This is a great article (paywall): “As God is my witness, gluttony is not a sin” in The Financial Times Magazine, 7 Dec 2023, London, https://www.ft.com/content/0fec3572-1186-4c45-88df-221243ee9997 (accessed 8 Dec 2023)

It’s in the Book of Proverbs that King Solomon lays out “six things the Lord hateth, and the seventh His soul detesteth”. This proto-listicle includes “a proud look” and “feet that are swift to run into mischief” (I’ve always rather liked the feet one), but there’s no mention of gluttony at all. The Lord patently never gave a toss about how much you eat.

It wasn’t until the fourth century that a monk called Evagrius Ponticus listed eight evil thoughts — fornication, avarice, hubris, wrath, boasting, self-esteem, sadness, dejection — and added gluttony for the first time. Then, in AD590, Pope Gregory I finalised the Seven Deadly Sins, getting rid of some of the odder ones, combining a few and cementing gluttony’s place on the list, possibly while feeling the effects of one of those gigantic feasts of a pre-antacid papacy. Thanks, Greg.

Religious authority abhorred gluttony because they thought it indicated a lack of restraint, of self-control, and religion doesn’t work on people who can’t see the benefit in self-denial. The idea of deferring pleasure in order to experience paradise is predicated on believing in heaven in the first place.

Tim Hayward, FT.com

Summary: Dante’s Third Circle of Hell (Gluttony)

Raffa, Guy P., ‘Circle 3: Gluttony: Inferno 5’, Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Inferno (Chicago, IL, 2007; online edn, Chicago Scholarship Online, 21 Feb. 2013), https://doi-org.ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/10.7208/chicago/9780226702780.003.0005, accessed 7 Dec. 2023.

Cerberus, a doglike beast with three heads, guards the third circle of Hell and mauls the spirits punished here for their gluttony. The shades, writhing in muck, are unrelentingly pounded by a cold and filthy mixture of rain, sleet, and snow that makes the earth stink. One glutton, nicknamed Ciacco, rises up and recognizes Dante as a fellow Florentine. Ciacco prophesies bloody fighting between Florence’s two political factions that will result first in the supremacy of one party (white Guelphs) and then, less than three years later, the victory and harsh retribution of the other party (black Guelphs). After informing Dante that several leading Florentines are punished below in other circles of Hell, Ciacco falls back to the ground, not to rise again until the Last Judgment at the end of time.