Common Questions About the Seven Deadly Sins

What are the seven deadly sins?
The seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. They are sometimes called the capital or cardinal sins, and the idea behind the list is that they are not individual bad acts so much as root habits: the soil other wrongs grow out of. Pride leads to contempt, greed to dishonesty, wrath to cruelty, and so on. The list has been painted, preached about, written into Dante’s Purgatorio and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and borrowed by everything from the film Se7en to anime and video games, which is why most people can name four or five of them without ever having looked it up. Each one also has a traditional opposite, usually listed as humility, generosity, self-control, kindness, temperance, patience and diligence, and those opposites are arguably the more useful half of the idea.

Are the seven deadly sins in the Bible?
Not as a list. The seven grew out of a list of eight troubling “thoughts” written down by a fourth-century monk named Evagrius, and were trimmed to seven by Pope Gregory the Great around the year 590. Every one of the seven is discussed somewhere in scripture, but no single passage names them together. The Bible does have its own list of seven, in Proverbs 6:16-19, and it is surprisingly different: a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet swift to mischief, a false witness, and someone who sows discord among brothers. Only pride appears on both lists. If you want the full history, our article on whether the seven deadly sins are in the Bible walks through it.

Which of the seven deadly sins is the worst?
Traditionally, pride. Gregory the Great treated it as the root of all the others, and most writers since have agreed, partly because it is the one that makes the rest hard to see. A greedy or angry person can usually be shown what they are doing; a proud person is busy defending it. That said, “worst” depends on what you are measuring. Wrath tends to do the most visible damage to other people, envy is the only one that delivers no pleasure at all, even briefly, and sloth is the quietest, which is exactly why it can hollow out a life without anyone noticing. A more useful question than which sin is worst is which one has the strongest grip on you, because that is the one actually shaping your days, and it is often the shadow side of something you are genuinely good at.

Is sloth just another word for laziness?
Not quite, and the difference matters. The older word behind sloth is acedia, which meant something closer to not caring: a flat, listless indifference, a sense that nothing is really worth the effort of starting. Early monks called it the noonday demon because it tended to arrive in the dead middle of the day. A person can be extremely busy and still be slothful in this older sense, filling every hour with tasks while avoiding the one conversation, decision or commitment that actually matters. Equally, resting is not sloth. Real rest restores you for the things you care about, while sloth is a slow withdrawal from caring at all. That is why the traditional opposite of sloth is diligence, which means showing up for the small things that matter, not frantic productivity. Seen that way, sloth is often more about tiredness and disappointment than about character.

How do I find out which deadly sin is mine?
Take the free seven deadly sins test above. It walks through twelve ordinary moments, like someone cutting in line, payday, an argument, a Friday night after a hard week or a piece of honest criticism, and every answer quietly adds weight to one or two of the seven. Answer with what you actually do rather than what you wish you did, and go reasonably fast, because first instincts are usually more honest than considered ones. It takes about two minutes, there are no wrong answers, and nothing is saved or stored. At the end you will see your strongest pull, the two runners-up with the percentages behind them, an honest read on the strength that sin usually grows out of and what it costs you, and its traditional opposite. If you sit close between two, read both. Take the test above and see which one is yours.