Abstract

I am interested in those vices which appear on lists of ‘deadly sins’, not from any theological point of view but because of the insight revealed in their selection as being ‘death to the soul’, which I understand as ‘corruptive of the self’. ‘Corruption’ is here to be taken in a literal sense as ‘destruction or dissolution of the constitution of a thing which makes that thing what it is’. Such corruption is to be found in the structure of the will. Aquinas thought that vice consists in desire gone wrong because uncontrolled by reason. Perhaps what follows can be seen as an interpretation and filling out of this view.