seven deadly sins ch 1

1. According to Fairlie, the psychological explanations of the waywardness of our behavior and the sociological explanations of the evils of our societies have come very nearly to a dead end. This, he says, is because they shirk the problem of evil, and they shirk it because of the major premise on which they rest. What is the major premise on which they rest?

The Fact of Sin

1. Fairlie reports that the subject of sin often seems to provoke humor. Why? What do people seem to think is the truth about sin? About which of the capital sins do people usually have this view? When does their merriment tend to taper off?

2. What in especially interested about Fairlie is that he describes himself as a “reluctant unbeliever.” So, as you read this book, always remember that the writer is not a theologian, nor even a theist. So, for example, when Fairlie is talking about sin, he himself does not take it to be a “willful violation of our life in God.” How does he understand it, then? Why, for example, does he say that sin is “less like the act of a criminal than the act of a traitor”?

3. Why, according to Fairlie, do we fear what the idea of sin tell us about ourselves?

4. According to Fairlie: “Sin is the destruction of one’s self as well as the destruction of one’s relationship with others.” Where, according to Fairlie, is the damage done? Why does Fairlie, an atheist, think that “talk of God” can help in understanding the damage done by sin?

5. According to Fairlie, although the unbeliever finds it difficult to talk about the Transcendent Other, yet, when he attends to the deepest part of his being, what does he find?

6. What does Fairlie think of picture of human nature held by most modern secular humanists?

7. Why, according to Fairlie, are many people today attracted to feeble and unexacting forms of Eastern religions?

8. What was “first necessary,” according to Fairlie, in order to conceive the terrible destructiveness of sin?

9. Why, according to Fairlie, must the Beatitude that says “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” be read in the context of the Christ’s life and teaching? What does that context help to teach us about sin?

10. What is the saying of St. Augustine that serves as the epigraph for the book? (Fairlie mentions it again on p. 10.) Given the context in this chapter, what do you suppose Augustine means by this phrase?

11. Fairlie rightly points out that the list of “seven deadly sins” was first a list of the vices that beset the monastic life. Later, Gregory the Great defined the sins so that they were able to serve as a classification of the normal perils of the soul in the ordinary conditions of life, and not merely as a list of the temptations that those in the monastic life must resist. In this context, Fairlie discusses how difficult it is for people in contemporary culture to understand monastic life, a difficulty which extends to our understanding of the virtues in general. Indeed, as he point, “Our unwillingness and inability to understand the monastic life extends even to the outside world.” He gives the example of virginity. What do we tend to think about virgins? What does Fairlie think?

* We tend to think: Not quite healthy. She is certainly thought to be peculiar.
* Fairlie thinks: Why should men or women not decide whether in a monastery or convent or not, that sexual activity is not the expression of their personalities in which they are most interested, or the pursuit to which they are most inclined to devote their lives?
* [Note the objection: This is something God has given us. It would be wrong not to engage – indeed, not to indulge fully – in it. And yet, consider: God has given us many gifts: the ability to run, to lift weights, to jump high, to think mathematically, to paint pictures, to appreciate beautiful art. Why should men or women not decide whether that activity is or is not the expression of their personalities in which they are most interested, or the pursuit to which they are most inclined to devote their lives? Is it really “sick” for a super-model to decide she doesn’t want that life anymore and wants instead to raise children or feed poor people? Is it really “sick” for a man who is an excellent CEO of a major drug company to retire early and devote himself to carpentry or helping Alzheimer’s patients?
* Similarly, yes, we have the gift of being able to join with another and reproduce the species. Would it be “sick” or “unhealthy” to decide now is not the time and circumstance to engage in it? Or is it really the case (like the pulleys-and-levers picture of human nature) that we just gotta’ have it? There’s no way to resist. Everybody gives in. Don’t try to be different. What? Do you think you’re special, or something? Everyone else is doing it. Besides, even trying to resist the temptation would be unhealthy. It’s sick. Worse yet, it’s so uncool. Quite frankly, it’s laughable. You just make yourself look ridiculous. And by not engaging in sex, we all know that you’re judging us. And there’s nothing worse than people who are judgmental! (That’s a lot worse than people who engage in pre-marital sex.) Hey, you need to stop judging people, just chill out, and learn to go along and get along.
* To be honest, it reminds me of the reaction my college friends used to have towards me when they found out I didn’t drink. “You don’t drink? What’s wrong with you? Here, try this!” Why was it so important to them that I drink? They didn’t care about any other aspect of my diet. They didn’t spend countless hours trying to get me to drink grapefruit juice or eat vegetables. I could have been eating cockroaches, and that would have been fine. But not drinking alcohol? Why, that just wasn’t healthy! It made me think that something else was going on other than just trying to get me to try something new.]

12. What does the Parson in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales say about the Seven Deadly Sins? How does this comment help to throw light on the question: Why these seven vices? Why not others of which we are acutely aware?

13a. Once we have admitted that the Seven Deadly Sins are, as the Parson says, “all leashed together,” what does this force us to take responsibility for?

13b. Fairlie makes a similar point on the next page (15). He claims that: “The concept of the Seven Deadly Sins has at least this to be said for it ....” What is it that the concept does not allow us to do?

14. What, for example, according to Fairlie, is the problem with simply thinking about “cruelty” as a sin on its own, without considering it as being linked to other sins and vices?

15. What does Fairlie think of the suggestion, heard “on all sides today,” that, “in a rather simple-minded way, we may just love each other as we are, without much being expected on either side”?

16. “The understanding that we sin,” says Fairlie, is a summons to what? What does he mean?

17. According to Fairlie, what is the primary characteristic of the “gods” people invent for themselves with what he calls peoples’ “Do-It-Yourself God Kits”?

18. Fairlie says that his essays are written from the belief that “much of the fecklessness and triviality, dejection and faintheartedness, wasting and corruption, which we now feel around us, in our personal lives but also in our common lives,” have their source where? What does he mean?

19. Why is it that, according to Fairlie, although sin “seems to us a strong and ominous word,” it is worth realizing that, “without the notion of it, our situation can seem even more ominous”?

20. Why, according to Fairlie, is it the case that, “If we acknowledge the existence of sin at all,w e must acknowledge that there is original sin”?

21. As Fairlie points out (p. 22), the idea of original sin has sometimes been used to justify various concepts of predestination that would obliterate the importance of free will. What is St. Augustine’s view of the matter?

22. Why is it the case, according to Fairlie, that “We must not be frightened of the idea of original sin”?

23. One of the issues Fairlie takes up in this chapter is the relationship between sin and society. Two opposing errors are to be avoided in this regard. The first error would be to seek an “easy exoneration” for our own behavior and responsibilities “in the actual or supposed conditions of our society.” The other error to be avoided would be not recognizing that societies can become sinful as well as individuals. “A society,” says Fairlie, “is not only the individuals who compose it. It has its own life, in its laws and institutions, customs and values, and through them it is able to impose on us.” In other words, we must not fail to recognize the ways that society can affect our lives, and yet we must not exonerate ourselves from our own responsibilities by pointing to the “structures” of society.
In this context, Fairlie proposes (p. 26) that, “The relationship of the individual to his society has seldom been less harmonious than now.” So, for example, what should the individual be able to find in the performance of his social responsibilities? What, on the other hand, should the society be able to draw on confidently from all its members? What, on the contrary, according to Fairlie, is the “breath and depth of the relationship” today between the individual and his society? What sort of “shared understanding” do we lack that, as a society, we need?

24. On p. 28, Fairlie touches upon what I often call the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum of contemporary American politics; but instead of talking about “conservatives” and “liberals,” he more accurately (in one sense) talks about “conservatives” and “socialists.” What is the odd parallelism between “conservatives” and “socialists” with regard to “individualism”? Explain.

25. According to Fairlie, is there any reason why a society that is “progressive” in its economic structures should also be “progressive” in its cultural attitudes? In other words, is there any reason why someone who believes in a more equal distribution of goods should also believe in more permissive standards of behavior? Explain why or why not?

26. Fairlie admits that he is critical of psychiatry. What does psychiatry tend to make us do?

27. What does Fairlie find in a statement by actress Shirley MacLaine that causes him to call it, “not only self-centeredness raised to self-obsession, but a rationalization for self-aggrandizement”?

28. Why, according to Fairlie, is it the case that, “A life that is self-justifying is one that is uninteresting”?

29. According to Fairlie, “All the Seven Deadly Sins are demonstrations of love that has gone wrong. They spring from the impulse which is natural in man, to love what pleases him, but the love is misplaced or weakened or distorted.” Explain what he means. So, for example, which sins are said to be sins of perverted love? Which is a sin of defective love? And which are said to be sins of excessive love? By the way, how does these designations – excessive, defective, perverted – serve to signify to us that “love,” in its truest sense, is a virtue (and not, for example, merely a “feeling”)? By the way, have you ever thought of love as a virtue – as something you needed to work at perfecting – as opposed to something you just naturally “fell” into or as a feeling that just spontaneously “erupted” out of you?

30. According to Fairlie, the sins begin in love. Where do they end?