What leads us to temptation

Lust, Sloth, Anger, Gluttony, Greed, Envy and Pride drifted frowning through early Christian tradition until the 6th century, when Pope Gregory the Great codified them as the seven deadly sins. They did not of themselves mean damnation -- that depended on how seriously they were practiced -- but they staked out the perilous paths that could lead to it.

They also provided artists and writers with material more colorful than theology usually makes available. Hieronymus Bosch, among others, for the painters; and as for literature, “Piers Ploughman,” Dante’s Inferno, “The Parson’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury outing, Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” and even Bertolt Brecht.

This wealth doesn’t favor the effort made by Aviad Kleinberg, an Israeli professor and writer. His “Seven Deadly Sins” seeps vaguely among its categories like watercolors let to run together. Attempting a sprightly bite, it gums at its subject.

Even Thomas Aquinas, not the liveliest read, was more fun, at least on gluttony (he may have taken special interest, being rotund to the point where a semicircle had to be cut from his writing table). He set down six ways: eating too early, too much, too expensively, too passionately, too daintily, too disgustingly.

Introducing his seven sins, Kleinberg writes that he will not compete with the many scholarly and philosophical books on the subject. “What I offer the reader here is something else: a slim volume, an essay on the human passions, a personal look at the impulses that make our lives wonderful or horrible, or both.”

Not really. For the most part he makes only a glancing effort to bring his own reflections and experiences to bear. More important, there is very little effort to deal with the sins in contemporary context. Instead, Kleinberg, who has written extensively about medieval Christianity, writes almost exclusively on how Christianity and Judaism have dealt with them.

There is an autobiographical sin-note in the introduction in which he recalls maliciously and secretly destroying an elaborate sand city built by a nerdy schoolmate. It left him feeling only emptiness and pain. A more telling passage comes in the book’s strongest chapter: Pride.

He recounts his resentment of the superior manner of a brilliant professor, and his own admittedly brash and half-baked confrontational outburst in the classroom. Amused, the professor chatted amiably with him afterward and hired him to do research.

“Our professors were institutionally arrogant even if they were personally modest,” he writes, now numbering himself among them. “The university is not an ad hoc gathering of intellectuals but an institution that uses and abuses power.”

That pretty much does it for personal sin-wrestling, aside from citing, for Gluttony, his son’s happy attack upon a steak after a vegetarian phase; and a generic Lust paragraph mentioning his own inflamed adolescence. Otherwise, Lust is aired mainly through old texts, with hardly a mention of its application to today.

A large part of the book refers to rabbinic writings. A much larger part is devoted to Christian theologians, notably St. Augustine, and the pronouncements of the Catholic Church. There is nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. Indeed, no one ever wrote with a more anguished vitality on the subject of sin than Augustine. There is a witty discussion, in Gluttony, of the concern by medieval Catholic authorities about taking the anti-glutton fight too far. One abbot, well-fed no doubt, expelled an extreme ascetic from the community with an indignant farewell: “Go your way . . . you have edified us enough.”

As for the rabbinical texts, there is an alarming citation from Isaac Ben Yedaia about the fearful potency an uncircumcised organ gives to its possessor and the uncontainable passion it arouses in women. Better the mediocre performances of the circumcised, the rabbi argues, and more energy left for God.

Still, to bring out a “personal” book on the deadly sins that turns out to be a light and somewhat jumbled and blurred survey of what is largely their remote textual history is a fairly dispiriting exercise, made even more so by avoiding any real engagement with the past few centuries. It suggests the Spanish phrase about serving a meal of cat dressed as hare.