6.Richard Lavynham, A Litil Tretys on the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. J. P. W. M. van Zutphen (Rome: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1956). 14 manuscripts are extant of the Tretys.
7.Chaucer, “Parson’s Tale,” in Riverside Chaucer, X.743.
8.Young, p. 171. The late medieval English Fasciculus Morum lists theft, treachery, tricks and lies, usury, simony, and sacrilege. Although this last might seem incongruous to modern understandings of avarice, the classification is found in the early Church and throughout the later Middle Ages. Newhauser, The Early History of Greed, p. 30.
9.See Richard Newhauser, “The Love of Money as Deadly Sin and Deadly Disease,” in Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 315–26.
10.Newhauser, “Love of Money,” p. 322.
11. A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, Vol. 1, p. 349.
12.Gower, Confessio, III, V.155.
13.Ibid., III, V.194.
14.Ibid., III, V.223–4.
15.Ibid., III, V.280–2.
16.Ibid., III, V.321–5.
17.Ibid., III, V.249–57.
18.Gower, Mirrour de l’Omme, p. 106.
19.“Medicines to Cure the Deadly Sins,” pp. 273, lines 73–84.
20.Ibid.
21.Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, p. 92.
22.London, British Library MS. 331, f. 59v; Langland, Piers Plowman, XVII.343.4; Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, ed. William Aldis Wright (London: J. B. Nichols, 1869), p. 117. Also, see Newhauser, “The Love of Money,” p. 319.
23.Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, p. 482, line 18024.
24.Lambeth Palace MS. 392, f. 173r.
25.Ibid, f. 173r. Likewise, in Robert Mannyng’s procession of sinners where the priest sees external manifestations of their internal souls, those with “vysages of meselrye [leprous faces]” “lyke foule maumetrye [idolatry]” represent the avaricious, those who “loue more gode þan God almyȝt and “on worldly þyng þey most affye [believe].” Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, p. 318, lines 10209–10, p. 319, lines 10238, 10240. Avarice was associated with idolatry. See, for example, Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, where Avarice wears a “mawmet” on her head (p. 461, line 17206).
26.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, qu. 30, art. 3.
27. Fasciculus Morum, p.323.
28.Gower, Confessio, Vol. 3, V.420–4.
29.The contemporary writing on greed and fear is substantial, but one recent example is Andrew Lo, “Fear, Greed and Financial Crises: a Cognitive Neurosciences Perspective,” Social Science Research Network Working Papers Series (October 2011). Accessed 15 April 2013.
30.Knuuttila, “Medieval Theories of the Passions of the Soul,” p. 57.
31.Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages, pp. 70–1.
32.Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, p. 93.
33.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, Qu. 118, art. 1.
34.For a survey on image of aging and melancholy, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964).
35.“Chirurgie de 1392,” p. 177.
36. The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principium of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs and Paul G. Remley (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 145. See also Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages, p. 70.
37.Brit. Mus. MS Harley 8828, fol. 65v cited in Wenzel, “The Seven Deadly Sins: Some Problems of Research,” p. 8.
38.Rypon, RY51B, ed. Johnson, forthcoming.
39.Ibid.
40.Ibid.
41. Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, p. 272.
42.Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, p. 175, lines 5339–40.
43.Ibid., p. 175, lines 5333–4.
44.Ibid., p. 175, lines 5335–8.
45.Giles of Rome, The Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 145–6. See also Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages, p. 70.
46. Speculum Sacerdotale, ed. E. H. Weatherly, EETS o.s. 200 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936) pp. 90–1.
47. Jacob’s Well, p. 143.
48.Guy de Chauliac, The Cyrurgie.
49.Bodley 95, fol. 6 cited in Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 351.
50.Cambridge, UL MS. Ii.iii.8, fol. 129 ff. cited in Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 280.
51. A Critical Edition of John Mirk’s Festial, edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II, Vol. 1., ed. Susan Powell, EETS o.s. 334 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 229. There are at least 26 extant manuscripts of Festial from late medieval England.
52.For example, Chaucer’s Parson treats avarice with “misericorde, and pitee.” Chaucer, “Parson’s Tale,” in Riverside Chaucer, X.803.
53. A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, p. 61.
54.Ibid., p. 62.
55. A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, p. 63. For the drying of the body with age, see Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages, p. 70 and On the Properties of Things Vol. 1, pp. 137–40.
© The Author(s) 2016
Virginia LangumMedicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and CultureThe New Middle Ages10.1057/978-1-137-44990-0_7
7. Sloth
Virginia Langum1
(1)Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
Before there was “sleuthe” there was acedia, which means something more like apathy or torpor, a spiritual dryness. While the notion of acedia had existed for centuries before, it received its first systematic treatment in the writings of the desert monk Evagrius Ponticus. 1 For Evagrius, acedia is the worst and most violent of the vices. For his follower, John Cassian, acedia is also insidiously destructive of ascetic discipline. He describes its trajectory as one from horror in the mind over one’s circumstances to disgust at one’s peers to physical paralysis of one’s own labor. 2
Acedia is not mere laziness. However, there are significant points of overlap between the senses of spiritual malaise and physical lethargy, even at this early date. For example, Cassian’s remedy for acedia is manual labor. 3 Gregory, however, in writing of tristitia [sadness] instead numbers its species as malitia [malice], rancor, pusillanimitas [pussillanimity], desperatio [despair], torpor circa precepta [slothfulness in keeping the commandments], and uagatio mentis erga illicita [wandering of the mind toward illicit things]. 4
Writers in the later Middle Ages pay increasing attention to sloth’s external characteristics, rather than its psychology. This change probably reflects the direction of Western theology toward more general pastoral care and away from a more specific desert asceticism. 5 Whereas the danger of acedia weighed heavily on the desert monks and scholars, who were often isolated in their cells, sloth tended to trouble the ordinary faithful. Yet older ascetic and clerical conceptions of sloth persist alongside the developing presentation of the sin. The scholar Siegfried Wenzel has surveyed the parallel and intersecting careers of acedia; I focus here only on how the ambiguity of its definition reflects upon physiological arguments related to sloth.
The status and understanding of sloth in relation to the soul and body changes around the thirteenth century. Although a strictly spiritual sin for the desert fathers, sloth increasingly relates to the body. In Alexander of Hales’ thirteenth-century scheme of spiritus, anima, and corpus, sloth slots under anima, denoting the soul as it pertains to the body. 6 Also drawing together the spiritual and corporeal, Aquinas defines acedia as “the negligence of a man who declines to acquire spiritual goods on account of the attendant labor.” 7 Yet as the later medieval period progresses, sloth also features as a temptation of the flesh (as opposed to the devil or the world) or a sin of the flesh (as opposed to the soul or spirit) in schemata of the seven deadly sins. 8 In a fifteenth-century Middle English s
ermon, for example, sloth confidently figures with lechery and gluttony as one of the sins in which “þi flessch temptes þe.” 9 This shift in emphasis from soul to body implicates sloth’s physiology and basis in the humors.
Metaphorical Sloth
Cassian’s description of acedia utilizes several medical metaphors. He first describes the sin as a “kind of fever” that attacks at the same time each day “inflicting upon the enfeebled soul the most burning heat of its attacks at regular and set intervals.” 10 He also describes acedia as a “disease” but it is one that must be “cast out” “from the depths of his soul.” However, these are not medical interpretations of acedia that we will see later. For Cassian, acedia is foremost a condition of the soul, not the body, which nonetheless impacts the body through the soul.
Later medieval religious and poetic texts associate sloth with a variety of ailments and pathological conditions, including quartan fever, quoditian fever, palsy, leprosy, fever, gout, dead flesh, apoplexy, melancholy, back pain, heart disease, and gas.
In terms of a direct bodily correspondence, sloth is usually paired with the feet. In Hilton’s mappings of sins onto body parts, the feet denote sloth. 11 In sermons, plotting Christ’s wounds as remedies for the seven deadly sins, sloth is the nail through the feet. 12 Likewise, the slothful are often punished in purgatory and hell by having their feet or legs broken, or by gout, which involves the swelling of the feet. 13 Sloth first binds the Pilgrim’s feet in the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. 14 We can see this kind of image as a symbolic correspondence. The bound feet metaphorically restrain the slothful from activity. Patristic in origin, the association of feet and sloth was well established in the later Middle Ages. Phillipe de Vitry (d. 1361), for example, writes of the two feet pes intellectus and pes affectus, which represent the two faculties of the soul, and of which the slothful use only the first. 15 The necessity for contemplatives to use their pes affectus (elsewhere pes amoris) or “foot of love” in the journey to God serves as a significant image in mystical texts, such as The Cloud of Unknowing. 16 Podagra, or gout of the foot or big toe, is also paired with sloth. John Bromyard uses podagra as a synonym for sloth: “those are affected by podagra … are usually rather slack in things that belong to God, such as sermons and useful enterprises, while they are much faster when it comes to shows and idle occupations.” 17
Beyond diseases of the foot and gout, the medical conditions most commonly associated with sloth are palsy and lethargy. These references range from metaphorical to material, often confusing causality and correspondence. The unconfessed slothful are punished with palsy in the purgatory described in “A Treatise of Ghostly Battle.” 18 We recall the paralytic of Bodley 649 who fuerunt figurati the slothful in an exegesis of Matthew 9, Christ’s healing of the paralyzed man. 19 It is often difficult to discern whether lethargy serves as a metaphor or a symptom of sloth. Lethargy was, after all, a medical condition, as recognized by Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Lanfranc of Milan, for example. 20 However, Gower in Mirror of Man seems to anticipate this problem, distinguishing between symbolic and material lethargy in his description of sloth as “like lethargy, which kills the sleeping man.” 21
Finally, pastoral writers depict the eyes of the slothful as sleepy or obstructed. Langland’s Sleuthe has “two slymed eighen” that likely refer to the obstruction of sleep-induced discharge. 22 Peter of Limoges describes both the “internal eyes … weighed down with the sleep of laziness” and the external eye that cannot be kept open during the hours of office. 23
Metonymic Sloth
The tension between disease and sin is particularly acute in depictions of sloth, due to the blurriness of the distinction between sloth and tristitia, or sadness. In theological and medical contexts, sadness is identified as a passion, or emotion, and acedia or sloth as a sin. Aquinas unifies them by making acedia a type of tristitia, or sorrow.
As we recall from our discussion of envy, sorrow is one of the chief passions for Aquinas. He explains that this passion causes a contraction or flight within the body, threatening not only the health of the soul but that of the body. 24 Acedia is a special kind of tristitia, a “sorrow for spiritual good.” 25 Accordingly, whereas sorrow is not always evil, acedia is. How bodily is acedia? As a type of tristitia, acedia involves the sensitive appetite. Yet while tristitia might refer to sorrow belonging to either the sensitive or the intellective appetite, Aquinas emphasizes that acedia must involve the will. It is not strictly a movement of the sense appetite, such as bodily pain or sorrow, dolor. 26 If only a mere beginning of sin, in the sense appetite, it is venial; yet with the consent of reason, it is mortal. 27
Does acedia involve both the body and the soul? According to Aquinas, acedia must involve both body and soul, or it is not a sin at all. We recall the reference to physical labor in his definition. However, the spiritual dimension is imperative; acedia is not simply a matter of distaste for physical labor, but rather sadness about the divine good and the potential movement away from the divine good caused by physical labor. 28 However, as the concept of sloth emerges, it incorporates a wider range of activities and behaviors. For example, Jacob’s Well defines “slowthe” as “whan þou art vnlusty of þi-self, to seruyn god or þe world, desiring princepally bodily ese, lothe to travayle, outhir for lyiflode bodyly ouþer for lyiflode gostly.” 29 Sloth relates not only to spiritual duties but to those of the world; work serves both the body and the soul. 30
As for the increasing embodiment of sloth, other moralists claim that sloth itself is a passion. In The Donet, the fifteenth-century bishop Reginald Pecock pays special attention to sloth, which he views as unique and thus deserving of particular treatment. Consistent with his arguments concerning anger and envy, Pecock claims that in some instances sloth is not a moral vice. If a person’s willingness “to leeue and forbere what resoun biddiþ to be doon” in the interests of “eese or for squaymosenesse of peyne” is called “slouþe,” then “slouþe is no moral vice or synne, but it is natural and indifferent to moral vertu and moral vice.” 31 Pecock’s categorization of sloth as passion or sin probably reflects an expansion of the concept, which is liberated from the spiritual.
However, Pecock goes further, arguing that sloth is not a sin to be numbered among pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, and lechery. If sloth is defined as the desire to “leeue and forbere, or a nylling to do, what resound biddiþ to be doon,” it is better understood as a “general moral vice contrarye or stonding aʒens many special moral vertues.” Rather than a distinct sin, sloth is an “aggregat of manye diuers special moral vicis.” 32
Material Sloth
Many religious and medical writers associate sloth with humoral imbalance. Sloth is linked with both phlegm and melancholia, reflecting the ambiguity of its definition as closer to despair or laziness. 33
The older definition of sloth, spiritual dryness or depression, corresponds to an association with melancholy. When aligned with melancholy, sloth has implications for gender and the possibility of religious and emotional experience. According to medieval medicine, men tend to be dominated by hot and dry qualities, or the choleric and sanguine humors, whereas women tend to be dominated by wet and cold qualities, or the phlegmatic and melancholic humors. Of the male personality types, cholerics are thought to be energetic and volatile, and the sanguine cheerful and generous. Of the female personality types, phlegmatics are thought to be dull and sluggish and the melancholic delusional and self-centered.
Humoral balance was considered to have a profound influence on spiritual capacity, particularly the ability to see spirits and distinguish between demonic and divine ones. Different humoral balances led to different possibilities for religious experience. William of Auvergne thought that the phlegmatic complexion was especially unspiritual, whereas melancholics were more susceptible to mystical rapture. However, he distinguished the potential for mystical visions according to gender, separating the melancholic complexion from melancholic imbalance or illness. According
to William, the former, a pathological condition experienced by men, lent itself to true visions, whereas particular imbalances in women could lead to false visions. 34
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