Tag Archives: envy

The Second Sin

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It was, St. Paul said, through one man’s sin of pride that death entered the world (c.f. Romans 5:12).  It was through another man’s envy that death was realized.  Cain killed Abel out of envy.  This pattern, pride followed by envy, is the same path followed by Lucifer.  First pride in defining how he would be like God, then through envy he attacks mankind (c.f. Wisdom 2:23-24).  It is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and is perhaps the deadliest of these vices because of the way in which it addicts us to misery. 

Envy is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas (who cites St. John Chrysostom), is “sadness at another’s good” (De Malo, q.10 art.1).  And herein lies the reason for its deadliness.  Properly speaking, sadness is oriented towards evil and should only be experienced in its presence.  For the envious, it is good that causes it.  This is because the man with the vice of envy experiences someone else’s good as a threat to himself.  More specifically the good of the other person is thought to detract from his own excellence.  And since he experiences sorrow, sorrow that can only be mitigated by removing the evil cause, they will for the person’s excellence to no longer below to him.  They don’t really care if they receive the excellence, they only want the other person not to have it.  Victor Hugo, in his poem, Envy and Avarice, captures the envious heart.  When God offers envy anything he wants with the only condition that his neighbor will get double, he says “I would be blinded of one eye!”.   

The Evil Eye

What Hugo is subtly pointing out is how envy has its punishment built in.  The misery the envious experience never really lets up as long as envy lives in their heart.  Their sadness never subsides while the vice is still present.  In this way some have called it the “just vice.”

The blindness that comes from only one eye is also particularly descriptive because, although envy is in the will, it stems from the inability to see correctly.  The envious see everything in terms of competition.  Their self-worth is predicated upon being better than someone else.  Their self-love is only possible when they hate their neighbor since envy renders them unable to “will the good of the other.” 

As a culture addicted to self-esteem, we are particularly vulnerable to envy.  This is why when someone does or achieves something good, there are always people who go searching out, usually through old social media posts, evidence that the person is deeply flawed.  Apologizing to the envy mob only has the effect of inflaming them further.  There can be no forgiveness for wrongs, real or perceived, when it is the good that the person has done that is experienced as the evil.  Cancel culture is not just about controlling thoughts, but also, and maybe primarily, about indulging envy.

The Second Greatest Commandment, according to Our Lord, is to “love your neighbor, as yourself” (Mark 12:31), but the envious find this command impossible because they do not grasp what the love of self means.  This connection between love and self and love of neighbor often causes us to confuse envy with jealousy.  Although they are often used synonymously, jealousy means that you love something that you possess, but fear that that it might be taken away.  Envy has no such desire to possess, only to see the other not have it.  Jealousy regards sadness at the prospect of losing something good that you already have while envy is sadness in reaction to someone else’s good.

The envious also are rendered incapable of fulfilling the First Commandment as well.  The hatred of neighbor necessarily spills over to God who is “the Giver of all good gifts” (James 1:23-24).  He ultimately bears the blame for unequally distributed His gifts and excellencies among His creatures.  Envy makes us like the younger brother in the story of the Prodigal Son.

Like all vices, envy is baked into our fallen nature and can only be removed by intentionally acting against it.  This, of course requires that we are able to identify it in our pattern of thoughts.  Envy is tricky because it hides in the dark.  Unlike the other vices, no one wants to admit to being so petty.  As Rebecca Konyndyk puts it in her book Glittering Vices, envy shuns open warfare mostly because of the feeling of inferiority—to declare one’s envy is to admit one’s inferiority.  And so, it normally is exercised through sins of the tongue such as detraction, slander and calumny.  We use all of these to keep others from holding the person in such high esteem.  It also manifests itself through belittling and “roasting” the other person.

De-programming Envy

Just as Sloth is the vice by which we fail to love God, envy is the vice though which we fail to love our neighbor.  So, one of the opposing virtues is charity.  Properly understood, charity is loving another person for God’s sake.  By loving the excellence of the other because it ultimately comes from God, we develop the habit of rejoicing in the good of others. 

In practice it consists in the virtue of kindness which is a fruit of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Gal 5:22).  Kindness flows from a burning desire to do good for one’s neighbor in a specific and concrete way.  As an example, St. Martin de Porres who often was the subject of severe ridicule because of his mixed-race complexion, would run after someone when they made fun of him in order to do some kindness for them.

St. Thomas also mentions that because envy regards two objects—namely the sadness and the prosperity of a good person, it has two contrary virtues.  First there is pity by which one grieves, both affectively and effectively, the misfortune of a good person.  Likewise, zealous anger is the opposing virtue by which one is saddened at the prosperity of the wicked.

Judas and the Wages of Envy

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The first full moon in Spring brings with it two things, both of which are equally predictable.  First there is Easter, celebrated on the Sunday immediately following that first full moon.  Secondly, there is the somewhat predictable “scholar” who will bring forth some long lost “proof” that Christianity is a hoax.  Usually it is by the “rediscovery” of some “lost” gospel.  Never mind that it was lost because the Church Fathers already knew about it and deemed it a fraud.  Easter 2006 was no different in this regard.  National Geographic released an English translation of the Gospel of Judas just in time for the Pascal feast.  This “gospel” paints Jesus and Judas as somehow in cahoots.  But it also has a particular appeal because it appears to answer an age-old question of why Judas did what he did. 

We must admit that it is more than mere curiosity that places this question before us.  Even if Christ ultimately claims the victory, it does not sit well with us that Judas was the collateral damage.  Nor are we comfortable with the fact that many of the Church Fathers place Judas in hell because, as Our Lord said, “woe to him by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.  It would have been better for him to never have been born” (Mt 26:24).  Nor should it.  Even if Judas is alone in hell, the losing of a single soul is the greatest of all tragedies.  But Sacred Scripture and the Church’s liturgical calendar place the question before us this week and so we must resist the temptation, like the heretics of the first Christian centuries, to “psychologize” Judas and try to explain it away as if he was a victim caught up in the tsunami of the Redemption. 

“Watch Out Lord”

We must first admit that neither Scripture nor Tradition gives us a clear answer as to why Judas did what he did.  And the lack of clarity is for a good reason.  Any one of us can be Judas—selling Jesus for something else.  This must be lesson number one or else we cannot even begin to unpack what might be hidden away in what we have been told.  We are each presented with the temptation of the thirty pieces of silver daily, although usually we settle for a whole lot less. We all sell Christ out in small (and big) ways every day.  As St. Philip Neri said every day of his life, “watch out Lord, lest Philip betray you today.”

The point is that we must all see in Judas our capacity to do likewise.  If a man who spent three years with God in the Flesh could do it, then anyone can.  It is only grace that preserves us from the temptations we would otherwise easily succumb.  And this is why when Our Lord warned the Apostles that one of them would betray Him, each of them feared it might be him.  They knew that they didn’t really want to, but they also knew that they were capable of anything given the right set of circumstances.  This is what it means to recognize that you are a sinner—not that you have done a bunch of bad stuff, but to know that at any point you are capable of falling off the wagon.  “Therefore, let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor 10:12).

Judas and the Role of the Devil

Likewise, we must also understand that the Gospel narratives are calling us to go beyond Judas’ personal motivation and to see in this great betrayal the hoof marks of the great enemy of man’s soul, Satan.  This is not to absolve Judas of responsibility but to acknowledge the role he played.  St. John tells us that “the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him” (Jn 13:2).  The devil had tempted Judas to betray Our Lord and Judas had made up his mind to do so.  As St. Thomas says in his commentary on this verse, Satan “enters into a person’s heart when one totally gives himself to following his suggestions and offers no resistance at all. Thus Satan first put the plan to deceive Christ into Judas, and then he entered into to possess him more completely and to lead him to accomplish the evil.”  In short we cannot rule out demonic possession in the carrying out of the betrayal.  Even if this is the case, Judas was a most willing participant and not merely a puppet in the hands of the devil.  Judas was willing, but may have lacked the “courage” to carry it out.  Once he consented to the devil’s suggestion, however, he ceded his personal freedom over to him.

This too can be spiritually instructive for us.  Judas shows us that we should not yield to temptations of the mind, even if we “would never actually do it.”  To consent to a temptation is to put ourselves under the power of the Evil One.  Very often we will entertain thoughts of revenge, even though we know deep down we are incapable of carrying it out.  This is very dangerous because when the source of the temptation is the devil, he is only too happy to help give us the strength to carry out our wildest fantasies.  If nothing else Judas teaches us that.

All that being said, I believe we can begin to uncover some of Judas’ personal motivation.  We must first eliminate what appears to be the obvious answer—greed.  Thirty pieces of silver was the price paid for the death of a slave and was not very much.  It would have been far less than Judas was likely making embezzling as keeper of the Apostolic money bag.  He was walking away from a pretty good racket.  That coupled with the fact that, because he inherited his father’s name, Iscariot, he was probably already wealthy, makes it unlikely that greed was the motivating factor.

Biblical Typology and the Judas/Judah Connection

Instead we can look at the Patriarch Joseph as a type of Christ.  For he too was sold for pieces of silver by his brother Judah.  And why did he do this?  For the same reason that Judas would betray Christ—envy.  Envy is the devil’s forte.  It was envy that motivated him to go after mankind when he fell.  And in his role as the Accuser, it is envy that he is constantly seeking to incite in us.  Envy always presents itself by way of accusation making it about what it’s not really about.  It is an attempt to tear down another person simply because they are stealing from your greatness.  Judas was not the thief, Christ was—”why was this not sold for 300 days wages?”.  The devil was not in Judas, it was Our Lord who was the devil. 

So, it was Judas’ envy of Our Lord in His absolute freedom, especially his freedom from a desire for riches, that led Judas ultimately to consent to turning him over.  And in this way, the story of Judas should be particularly instructive for us.  We live in a culture that has been particularly designed to incite envy.  When someone does something great, we scan their social media history to find a way to tear them down.  Supposed class/race/gender/sexual identity warfare is all about envy by demonizing the other.  Envy is the most difficult for us to see because we are living in it.  And that is why we must never forget what happened to Judas and the wages of envy.       

The Hidden Vice

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Soren Kierkegaard once remarked that envy was hidden and unconscious for most men.  This might explain why we find the seeds of it scattered throughout our culture.  There is the advertising industry for example which is built entirely on the goal to stir envy for things that we don’t really want except for the fact that other people have them.  So deeply embedded is envy that it is even institutionalized in the pitting of the poor against the rich (or women against men or nearly every other class conflict) in a quasi-communistic class struggle that our liberal democracy has adopted.  Therefore, it is instructive to shine a light on the havoc this vicious habit can create in our lives.

Envy has long been considered to be one of the Seven Deadly Sins, or, more aptly named Seven Capital Sins.  These “sins” are called Capital sins not because they are sins per se, but because they act as motivating forces for the actual sins we commit.  In short, one does not commit envy, but instead commit a sin because you are envious.  Envy is like a tree that produces rotten fruit.  Until we expose the roots of the tree, we will never be rid of its fruit.  The tree of envy is known by its tendency to, as St. Thomas says, experience “sorrow in the face of another’s good.”

The Sorrow of Envy

While this definition is correct, it needs to be nuanced a bit so that we do not chop down the wrong tree.  There is a holy envy that St. Thomas calls zeal in which we experience sorrow not because another person has something, but because we don’t.  We look at some good that another person has that we know we do not have and our sorrow moves us to work zealously to obtain that good thing.  In other words we grieve not because the other person has the good, but because we don’t.

Envy, on the other hand, grieves simply because the other person has that good.  It has a competitive quality about it in that the other’s greatness seems to subtract from my own.  This is why envy follows on the heels of pride and is the “second sin.”  Lucifer committed the sin of pride and then begrudged mankind for the good that he had lost.  It is by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are allied with him experience it” (Wisdom 2:24).  The first sin of man was pride, “to be like God.”  The second sin was “crouching at the door” (Gn 4:7) when sadness over God’s favor toward Abel, led Cain not to “do well” but to kill his brother.

It is ultimately envy that led directly to the death of Our Lord.  As Venerable Fulton Sheen articulates, “Annas was envious of His innocence; Caiaphas was envious of His popularity; Herod was envious of His moral superiority; the scribes and Pharisees were envious of His wisdom…And in order that He might no longer be person to be envied, they reputed Him with the wicked.”  Envy was the cause of the death of Peter and Paul and a cause of division in the early Church.  When the Corinthian community begins to form factions, Pope St. Clement sends them a letter reminding them just how deadly envy can be.

There are two reasons why envy is an especially strong temptation for us as 21st Century Americans.  The first is that we are a people that is obsessed with equality.  When everyone is equal in all ways, envy will seem justified and you will hardly recognize it for what it is.  If we are all equal, then we must do all that we can to level the playing field.

I alluded to the second reason earlier when I mentioned about the competitive nature of envy.  In a world that is mostly governed by a philosophical materialism, envy will seem like merely a recognition of the truth.  If life is a zero sum game then what you have actually takes away from what I have.  If I am poor it is because you are rich—you have taken more than your fair share and there is nothing left for me.  But most of life is not a zero sum game, especially when it comes to spiritual goods (which tend to be the things we envy most) related to personal character.

Because envy remains somewhat hidden to us, we may only recognize it by its effects.  When I see another person’s greatness somehow diminishing mine, there will always be the accompanying temptation to detract that person.  Somehow dragging another person down acts as a way of raising ourselves up.  If we step back and see truthfully however we will acknowledge that we can only envy those when we think better than ourselves in some way.  As Pope St. Gregory says, “We witness against ourselves that the other is better” (Moralia of Job, 84).  Knowing this, we should be very slow to make judgments about other people.  Envy causes us to find chinks in the armor of everyone we meet looking for ways in which we are superior to them.  It also explains why we often don’t like someone else, even though we cannot explain why.  “There is just something about them I don’t like” usually means “there is just something about them that makes me envious.”

This tendency to misjudge another person that accompanies envy is also a good reason why we should be very slow to believe things that we hear about other people (Fulton Sheen goes so far as to say we should not believe 99% of what we hear about other people).  Envy is the most common cause of gossiping and one of the reasons why we should avoid entangling ourselves in it.  It is also the reason why you can’t go wrong thinking the best of another person until you have hard evidence to the contrary.

The Antidote to Envy

While the Devil essentially says to mankind, “As I envied you, so now you must envy one another,” Our Lord offers the antidote to envy, “As I have loved you, so must you love one another.”  Vices can only be overcome by an opposing virtue so that envy is overwhelmed by charity.  When tempted to envy, we should perform some charitable act towards that person.  It can be as simple as saying a prayer for them or offering a kind word to or about them.  Fasting or making some other sacrifice for that person, especially that the gift we envy might flourish, can remove any traces of envy in our hearts.  Once we have skin in the game, that is invest in the person and their gifts by making a sacrifice, we cannot help but to root for them.

Dante, in the Purgatorio, offers us a second virtue to overcome envy.  As he meets the envious in the Second Terrace of Purgatory, he finds them scrambling about, deprived of the gift of sight by having their eyes sewn shut with iron wire.  They become like blind beggars depending upon each other to avoid falling off the Mountain.  In this way they learn to rejoice in other’s goods.  In being forced to depend upon each other they learn magnanimity.  The magnanimous person has a “large soul” in that they can rejoice in the good of another as if it were their own.  The magnanimous person is not offended by natural or even supernatural inequality, but simply rejoices in the good that is to be found.

In each of the terraces of the Mount of Purgatory, Dante also proposes a Marian example of the virtue.  For envy he offers Our Lady’s intercession at the Wedding of Cana as the example.  It is Our Lady’s magnanimity that causes her to see the threat to the joyful celebration and take the concern (“Woman how does your concern affect me?”) on as if it were her own.  This is why the 12th Century Saint Bernard of Clairvaux once counseled “If you are tossed upon the waves of pride, of ambition, of envy, of rivalry, look to the star, call on Mary the star of the sea.”

Our Lady, Star of the Sea, pray for us.