The Most Worthless Sin

It’s Not Lust, Gluttony, Anger, Greed, Pride, or Envy

The Geography of Hell: Boticelli’s Map of the Inferno

Laziness might not be the worst sin from a theological perspective—I’m not qualified to make that claim. But it is the most worthless sin, and the most unchivalrous. The worthlessness is expressed in the gulf between laziness and anything even vaguely good, however imperfect or inverted. Other capital sins, even if they miss the mark, usually at least aim in the direction of something advantageous.

We can highlight this worthlessness by first turning to the rest of the sins and hunting for something salvageable in each. The lustful man, the angry man, and so on—they usually give God something to work with, an inclination, tendency, or energy that might be redirected toward a virtue. The lazy man gives God nothing.

(Disclaimer: if you are one of those readers who like to willfully misinterpret an argument, please do not read any further.)  

Lust—

Lust is the most obvious example of the disordering of something good. Contrary to what many of us have been taught, the Christian tradition does not view sex as a bad thing or even a necessary evil. It is good. God made it so, and the great teachers of the tradition are unambiguous about this. To go even further, sex is not good simply for procreation: the unitive aspect—man and woman becoming one flesh—is distinctly good itself. Those who teach otherwise are flirting with heresy.

If anything, the problem is that sex is so good and so powerful that it needs to be protected, the way all the best things need protecting—because when abused they become monstrous.

And let’s be honest: high carnal drives also tend to accompany the manliness that any dynamic society needs. Most of the great heroes had powerful temptations toward this sin. They deserve to be criticized if they failed to master it, but the connection not imaginary. Heroism proceeds from a robustness of life within, which means appetite.

Gluttony—

As with lust, gluttony is driven by a desire for things that are good. Food and drink are good, necessary for life, to be enjoyed—within certain bounds. I don't even want to use the M-word here, because moderation might conjure an image of the unrelenting portion-control. When the time is right, we are supposed to feast! Avoiding gluttony is more about ordering the appetite and incorporating fasts along with feasts.

Anger—

It’s obvious enough that disordered anger damages a man from the inside out. But anger is also a natural and even required response in many cases, not to mention a spur to action. Aquinas and others have noted that the failure to get angry can itself be a sin—an “unreasonable patience.” One might ask, for instance: How are we supposed to react when seeing vulnerable children brutalized by wicked men? Anyone who tells you not to get outraged is bad teacher. The key is to check and channel it properly, so as to feel it in the right way and at the right times, and not to be owned by it.

And just as with lust, great men have tendencies toward hot-headedness, from which their greatness cannot be so cleanly separated.

Greed—

The argument turns a little more difficult at this point. Whatever else can be said about him, the greedy man at least has enough life within him to desire things. A larger theme of these reflections: desire is better than the absence of desire, and existence is better than non-existence. God can turn the greedy man’s desire for filthy lucre to desire for higher things.

Pride—

I’ve noted elsewhere that pride has become a very tricky word—used to mean both good things (self-respect) and bad (hubris). To be clear, I’m commenting now on theological pride.

Attempts to find the salvageable elements of pride will proceed along the same lines as greed. The prideful man, despite his massive faults, is capable of an assertion of self, unlike the lazy man. His desire is inordinate and reckless, but the proud man desires to be something great—and this desire can be channeled into the very real virtue of magnanimity and an ordered love of greatness.

Envy—

It's even harder to sympathize with envy, a surefire indication of a small heart. But the envious man, on some level, does strain after justice, the second of the cardinal virtues. His envy often stems from a warped and childish outrage that another should have this thing which he lacks and so he lashes out at the injustice of it. Perhaps if he is taught to know himself better and thus understand what he does and does not deserve, the envious man might be brought around.

Laziness, on the Other Hand…

Don’t misunderstand: all capital sins need to be avoided at all costs. All sin is self-defeat. My point is simply that laziness is the most self-defeating. Lust, gluttony, anger, greed, pride, and envy somehow pervert goods or quasi-goods—unlike laziness, which is a nothingness, a pathetic lack of spirit and desire. Laziness wraps itself around despair and cowardice in a tangle of viciousness that people once called acedia.

I not only fail to see any nearby or adjacent or inverted goods—I see several capital sins made worse in conjunction with laziness. Lust, for example: under the sway of laziness, the conquests of fornication descend into the consumption of pornography. The fornicator at least requires some enterprise or appeal to make his sins happen. The same cannot be said of the porn addict: his vice only creates deficits in personal enterprise or appeal. Then there’s gluttony. At least alcohol has some associations with conviviality and spiritedness. But that is too much for the lazy man. Infected with laziness, the glutton might instead turn to the anti-social escape of marijuana. Envy, for its part, becomes all the more resentful and unreasonable when laziness is involved. The lazy man is that much further from actually pursuing achievements of his own.

Conversely, laziness on some level seems to render a man incapable of other sins. Which might sound like a boon, but is far from. A man incapable of sin is not actually a man—he’s a sub-man, a cow. He cannot rise to level of making a free choice as a free man, even if it’s a bad one.

To close on a higher note, let me offer the antidote to laziness. It is not busybodiedness, which can itself be a symptom of the sin: we often busy ourselves with other things so as to avoid the real before us. The true antidote is magnanimity. Here I must recommend the writings of Josef Pieper. From The Four Cardinal Virtues:

This sorrow [of laziness or acedia] is a lack of magnanimity; it lacks courage for the great things that are proper to the nature of the Christian. It is a kind of anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him. One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness.