Illustration: Sunday Büro

W e are all fools in one way or another. Fools for love, fools for vanity, fools for greed and arrogance, laziness and envy.

In the fourth century AD, the Egyptian hermit Evagrius the Solitary classified human failings into eight major groups. In 590, Pope Gregory I revised Evagrius’ list to create the canonical seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride, which were to be defeated by the cultivation of the corresponding virtues of…