices. You're just choosing things that aren't good for you.
In the Christian sense of the conversation, it's a self-destructive way of life [00:21:00] insofar as God isn't there to sort of, um, give you a big list of commandments just to sort of assert His power over you. The commandments are ways of, of walking into a life of flourishing and full relationship.
They're ways to reorder and well order your love, um, in the right direction. So if you look at the biblical wisdom literature, and Psalms and Proverbs, for example, it will say, you know, what I'm trying to do is walk in the way of the Lord in order to-- and follow His law, meditate on it day and night, in order to avoid destruction. That's the way of sin. It's also the way of folly.
So again, that kind of idea that it's irrational to choose a path of life that's self-destructive. And what God would like to invite you into is a life of, of flourishing, fulfillment, love, peace, joy, et cetera.
It's interesting to me that Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with a conversation about blessedness, which is exactly the way Psalm 1 starts, "Blessed are they..."
So [00:22:00] there's a parallel here in wisdom literature in scripture that I think also finds its parallel in the eudaimonist tradition in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustine. So, there's a picture of what is human blessedness or flourishing consistent, what kind of lifestyle and patterns are healthy, good, fulfilling for us.
Lee
One of the things I will tell some of my students in one particular class is, we'll do these, this lecture on this counterintuitive claim that actually Christian orthodoxy has long been concerned with happiness as the goal of Christian life.
And a lot of people will kind of-- immediately are suspect to that. So, why do you think in the Protestant tradition, maybe especially, that, uh, the notion that happiness, rightfully defined happiness, we should say, I suppose, is not... why is there so much suspicion that that's not a legitimate pursuit for Christian life?
Rebecca
I think there's several reasons, but one large one is that [00:23:00] the conception of happiness has been kind of hijacked, I would say, in modernity by, A) subjectivity.
So self-reported subjective feelings of happiness are not the same thing as what Aristotle or Aquinas would describe as objective flourishing. You can be subjectively enjoying lots of things that are opposed to your flourishing, as lust and gluttony would, would attest, okay?
So I just wanted to get that distinction on the table first, and to note that everybody from Aristotle to Aquinas is talking about the objective conception. So first that, but then secondly, I think it's also important to think about happiness or flourishing as something that we're attempting to do in a fallen world.
So, what does it look like to pursue flourishing in a world in which things are made difficult by sin and disorder or whatever? So we don't necessarily even have-- and this is where the Protestants will say, we're not even sure we have access to [00:24:00] a conception of flourishing such that it could guide our behavior. So that's, that's one feature of the story there.
But also, as a last, I think, fairly important point in modernity, you get a real strong distinction between egoism and altruism. It has to be one or the other. It's either self-interested, or it's other-regarding. And the tradition of 2,000 years of moral philosophy before that, um, would resist that dichotomy and would say, no, I mean, a friendship or a parent-child relationship is a win-win.
It's not as though your flourishing is something that can be somehow disentangled from my flourishing. Either they go together or we're both not flourishing. So I think that the introduction of that distinction has confused the issue. If happiness is a common good and a communal concept, that's a different kind of ball game than if happiness is an egoistical conception of my own self-interest, which [00:25:00] might be opposed to yours.
Lee
You mentioned the language of 'attachment' a moment ago, and in your book you use the language of 'excessive attachment.' Can you give us kind of a definition of what that means or what that looks like - excessive attachment?
Rebecca
The picture that I'm working with implicitly here is coming from something akin to Aristotle's doctrine of the mean attitudes or desires towards something can either fall into access or deficiency.
So, for example, if I'm a soldier on the battlefield, I'm going to have a certain amount of fear. It's excessive fear if it makes me run away and not complete my mission, right, and do the cowardly thing. It's deficient if my recklessness or bravado doesn't help me consider the good of my own life to be something worth actually taking some adequate care for.
So I have to kind of thread my desire between those two, um, extremes. So when I say disordered attachment... [00:26:00] in excess, it usually means something that I'm holding onto too tightly, which makes me forego the kind of mission level commitment that I need to other goods that are either more highly ranked or more important in this situation.
So for example, if I'm at the dinner table and my excessive desire for pleasure makes me kind of a hoarder type eater, such that I completely disregard other people's physical needs in terms of sharing the food, but also makes me disregard the social niceties of human conversation and discourse around a table and the way that other people ought to be treated, then we're in the area of excess.
Lee
That opens up all sorts of complexities, right, in the in the pursuit of virtue. Aristotle will, in speaking about a virtue, will say, the virtuous person will be angry at the right thing in the right way for the right intensity for the right length of time, and so forth.
So it's always this sort of complexity of various considerations [00:27:00] that go into learning to be virtuous.
Rebecca
That's why we need good role models, because you don't get rules for how to behave. You need sort of a fine-grained application and there's no replacement, um, there's no book of rules that will do all that work for you. That's, that requires good judgment, but I think good judgment requires having that big picture view of what is it that constitutes a well-lived human life and how do all these different things that are goods, that are desirable, how are they all ordered within that big picture, that holistic grasp of everything that I need to have in view, and how the things are ranked or prioritized at any given time.
So it might be the case that, for example, when I'm at work, my focus on my work over and against my family's needs is perfectly appropriate. But then when I'm in a different context, prioritizing what my family might need would take precedent over checking more work emails. Well, it depends on the [00:28:00] context and it depends on what's appropriate at the time.
So that ordering of goods within a human life is really the big picture view that helps us make those fine-grained judgments.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our episode with Rebecca DeYoung.
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, more detail on each of the seven deadly sins and what one can do to work against them in one's own life.
Well, let's move to the seven capital vices. And what I would like to do is, let's see if we can work through these seven in a fairly rapid fashion. And I'll-- you know, the great bane of academics is to give a not terribly nuanced answer.
Rebecca
That's right. Soundbites, here we come.
Lee
That's right. That's [00:29:00] right.
So let's do-- because you certainly define these vices in ways that I think that will be counterintuitive to a lot of folks, given the cultural, uh, cache that a lot of these have.
So first, vainglory.
Rebecca
I call this the Triple A Vice: approval, acknowledgement, applause. Want too badly to be well-liked and well-approved of by others.
Lee
What's the related legitimate desire behind vainglory?
Rebecca
I think it is recognition and approval from others.
If you think about a parent-child relationship, this is how healthy ego attachment, healthy ego identity happens. The first thing children say to their parents is, "look at me, look at me." And if you get the right kind of regard from a parent or a significant other, then you have a healthy sense of yourself and you don't walk around the rest of your life in a state of excessive need.
So you don't walk around trying to cultivate and market an image of yourself, which may be very carefully curated. [00:30:00] You don't show up in situations excessively concerned with what other people think about you or their approval. You don't worry and lay awake at night wondering if people disapprove of you.
So having a healthy sense of self is, I think, dependent on those early right social attachments, and those happen through genuine approval. So that is a genuine good, I think. And we can fall into deficiency there too, but we can also fall into sort of excessive concern with other people's regard for us.
Lee
Possible steps toward a cure if you're afflicted with vainglory?
Rebecca
Solitude and silence.
What I always say is-- I mean, I'm someone who spends a lot of time in the limelight. I'm a teacher and I'm a speaker. If you are up front in front of people, you need to very carefully balance that time with solitude and silence, where how you come across to others is simply just not on the table.
You need some relief from being in that space and always sort of carefully paying attention to, how am I coming across to others. You [00:31:00] need to sort of sit stripped bare and listen to the voice of love, which in the Christian tradition comes from God.
Lee
Rebecca
Envy is resentment at the gifts of others and the way that my worth and gifts come off as inferior by comparison.
So it's a comparison vice, a competitive vice. It thinks of identity as a zero sum game.
Lee
What's this look like, consequence-wise, at its worst?
Rebecca
Envy, I think, is one of the worst ones. It destroys love relationships. You are not able to love yourself because you come at the situation with a sense of your worth being conditional on out-competing others.
And if you fail at that, then you resent them. And if you succeed at that, you have also, in some ways, cut yourself off from a relationship with them. So it's really a kind of no-win type of vice.
And if you're in the Christian tradition, you would be resentful of [00:32:00] God for misallocating things so unequally and giving you the shaft. And you also resent your, your neighbor or your rival. And so it can destroy even the closest and best of relationships. It's the enemy of love.
Lee
Possible steps toward a cure for envy.
Rebecca
For envy, that is a really tough one. It is, I think it requires a paradigm shift in how you see yourself. So, you have to find some sense of self that has unconditional worth.
So, there are, of course, humanistic versions of that with sort of the intrinsic dignity of the human person. The Christian tradition grounds it in our unconditional um, belovedness as a child of the Father.
Lee
Rebecca
This is one of my favorites. People think of it as laziness, but it's really not laziness about work. It's laziness about love.
I think of this vice as resistance to the kind of uncomfortable, sometimes, [00:33:00] transformative demands of being in a long-term love relationship, either with God or with each other.
Let's just say you're committed to a long-term love relationship, or some important project, and you know, then it starts to get routine or it starts to get hard or it starts to stretch us out of our comfort zone or the relationship hits a snag and requires forgiveness.
There's all sorts of things that sort of, uh, make our will flag or bog down a little bit where we're thinking, oh, it might be easier to just bail and get out or escape or avoid. Or if we can't avoid, sort of numb out and check out, those are all kind of the dynamics of, of this particular vice.
It can take the form of distracting yourself with work and all the things at work and filling your life up with things that you would rather be doing. And for many people that would, that could be work. It could easily be, you know, mindless video gaming all weekend long, or, or it could be something in [00:34:00] between. It doesn't matter sort of how noble or ignoble the diversion activity is, it's still a symptom of restless resistance to where you really are supposed to be putting your effort.
And that is an investment and a love relationship.
Lee
Rebecca
Ironically, staying. Staying put. So we think of sloth as, like, moving too slowly or not getting off your chair to do stuff. The cure is actually the opposite.
So the way that the early monastics thought of this is, you want nothing more than to flee your current commitment and go somewhere more interesting. So the discipline is to stay put, rather than to follow the impulse to escape. And the same thing is true for us.
Lee
Rebecca
Well, greed is pretty familiar to most Americans. I would just as soon go for a more subtle form of it. Sort of how, how attached am I to being in charge [00:35:00] of my own provision and well being, materially speaking, and how much do I put my trust in God versus in, um, the things that I can provide for myself?
We really love to feel like we're self-sufficient unto ourselves, and that is a classic marker of greed.
Lee
Consequences of this when it goes to seed.
Rebecca
There are lots of consequences that are pretty obvious, you know, sort of theft and robbery type things, but I would say on the more sort of mundane level-- I'm always trying to make these vices common, because that's the way they were originally designed, is not just for the, you know, the sort of more egregious cases of the vices that we could all, you know, name names.
But the more common forms of greed would be things like answering the question, what are your greatest hopes and dreams, in material terms, in terms of what you can acquire. Does it make you feel better when you're feeling bad to go buy something for yourself? Is it really important to you to own and [00:36:00] possess and be the master of things? And are you then tempted to think of people in the same terms that you think of things, as commodities, as resources, as things to be manipulated toward your own ends, um, to make your own life more comfortable?
I think that would be a worry. I think restlessness is also a very common symptom of greed. Always not being satisfied with what you have right now and always wanting a little bit more.
The question for all the vices is what is my picture of happiness? What am I trying to make the center of my quest for happiness?
And if it's something that can't deliver, then you're going to end up with long-term disappointment. And material possessions cannot deliver, and that is the source of the restlessness, the source of the discontent And it's not surprising that psychology would be able to track that.
Lee
Rebecca
Wrath is, is disordered excessive anger, typically one of two forms - [00:37:00] wrong target, wrong mode
So you can either be angry at the wrong things or you can be angry at at the right things, but in the wrong ways, or you could do both at once, you know, be angry about the wrong things and be excessively vehement or resentful or whatever about it.
Lee
You point to how there's a lot of debate within the Christian tradition about anger itself, but you're, you're speaking of it in terms of, I think both the way Aquinas and Aristotle both would have spoken about it, that the problem is not anger as such, but some sort of disorder in one of the two ways you just pointed to, right?
Rebecca
Right. So anger is an emotion. It's like fear. So it's not a comfortable emotion, always, but it can be well ordered in the sense that justice is its primary object.
It's the setting, setting things right when they're not right. That's anger's target. It's sort of our instinctive response that, "it's not fair, we're mad about that!" um, so if you think of fairness as a legit target of anger, well, that's okay. That's righteousness or justice. And that makes anger a potentially healthy emotion. [00:38:00]
The trouble is, we almost always get it wrong. We are rationalizers about what is a righteous cause and what we deserve and make our honor the most important thing rather than the honor and dignity of all. So there's plenty of ways to mess this up.
But having anger distinguished from wrath is really important because we don't want to label the emotion with a vice name.
Lee
Yeah. Quick commentary on ways people might see that, uh, their anger might be disordered.
Rebecca
I would recommend keeping an anger journal. It's so revelatory of the ways in which our, our anger is disordered.
I have my students practice an exercise, um, which we call 'taking your wrath for a ride,' where we, we try to drive the speed limit, and wait calmly and patiently at stoplights without doing anything else, just practicing waiting. And if you want to put a spiritual spin on it, keeping company with Jesus, who is actually in your car with you.
Um, paying attention to him rather than all the other annoying people or the fact that you have to wait. [00:39:00] So again, when you're driving the speed limit, of course, then everyone will be passing you. And your job is to pray for everyone who passes you instead of, you know, the usual hand gestures that accompany people.
So this, it's sort of just a really, sort of, commonplace way to build in patience, generosity, gentleness, an unhurried approach to the world. You'd be amazed at the way hurry exacerbates anger. So learning to wait and learning to slow down is a great way to practice gentleness toward others.
Lee
Rebecca
Gluttony is just the excessive desire for pleasure for myself in the act of eating. So it's not necessarily overconsumption, per se. It is making the focus of my eating my own pleasure in a way that crowds out other legitimate goods that I should be paying attention to.
Lee
And yeah, so you're pointing in this chapter to the ways in which being overly [00:40:00] fastidious might actually be a sign of gluttony.
Rebecca
Right. You don't have to eat too much. You might just be too fussy. Or you might be fussy about the way that your food is prepared or it has to taste a certain way or whatever.
But the, the point there is that your preoccupation with how it tastes as a way of satisfying my own appetite just predominates the experience. And you know, maybe that isn't a huge problem for lots of people, but we do tend to eat more for taste than nutrition in this country, shall I say, and we tend to eat more than what is good for us because it's pleasant.
So Aristotle would say, if you look at human beings, they tend to be sort of excessive pleasure seekers. So if you want to hit the mean of virtue, you're going to want to lean a little bit farther away from pleasure than you would be inclined to, sort of on the face of it. So that's just good advice for dealing with gluttony, period.
Lee
Um, any other possible steps toward cure?
Rebecca
The Christian tradition would recommend [00:41:00] fasting, and I don't necessarily, you know, recommend that for everyone. There are people who struggle with eating disorders for whom fasting is maybe not the best spiritual discipline here. But the practice for all of these vices is if you engage in a practice or a discipline of detachment, that does two things.
One, it reveals how attached you are. If it's really, really hard to give something up, you might think, oh, maybe I'm holding on to that a little too closely. If it's really easy to give it up, that just might be sort of a double check. Okay, I'm holding this loosely enough. I'm not sort of building this into the centerpiece of my life and my heart's greatest desire.
But detachment, so it can be a diagnostic exercise, but then it could also, I think, if we practiced over time, wean our desires off that thing, gradually detach us from it in a way that frees us up to love other things, to fill those back into our lives.
Lee
Rebecca
Lust. Same thing. Excessive desire for sexual pleasure in a way that undercuts the goods of human sexual relationships, fully human sexual relationships.
So, lust tends to dehumanize for that reason, because it privileges pleasure over relationship.
Lee
Any more description then of what symptoms of this might look like?
Rebecca
I should just mention too, there are versions of the vice of lust which broaden the conception of lust to sort of any kind of luxury or excessive pleasure. So that's a different, more generalized spin on lust. And that could take place in, you know, sexual arena and in other places as well.
I tend to use it in the more focused way because otherwise it's hard to distinguish it from other vices like greed or gluttony. The ways to sort of diagnose lust is... it's hard to diagnose because it actually causes a kind of, uh, how to put this... spiritual blindness, like [00:43:00] anger has a blinding function in the sense of when it gets excessive, you're blind to the humanity of the person that you're angry at, and that enables violence.
And the same dynamic you'll see in lust. If, that kind of blindness to the humanity of the other person involved, the person you're getting sexual pleasure from, enables violence. And so I think the pornography industry is a perfect example of this. The escalating of desire and the propensity toward violence is definitely symptomatic of some disorder there.
Lee
Rebecca
Lust is a tough one. I think we need more humanizing relationships.
I think the best cure in some way is to get a taste of the good that you're missing. So with lust, I think, what does it look like to have an intimate friendship and to find that life giving? What does genuine human physical affection of the right sort look like? Are you getting enough of that? [00:44:00]
I wonder with my college students. I mean, they live in dorms. No one touches them, ever, in a healthy way. And so then they go to parties on weekend and they're starved for it. They're starved for real life giving friendship. They're starved for the right kinds of physical affection, normalized affection that you'd perhaps get in a family.
And it just makes you more vulnerable. So I think finding, um, good life giving relationships and communities is ultimately going to be the way to, to wean yourself out of that place of deficit.
Lee
That's a very helpful overview of all seven of those. Thank you.
If you were going to give some sort of encouragement to those who think, okay, I can see how this could be helpful to me, what would be some first steps or key resources that someone might need to begin, uh, taking this sort of approach?
Rebecca
I would suggest a couple of exercises.
One, that memento mori exercise that we started with. That's a, Latin means, [00:45:00] "to remember your death." So to look back on your life as a whole and to try to reflect on your character.
Is there any place of discontentment in your life, or, or place where you would look back and say, wow, I've really found joy in that area of my life, and my character reveals right attachments there. And there are places of consistent discontent or disappointment or discouragement. What, what's going on there?
And that's an invitation into this kind of diagnostic exercise. But it's important, I think most important, to have a vision of what is right and good and true and beautiful at the end of the road.
Is there a positive ideal of a flourishing human life that you long to live into? If you look at the way advertising works, it, it doesn't tell us what's wrong with us. It tells us, it gives us a picture of the life that we should long for.
And I think their Christian tradition does this. I think the Aristotelian eudaimonist tradition does this. Give us a vision [00:46:00] or a picture of a beautiful, well lived human life.
So going back to the memento mori exercise, who is a beautiful picture of virtue? Who is a person who you think, I want to be like them when I grow up? Look at their life. It's a beautiful picture of everything that a human being can be. A beautiful picture of virtue. How do I live into that?
I think a positive ideal is ultimately more motivating, and it also helps-- not only just expose the places in which we're falling short of that ideal, but also provides motivation, um, to try to overcome those things.
I would also recommend doing all of this in community.
Lee
Rebecca
This is not an individual self help project, and in the Christian tradition, I would strongly emphasize that this is a grace fueled transformation, not a, 'go virtue team, practice harder' kind of transformation.
Lee
Rebecca
It's not as though you don't have to be intentional and disciplined yourself, but that's not the whole story, at least in the Christian tradition.
Lee
We've been talking to Rebecca [00:47:00] DeYoung, professor at Calvin College, the author of Glittering Vices, A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies.
Thanks so much, good professor. Thanks for your work and your good words and your time today.
Rebecca
Lee
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Rebecca DeYoung on her book Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation, supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our [00:48:00] thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.