Self-Help and the Seven Deadly Sins with Peter Jones

Hi everyone and welcome to Episode 336 of the medieval podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Sebalski. We've all been there, suddenly faced a face with our ugliest selves, wrestling with pride and V. Anger, Sloth, Averis, Glutany, or Lust.

A.K.A. the Seven Deadly Sins. In the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers divided moral missteps into these seven familiar categories, allowing them to ponder the many ways humanity can fall into sin, as well as how to get out of it. All these centuries later, we might ask ourselves, are the seven deadly stins still relevant?

Can they still teach us anything about human nature? My next guest dives deep into medieval sources and his own brushes with sin to take on these questions. This week I spoke with Dr. Peter Jones about the seven deadly sins.

Pete teaches history at St. Louis University in Madrid and is the author of laughter and power in the 12th century. His new book is one after my own heart. In fact, I even gave it a blur because I liked it so much.

is called Self-Help from the Middle Ages, a journey into the medieval mind. Our conversation on how people grappled with the seven deadly sins in the Middle Ages, some pretty fun confessions, and how the medieval perspective might just help us better navigate the modern world is coming up right after this.

Well, welcome, Pete. It is so nice to meet you, and I love your book, and we've just had the best chat already so far as well. Welcome to the podcast, this great dab you hear.

It's terrific to be here, long time listeners. So this is just such a treat for me. Thank you, Danielle. Well, thank you.

And so your book, let's just jump right into this. This is a book that is almost as personal as it is research. So what made you want to do a confessional, like Augustine here? What possessed me?

So the topic is the seven daddy sins, right? Essentially. And you know, I've been teaching the daddy sins. I was teaching in Siberia at this rather strange,

but wonderful institution. And I taught class on the 70s since, and it was, I realized it was a great gateway to understanding so much about the Middle Ages.

You know, through discussions about Anger, we can talk about the Crusades, to envy we can talk about the universities and rivalries there.

And so on. So I love the topic, and then coming to write about it, I mean, as a historian, I felt, what is my role here?

My pretending I don't have any of these things. I don't have any of these or edges. I don't suffer from pride or anger. And so, it was quite important to me to put myself in it

because I think I didn't like the idea that a historian would be above all of these things and surveying them from the outside. And I think it's such a personal topic

like to write about particularly something like sloth, which I guess will come to which you know, shade into something we understand as depression or listlessness or you know,

and things like that, envy, pride. Do you know what, a lot of it just sounded like? To me, this has kind of been my academic backing track to sort of precarious academic life.

I've gone through all seven of the same, so many times. Now, I just thought more fun to put the person in it and to show, because the message of the book really is and I think the message of some of the best theology

which we can talk about is it's quite forgiving. These aren't really so much deadly sins as things we all go through and all struggle with in a lifelong way.

So I thought it was important for this story for me to show that I'm implicated in that but I'm not outside it. And I suppose I was also thinking about the conventional model or gust in Dante. There's a lot of hubris in that I know, but you know, I wanted to make Dante a kind of unconscious model for the book So he threw himself in so I thought I took myself in

I love that and we do start with pride which is something that you're at so with three. I know look I've already been too proud heaven. I and we're only four minutes in. I love it So we're talking about confessions, we're talking about theology, we're talking about how to live better, and this is a book called Self-Helps. So if we're talking about help, why did you go for sins? Why didn't you go for the best advice?

Like how to, I don't know, win at life, we went straight for the sins, tell me about this. Well, I think the idea is that, well, in the medieval sort of confessional practice, you begin, you know, how do you recognize yourself? what you understand yourself in order to improve, you have to begin with a sentence.

There's this idea that you, if you're working through confession, it's like looking in a mirror, right? It's the sort of the form of confession,

sometimes sort of as a kind of mirror, a confession, you are learning about yourself and reflecting in total honesty on all of your flaws. And I think that is certainly,

I think the best place to start with self-help is not so much what are the best things to strive for. Let's recognize the kind of some of the habits we have. But on the other hand, I think it comes down to the message of what I think is the most compassionate

kind of advice on the Sims, Thomas Aquinas and Dante and people in that tradition. It's sort of recognizing that these things are redeemable. So you're, I say, putting my temperature, like my pride, you know, here I am, you know, writing such a book and believing in myself to do such a thing.

There's something redeemable about it. an eight-pride for example becomes hubris and sort of a terrible egotism when you don't recognize and this is Thomas Kleinus talks about it in these ways. When you're not recognizing your own limitations, where you're extrapolating and expanding

beyond what you're actually capable of. It's something like a quinoceau, it doesn't think we should therefore slip into a total state of humility where I think I can't do anything. I shouldn't write this book because I'm a worm and I'm useless at everything.

This is what Thomas would call Poussalanae Mati, a weakness of spirit. And I suppose the point there is that you can't be useful to anyone if you don't