page_title: Seven deadly sins
section_title: Gluttony
hierarchical_section_title: Seven deadly sins / Historical and modern definitions, views, and associations / Gluttony
context_page_description: The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings, although they are not explicitly listed in the Bible. Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities. According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth, which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues. These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one's natural faculties or passions.
  This classification originated with the Desert Fathers, especially Evagrius Ponticus, who identified seven or eight evil thoughts or spirits that one needed to overcome. Evagrius' pupil John Cassian, with his book The Institutes, brought the classification to Europe, where it became fundamental to Catholic confessional practices as evident in penitential manuals, sermons like "The Parson's Tale" from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and artworks like Dante's Purgatory.
context_section_description: Gluttony (Latin: gula) is the overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste. The word derives from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow.
  In Christianity, it is considered a sin if excessive desire for food causes it to be withheld from the needy.
  Medieval church leaders (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) took a more expansive view of gluttony, arguing that it could also include an obsessive anticipation of meals, and the constant eating of delicacies and excessively costly foods.
  Aquinas prepared a list of five ways to commit gluttony, comprising:
  Laute – eating too expensively
  Studiose – eating too daintily
  Nimis – eating too much
  Praepropere – eating too soon
  Ardenter – eating too eagerly
  Of these, ardenter is often considered the most serious, since it is extreme attachment to the pleasure of mere eating, which can make the committer eat impulsively; absolutely and without qualification live merely to eat and drink; lose attachment to health-related, social, intellectual, and spiritual pleasures; and lose proper judgement: an example is Esau selling his birthright for ordinary food of bread and pottage of lentils.  His punishment was that of the "profane person ... who, for a morsel of meat sold his birthright". It is later revealed that "he found no place for repentance, though he sought it carefully, with tears".
caption: Still life: Excess (Albert Anker, 1896)
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