Happy new year! I rang in 2009 at a fabulous party last night, so I caught up with the next two episodes of the History Channel’s Seven Deadly Sins tonight: gluttony and sloth. As I suspected (after writing and publishing my last post, unfortunately), watching a few more episodes gave me a more balanced view of the series, even if the content is still unbalanced.
Gluttony was referred to as “the most paradoxical” of the seven deadly sins, the paradox being that eating is a necessity of life. Gluttony is so easy to commit that it was made to seem foolish that simply eating or drinking too much could be so wrong. There was even discussion of a hormone, lectin, that is underproduced by people with a certain genetic defect, and which causes overeating because of the inability of sufferers to realize that they aren’t facing a famine. Even if that distressingly obese mouse proves that lectin is to blame in some cases, sin is still sin. Extreme overindulgence shows a lack of discipline and respect for food and the body. It’s an easy sin to commit, but so is all sin. “Everybody’s doing it” is a lousy excuse across the board.
Sloth was “the most insidious” of sins. I think this was the best episode yet. Instead of outright criticism of Pope Gregory for conflating acedia and tristitia into the one sin of sloth to “make room” for another, the various critics examined how the two sides of sloth are different. I think of acedia as spiritual laziness. Acedia is the negative spirit that just doesn’t do anything. It’s laziness and opposition toward work or exertion of any kind. Tristitia is closer to despair and hopelessness. I felt that the show’s producers handled the questions of medically-diagnosed depression, suicide, and moral loss of faith very well. They left it open to the viewer to decide how to understand sloth, as sin or science.
As I watched tonight, I thought about the previous episodes and their seeming ignorance of the nature of sin. Never in the four episodes I’ve seen (all that have aired so far; it’s a new series) has anyone defined sin. It’s a standard expository procedure: you have to define your terminology. If you don’t understand what sin is, it’s clearly impossible to figure out why these seven are so deadly. There was never a comparison of these “deadly sins” to the non-deadly ones–or an acknowedgement, even if only lexical, that there are non-deadly (read: venial) sins. I’m eager to see how anger, greed, and especially pride pan out, and if the History Channel will ever (try to) tell me what sin is.
