Wrath/Ira: The Seven Sins – part IV of VII

Anger or more precisely wrath or rage is perhaps one of the more complexes of the cardinal sins because its field of identification and expression is so wide, it moves beyond the sphere of self and aim towards usurping parts of the world not naturally pertaining to the one suffering from rage. It can stretch out in the world and then collapse upon the wrathful leading to suicide.

In the 7^th canto Dante describes in Inferno that here in the fifth circle where the wrathful ones were found he saw more people than anywhere else, they were clashing against each other in a never ending clash and turmoil, like hungry wolfs taking bites of each other just to be hurled apart and clashed against each other yet again, like a tormented wave of angry flesh.

Wrath can range from destructiveness and hurtfulness of any kind to violence, vengeance and war. In the 7^th Canto Dante do speak of the battle between Michael and Satan, but this should not be interpreted as some forms of wrath are good – on the contrary, in this imagery, the Satanic impulse is the wrath of the worlds which the mindful Michael subdue and thus dominate the darker passions with a clear mind. Dante further see wrath as a love for justice that is perverted into spite and vengeance and he have here in mind how history at all times have demonstrated how a desire for justice can lead to violence and feuds that is passed down in families, like ancestral curses. Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ being one tale of the misfortunes of Wrath.

There are some tendencies in modern psychology of a humanist bent to see anger and consequently rage as passions that hold a potential useful and good, that it is simply viewed as energy. But this is not so, anger is a passion that has been given a direction and its quality is violence and destruction. Wrath is Lord Mars falling into the clutches of Moon and Saturn that pervert his energy into something foul (Saturn) or into energy misdirected and misplaced (Moon). Here vengeance and violence upon the world as dictated by mars or the final implosion and self destruction as generated by Moon gives the spectre of wrath.

Anger is a passion caused by some feeling of injustice being committed; it can be towards your personae, towards your principles, towards your ancestry or some cause or value you identify yourself with. It might start as something experienced as a provocation or a wrongdoing done deliberately against you – and in this you take this aerial passion and mould it to a seed that you place in your stomach and from here you allow it to take fire and ignite heart with putrid fumes and thus the mind get cloud in the irrational vapours of negative and destructive passions. Anger that is allowed to grow into wrath will always seek destruction, it will seek to even the scores and it will seek redemption for the perceived attack by the bane of axe and sword. It is the path of cruelty where love has seen its death in the first flicker of poisonous fumes oozing forth from the wrathful one...

Wrath is poison, as William Blake spoke of in his poem, 'A Poison Tree' that speaks of the complexity and bane of wrath:

  

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend: 
I told my wrath, my wrath did end. 
I was angry with my foe; 
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears, 
Night & morning with my tears; 
And I sunned it with my smiles 
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night, 
Till it bore an apple bright; 
And my foe beheld it shine, 
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole 
When the night had veil'd the pole: 
In the morning glad I see 
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree

Invidia: The Seven Sins – part III of VII

“Pride, envy, avarice - these are the sparks have set on fire the hearts of all men”

- Dante

When Virgil takes Dante to Purgatory in Canto XIII he sees people wearing coats that look like grey and bruised flesh, their eyes are sewn up with iron wires in a terrace where the blind leads the blind as they stretch out towards any good angel and fragment of love they can find. Here Dante also meet Sapia, a noblewoman purged for taking greater joy in others misfortunes than her own fortune.

Invidia or envy is about feeling sadness for another man’s good fortune, it is the negation of charitas (charity), an absence of love...

Invidia is also integral to the mystical powers of those who possess the evil eye. Naturally, some possess the ‘evil eye’ because of an overflowing of an inherent power undirected – but care should be observed so this most negative effect is not taking hold.

A person possessing the ‘evil eye’ and who is suffering from the affliction of invidia will constantly reap misfortune and this will in turn call upon anger and greed to walk with envy.

Invidia is perhaps the most poisonous of the vices, it contaminates the envious one and also its environment in a rapid and brutal way where the seed of misfortune is planted in all corners, bridges and crossroads of life where it grows hasty into a thorny and foul plant that seek only to harm its environment not realizing that the greatest harm is the putrid heart of the envious one.

If we have everything, but lack love, we have nothing and charity is an attitude that seeks the well being of our fellow men and women, because if your life gets better – my life gets better, as Awo Falokun so often writes in his books.  Charity is indeed an antidote for Invidia.

Envy is not solely to take joy in another person’s misfortune; it is also about wishing for you what your friend and neighbour have. It can also mask itself behind a feeling of your friend of neighbour being undeserving of their good fortune – and that you see yourself as more worthy of a particular good fortune. Invidia is a most ugly and monstrous illness that set out to sabotage not only one’s own fortune, but ANY good fortune the envious one sees.

The wish for one’s life to get better, to have condition similar to ones friends and neighbours is a good thing, because in this we dream of our achievements and what becomes flesh must first be born in dreams. But the desire for possessing what someone else have just because of your distorted idea of justice where you judge someone else as unworthy of their good fortune is the grim grandmother of all nightmares.

Aristotle understood envy as a feeling of pain occurring in the envious one seeing another person’s good fortune and as such it is the beginning of perpetual unhappiness.

Both the narcissist and the one of no self esteem can develop this affliction and become a venomous presence for its own soul and for everyone he or she touches. This is perhaps most of all evident in the fairy tale ‘Snow White’, where envy is the entire cause of all its misery – as it is in Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’. In both instances we see that envy takes so much place in its hasty growth that love is made impossible.

Properly in the second terrace of Purgatory where they are purged, it is the eyes that are sewn up, the window of the soul, the very mirror of the ‘evil eye’ and the well of desire...

The best remedy for this most wicked of sufferings is to be content – because he who is content is truly rich in his or her contentment and have made place and room for love.

Luxuria: The Seven Sins - part II of VII

"But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death."

- James 1: 14 - 15

-    Luxuria, or better known as lust is by John Cassian understood to be the very womb of sin and death in accordance with James 1. Whereas pride/hubris is the seed of sin, lust is the womb of the sinful seed. Today the word ‘lust’ carry an overtly sexual and hedonist flavor and in truth one of the predecessors of ‘luxuria’ is found in the activity related to porneia or prostitution, but more than this, luxuria is a thymus, an appetite. Perhaps the most proper idea that still carries on the inherent idea of ‘luxuria’ is actually luxury – in other words, an excess. In Antiquity as in galenic medicine all disease was caused by excess of something, in the cause of ‘luxuria’, we are speaking of an excess of pleasing oneself. This self pleasing is of a nature that generates disequilibrium. This disequilibrium will cause one to seek the pleasure of the flesh in excess, it be wine, debauchery, money or whatever that pleases and arouses the flesh. A great example of ‘luxuria’ proper is found in Dunmore’s ‘The Libertine’ (2004) about the life and demise of the Earl of Rochester. The important lesson here is that because of his ‘sin’ he executed his destiny in imperfect ways and consequently reaped disgrace upon his death and testimony...

Fornication and hedonism is also ideas close to us when we hear lust being mentioned, it does have a sexual connotation, a sensual rouse where the devils of coitus and angels of orgasm sing their tritons and serenades in the name of lust. But the focus on fornication is perhaps distorted as the sin, ‘luxuria’ is about a distorted focus on the bodily sensation of pleasure. As such any addict will be ruled by the demons of lust, because addiction is a hunt for the pleasure of the flesh at the cost of anything else. ‘Luxuria’ is one of the means humans use to escape bad feelings and states in general and is the route of escapism.

Any love binding is a child of ‘luxuria’, where an sensual obsession of a flesh that is not one’s own turn into something of primordial importance, neglecting anything but the desire and its object. Lust is the sister of sorrow and granddaughter of despair because the lusting one in absence of the desire will have only sorrow and despair to support the obsession that is taking shape.   

Interestingly, Dante is seeing those suffering from ‘luxuria’ as people who have lost their reason to appetites, and in this he hits the nail at the centre of the heart – the sin of lust is about losing one’s reason in favor of the appetites of the flesh, to please a sensation. Dante writes in the 5^th canto of Inferno:

I came into a place mute of all light,
  Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest,
  If by opposing winds 't is combated.

The infernal hurricane that never rests
  Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine;
  Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them.

When they arrive before the precipice,
  There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments,
  There they blaspheme the puissance divine.

I understood that unto such a torment
  The carnal malefactors were condemned,
  Who reason subjugate to appetite.

For Dante the hurricane is the element of passion and desire that replicates the works of ‘luxuria’ on the soul and he takes this a step further by speaking about those he see in this infernal circle. Of these we find Semiramis that was reputed to make debauchery a lawful obligation of her citizens. In other words, it is about the abuse of others for the gratification of one’s own desire for sensual, sexual or emotional pleasure. He also see great lovers like Tristan and Achilles who lost their reason for the sake of desire and he see Cleopatra, whom he see as voluptuous, a constant threat in many hagiographies speaking of the temptations of saints. We read further on in the 5^th canto:

To sensual vices she was so abandoned,
  That lustful she made licit in her law,
  To remove the blame to which she had been led.

She is Semiramis, of whom we read
  That she succeeded Ninus, and was his spouse;
  She held the land which now the Sultan rules.

The next is she who killed herself for love,

  And broke faith with the ashes of Sichaeus;
  Then Cleopatra the voluptuous.

Helen I saw, for whom so many ruthless
  Seasons revolved; and saw the great Achilles,
  Who at the last hour combated with Love.

Paris I saw, Tristan; and more than a thousand
  Shades did he name and point out with his finger,
  Whom Love had separated from our life.

One of the many things Dante tries to bring attention to is that love and desire might reflect one another – but they are not necessarily in balance all the time. We can lust for something and seek to possess and walk then in the land of potential obsession or we can love and dwell in the islands of possibility and freedom.

Love is the archetypical idea from whence lust sprung forth and is as such a spirit of pleasure that unfolded when Eros met Psyche in their meetings veiled in nocturnal fire. Love and lust is born from this same nocturnal fire we know as Venus – but She also rules the sign of the Scales (Libra) where love and lust are the heart and blood in the scales.

As such, the ‘sin’ – or failure in lust is about self serving excess where we seek to possess what is not ours, where we seek to force or take pleasure according to our desire with one’s self-pleasure as the sole, and often only, focus. If this occurs we have no love and if we have no love we have nothing, but the empty sorrow of despair...

So, I say; know your sin...and through this you shall know yourself...