In the fourth century, a monk named Evagrius led a group of monks into the desert. They wanted to separate themselves from the sinful world so that they could live holy lives. But ironically, it was in the desert that they were confronted with their own sin. Evagrius wrote down the biggest sins he observed and called them the “eight evil thoughts.”
One of his students, John Cassian brought these ideas to the Western Church where they were translated from Greek to Latin. Later in the sixth century, St. Gregory the Great (who would become Pope Gregory I) took his list and revised it. It became what we now call the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony and Lust.
Now I know these sins don’t sound very deadly. They actually sound pretty ordinary. Where are the sins like murder, adultery or torture?
What makes these sins deadly isn’t how gruesome they appear. What makes them deadly is their power to give birth to more sin. That’s why they’re also called the source or the cardinal sins.
But out of all the seven sins, one of them is the deadliest of all. One of them is the root of all the other sins. One of them is the “upstream” sin that feeds the other sins. The sin we’re going to talk about today is Pride.
