[maryz]

The one omitted by St. Gregory the Dialogist was self-esteem.

I find it hard to believe that the modern notion of "self-esteem" even existed in Cassian's time, and surely he didn't write in present-day English! I don't recall encountering the phrase in anything written before the 60s, though it might have been a "term of art" in therapeutic circles before that. What is the Greek(?) word being translated as "self-esteem"?

He writes about what a subtle vice it is, how it finds an opening in the practice of any virtue (see how well I fast. . . see how humble I am. . . ).

We learned of this by the term "spiritual pride" (incidentally, there's a passage about it, I think under that name, in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

[The_Reader_David]

Alas, I have my copy of The Philokalia in Sheppard's English translation, and do not have a Greek copy of Cassian's The Eight Grievous Vices to hand. His description of the vice, though, bears a remarkable similarity to what folks in "therapeutic circles" pass off as a virtue, and the Sheppard translation was done recently enough that Sheppard would have been aware of the modern usage in Englishing the Greek. Anyone who teaches at an American university can recognize the vice has been inculcated in incoming undergraduates, and as a contributing factor in some of them being almost ineducable.