March 16, 2024: Avarice
Good afternoon. I am continuing with the deadly sins series for Lent this week; today is part 5 of 7, on avarice. Although the terms avarice and greed are similar and sometimes used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Avarice refers more to the desire to have wealth, while greed is a desire to consume. In that sense, greed is more similar to gluttony, which is next week’s topic.
How much is enough? That is an age-old question, and also the title of a book that I highly recommend by Art Simon, a Lutheran minister who founded the Christian, anti-hunger lobbying organization Bread for the World, to which I referred positively two weeks ago. I don’t have a definitive answer to that question, but it is probably fair to assume that most readers of this blog (as well as the author) are fairly wealthy by world standards, and fabulously wealthy by the standards of the early Middle Ages, when the seven deadly sins reached their current formulation.
What is behind avarice? Each of the deadly sins can be seen as a way of putting something transitory ahead our relationship with God. In the case of avarice, that something transitory is money.
If we dig deeper, my observation is that fear often underlines that desire, and two fears in particular. First, we are afraid of disaster by not having enough. “Retirement anxiety”, or the fear of not having enough savings to live comfortably throughout retirement, is a common thing and a fear that financial planners like to prey upon. But as always, “enough” is a word that can be interrogated. In psychology, there is the notion of the “hedonic treadmill”, the idea that when a person gains more wealth, they also increase their expectations, so that their level of happiness does not improve after a temporary spike. Taken to the extreme, as long wealth remains the central focus, no level of wealth will be enough so that a person’s anxiety is satisfied.
Contrast this to Exodus 16, where the Israelites, having escaped from Egypt, are wandering through the desert to Canaan and worried about whether they will have enough to eat. God provides for the Israelites by raining down manna (a type of bread). As explained in Exodus 16: 4-5,
4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”
The phrase “test them” is critical. The people are to trust God by not trying to hoard manna, but to take each day only what they need. Except on the sixth day, because people are not to gather on the seventh day (the Sabbath), and God rests too by not providing manna on that day. Of course, many people fail both tests, by trying to hoard manna, which goes bad during the night, and by trying to gather on the seventh day.
I can hear the objections already. Surely, it is common sense for a person to save for retirement or a rainy day. I have an investment account of my own. So what does this mean for our own lives? I don’t have a snappy answer for this question, so it is left as an exercise for the reader.
The second fear is that, insofar as wealth is perceived as a marker of one’s character, a person’s self-worth can be tied up with their wealth. I discussed this a few weeks ago in the context of envy. Especially for American readers, we have a notion—and a valuable notion in my view that I wouldn’t want to change—that a person controls their own destiny. Wealth can be earned through hard work and by providing value to society, rather than simply inherited or competed for in a zero-sum game. But a dark side to this attitude is that, when one perceives one’s neighbors as having more wealth, one suspects that they must be better in some way: harder working, more intelligent, or more canny with how they direct their efforts, and we fear that our character must be deficient by comparison. This fear is a powerful motivator for hoarding and miserliness.
The idea that wealth, or more specifically, the pursuit of wealth, is a kind of prison rather than the source of liberation that most of us imagine wealth to be, is an old one that goes back at least as far as the Bible (1 Timothy 6:9-10 for instance), and it shows up frequently in what, for lack of a better term, might be called class envy. In my experience, this view is not quite right, or least too imprecise. It is more specifically the two fears, and other wounds that underlie avarice, that imprison people. In the happy ending of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge learns to be generous and that other people matter more than his balance sheets, but he does not give away all his money. Should he? We’ll come back to that.
Although I have cited some Biblical passages, we should discuss the elephant in the room that many religions, including (perhaps especially) Catholicism, have a reputation for avarice themselves. But our understanding of this subject should be balanced. On the one hand, the Church played a leading role from the early Middle Ages in caring for widows, orphans, and the sick, well before there existed any sort of welfare state. In fact, tithing (giving 10% of one’s income) was often mandatory in the Middle Ages, and so this practice could be viewed as a proto-welfare state. On the other hand, as anyone who has been to the Vatican (and most who haven’t) knows well, the Church has accumulated great wealth over the centuries, and that accumulation does often cross the line into avarice. Unfortunately, many Catholics today are defensive on this point and avoid taking it head on. Avarice was behind one of the greatest scandals in the Church’s history—the sale of indulgences—which was one of Martin Luther’s grievances in the 95 Theses that launched the Protestant Reformation. See this article for more about indulgences.
Whatever Luther may have said about the sale of indulgences, the track record of other denominations on this subject hasn’t been much better. The Prosperity Gospel, which emerged in the United States after World War II (though has earlier roots) and is spreading around the world, is the view that material wealth, as well as good health, are gifts from God as a reward for one’s faith. Prosperity Gospel is worse than plain old avarice, because it explicitly subordinates God and faith to a person’s material wants. At this article explains, it would be unfair to reduce all Prosperity Gospel teachings to private jets and the Jim Bakker scandal. But it is theologically unsound and quite obviously untrue, and it should be regarded as a heresy. The pursuit of wealth and political power is an enormously corrupting force in modern American Christianity, and as I argued a couple years ago, this is a major reason why Christianity in the United States today is in serious decline.
Now, this could go on forever, but we should also mention quasi-spiritual New Age-y beliefs such as the Law of Attraction. This is the idea that the quality of one’s thought can bring experiences, positive or negative, into one’s life. Positive psychology is one thing, and I won’t attempt to discuss that field, but the idea that thoughts can, in and of themselves, “manifest” in reality, has no merit whatsoever. Furthermore, it is very harmful when a person tries to substitute magical thinking for actual work or blames themselves for setbacks because they didn’t wish hard enough.
While we live in a world that is fabulously wealthy by the standards of most of history, an enormous amount of poverty and suffering still exist. About a tenth of the world’s population faces chronic hunger, a figure that has become stubbornly fixed in the last few years. Millions of children die each year from preventable and treatable diseases. Poverty is a fact of life even in wealthy countries. I see it frequently because I have frequent business in downtown Portland, Oregon, a city with a notorious homelessness problem. For some, poverty is a more abstract problem. I worry too about whether I will have a comfortable retirement, but working with people who live in tents in public parks makes a mockery of those worries.
I think all of us wish we lived in a world without poverty. Many of us donate our time and/or money to help the poor. Very few if any of us donate as much as we reasonably can—I certainly don’t. When we don’t help the poor, or we do so at a much lower level than we reasonably could, we have all sorts of justifications.
I give as much as most people of my wealth level, so God should be satisfied.
People are poor because of their personal failings, such as drug addiction (more on that next week), laziness, etc., and I don’t want to support that.
Poverty is a huge moral scandal, and politicians ought to do something about it.
It is natural, and therefore good, that I should care about my friends and family more than I care about people in a distant country.
Poverty will always exist, and so it is pointless to try to do anything about it. (Christians often make this excuse with a misinterpretation of Matthew 26:11.)
Charity merely contributes to “overpopulation” and ultimately makes poverty worse.
The Gospels are very clear on this. See, for example, Matthew 25: 31-46, where Jesus, through a parable, states, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Imagine that, when the end of your life comes, as it will very soon in cosmological terms, Jesus asks (proverbially, if you will) what you did for Him during your life? You remember Matthew 25: 31-46. Will you have a good answer to that question, or will you have only the excuses that are listed above?
There is also the story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16: 19-31). Here, Lazarus is a beggar to lives outside a rich man’s house, but the rich man ignores him. Both eventually die. At that time, Lazarus is in paradise, but the rich man is in Hades. It is easier for many of us to ignore poverty than it was for the rich man, when it is much farther away geographically. We can go farther and show contempt for the poor. It is all too common for businesses and trade groups to seek government favors for their benefit and the expense of the rest of society. It is all too common for homeowners to seek ways to keep “undesirables” out of their neighborhood. Opposition to immigration with dehumanizing rhetoric is all too common. These behaviors are so common that we accept them as normal practice in politics, rather than recognize them as the grave sins that they are.
Finally, let’s consider Matthew 19: 16-30. Here, a rich man, who says he has followed all the commandments, asks Jesus what he needs to do to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus says (verse 21), “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me,” and the man goes away crestfallen, for he does not want to do this.
23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
The meaning of this passage has been greatly discussed. It goes on,
25 When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”
26 Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
To this many Christians say, “Phew, I don’t really have to sell all my possessions”. But what if Jesus really means what He says in verse 21, and we cannot rationalize that away? It’s something to think about.
I want to conclude this post by going back to Art Simon, who I mentioned at the beginning. Simon died last year at the age of 93, and I had the great privilege to meet him a few years ago at a Bread for the World conference. Simon was a humble man, and talking with him, you would never guess that he had accomplished great things.
I had the chance to ask Simon about his book, How Much is Enough? To paraphrase as best I can, Simon explained that the problem isn’t that we want too much; it’s that we want too little, or specifically, we don’t want the right things. A life that is oriented toward love of God and love of our fellow humans is infinitely richer than a life oriented around the accumulation of money and things. Thus freedom from avarice is not merely about trying to earn a reward for the next life; our reward comes in this life and ultimately makes life worth living.