Facing Our Obsessive Patterns: The roots of the "seven deadly sins"

This article, from Pastor Theodore Notthingham, pinpoints one of the essential differences between Inner Christianity and modern Western Christianity.  What we know as the "7 deadly sins" weren't sins at all, but "distracting and afflictive thoughts" that undermine spiritual life.  The shift in perspectives is a symptom of the transition of Christianity from a school of transformation and liberation to a tool of the Empire:

This idea of the "seven deadly sins" is not original to the Catholic Church and is a reduction and distortion of the spiritual teaching that came before it and that has largely been lost to us.  In order to recover something of the original meaning, we must return to the fourth century and the middle-eastern lands where these teachings germinated.  It was the Greek monastic theologian Evagrius of Pontus who first drew up a list of eight human "passions": gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (sloth), vainglory, and pride. For Evagrius, these passions represent an increasing fixation with the self, with pride as the most egregious of them. These passions are brought into play by thoughts or images which Evagrius does not name "sins" or "vices" but rather logismoi, meaning distracting or an afflictive thoughts.  These thoughts might be identified in our day as deeply ingrained obsessive patterns that are reinforced by habit.

These obsessive thoughts undermine the spiritual life and require recognition and resistance.  They are not seen as a moral failing calling for repentance. Evagrius held that spiritual progress depends on close observation of thoughts as they arise in the mind. Thoughts are symptoms, not sins. They buzz around in the mind looking for cracks in the heart – points of weakness and vulnerability. Their Greek name, pathi (pathology), suggests that a person is brought by them to a state of passivity and slavery. In fact, they overcome the will, so that the person victimized by his or her passions no longer has access to their free will.

Ancient writers give us a surprisingly contemporary psychotherapy of the human soul. Nilus the Ascetic writes that the stomach, by gluttony, becomes a sea impossible to fill – a good description of any passion. The objects which the passions look for cannot satisfy them because objects are finite and as such do not correspond to the unlimited thirst of the passions.

The full article is here