Today is the feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena! Just a thing to know. She’s cool. I’m still kicking myself that I did not see her tomb when I was in Rome a decade ago.
Yesterday was also Terry Pratchett’s birthday, which I think is worth bringing up.
I had the thought for this essay since I got towards the end of watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and it’s been bouncing around my head every so often. Some spoilers for that series up ahead, but it’s been out for ages so I don’t think anyone cares.
Might be worth mentioning that Saint Thomas Aquinas called them “the Seven Deadly Vices” because many of the “Deadly Sins” embody emotions, rather than sins themselves. The problem isn’t feeling the emotions, it’s letting them control your actions. If you care about these things.
Fullmetal Alchemist, Sin, & C.S. Lewis
Why yes, I would accept an anime adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s fiction.
[For the record, when I refer to Fullmetal Alchemist, I mean the anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, because that’s the one I’m familiar with. I have not watched the original anime series nor have I read the manga. If I say something that contradicts those–tough toenails! I don’t know about those.]
Throughout the run of Fullmetal Alchemist, our heroes come up against homunculi, artificial humans created through alchemy, powered by Philosopher’s Stones to make them incredibly hard to kill. All of the homunculi are flunkies of the main villain of the show (who is also sort of a homunculus?), and they’re all themed after the Seven Deadly Sins. The idea presented is that they embody those sins–they’re split off from the original, him shedding those aspects of himself into separate beings.
Mind you, some of these are not too deep in how they’re portrayed. Gluttony is a fat guy who eats people. Take that how you will.
Something that becomes obvious towards the end of the story’s runtime is that some of these homunculi are not just vaguely evil or sinful for no reason–it’s driven by specific desires. Right before death, it’s revealed that Envy’s disdain for humanity is built out of, well, envy for the way humans can build trust and relationships even when they have reason not to. Greed comes to the realization that his hunger for as much wealth and power as he can grab is an attempt to substitute those things for what he actually wants, that is, the satisfaction of friends and family. More than once it’s suggested that the main villain even creating the homunculi was motivated by his desire to have a family the way a human does.
It’s also worth noting that many of these homunculi, when they die, actually have pitiable death scenes. I’m considering doing a Note about that, too.
So let’s talk about this understanding of sin. The Catholic definition of sin that you’ll get in theology courses or Catholic middle school is that sin is an act that willfully separates us from God. Which is a good definition! If we see God as the Ultimate Good, then sin is something that willingly turns away from that. Now even though sin is willful, it’s worth noting that it’s not out of nowhere–many sins are things that good, but taken too far. Enjoying food is good, but valuing eating above rationality, other human beings, and at the expense of other important things–that’s bad, and what we call gluttony. Because I’m rewatching Legend of Korra right now, I’m reminded of Toph’s description of several villains in that series–their motives weren’t bad, but they were out of balance.
C.S. Lewis rather famously took issue with the notion that Good and Evil were equal and opposite forces, because people who do evil acts are doing it because they’re trying to do something good. Sometimes that ‘good’ is as simple as “It makes me feel good,” but that’s still a good. People don’t do evil things because they’re attempting to do something evil, they just think it’s good in their own way.
This is emphasized in the trial scene of Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, in which the men who kidnapped our hero Ransom and took him to Mars as a sacrifice (that the Martians didn’t really want, because they’re an Unfallen planet so they don’t go for that kind of thing but they didn’t speak the language so they misunderstood) have to make their case to the ruler of Malacandra/Mars. Devine only went to Mars for the gold. Weston gives a long, rambling speech that Ransom has to translate into the Martian language, essentially glorifying colonialism and crushing other civilizations in order to help the human race.
Mars’s ruler, the Oyarsa, judges these two, and while he doesn’t like either of them, he judges Weston to be mildly fixable. Devine wants gold–he only wants the good for himself, and doesn’t care about anyone else. He’s beyond help. Weston, on the other hand, at least cares about his species and his descendants. That doesn’t excuse his actions in the slightest, but it makes the Oyarsa think that at least there is a desire to do something good, albeit a twisted one that thinks the best way to do good is by harming someone else. It’s a good desire, but it’s twisted into something incredibly evil: rampant colonialism.
So I’m kind of amazed that Fullmetal Alchemist took this route in depicting the Seven Deadly Sins? Maybe that’s silly of me, but a lot of works, even Western media with theoretically closer cultural proximity to the source material, don’t, and don’t even seem to understand the concept of sin. Darksiders III has the Seven Deadly Sins as the main antagonists and boss battles, but it kind of bungles the delivery. The opening narration asks something like, “Hey, if God created sin doesn’t that mean sin is good???” (A clue: no.) The Deadly Sins are just mindlessly malicious too, and in ways that don’t necessarily add up. Lust is transformed into being just… a desire for things, I guess.
[Also, thing that super annoyed me: Sloth is given the title “Lord of the Flies,” and that’s dumb. In demonology that title goes to Beelzebub, who is the demon associated with Gluttony (which makes more sense because flies will eat even gross food, like rotting meat or actual poop).]
The game sort of ends saying that humans are blamed for the Seven Deadly Sins when they’re the playthings of other powers, which doesn’t make much sense to me given the way the series has been built so far. It’s more a story about the main character, Fury, learning to overcome her own flaws (sometimes embodied by the Seven Deadly Sins), rather than actually considering why someone might give into those vices in the first place.
And I’m impressed that Fullmetal Alchemist DOES ask more about these ideas. It doesn’t just say, “Here’s a sin/bad thing, like Envy or Greed.” It says, quite explicitly, “Why does someone act on Greed or Envy? Because that person is looking for something that he or she doesn’t know how to obtain otherwise. It’s an attempt to do Good, badly.”
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