Show Notes
Prof. David Elliot draws on Aquinas, Gregory the Great, and the desert monastic tradition to present the seven capital vices — pride (their queen and root), vainglory, envy, wrath, avarice, sloth, lust, and gluttony — as "gateway vices" whose strategic targeting, through their opposite virtues and spiritual training, uproots dozens of further sins in the Christian's journey toward the heavenly homeland.
This lecture was given on March 24th, 2026, at University of Arizona.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events
About the Speaker:
David Elliot is the Grace P. Hobelman Chair in Catholic Moral Theology, with a specialization in fundamental Catholic moral theology, virtue ethics, and the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. He received his Ph.D. in moral theology at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, and was awarded a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship as Research Associate in Theological Ethics at the University of Cambridge, coming to CUA in 2017. He is the author of one monograph and eighteen journal articles and book chapters invited or already in print.
Keywords: Acedia, Aquinas, Capital Vices, Contraries Cure Contraries, Gregory The Great, Homo Viator, Pride, Remedies, Seven Deadly Sins, Spiritual Training
More from The Thomistic Institute
Prof. Scott Cleveland explores the Aristotelian and Thomistic vision of friendship, arguing that true flourishing requires overcoming the vices of envy and apathy through the practice of charity and virtuous love.
Prof. Erik Dempsey explores Original Sin as a fundamental, lived reality inherently inclining the human person toward wrongdoing, but recognizing our brokenness is essential for understanding our constant need for divine grace and justification.
Prof. Adam Eitel argues that modern identity theories ultimately fail because they lack a stable metaphysical grounding, and he proposes an alternative view rooted in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s exposition of Psalm 8.
Fr. Irenaeus Dunlevy examines the contemporary crisis of identity by contrasting modern fluid subjectivism with the Thomistic realist perspective of the human person, arguing our true identity is rooted in our nature as beings created by God and ordered toward Him
Prof. Adam Eitel contrasts the modern, self-constituted notions of identity with the Thomistic understanding of man as a creature capable of seeing God., whereby our human identity is fundamentally reordered from the Adamic image to the image of Christ