Seven deadly sins who identified seven or eight evil thoughts or spirits that one needed to overcome. Evagrius' pupil John Cassian, with his book "The Institutes," brought the classification to Europe, where it became fundamental to Catholic confessional practices as evident in penitential manuals, sermons like "The Parson's Tale" from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," and artworks like Dante's "Purgatory" (where the penitents of Mount Purgatory are depicted as being grouped and penanced according to the worst capital sin they committed). The Catholic Church used the concept of the deadly sins in order to help people curb their inclination towards evil before dire consequences and
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