Historian Peter Jones on a little-known 14th-century text whose set of psychological tools for self-help work as well today as they did when it was written

I can’t think of the word. It’s not ‘distant’ or ‘obscure’, these are too cold. But it’s not ‘exotic’ either. What’s the word for this, the thing that horrifies you but then unlocks your heart?

In my hands is a book written on lambskin seven hundred years ago. It’s tall, like an oversized restaurant menu. The pages are yellow, the spine has the waxy feel of dead skin, and it smells of damp gardening gloves. It weighs roughly the same as a large fresh salmon. I’m sitting with it in the Vatican Library, and under the flash of the archivist’s spectacles I feel like the skinned lamb myself. Usually this book is kept in a concrete vault. You have to show your credentials at the front gate and surrender your passport to the Swiss Guards. Next you have to go through a brief interview, get your photo taken, sign several forms, and leave all your things in a digitally activated locker. Only then, after you’ve stripped off your modern identity, are you allowed to climb the stairs and get your hands on this, the world’s only copy of the Ark of Wisdom.

Is it worth travelling to the Vatican City for? Opening up the 650-year-old manuscript, I find every combination of anxiety and desire. And although the ink is ancient, the ideas are as fresh as if they had been written this morning. Across the 300 pages there are ecstasies and passions, rages and fantasies, procrastinations and jealousies. So many of the thoughts I imagined were mine alone – thoughts exhilarating, petty, lonely or afraid – are here, exposed in brown Gothic handwriting. There are the telltale signs of hypocrisy; the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of personal grooming; the best remedies for depression. The book pulses with energy, as if every word were written by somebody who already knew our world was coming.

I shouldn’t be surprised that this manuscript feels so alive. It was structured around a sixteen-hundred-year-old system that still works; a map that continues to function as a reliable guide to the human brain. Because the Ark of Wisdom is really a handbook for how to live with the Seven Deadly Sins.

For most of us in the twenty- first century the Seven Deadly Sins are a bit of a joke. Not too long ago they inspired a range of ice creams, with a pink strawberry ‘Lust’ and a peanut-butter ‘Sloth’. Graphic novels have made them into villains, and video games have made them into end-of-level bosses. It’s still possible to stream Se7en (1995), the blockbuster movie starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, which features a serial killer who punishes people for each sin in turn (although in the wrong order).

But in the Middle Ages the Deadly Sins were more than a gimmick. They were psychological tools, keys for deciphering personality and decoding desire. They were a Periodic Table for the mind. As desert monks like John Cassian described them, the sins were a system for ordering and processing all thoughts. Every tempting idea and harmful act, in theory, could be traced back to some combination of these seven.

What are their names? And what’s their ‘correct’ order? Listing them in their classic form – and in their usual ranking, from most to least ‘deadly’ – the seven are:

1. Pride: Self- obsession, to the point of dismissing the lives of others. This usually grows out of your focus on yourself.
2. Envy: Craving for other people to fail, or for their successes to be crushed. This usually grows out of your focus on others.
3. Anger: Frenzy, rage and a loss of the power of reason. This usually grows out of your impatience with others, or with yourself.
4. Sloth: Despair, depression, or falling out of love with life. This usually grows out of a lack of focus.
5. Avarice: Questing for more and better possessions. This can also cover ‘wasteful’ generosity, or fixation on different objects. It usually grows out of a focus on material things.
6. Gluttony: Excessive desire for food, alcohol, or other consumables. This can also cover total abstinence from eating, or excessive connoisseurship. It usually grows out of a focus on necessity.
7. Lust: Fixation on sex, but also sensory pleasure. It usually grows out of a focus on bodies.

The Ark of Wisdom moves through each of these seven with the precision of a sniper and the compassion of a kidney donor. Written sometime in the late 1300s, it has rarely been cited or copied since. In fact, it remained more or less unknown beyond the monastery near Milan where it was first kept. So, reading it now, in the Vatican Library, is a moving experience. But really, the Ark of Wisdom is only the beginning. Out there in Europe’s archives are thousands of works just like this one: books that use the Seven Deadly Sins to explore temptation, frustration, fear, anxiety, grief and passion; guides for coping with rage and narcissism, and for embracing life’s positives. Obstacles keep these books out of our reach. Most are inaccessible, written in obscure languages and torturous handwriting. Also, they’re usually packaged under two labels – ‘medieval’ and ‘theology’ – that don’t always excite the average reader.

And this is an enormous loss. Because if these guides have a true home, it isn’t in the concrete vaults of a library building. And it’s not in a university research seminar, either. It’s in the hands of all of us, as we struggle through these labyrinths we get thrown into. The dark mazes of our lives.

This is an extract from Self-Help from the Middle Ages: A Journey into the Medieval Mind by Peter Jones (Hutchinson Heinemann, £20). Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

A Drink with the Idler

Peter Jones is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday 23 April, 6pm-7pm. Peter will be chatting to Tom Hodgkinson about medieval approaches to the Seven Deadly Sins and how these ideas can teach us about living well today.
Mark Vernon will also present a new Thought for the Week.

Find out more and book tickets here. It’s FREE to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.