Backward Mutters

Of Pride, Dorothy Sayers in her commentary on Dante’s Purgatory writes, “Pride is the head and root of all sin, both original and actual. It is the endeavour to be ‘as God’, making self, instead of God, the centre about which the will and desire revolve. In its narrower and…

The second of the Perverted Loves is Envy. Envy, though akin to greed or avarice is taken beyond an excessive love for one’s own welfare to the desire to deprive another of that thing which you desire. Where greed would work an ingratitude to God for all that he has…

We make the turn from the excessive loves (greed, gluttony, and lust) and the defective love (sloth) into the final three of the Deadly Sins which are what Dorothy Sayers refers to as Love Perverted. The Perverted Loves are loves which though mirrored in some of the others becomes so…

We’ve left the sins which Dorothy Sayers calls “Loves Excessive”, and we come to Pride which alone occupies the category of “Love Defective. Sloth is, according to Sayers, a failure to love any object in its proper measure and particularly to fail to love God with all one has and…