Lenten Programme III: Envy
The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme III: Envy
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025
“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 in constantly comparing ourselves to others.
It is 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). Quite a remarkable insight into the perversity of our humanity. Such is the hurt or harm of envy.
