Article III: Concerning Sins Which Call for Heavenly Vengeance

— Origin of the opinion. Various places of Sacred Scripture, where a peculiar vengeance is announced as either taken by God or to be feared from Him, led theologians to distinguish four sins as "crying to heaven." From the time of Canisius they are contained in these verses:

The voice of blood and of the Sodomites cries aloud to heaven,

The voice of the oppressed, the wage of labors detained.

And so they are enormities against the individual neighbor: homicide; against the human race: sodomy; against the social good: oppression of the poor, widows, and orphans; the defrauded wage of workers.

⁴ Gen. 4, 10; 18, 20 ff.; Exod. 22, 23; Eccli. 35, 18 ff.; Deut. 24, 14 ff.; St. Jas. 5, 4.

— I. Capital sins are vices not necessarily graver than others or mortal, because of which man is led to several other sins.

Two vices are as it were the heads of all sins: cupidity, whether you take it for the appetite of riches or for the pursuit of one's own good as such; and pride which, if it is perfect, denotes the repudiation of all subjection.

But other sins which are called capital have the nature of proximate origin with respect to several sins; these, by the custom of today, are numbered seven.

1. Pride, or rather vainglory, insofar as it denotes an inordinate excessive mode of pursuing one's own excellence. It is of itself venial; it begets presumption (an appetite of undertaking something beyond one's powers), ambition, and vain glory. The contrary defect is pusillanimity; the middle is the virtue of magnanimity.

2. Avarice, or the inordinate appetite of temporal things, venial from its own kind, begets hardness of heart, gives birth to violence, fallacies, frauds, and betrayal. To this is opposed the vice of prodigality. The middle is liberality.

3. Luxury, or the inordinate appetite of venereal pleasure, concerning which elsewhere. It begets in the intellect blindness of mind, the precipitation of one acting without counsel, the inconsideration of one doing things that are disgraceful, and inconstancy in good purposes. In the will false love of self grows, hatred of God is prepared, affection for the present age is fostered.

4. Envy, or sadness concerning another's good, insofar as that is diminutive of one's own excellence: the increase of another's excellence is apprehended as if one's own evil. It gives birth to hatred, detraction, joy concerning the neighbor's evil, and whispering. Charity is opposed to it.

5. Gluttony, in general, is the inordinate appetite of food and drink. Excess is called crapula. Abstinence is opposed to it. From its own kind it is a venial vice. Besides bodily effects, it begets in the soul dullness of mind, foolish gladness, loquacity, buffoonery.

It is repugnant to piety that someone without a just cause should feed on human flesh or blood.

Drunkenness in the special sense, if it is perfect, denotes the voluntary induction of a state in which someone is immediately deprived of the use of reason with proximate incapacity of recovering that use. Since reason is our directive faculty, drunkenness of itself makes a reparable mutilation, which, illicit according to itself, can licitly be intended or chosen for the good of the whole person or body, or permitted for a just and reasonable cause, such as recovering health and the soothing of bitter pains supply. These excluded, that perversion of order, by which the principle of order is withdrawn, is grave in its kind; nevertheless it admits smallness of matter, from the shortness of time and the absence of danger of material sin. For the cutting off of the mere anxieties of agony it is not licit to deprive a dying man, for example by the aid of morphine, of sense and reason, at least when no particular pains are to be put to sleep.

As a means of just defense, another's involuntary drunkenness can be induced; indeed, according to several, even that culpable to the neighbor, if he is determined toward a greater evil.

Imperfect drunkenness is of itself venial. As long as someone continues to discern between evil and good, he is not yet perfectly drunk.

Subjectively, quite many are excused from grave sin, because they did not fully notice the danger of drunkenness. Evils committed in drunkenness are imputed if, as sufficiently connected, they were foreseen and remained evils, that is, material sins. Societies called temperance societies are usefully established for healing drunken persons. For many the sole medicine is complete abstinence from intoxicating drink.

6. Anger is an inordinate appetite of revenge: inordinate on the part of the mode, and this is venial; or on the part of the object, and this is grave in its kind. It begets indignation, swelling of mind, clamors, blasphemies, insults, maledictions, and quarrels. An ordered appetite of revenge is called anger through zeal. Neither such anger nor severity which is inflexible concerning punishments when right reason demands it is opposed to meekness or clemency.

7. Sloth, or weariness of soul, as a capital vice, is not taken for every relaxation of soul in cultivating virtue, but for sadness and weariness concerning divine friendship: then it is mortal from its whole kind. It gives birth to aversion from spiritual goods, pusillanimity and despair concerning salvation, rancor, torpor, and wanderings of mind in spiritual exercises.

A proper and direct precept of laboring is not demonstrated.

II. By the name of sins against the Holy Spirit theologians are accustomed to call six sins which particularly oppose the Holy Spirit, because they resist the action of grace more, and therefore are blotted out with greater difficulty. They are: Presumption, Despair, attack on known truth. Envy concerning grace granted to a brother, Obstinacy. Impenitence.

III. From various places of Sacred Scripture are gathered four sins which peculiarly call for heavenly vengeance. The first, against the individual neighbor, is homicide; the other, against the human race, is sodomy; the third and fourth are against the social good: oppression of the poor, the defrauded wage of workers.

IV. Because of positive or negative cooperation, sins committed by another are also imputed.