BOOK REVIEW : Surveying the Contemporary Moral Landscape : THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS: Jewish, Christian and Classical Reflections on Human Nature, <i> by Solomon Schimmel</i> . The Free Press/Macmillan. $22.95; 298 pages

“The Seven Deadly Sins” is one book that media moralist Dennis Prager will want to buy and read. Heck, it’s a book that Prager will wish he’d written--an ardent and eloquent argument for bringing back the biblical notion of sin and putting it to work in our own benighted world.

“All of us are engaged . . . in a personal ongoing battle with sin and vice,” Schimmel insists. “Our failure to live up to the best we can morally be is as tragic as the unhappiness our evil causes.”

Solomon Schimmel, a professor at Hebrew College in Massachusetts and a practicing psychotherapist, is disdainful of what he broadly defines as “amoral” or “secular” psychology.

He condemns “the relaxed moral and ethical standards of our society.” And he urges us to regard the old-fashioned ideas of vice and virtue as useful insights into human nature and not merely “relics of antiquated theological and philosophical traditions.”

Schimmel harks back to the seven cardinal sins of ancient moral iconography--pride, anger, envy, greed, gluttony, lust and sloth--as the benchmarks of ageless moral wisdom, and he uses them to conduct a wide-ranging survey of the contemporary moral landscape.

“The seven sins directly relate to a host of problems addressed by clinical and social psychology,” he writes. “Low self-esteem, aggression, racial animosity, economic anxiety, executive stress, obesity, sexual dysfunction, depression and suicide are among many problems directly related to the seven sins.”

Schimmel is playing an elaborate--and, at times, entertaining--intellectual game in “The Seven Deadly Sins.” He devotes a chapter to each of the cardinal sins, presents various case histories and cautionary tales and then asks: How many sins can you find in this picture?

Schimmel’s motives are decent enough, and he tries mightily to speak in terms that a “secular” thinker might be able to understand. He does not ask his fellow psychologists to share his own belief in a moral code ordained by the Almighty; at one point, for example, Schimmel suggests that we can believe in “Fate” if we cannot bring ourselves to believe in God.

But Schimmel insists that the therapist “must be willing to address difficult moral issues with his patient” and, in order to do so, the therapist “has to be knowledgeable in moral literature and philosophy and be morally sensitive himself.”

Thus, Schimmel offers “The Seven Deadly Sins” as a refresher course in what the author rather euphemistically calls “the pre-modern traditions” of ethics and morality as practiced by “classicists and medievals.”

He has an impressive command of the Scriptures, the classics and some of the more obscure mystics and moralists of both Jewish and Christian origin, and his sources range from the Genesis and the Gospels through “Confessions of St. Augustine” to Othello and “Paradise Lost”--but not much beyond.

He makes the point, perhaps inadvertently, that the “moral literature” of Western civilization can be pretty racy stuff--the chapter on lust, for example, underlines some of the more lurid passages of the Book of Samuel. And he is even capable of cracking an elegant Talmudic joke, as when he obliquely refers to the male genitalia as “a small organ which when constantly fed is hungry but when deprived is full.”

Still, Schimmel has an off-putting tendency toward finger-wagging and guilt-tripping. “Since most of us can control our sexual appetite,” he harrumphs, “if we fail to do so when required, we should feel guilty.” And he readily admits that he makes good use of guilt in treating his own patients:

“How do you react when you see someone else behaving like a pig?” he routinely asks the patients who come to him for “weight-control therapy.” “Would you like your spouse or children to be so crass and animal-like at the table? Your passion for food so overwhelms you that you don’t realize the dishonor you are causing yourself by your gross eating habits.”

“The Seven Deadly Sins” is challenging, even radical. Essentially, Schimmel questions the conventional wisdom of law, government, media and--above all--psychotherapy. But Schimmel is so stern, so quick to sermonize, that I found myself wondering what it must be like for a patient to spend time on his couch.