Seven deadly sins soul," proper response to anger, friendliness, and wit or charm. Roman writers like Horace extolled the value of virtue while listing and warning against vices. His first epistles says that "to flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom." The modern concept of the seven deadly sins is linked to the works of the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, who listed eight "evil thoughts" in Greek as follows: They were translated into the Latin of Western Christianity (largely due to the writings of John Cassian), thus becoming part of the
Seven deadly sins sins such as restlessness and instability. Dante refined this definition further, describing acedia as the "failure to love God with all one's heart, all one's mind and all one's soul"; to him it was the "middle sin", the only one characterised by an absence or insufficiency of love. Some scholars have said that the ultimate form of acedia was despair which leads to suicide. Acedia is currently defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as spiritual sloth, which would be believing spiritual tasks to be too difficult. In the fourth century, Christian monks believed acedia was not primarily caused