The Seven Deadly Sins:
Avarice and Envy
4 March 2007
Today we are moving on in our discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins to a consideration of Avarice and Envy. They are not a likeable pair and few would admit to being under their control. As if to make it easier to accommodate her, Avarice has, over the years, changed her image. Envy hasn’t been able to manage this kind of extreme makeover. One of the first Christian writers to deal with Avarice at length, was a writer named Lactantius, of the 4th or 5th century, I think—he presented it as a grasping hag, picking over corpses strewn on a field of battle, accompanied by her unholy brood: Care, Hunger, Fear, Anxiety, Perjury, Dread, Fraud, Sleeplessness and Sordidness. Later on she learned to assume the more maternal guise of thrift, or prudent investment for the future. Over the centuries she has changed again and again, and we have known her as laissez faire, eminent domain, the “Invisible Hand” of economic law in the Wealth of Nations, and more recently, free trade, globalization, downsizing, and outsourcing, NAFTA and CAFTA.
It is not an accident that Avarice, or Greed, now masks herself under the guise of impersonal abstractions. It is easier to lose sight of her that way, both in larger social ways and in personal, private ways. Social greed can be masked by considering it a kind of economic necessity; personal greed can be masked by thinking of ourselves as having to do what we have to do to get by in a system we did not create. We can comfort ourselves by accusing famous sinners—like the Enron bunch—and overlook our complicity in our own personal greed. It would be more honest, I think, to recognize that the way we have organized our public life is largely driven by greed and our economic system appeals to us through our personal avarice. We tend to call ourselves consumers before we think of ourselves as citizens. Everything in our world is for sale, has a price. The foundations of our democracy are even at risk as elections now are almost entirely about who can raise the most money.
So what is greed? I have been trying to rethink the seven sins in the light of Merton’s notion of the false self, which is extremely illuminating here. But I will wait a bit to get to that and start instead with a story. Some of you may remember this one. It is from Dostoyevsky. There was once a peasant woman—an extremely covetous old woman—who died a wretched, greedy sinner. Obviously the only place for her was in hell in the lake of fire, where she was tormented day and night. Her guardian angel, who had done the best he could for her all her life, finally remembered that she had done at least one good deed: she had once given an onion to a hungry person. So he went to God and asked that the woman be given a second chance on the basis of her sole good deed. God, being merciful, agreed. He said that the angel might offer the woman an onion to grasp hold of, and if she held on to it, the angel might pull her out of the lake of fire.
So that is what the angel did. The woman was delighted: she grabbed the onion and the angel started to lift her out. When the other souls around her saw what was happening, they grabbed hold of the woman, so as to be pulled out, too. You might think that an onion was not strong enough for such work, but I must remind you that souls without bodies are extremely light. In this case the onion was strong enough and many other souls grabbed hold of the woman. But when she saw what was happening, she became enraged and started to kick at them and push them away. The angel cautioned her, but she persisted. With every kick and shove the onion unraveled a little more until finally it broke and the woman was lost in the lake of fire.
What was the matter with that woman? Her covetousness was ingrained, I fear. In her mind it was her onion. The angel was giving it to her. It did not belong to those other people; they had no right to it. It was for meant her alone. But by trying to have exclusive possession, she lost any possession at all. That is typical of avarice. Greed wants things for oneself, not to share. Avarice is anxious about owning things, it has a need to possess, driven not by a real love of things for themselves, but for the sake of having them—not even so that one can use them, often enough, but simply to display them. That doesn’t mean that possessions are evil: in a moderate degree and for a reasonable purpose they are good. Possessions are part of our embodied existence. They give expression to our personalities, they represent a kind of care for the place we live in and a valuing of the goods of creation, and they are means by which we can assist others. But it is possible to want something without really valuing it, merely for the sake of having it, or for the sake of its value as others will perceive it. It is also possible to accumulate things beyond any reasonable purpose. It is almost as if one frantically tried to get things in order to prove that, by having them, one were real. In this way an image of a person is created through possessions, but since it is a work of covetousness, the image is a false one. The person we are trying to project in our avarice is someone God does not know.
And that gets us back to Merton. He said that the essential sin is the falsity that tries to be real, to be true, as if God did not matter, as if there actually was a space in which we could freely make ourselves what we want to be without reference to the deepest reality of who we are in God. It is obvious, is it not, that much of our getting and possessing is driven by an anxiety to dress up that false self by means of things we can own. Covetousness is the drive to accumulate things without true reason or purpose, in order to give substance to this false self by means of them. It is a kind of idolatry, as Paul once said. But, of course, if we do not know who we truly are, then we cannot fight off greed, because we are driven by that nagging sense of incompleteness, or emptiness, to externalize our identity through the things we own. The only hope to beat such an insidious sin is to find God and submit to him and learn who we are through that submission. That doesn’t take away all the difficulties of ownership and avarice, but it is a wonderful and necessary start.
I discovered that it was only in the late middle ages that pride was finally given the place of honour as the chief capital sin. Earlier, greed vied for first place. There are places in Scripture where it seems to be so: Paul called the love of money, that is, avarice, the root of all evil. When a man came to Jesus to ask him to arbitrate his father’s will, he said: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” But in a funny way, our lives in this age of our history have come to consist in what we possess. In this race to possess, the economic system we have constructed for ourselves bears a heavy burden of blame. We are constantly exhorted to buy things without reference to our needs, except our need or anxiety, stirred up by our advertisements, to find some kind of security in manifold possessions.
A recent writer on the Seven Deadly Sins (Henry Fairlie) said: “From the moment at which the child begins to receive the messages from the society around it, it is subject to the continual pressure of group attitudes that tell it that it will be judged only by success, and that success will be measured largely by its acquisitiveness. No other model is set before it.” As if to prove the point, one reads in a recent survey of the goals of incoming college freshmen that, unlike 30 years ago when the most popular desire was to develop a working philosophy of life, more than two thirds now simply want to make a lot of money.
Among the many evil effects of avarice are two things I want to mention. First, it is distracting. The greedy person is a distracted person, out of touch with himself—which is, of course, part of the cause of his avarice in the first place. The writer I just quoted says this: “As it is in ourselves, Avarice in our societies is a harassment, difficult to push aside. We are harassed into working in ways that are unsatisfying, so that we may buy things that we have been harassed into believing will satisfy us.” This continual harassment to buy things and to work to be able to buy them is the only way we have figured out to keep our society going—except for the occasional war. But when a society is motivated in that way, it has lost its moral sanction.
Another corruption of avarice is an increasing hardness of heart towards the poor. We live in a time of increasingly desperate poor folk. In the last several years the poverty rate has increased every year until now there are 37 million people living in poverty in the USA. You may have seen the article in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago that in the last five years there has been a marked increase in the poverty of the most seriously poor, those who live at less than half of the poverty rate—at a time of increasing corporate profits and increasing labor productivity. The last 30 years has seen a marked increase in the number of billionaires in this country, too. To own one billion dollars is to have control over the assets equivalent to the life-time earnings of 20,000 average workers.
Why am I talking about these social conditions in a sermon about sin? Simply to remind us that our temptations come from three sources: the devil, of course, and our selves—the flesh—but also from the world. Christians have too long been slow to recognize that many of the social and economic conditions we take for granted and seem so natural, are actually sinful. Remember several years ago, there was a popular book named The Prayer of Jabez? It was almost entirely about how to get lots of stuff through prayer, yet it was being recommended in all the big Christian media outlets. Now we have The Secret, which, I am told, claims to reveal the secret of the higher life, but which is also mostly about having more stuff. We have been propagandized into complacency if we think that it is merely normal for a country to tolerate so much wealth on the one hand and so much poverty on the other. Perhaps I should rephrase that: it is entirely normal for nations and empires to tolerate extreme disparities between rich and poor. That is part of the corruption and sin of the world. The Christian community has to be on guard against adopting the assumptions of such sinfulness if it is going to be true to its own foundations. And this is not a “liberal” position any more than it is a “conservative” position.
Again, listen to these words: “The curse of the economic system, to conservatives no less than to its critics, is that it will sell anything to anyone, and it will sell any values as well as any commodities. It is commerce that sells as art what is not art, as books what are not books, as music what is not music, as morality what is not morality, as happiness what is not happiness, even as Christmas what is not Christmas. Wherever a quick buck is to be made, it will be there like a shot, and damn the consequences to society.” In the years since Henry Fairlie wrote these words, there has been a word coined to refer to what he said: “commodification”: that is, almost everything can be, and has been, turned into a commodity in order to be marketed—religion included.
In the Christian community, we must be sure that what we accept as normal is dictated by Kingdom values, not by the conventions of late capitalism. And one of the best ways to recover our Christian perspective is to devote ourselves to our poorer brothers and sisters. It is hardly possible to live in a different socio-economic system than the one we are in unless we move away to a place where globalization has not yet reached—if there are any such places left in the world. But in the midst of what we have, we must labor to be true to ourselves—at least, to know what we are up against and to name the sins correctly. We have to be in the world—and God made us to be here—but we do not have to be of it in the way it has become.
It is not only acquisitiveness that is stimulated by our society, however. There is something just as bad or even worse—and it finds a ready place in our hearts. I am now talking about envy. Envy is also the sin of the dispossessed or false self—the one who experiences the emptiness of trying to live away from the mercy of God but who has not recognized where that sense of emptiness comes from. The envious person looks at the successful, or the talented, or the rich person and not only would like to have what they have, but feels personally diminished because they have what they have. That is, it is not simply what the talented or the successful person has that is desired—this could be simply avarice or even a good kind of desire to emulate the worthy person: to model oneself after a hero. The envious person, however, has no hero. He is filled with a sense of sadness over another’s success. It should have been his. He cannot bear the talents of others, because those should have been his talents and would have been if only things were fair.
Where does this come from? How could we possibly think that we should all be able to have the same or equal talents, be the same successes, have the same exciting experiences? And why would we think someone else’s success is our failure? Again, I think it is due to the falseness of our position in regard to God. If we do not know ourselves in God but are still struggling to be someone we want to be or think we want to be without reference to Him, then we are operating out of a low sense of self-esteem that will fabricate any kind of rationalization to justify its dislike of those who seem so confident and capable, and will try to take revenge on them—although, in envy, the revenge is taken on oneself. Now there are real reasons for low self-esteem. Some people have been abused as children or suffer from depression and there are therapies they need to take advantage of. Low self-esteem can also be the result of years of poverty—for which there is no easy solution. The low self-esteem of envy, however, springs from sin and results in resentment. It begins in a false understanding of oneself and the pursuit of that falsity, which is pride, and leads to the feeling that one has been cheated and that the people who have succeeded have taken unfair advantage and are not so good as they think they are. This is only cured truly by a discovery of who we are in God and an acceptance of what God wants us to be. Another word for that is repentance.
Generally speaking, we are not envious of everyone, but rather those who are most nearly like us. That is, I don’t envy the billionaire his money even if I think he got a lot of it by crooked means and retains it through avarice. Billionaires are in such a different league than I am in, that I cannot feel personally diminished by their success. I cannot be envious of a scholar like Tom Wright, either, even though I would seriously like to write a single book as good as all of his are. He is in a different league, too. But I am tempted to resent, that is, to envy, the priest I know who is not much different than me, who just got elected bishop. Am I not just as good as he is? As talented? As capable? Obviously the system is rigged and corrupt! You see what I mean? But there is no reason that a priest more or less in the same league as I am in, elected a bishop, should diminish me. I am who I am in God whether anyone else in the world cares about it except God. If I am who God wants me to be, or if I am seriously in the process of pursuing that identity, should I then feel bad about myself because I don’t have someone else’s success? Is that stupid? Of course it is, and sinful, too.
Yet, that kind of thing is common. There are many resentful people around, especially middle or past middle-aged people, who feel as if things have not been fair and they have ended up with less than they deserved. Such feelings can fester and poison one’s old age. One of the great evils of this sin is that it is so destructive of the person who succumbs to it. There is hardly a good word to be said about envy. It is envy which has the evil eye, the slant-eyed side-long glance at the object of its unhappiness. No one is willing to defend its resentment.
You would think, then, that our societies would do whatever they could to discourage it, when in fact they incite it with false talk about equality. If you believe Oprah or Doctor What’s-his-name, all you have to do to have the same wonderful experiences as Mr Celebrity-of-the-Day is to read a book, undergo a therapy, buy a product, learn to think in a new way. And if we don’t listen to the talk-show hosts themselves, the advertisements make the same claims. We all have a right to be healthy into our old age, we all have a right to be beautiful and sexy and well-off. And when we are not, there is cause for resentment and envy toward those who are. Our advertisements seem to promise an equality of outcome which we know is not true. As Henry Fairlie put it: “the most destructive feeling that is excited is not acquisitiveness but a sourness of feeling in people whose own personalities, simply as human beings, are given no real satisfaction or acknowledgement, irrespective of such talents or capacities or ambitions as they may possess. Fundamentally what we mean by equality is that everyone should be given an equality of consideration. But this is precisely what our societies do not do in their neglect of the individual as a citizen. While the Christian message was believed, it at least carried the reassurance that one was equal in the eyes of someone, that somewhere one was of as much consequence as others in the final order of things, even if that somewhere was in another world.”
And that gets us back again to the root cause of this sin: our lack of understanding of who we are in the mercy of God. And since most people need help reaching this conclusion, we can see the importance of the kind of community the Christian Church tries to be. Obviously, we all still carry our sins with us as we aim to be the persons God is calling us to be. There are ways in which we have not perfectly discovered our true self or figured out how to allow this self to come to expression in all the details of life. But we know what we are talking about here and where we are going. And so we can help each other and live together like people who understand who we are in God. That means a way of life that is different from the Avarice that controls our economic and cultural life and the Envy it breeds.
These are, of course, not pleasant things to talk about. And I may have gotten some of the details wrong, so I would really appreciate any feedback you might have. In the meantime we give thanks to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit who has brought us out of enslavement to these sins and given us the vision of the new Jerusalem and the desire to live as an outpost of the Kingdom of God in this place.