Lenten Meditation: Envy

admin | 26 March 2009

Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Envy

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Envy and anger complete the triad of perverted love, the first of Dante’s threefold classification of the Seven Deadly Sins as forms of disordered love: love perverted, love defective and love excessive. From the standpoint of the theology of amor, everything comes down to what and how we love. That we love belongs fundamentally to our identity as spiritual beings.

As Dante sees it, pride, envy and anger constitute the forms of perverted love, the love that swerves to evil. Sloth is lukewarm love, a defective love, while avarice, gluttony and lust are the forms of excessive love, “love too hot of foot.”

We have already seen how pride is in all of the seven deadly sins. But of all of the seven sins, envy is the most unique and in some ways the most destructive. Why? Because, as one commentator (Graham Tomlin) puts it, there is no joy in it, no fun in envy at all. It is singularly perverse. Its only satisfaction is endless self-torment.

Envy is about hating the happiness of others. Gregory the Great describes the envious person as “so racked by another’s happiness, that he inflicts wounds on his own pining spirit.” John of Damascus defines envy as “discontent over someone else’s blessings.” Likewise, Aquinas describes envy as “sadness at the happiness or glory of another.” Envy is simply endless discontent.

And not just discontent at the happiness or blessing that others enjoy, but even at the prospect of their future happiness or blessing. This destructive and hurtful aspect of envy is well described in a Jewish devotional work, The Ways of the Righteous. It relates the parable of a greedy man and an envious man who met a king. “The king says to them, ‘One of you may ask something of me and I will give it to him, provided I give twice as much to the other.’ The envious person did not want to ask first for he was envious of his companion who would receive twice as much, and the greedy man did not want to ask first since he wanted everything that was to be had. Finally the greedy one pressed the envious one to be the first to make the request. So the envious person asked the king to pluck out one of his eyes, knowing that his companion would then have both eyes plucked out.” As Solomon Schimmel points out, “this illustrates the masochistic form that extreme envy can take. The pathologically envious are willing to suffer great injury as long as those they envy suffer even more” (The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology).

The ugliest of the ugly sins, envy remains something distasteful and hated even in the contemporary context. There is simply nothing attractive about envy at all. The novelist, Zadie Smith, notes that the concept of envy is part of our contemporary solipsism, our self-obsession, even when Church and God are despised and discounted. “We don’t mind being seen to be angry or lustful or even lazy, but we dislike being seen as envious. It is unattractive. And our vanities superseded our virtues long ago.”

But as always there is a paradox. For all of the ugliness of envy, for all that we despise envy, envy is a driving force in contemporary culture. It is the key assumption in advertising and the motive power that drives the economy. We are constantly exhorted to buy this or that product in order to be “an object of envy to our friends.” As Mark Twain observes, “a man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.”

So here is the paradox. Envy is the most hated and the most cultivated of all of the seven deadly sins in contemporary culture.

How are we to explain the dynamics of envy? It starts with comparisons. Comparisons are odious, hateful. Envy is rooted in comparing ourselves to one another and never finding any satisfaction either in ourselves or in the achievements of others. Envy is invidious. That is actually the Latin term, invidia. It captures its inherently destructive and hateful character. Envy poisons society. It is the poison that infects and destroys relationships. Henry Fairlie captures this aspect of envy somewhat humourously.

One of the destructive forms that Envy takes today is the widespread assumption that everyone should be able to do and experience and enjoy everything that everyone else can do and experience and enjoy. We must all plod through The Joy of Sex as if it is the Canadian Air Force book of exercises. “All together now! One-two-three-four!” If we hear that some people perform the sexual act while swinging from a chandelier, we feel wretched because we have not done it and we do not even have a chandelier. People who have been wholly content in their own natures, and in their expression of them, are suddenly persuaded that they have been missing something. No societies in the past have ever so assiduously taught people to envy experiences that cannot by nature be theirs. Someone once put out a parody under the title, The Job of Sex, and it exactly captures the arduousness of the self-torment to which Envy reduces us. (The Seven Deadly Sins Today).

Envy pervades all our attitudes. Its destructiveness is well described as “The Revenge of Failure.” Envy undermines all standards. It insists on a false leveling of abilities and distinctions. It is destructive of all achievement. It is the denial and the betrayal of any concept of an objective good. For example, “if we cannot paint well, we will destroy the canons of painting. If we will not take the trouble to write poetry, we will destroy the rules of prosody and pass ourselves off as poets” (Fairlie).

Envy simply hates the good of others. Another’s virtue is seen as an injury to me. In this sense, envy is a revolt against order, against the inherent hierarchy of talents and abilities. Contemporary society might seem to pit equals against equals but it is truer to say that it pits unequals against unequals. Envy hates the form of the good in others. It is the ugliest of the seven deadly sins because it is consumed by the hatred of the good, the true and the beautiful in others and, ultimately, in God.

This powerful force is rooted in our fear of God. I do not mean holy fear, the fear which honours and respects the divine. I mean the fear of what another has and is which we do not have but aspire to have and be, not as something shared but as something uniquely possessed by us. Not others, not God.

In this sense, the pride of Lucifer is also envy in his wanting to be God himself. The story of the Fall in us, too, is about wanting to be like God, “knowing both good and evil.” The hidden dynamic in that is our wanting to be God ourselves. Therefore we hate God (who is) and despise God’s world (created by God). One can, perhaps, see how envy informed by pride, also slides over into avarice and anger and so on.

The first story after the Fall in The Book of Genesis is the story of Cain and Abel. In a way, it is a story about envy. God accepts Abel’s offering but not Cain’s. Cain kills Abel. Why is one offering accepted and one not? Seems unfair. Guess what? Life is unfair. There is an element of the arbitrary here. One is chosen; the other is not. “So Cain was very angry and his face was downcast. And the Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry?” And so it begins. Cain’s resentment at reality, in this case, God, then finds its outlet in what is at hand, Abel, his brother. The story is really the continuation of the story of the Fall in us.

In the opening chapters of Genesis, creation is emphatically recognized as good, indeed, very good. Therefore the commandment given to the Adam – Man – is also good. To go against it by way of an alternative interpretation through the insinuation of questions that call into question is to oppose the goodness of God and his created order which are the very things upon which one’s own existence depend.

The story of Cain and Abel is about Cain’s resentment at God which he takes out on Abel. Cain destroys the one whom God has honoured because God has not honoured him. Once again, we see the spiteful and destructive character of envy.

It is, of course, a well-known literary theme. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, Iago’s envy of Othello and the fair Desdemona results in the destruction of both. Such is the malice of envy. “If I, Iago, can’t possess the desired objects, then, Othello, neither will you.”

Envy helps us to understand the story of the Crucifixion. Mark relates the encounter of Jesus before Pilate, noting that Pilate had “perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up” (Mark 15.10). Envy is the powerful and destructive force in the story of the Crucifixion and part of its ugliness. The ugliness of our resentment against God results in our crucifying God. The point of the Lenten Journey and especially Holy Week and Good Friday is for us to realize our place in the story as those who crucify Christ. In Christ, God gives himself into our hands that we may do with him what we will. What we will is to crucify Christ.

It is all part and parcel of our destructive folly, the destructive folly of sin, especially the sin of envy. And it is ugly.

What is the counter to envy? Mercy. Beati misericordes. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” It is the one beatitude that signals the paradox of the same, mercy for mercy, rather than the paradox of difference that belongs to the other Beatitudes.

Dante, in the Purgatorio, portrays the envious as blind with their eyelids sown tight. They are huddled together and dependent upon one another on the cornice where they await the purgation of their sin. Their blindness is the image of their sin for what they saw was not the good of others in which to rejoice but the good in others which they hated and resented. The purgation of their sin is through hearing. They hear the lessons of mercy. They are to learn how to rejoice in the good of others and in the good that others show to others rather than resentful animosity and destruction. We find our good ultimately in a community of goods that are shared and are increased, not diminished, by being shared. In a way, it is the lesson that The Fourth Sunday in Lent also teaches about Christ’s feeding the multitude in the wilderness; through what is shared, five barley loaves and two small fishes, there is plenty, indeed, twelve baskets are filled from what remains to sustain us in the spiritual journey. Dante puts it this way:

Because the more there are who there can say
‘Ours’, the more goods each has, and charity
Burns in that cloister with a larger ray. (Purg. XV, ll. 55-57)

Being able to rejoice in the good of others is about rejoicing in the goodness of God himself and in what he provides for us. It is the meaning of that “Jerusalem which is above [which] is free; which is the mother of us all” (Galatians 4.26). We find our true good and blessedness in the mercy of God. And paradoxically, true equality is found in mercy. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.”

Mercy is the antidote to envy. It needs to be nurtured and encouraged in us. It can only be arrived at through our contemplation of the divine generosity. Dante sets before us the great examples of the spirits of generosity: Mary, Orestes and Christ himself. He reminds us of Christ’s great teaching, a teaching unique to Christianity and one which draws out the deeper depths of mercy. Christ commands us to “love your enemies.”

The power of that teaching is seen at the Cross in the first of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” It is this kind of spiritual wisdom that illuminates and overcomes the despairing realities of our envy-filled lives. It is the spiritual wisdom that we need to recall and reclaim.

Solomon Schimmel, a professor of Jewish education and psychology, offers an extended reflection on envy, pointing out precisely the need to recover the spiritual wisdom that can heal and restore our wounded and broken humanity, a humanity distorted by the ugliness of sin, especially the sin of envy. He writes:

Because secular psychology does not challenge the prevailing materialist and hedonist values and our culture’s nonspiritual and amoral criteria for evaluating human worth, it cannot provide radical remedies for envy. Some psychologists have suggested strategies for coping with it, such as focusing on one’s positive attributes, working harder to achieve what one envies or, alternatively, discounting the importance of what you envy. These, however, fall far short of what the religious and philosophical moralists would prescribe. Secular psychology does not emphasize the immorality of envy and its incompatibility with compassion, love, and justice as they do. (The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology).

In the mercies of Christ, we confront the ugly, destructive nature of envy and learn the lessons of mercy which alone can redeem us. It the project of Lent and it belongs to the struggle of our lives in faith.