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To love is to seek others’ good and rejoice when they have it.19 To envy is to seek to destroy others’ good and sorrow over their having it.
Soon after, they devise a plan to kill him. What the analysis of envy so far suggests, however, is that hatred of the rival is an elaborate cover-up, ultimately, for the envier’s sense of rejection and unworthiness—his own self-hatred.
Even if she could be successful in bringing her rival down and establishing her own superiority, however, her self-worth is still a fragile and temporary thing.
What they do not see, however, is that the cure for envy requires getting out of the comparative game of engineering self-worth altogether.
The vice of envy is rooted in pride, because the envier takes it to be her prerogative and responsibility to make her own place in the ranking and manufacture her own worth by excelling the relevant rivals.
As a spiritual problem, envy requires a spiritual solution.
God tells us in Isaiah 43:1–4, “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine. . . . You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” We are loved already and unconditionally—not because of our moral worthiness,
Jesus in the Gospels—especially in Luke’s account—makes a point of affirming and lifting up those who lack status or worth, those who count low or not at all in the social rankings of the day, those who are the littlest and least.
Because the envious essentially see the world as a great competition, a world of winners and losers with nothing in between, part of unlearning envy (or better still, preventing it) must involve investing ourselves deliberately and deeply in activities with shared or common goods.
Aquinas and Gregory believe that envy often arises from vainglory, a vice defined by its excessive love of praise and approval of others.
In this case, the envious can practice doing acts of love for others, countering the malicious inclinations of the envious, in ways that no one else notices.
Because the envier needs to learn what it feels like to do something good for another, without her usual frame of reference in which these acts will be noted, tallied up, and made the basis of comparisons between persons.
Vainglory is the excessive and disordered desire for recognition and approval from others.
Unlike the vainglorious, however, the ambitious seek honor not from just anyone, but rather from those with the requisite taste or expertise.
Vainglory, by contrast, merely inclines us to seek a big round of applause. The proud person wants be the director of the best show ever produced, the ambitious person wants rave reviews crediting her work as director from a certain circle of critics, but the glory-seeker will happily sink to new depths of shallow sensationalism as long as ratings will be high.
When others witness these acts, their attention is elevated above the one acting and is ushered, momentarily, into the cathedral of God’s presence in human action.
The vainglorious, by comparison, are working for the artificial illumination of the limelight and the canned applause from a sitcom audience.
Likewise, what’s wrong with vainglory is not the human need for recognition and approval itself, but for the excessive and empty ways we seek to satisfy this desire.
In a similar way, we can break the forms of vainglory down into two main types—cases in which we desire to be admired for the wrong things, and cases in which we desire to be admired in the wrong way, that is, too much.
Augustine uses vainglory to name the ultimate disorder behind even the greatest virtuous acts of the Romans. “Glory they most ardently loved: for it they wished to live, for it they did not hesitate to die,” he writes.16 His analysis of the problem is simply this: even the Romans’ pursuit of virtue was ultimately meant to serve the greatness of their own reputations.
Hypocrisy is the natural result of a heart sold out to vainglory.
Vainglory is a cheap substitute for true fulfillment of the human desire to be profoundly known by another person—to be known by name, for who one truly is—and to be loved just that way. Scripture itself acknowledges this need.
To know God is to understand that he deserves our praise and worship. To love him is to want to give him glory. Augustine says,
Two spiritual disciplines in particular pull some weight against vainglory—silence and solitude.
He describes it as distaste, disgust, sorrow, op- pressiveness, and restlessness, because the slothful feel that it is an intolerable burden to stay true to one’s commitment to God with all its daily drudgery and discipline—they would much prefer to escape and run away and be free of their wearisome vocation.
It is this transformation of our identity by God’s love that the slothful person resists.
For what good would their prosperity do them if it did not provide them with the opportunity for good works? —Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
“Greed is good” speech in the film Wall Street, greed is such a commonplace part of everyday life that it is hardly counted as a sin anymore.1 The idea that greed is the necessary psychological fuel for a capitalist and consumer economy is only the most recent way to justify
In this chapter, we will define avarice primarily by what it looks like on the “inside,” since vices are habits of the soul. The inner condition of the heart is what gives rise to greed’s outer manifestations, which are typically categorized as excessive acquisition and excessive
Aquinas’s definition bears this out: greed is an excessive love of or desire for money or any possession money can buy.2
The liberal person’s free and open attitude contrasts with the greedy person’s tightfisted grip on money as mine.
The test of liberality is whether giving things away is easy and enjoyable.
‘it is the heart that makes the gift rich or poor, and gives things their value.
First, having sweated for it. It is harder to give away what we have earned ourselves.
Along with the attachments that come with having earned it ourselves, the experience of poverty can also shape our internal detachment and our patterns of saving and spending. This is the second hindrance Aquinas mentions.
Part of being generous now is adequately trusting God for the future.
The point is that a fully human life is lived in a way free from being enslaved to our stuff.
Even luxury has its place in human life: fasting does not preclude feasting.
However, what this view of luxuries sees that greed does not see is that the value of possessions can reach beyond their monetary value.
The hallmark of well-entrenched greed, then, is a willingness to use people to serve our love for money, rather than the use of money to serve our love for people.
Aquinas argues that human beings are tempted to seek material wealth because it gives us the illusion of self-sufficiency—and therefore serves as a powerful incentive to deny our need for God.
The trouble with being rich is that since you can solve with your checkbook virtually all practical problems that bedevil ordinary people, you are left in your leisure with nothing but the great human problems to contend with: how to be happy, how to love and be loved, how to find meaning and purpose in your life. In desperation the rich are continually temped to believe that they can solve these problems too with their checkbooks, which is presumably what led Jesus to remark one day that for a rich man to get to Heaven is about as easy as for a Cadillac to get through a revolving door.21
“Avaricious people take pleasure in the consideration of themselves as the possessor of riches,”22 where riches denotes “possessions of which we are the absolute masters.”
Natural wealth is what we need to satisfy our natural desires for genuine human goods. Artificial wealth is what we need to satisfy desires that are artificially created and inflated.
Try documenting all expenditures for a month and list them in categories (savings, food, entertainment, repairs, car expenses, etc.).
Even further, others suggest taking a Sabbath rest from consumerism— for at least one month, refrain from going to the mall, or looking at catalogs and magazines, and limit exposure to advertising as much as possible, even if this means giving up television.
In an article called, “Why the Devil Takes VISA: A Christian Response to the Triumph of Consumerism,” Rodney Clapp quotes one retail analyst from the 1950s: “Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.”
Centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle ruled out money as the definition of what made human life happy. His reason? Money is only an instrumental good—it is only valuable for the sake of other things that one can acquire with it.
As Augustine writes, “Avarice wishes to have large possessions; you [God] possess everything.” This makes our avaricious grasping for more but a “dim resemblance to [God’s] omnipotence.”
[Wrath] is the love of justice perverted into the desire for revenge and for the injury of someone else; justice is the proclaimed motive for every manifestation of Wrath.—Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today
