- From Morality In Job, Pope Gregory I, 595: For the tempting vices, which fight against us in invisible contest in behalf of the pride which reigns over them, some of them go first, like captains, others follow, after the manner of an army, for all faults do not occupy the heart with equal access. Pride is the beginning of all sin. but seven principal vices spring from this poisonous root: vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust. For, because He grieved that we were held captive by these seven sins of pride, therefore our Redeemer came to our liberation. Pride begets envy; envy also generates anger; melancholy also arises from anger and runs down into avarice. It is plain to all that lust springs from gluttony, when in the very distribution of the members the genitals appear beneath the belly. And hence when the belly is inordinately pampered, the other is doubtless excited to wantonness. Gluttony is also wont to exhort the conquered heart, as if with reason, when it says, God has created all things clean, in order to be eaten, and he who refuses to fill himself with food, what else does he do but gainsay the gift that has been granted him? Lust also is wont to exhort when it says, Why enlargest thou not thyself now in thy pleasure, when thou knowest not what may follow? The hapless soul, once captured by the principal vices, is turned to madness, laid waste with brutal cruelty. the soldier of God, since he endeavors to pursue the contests with vices, smells the battle afar off; while he considers, with anxious thought, what power the leading evils possess to persuade the mind, he detects, by the sagacity of scent, the exhortation of the leaders, and by foreseeing them afar off, he finds out the scent of this howling army.
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- From Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas, 1496: It would seem that gluttony is not a sin, for our Lord said: “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man.” Further, “No man sins in what he cannot avoid” Gluttony is immoderation in food, and man cannot avoid this, for Gregory says, “Since in eating pleasure and necessity go together, we fail to discern between the call of necessity and the seduction of pleasure,” and Augustine says, “Who is it, Lord, that does not eat a little more than necessary?” Therefore gluttony is not a sin. Further, in every kind of sin the first movement is a sin. But the first movement in taking food is not a sin, else hunger and thirst would be sinful. On the contrary, Gregory says that “unless we first tame the enemy dwelling within us, namely our gluttonous appetite, we have not even stood up to engage in the spiritual combat.” But I answer that Gluttony denotes not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire. Desire is said to be inordinate through leaving of reason; that which goes into man by way of food, by reason of its substance and nature, does not defile a man spiritually, but the Jews, against whom our lord is speaking, and the Manichees deemed certain foods to make a man unclean. It is the inordinate desire of food that defiles a man spiritually. Gluttony does not regard the substance of food, but in the desire thereof not being regulated by reason. It is a case of gluttony only when a man knowingly exceeds the measure in eating, from a desire for the pleasures of the palate. The appetite is twofold: There is the natural appetite, which belongs to the powers of the vegetable soul. In these powers virtue and vice are impossible, since they cannot be subject to reason. But there is another, sensitive appetite, and it is in this appetite that the vice of gluttony consists. Hence the first movement of gluttony denotes inordinateness in the sensitive appetite, and this is not without sin.
- From Purgatorio, Digital Dante, Columbia University, 2019: The souls on the terrace of gluttony are emaciated. They suffer a punishment that involves immense craving for the fruit of trees that they can never eat. This linkage between desire felt by the soul and emaciation experienced by the body was already flagged as a thorny issue in Purgatorio 23: Dante posed the question: “Who would believe that the odor of a fruit and the odor of the water could, by generating desire, so reduce a soul?” How one who does not need nourishment — in other words, the virtual body of a non-living soul — can be made thin by not eating? The question prompts a discussion of the divine creation of virtual bodies as well as discussion of the divinely-governed biological creation of physical bodies. The discourse on embryology of Purgatorio 25 can be viewed as a key installment in an ongoing Dantean insistence on the indissolubility of body and soul. In effect, Dante invents a theory whereby human souls possess bodies as they await the resurrection of the flesh at the Last Judgment. It is interesting to note that Dante’s afterlife theory of the body reverses the order of creation. This is of course a key issue for one who constructed a “virtual reality” in his poem. Dante has in some fashion anticipated our expression “virtual reality” in his description of the “virtual” bodies of the souls in the afterlife. Purgatorio 25 concludes with the arrival of the wayfarers at the seventh and last terrace, the terrace of lust, and the pilgrim fears the flames on one side and the precipice on the other. He sees spirits walking within the flames and hears their voices calling out examples of chastity.
- From The Seven Deadly Sins in Our Time, rev Gaius Florius Aetius, 2012: In our relativistic times, when many take the attitude that there is neither good nor evil, that everything is “somehow” a matter of opinion, we are naturally very skeptical about the theory of evil, sins, and vices. For a purely materialistic person, the question of “sin” does not arise at all. In the rational view of materialism, there can only be the question of expediency, of which attitudes or actions are conducive to an end. Even if there are certainly atheists and materialists who are quite virtuous, morality per se is irrational. The reason for this is easy to grasp: because in the end there is no reasonable reason at all to be good, except the fear of punishment. If it would be individual, then morality would lose its character as morality, and would be only custom or individual usefulness. Therefore a materialistic morality is completely impossible. In the Church’s belief, the Deadly Sins are not sins themselves but actually attitudes that lead to sinful actions. Sin cannot be an emotion, since we are not masters of our emotions; sin can only be an action that we commit consciously. Gluttony and selfishness are often substitute actions: We stuff ourselves with chocolate because we lack love and affection; we indulge ourselves with goods because we lack self-esteem. While LUXURIA arises from an excess of self-satisfaction, GULA, gluttony, arises from a lack of self-esteem, and we want to stuff this lack. But since external goods never remove an internal lack, it is an endless desire that never ends because it can never be satisfied. Gluttony becomes endless because the real lack is not addressed at all. In the end, egoism becomes excessive, always born out of the fear of falling short, of having received too little. The big egoists are always small dwarfs in the heart, full of fear to come too short, to have too little and so they stuff everything into themselves, grab and take everything to themselves without measure and end. https://www.academia.edu/107015645/The_Seven_Deadly_Sins_in_Our_Time
- From The Joy of Sin, Simon Laham, 2012: Gregory made it impossible to gain any pleasure at all out of eating when he listed not one, but five ways to sin by gluttony. We have the obvious ‘too greedily’ and ‘too much’, but we also have less straightforwardly condemnable modes of eating: ‘too early’, ‘too expensively’ and ‘with too much focus on how the food is prepared’. This pleasure-maximizing attitude towards food was anathema in those Middle Ages monasteries in which the deadly sins were codified. When gluttony was deemed deadly in the Middle Ages, pleasurable overindulgence in food and drink spoke of an ungodly preoccupation with earthly, bodily pleasures, which came at the expense of a more proper focus on the divine and spiritual. These days, of course, gluttony is no longer the multi-headed beast that Gregory condemned: Gluttony is now one-dimensional; it is all about eating too much and is moralized because of obesity. For many, ‘gluttony’ is synonymous with ‘fat’, fostering a one-dimensional, puritan and boring view of food and eating. Social psychologists have long known that human behavior of all kinds is at the mercy of the environment. Eating is no exception. The relationship between the gluttonous drive to consume and its impact on the body depends crucially on one’s surroundings. Put simply: gluttony is adaptive in environments in which calories are scarce, like the African savannas of our deep evolutionary history, but not in those in which calories are plentiful, like Mississippi. We evolved to eat much and do little–a sensible evolutionary strategy.
- From Fasting, Fat Shaming and Finding Christ, Ashley O’Mara, Jesuit Review, 2018: After I took too many pieces of French toast for breakfast one morning when I was 12, my mom suggested I was, perhaps, getting a bit overweight? With these words, she introduced me to a body I had never really looked at before. My mother’s comments about other women’s weight always carried a moral judgment: The “overweight” girls in ballet class had bad parents who let them eat too much; my religion teacher did not eat “right”; “obese” people generally are a drain on the healthcare system. Fat people wear their supposed sins in public, my mother reasoned, and so their bodies were available for public comment. Before the French toast incident, I did not believe that I could be fat. I did not have a sophisticated sense of morality, but I was convinced that I was a good person. But when Mom observed that I was overweight, she verbalized my body into existence. I started biking obsessively: For a short while, I lost a little weight, but my lackluster follow-through deteriorated into an unhealthy obsession with food. The more forbidden a brownie was, the less I was able to resist the temptation; Instead of Commandments, I memorized calorie counts. My doctor and after-school TV programs told me to look at the women around me and understand that fleshliness was normal. But to my perfectionist mind normal did not mean good. The Madonna is said to have instructed her followers to fast from everything but bread and water twice a week until the end times. With the stress of starting my master’s studies and teaching for the first time, caring for my body was no longer a priority. One evening, skipping dinner in order to lesson-plan, I glanced at an article from a unit on fat-shaming that a fellow instructor had developed: it connected descriptions of systems of oppression like sexism and ableism to sizeism. I was reminded of the medieval women mystics I was reading about, saints who tried to recreate Christ’s pain in their flesh. Was I really trying to make myself healthier, as my mom tried to tell me, or was I just participating in a system of oppression? I only recently realized that I was never truly what many people would consider to be “fat,” and my struggles did not measure up to those of many plus-size women. I still find my body to be endlessly frustrating, as it continues to do things without my consent. After celebrating mass one Christmas Eve with more anxiety about my worthiness than joy, I fumbled for a friend’s assurances, called out into a body whose matter was carbon, oxygen, bone and blood and muscle—the only things that made it matter. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/02/07/fasting-fat-shaming-and-finding-christ-my-body
From The Connection Between Diet Culture and Purity Culture, Charles Stiles, Evergreen Counseling, 2020: When I began un-learning diet culture, I found there was another layer of shame about my body- one that went deeper than size or shape. This deeper layer was about my body being essentially sinful and dangerous, and not to be trusted. I grew up in an evangelical home where my body was policed for multiple reasons – it wasn’t just my fatness or my thinness, but how “sexy” I dressed. The messages around weight stigma blurred with the messages around keeping my body pure and virginal. Multiple clients I work with were raised with “purity culture” along with diet culture. The premise is that we must keep our bodies pure and virginal for marriage. I do believe that the connections between purity culture and diet culture can be harmful and shameful. Messages that both purity culture and diet culture share include that your body is the source of sin, your natural impulses and desires will lead to sinful and “bad” things your body is shameful, it wants things it “shouldn’t” want or looks how it “shouldn’t” look, you are supposed to have control and mastery over your body, we cannot trust our instincts, which are body-based, other people know best and we need to follow, etc. In general, this promotes mind/body disconnection. Understandably, when we are disconnected from our bodies, it can possibly lead to shame, Eating disorders, Sexual confusion, Denial, Dissociation, Fear of intimacy, Difficulty with boundaries, Low self-worth, and other physical symptoms. We need to un-learn purity culture, perhaps with the guidance of a therapist, coach, or instructor. It means building self compassion to counteract the shame we’ve internalized. Overall, it means befriending our bodies and ourselves. I speak from experience when I say this path is absolutely possible. https://evergreencounseling.com/the-connection-between-diet-culture-and-purity-culture/