If all the sins a person can commit is
described as a single tree, this mighty tree of sin has only seven roots, says
Venerable Louis Granada (16th century Dominican). The soul which is
able to find and destroy these seven deadly roots will be free from the slavery of sin. This was the firm belief
of the saints and the Desert Fathers (as Cassian records). Remember the words
of the Master: whoever sins is a slave
(Jn 8:34).
Listen carefully Immortales. This mighty tree
we may also call (false) self-love. Self-love is the enemy of love of God from
which all sins come. Each time you committed a sin, it was because you chose
what you wanted instead of what God wanted. A saint is a person who loves God
more than himself in all things
(that is in thought, word deed and action); and does the will of God in all things.
Obedience is doing the will of God; disobedience is doing our will or the
devil’s. To obey is to say you love the one you obey; to disobey is precisely
to say you love yourself or something else more than God. Jesus tells us in
John: The Father loves me because I obey
Him (I lay down my life for my sheep!” Therefore, Immortales, you must learn at once that to root out self love is the same thing as to root out the seven deadly
roots of sin.
What
are the Seven deadly roots of the tree of sin?
Louis of Granada calls them the mighty giants which prevent our entry into
Heaven. These are the seven vices or capital sins. Foulton Sheen calls them the
seven pall bearers (coffin carriers) of the soul. But because of the way they
operate in everyday life, we shall call them the seven grave diggers of the soul, or better still, the seven prisons of the soul. In the
Chronicles of the Leper King they are called the “seven soul killers”. 1 John
2:16 (KJV) gives us three sons of self-love: The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and
the pride of life. These are love of pleasure, love of riches, and love of
honours. Love of pleasure produces three deadly roots, lust, gluttony and
sloth. Love of riches produces covetousness or greedy. Love of honours produces
pride. That root of sin we call anger (and hatred) is produced when something
prevents us from satisfying self-love. The root of sin called envy or jealousy
grows into the soul when we see others with something self-love wants to claim.
These then are the seven deadly roots of sin, the seven capital sins, the seven
pall bearers (coffin carriers) or for operational reasons, the seven grave
diggers of the soul: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, envy or jealousy, and
sloth. Louis of Granada warns, “we must violently attack these mighty giants
who prevent our entrance into the Heaven.”
These then are the mighty deadly and
rebellious seven and what they mean: pride
(false love of honour, excellence, etc), covetousness or greed (love of
money and material things), lust (wrong
desire for sexual pleasure), anger and hatred (feeling of bitterness against a
person and love of revenge), jealousy or envy (feeling of sadness or sense
of loss when something good happens to a person), sloth (unwillingness to do our duty) and gluttony (a wrong love of
drinking and eating). They are the seven
killers of the soul. The killers described by the Lord and Master in Mt
8:14 (parable of the sower) as thorns which strangle (choke) the tree of life, sucking it dry until it is
dead and useful only as firewood (gathered and burnt up). By filling the soul
with the poison of self-love ( just as the snake poisons a body), they slowly
kill the love of God in the soul. Accordingly a contemplative has called them
the “seven soul killers.”
Sadly,
this handout deals with only pride, jealousy, anger and lust; covetousness,
sloth and gluttony are left out. This
will be included in the book however.
BECAUSE
THESE ROOTS OF SIN ARE HABITS, THEY ARE ESPECIALLY DEADLY
Each root of sin is a habit; that is why they
are called the seven vices. St Thomas Aquinas teaches correctly that a vice is
a bad habit in operation (negative operational habit); and a virtue is a good
habit in operation (positive operational habit). The soldier of Christ (the
combatant spirit) is the person who without tiring, and without rest works hard
to root out the vices and to plant the virtues at the same time. The seven
virtues which battle against the deadly roots of sin are, humility (poison of
pride), generosity or liberality (killer of covetousness or greed), chastity
(destroyer of lust), meekness (killer of anger), brotherly love (enemy of
jealousy), diligence or hard work (enemy of sloth), and temperance or control
(destroyer of gluttony).
It is important to note that fasting,
abstinence, works of self-denial are also very important and strengthen the
will in dealing with the vices.
THE
METHOD OF THIS WORK
In uprooting the roots of sin, we shall use
the method
of the doctor. Treating each deadly root of sin as a disease, we shall
diagnose (describe, and say what it is and how it kills the soul); Next, in the
style of Venerable Louis of Granada (in his work “The Sinner’s Guide”, Chapters
30-38) we shall provide the medicine or remedies just as the
doctor does.
The mighty tree spoken of earlier is the tree
of vice or sin. The man is you, Immortal. The axe is virtue. The sea is the time
given us in this life—in which we must bring down the tree of (the slavery of)
sin. We begin next with pride.
