[...]... judged to be the greatest offenses to the soul and the root of all other sins As certain sins were subsumed into others and similar terms were used interchangeably according to theological review, the list evolved to include the seven as we know them: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth To counter these violations, Christian theologians classified the Seven Heavenly Virtues the cardinal:... writer finds the conceptual and practical challenges that a deadly sin poses to spirituality, ethics, and everyday life The notion of the Seven Deadly Sins did not originate in the Bible Sources identify early lists of transgressions classified in the 4th century by Evagrius of Pontus and then by John of Cassius In the 6th century, Gregory the Great formulated the traditional seven The sins were ranked... his study to the garden, from the domain of reason to that of nature There is an evident echo of the garden of Eden and the myth of the Fall And Christian commentators of the time had no trouble giving the story a misogynistic turn, making Phyllis into Alex10 LUST Lust.book Page 11 Wednesday, October 22, 2003 9:53 AM ander’s wife and supposing that the moral is not the victory of lust, but the deceitfulness... Love is individual: there is only the unique Other, the one doted upon, the single star around whom the lover revolves Lust takes what comes Lovers gaze into each others’ eyes Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits and stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities (fig 9) Love grows with knowledge and time, courtship, truth, and trust Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway, the collision of two... social criticism, popular culture, and art and literature Whether the deadly seven to you represent the most common human foibles or more serious spiritual shortcomings, they stir the imagination and evoke the inevitable question— what is your deadly sin? Our contemporary fascination with these age-old sins, our struggle against, or celebration of, them, reveals as much about our continued desire to define... typically the ecstatic finale, and when we go to the theater we do not want to leave before the ecstatic finale But neither is the ecstatic finale all we want, as if we could just make do with it, bypassing the rest of the performance Nor do we only want the relief that follows the ecstatic finale, or the state of having been through it We can have wants of that kind: I might not want to go to the dentist,... in the bar, even if one anticipates enjoying it when one gets there This is the reverse of lust We have to specify that our couple desire what they anticipate By themselves, even desire for sexual activity and its pleasures, and desire for them as ends in themselves rather than strategic routes to something else, do not give us full-blown lust Consider satiated libertines who regret the dying of the. .. the dying of the old fire They desire to desire as they once did In doing so, they also desire the activities and pleasures they once had: here, a desire to desire X implies a desire for X They mourn the days, or nights, of arousal that are slipping into the past But lust is not thereby electrified It may remain mortifyingly absent In the central cases we need to focus upon, lust is not only desire,... hundreds of specific genes supporting these various processes.10 18 LUST Lust.book Page 19 Wednesday, October 22, 2003 9:53 AM The interlocking systems are the nervous, endocrine, circulatory, and genitourinary systems There are also autonomic sexual mechanisms that ignore the brain altogether They underlie and contribute to the flooding of the body by desire Their different functioning at different... direct the intensity with which lust is felt, and their dormancy may give us good reason, against Freudians, for denying that sexual desire is in the air at all If we integrate mind and brain as we should, then the Freudian vision of even the infant mind as a seething hotbed of unconscious lusts is revealed as the fantasy that it is No excitement, no blood boiling, no lust But our concern is lust in the . (editor) Tr ut h (with Keith Simmons) Lust. book Page iv Wednesday, October 22, 2003 9:53 AM Lust The Seven Deadly Sins Simon Blackburn The New York Public Library 2004 Lust. book Page v Wednesday, October. and then by John of Cassius. In the 6th century, Gregory the Great formulated the traditional seven. The sins were ranked by increasing severity and judged to be the greatest offenses to the. soul and the root of all other sins. As certain sins were subsumed into others and similar terms were used interchangeably according to theological review, the list evolved to include the seven