ENVY : Presented on 10/15/01 at The Newman Center by Rev. Bruce Williams, O.P. as part of the series on the Seven Deadly Sins.

From the beginning of this series I’ve been proposing that the so-called Seven Deadly Sins are better understood as Capital Vices, i.e., vices which beget sins of many different kinds. We’ve seen that these capital vices also have some causal connections among themselves; we illustrated that last week with Pride/Vanity and Greed. The vice we take up now, Envy, will have a causal connection with both of these and also with some of the others on the list.

We need to be quite precise about what we mean when we speak of the vice of envy. We commonly say "I envy you" to friends who experience some success or good fortune, such as a promotion or a winning lottery ticket or an opportunity to travel to exotic places or the ability to maintain a good physique even as they eat mountains of rich food, etc. Properly speaking, this isn’t envy; as we’ll soon see, envy in the proper sense is something people never admit to feeling.

Real envy involves a certain kind of sadness or distress we feel because someone else has a good thing that we don’t have. In the examples just given, when we say "I envy you" we’re not really sad at someone else’s accomplishment or good luck or good figure or whatever. If we’re sad at all, it’s not because someone else has a good thing, but simply because we don’t have it. We might accordingly make an effort to acquire it for ourselves, sometimes in a way that involves competing with the person who already has it, sometimes not, depending on what is involved. Either way, our attitude is one of "emulation" rather than "envy," and it can be wholesome or unwholesome (depending, again, on further particulars).

Still in other cases when we say "I envy you" to someone in this good-natured way, we’re not sad or distressed at all, either because s/he has something or because we don’t have it, and we’re not seriously interested in having whatever it is for ourselves. Our so-called envy here is not even "emulation," it’s just humble "admiration"; we feel humbled (but not painfully) as we admire someone else’s good and we relax in the knowledge that it’s out of our range.

We need to distinguish "envy" also from several other attitudes that are often confused with it. Very commonly, we take the words "envy" and "jealousy" as synonyms, but they really label different states of mind. Jealousy, unlike envy, doesn’t denote my distress over another’s good that I lack. More properly, it refers to my protective attitude toward some good that I already do have, one that I fear others may deprive me of. People jealously guard their wealth, their possessions, their spouses or their "significant others." In Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Othello is jealous – not envious – of the affections of his beautiful wife Desdemona. The character in that tragedy who resoundingly exemplifies envy is the archvillain, Othello’s pretended friend Iago.

Then there are cases, different from anything we’ve seen so far, where we really are distressed at a good that accrues to someone else, but where we’re still not involved with envy properly speaking. Sometimes our distress is motivated by fear. For instance, if we’re distressed at the outcome of a presidential election, most likely it’s because we’re afraid that the winner won’t be good for the country or, perhaps, that he won’t be good for our own particular interests. This kind of distress might be healthy or unhealthy – depending on what we’re afraid of, what sort of motives lie behind our fear, and, of course, whether or not our fear is well founded. In any case, the distress felt here is not envy; my sadness at who got to be president has no basis in any wish that I had become president myself!

Sometimes, instead of fear, the motive of my distress over another’s good is based on my sense that s/he is unworthy of it. Here again, I’m not properly envious, but, rather, "indignant" (from the Latin indignus = unworthy). This may or may not involve a feeling that the good accruing to the unworthy person should have come to me instead. In the preceding example, I might be indignant because I think G. W. Bush did not win the election fairly; but, unless I’m Al Gore, this doesn’t include the feeling that I myself was the rightful winner. Even if I am Al Gore and I do feel that way, what I feel is indignation and not envy.

How should we assess this indignation morally? Insofar as it bespeaks a certain sense of justice that has been offended, it might be seen as somewhat wholesome; this is how Aristotle regarded it. But St. Thomas Aquinas, who most often endorsed Aristotle’s views, here proposes that biblical teaching should prompt Christian believers to take a different outlook from that of the renowned philosopher. (Aristotle, of course, was working within a "this-worldly" perspective without the benefit of any divine revelation.) A major theme throughout Scripture is that we should avoid being distressed or resentful because the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer; we must, instead, trust God to see that justice is ultimately vindicated for all, whether here or hereafter. And so the attitude of indignation, even though it is not to be confused with the vice of envy, is nonetheless still not an attitude that should be cultivated by Christians. Faith in God’s providence should enable us, rather, to live more or less serenely with the fact that life, as John F. Kennedy famously noted, is often just not fair.

Now we’re finally ready to see what real envy is, and how malicious it is. Envy denotes a sadness or distress I feel about a good belonging to someone else, not motivated by fear that that person will thereby harm me or others, and not motivated by my conviction that s/he is undeserving of that good, but purely and simply by my sense that the other person’s having what I don’t have diminishes my self-worth.

Famous biblical examples of envy abound. We can just cite a tiny sampling here: Cain’s envy of Abel (Gn. 4:1-8); Saul’s envy of David (II Sam. 18); the envy that caused the dispute before King Solomon between two harlots, as to which of them was the real mother of a newborn baby (I Kgs. 3:16-28); and the envy attributed to the religious adversaries of Jesus (Mk. 15:10). Note in two of these examples that envy causes the first murder in human history, and also the murder of the Son of God; in the other examples, envy very nearly results in murder. And if we go just a little beyond the commonly acknowledged canonical Scriptures to include deuterocanonical and patristic writings, we encounter legends and speculations identifying envy as key to the downfall of Satan and his subsequent seduction of the human race. This is sometimes seen simply as Satan’s envy of God, sometimes as his envy of human beings whom he is commanded to revere as bearers of God’s image, and – in St. Augustine’s conjecture, for instance – it’s Satan’s envious resentment of God’s ultimate plan to become incarnate in the humanity of Jesus.

Let’s just recall now a few celebrated examples from secular literature. Consider again the pre-eminent example of Iago, whose envy of Othello propels him into calumny and false accusation resulting, here too, in murder. Consider the vain queen’s murderous envy of her more beautiful stepdaughter, Snow White, in the immortal Grimm fairy tale. Consider Salieri’s maddening envy of the superior musicianship of Mozart, so dramatically portrayed in the play (and movie) Amadeus. And finally, note that on the current New York Times best-seller list there’s a new novel by Sandra Brown bearing the title Envy. I won’t spoil your enjoyment of this thriller by telling you the story, I’ll just heartily recommend it to you as a great read and an excellent meditation on the nature and destructive power of this vice; Ms. Brown gets it exactly right.

Clearly the vice we’re dealing with here is a consequence of other, deeper vices. It stems first of all from pride and vanity. It’s easy to see how proud people become envious when the excellence of others deflates their outsized egos; a vain show-off will naturally be envious of those who show him or her up. Let’s also notice how naturally envy results from the vice at the opposite extreme from vanity, i.e., the vice of faintheartedness, the lack of wholesome "pride" and the consequent avoidance of serious effort in pursuit of excellence. Fainthearted persons are prone to envy people of truly superior quality, because the latter’s outstanding virtue painfully points up their own lack of virtue.

Other vices besides pride, vanity, and faintheartedness can also give rise to envy. If I’m consumed with greed, I’m likely to envy people whose material wealth exceeds my own. If I’m steeped in gluttony or lust, I’m apt to envy people with more access to the sensual gratifications I inordinately crave. It may be due to its derivative character that envy was not specifically identified on the earlier lists of capital vices. What was listed, instead, was a vice bearing the generic label tristitia or sadness. We’ve seen that envy is basically a type of sadness, and it’s worth remarking here that persistent and inordinate feelings of unhappiness or discontent in a person’s life are apt to be symptomatic of envy. (But that’s not the only possibility, as we’ll see next week.) In any case, even though envy is a derivative of other vices, it’s also in itself a source from which other sins are derived; as such, its placement on the developed list of seven capital vices is well merited.

Let’s look now at the typical derivatives or offspring of envy. First there’s detraction, the deliberate defamation of someone with the precise aim of harming the person’s reputation. Envious people very often like to strike at their targets in this way. Sometimes what they say about their targets is true, but this does not excuse them from the sin of detraction if their damning disclosures have no reasonable warrant such as the obligation to report a crime or the need to avert some significant harm. Often enough, detractors are not even limited by the constraints of truth; when they resort to telling injurious falsehoods about their victims, the aggravated detraction becomes calumnny. Worst of all in this general category is talebearing or backbiting, where the object is to sow discord among friends by spreading tales calculated to incite resentment; again here, it’s of secondary importance whether the tales told are really factual or not. In all these cases, the object of the detractor or talebearer is to bring harm upon someone whom s/he envies.

In these ways and in many others as well, envious people exhibit a spiteful character that rejoices in their target’s downfall even if they don’t thereby gain any real advantage for themselves – even, indeed, if they harm or destroy themselves in the process of bringing their target down. Solomon Schimmel illustrates this by citing a Jewish parable about two men, one greedy and the other envious, who were told by their king that he would grant either of them any request on the condition that the other man would be given twice as much. After some understandable hesitation on the part of both, the envious man was prevailed upon to ask first, and he requested that one of his eyes be gouged out!

Corresponding to this perverse joy at another’s harm is the envious person’s frustration / rage at the other person’s success despite the envier’s efforts to ruin him or her. And taking all of these offspring together, what they ultimately point to is nothing short of hatred. The sin of hatred, precisely because it bespeaks consummate malice, is not itself a capital vice, but, rather, it’s the final extreme outcome of the capital vice of envy. Remember Iago’s "I hate the Moor." And remember, from that example and others we’ve mentioned here, this hatred is often literally murderous.

All these considerations put us in a position to understand why it is, as I mentioned toward the beginning, that envy in its proper meaning involves something no one wants to admit to. It’s too shameful. People often conceal it even from themselves by disguising it as justified "indignation," imagining that those they envy have come upon their success undeservedly or even by wrongdoing. Sometimes there can be a really honest element of indignation along with envy, but then the factual basis of indignation is exaggerated so that the enviers can feel like the righteous victims of their targets while ignoring their own envy.

I dare say that this applies to the terrorist hatred of America. We really are the envy of much of the world – not just in the improper, benign sense intended by people who say they "envy" their friends, but in the literal, malicious sense of the vice we’ve been considering. President Bush has, I think, rightly pointed out that people in some parts of the world enviously resent our freedom simply because they have never known freedom themselves. (It’s not unlike rigid religious people everywhere – even in the church – who envy and, consequently, attack the spiritual freedom of others; arguably this helps explain why Jesus himself was envied by some of his own coreligionists.) In saying this, I’m not unsaying what I said last week about the probability that some anti-American hatred stems from our nation’s problem with greed which entails a measure of exploitation and indifference toward less fortunate peoples. In other words, the hatred directed against America may well illustrate that same mixture of indignation and envy which is the basis of so much hatred at the interpersonal level. So, America’s response needs to be balanced. We mustn’t dismiss other people’s arguably just grievances against us, as though they amounted to nothing but envy. On the other hand, we mustn’t allow any such grievances to serve as a cover for the element of real envy that also motivates our enemies. And in any case we can’t accept the obscene implication that anyone’s grievances, however true in themselves, furnish a valid excuse for the atrocities committed against us.

At all events, it’s not hard to see why envy in its proper sense is something people are too ashamed to admit. We’ve noticed, first of all, how foolish it is in its spite, directing hatred against others even when the envious person self-destructs or at least gains nothing in the process. But the more basic reason we’re so ashamed of being envious is the sheer malice of this vice; indeed it’s this very malice that drives envious people to such insanely foolish, self-destructive extremes. The virtue which envy directly opposes is charity – nothing less. With charity, we feel enhanced by our neighbor’s good; with envy, we feel diminished by it. The love of charity would unite us with our neighbors and have us rejoice in their good as in our own; envy, directly to the contrary, alienates us from our neighbors and makes us resent their good simply because we don’t possess that good for ourselves. No one wants to admit to being so basely malicious, and that’s the deepest reason we don’t admit to envy.

Envy in its full-blown conscious and willful form, precisely because of its radical contrariety to charity, is by definition a mortal sin. The consoling news is that a great deal of envy escapes the grievous culpability of mortal sin because it is not full-blown and often is hardly even conscious. Aquinas observes that subtle, involuntary feelings of envy are found even in the very best people (in viris perfectis). One symptom of their presence is the tendency of so many good people to be hypercritical of others, often rationalized as "constructive" criticism; I suggest there is some faint reflection here of that verbal taking-down of others which we’ve considered under the heading of detraction and related sins. (Priests are often frightfully severe in criticizing one another – as regards preaching competence, pastoral effectiveness, etc.)

Generally in these cases, envy is more a failure of weakness than of malice. Still this begs the question, what remedies are available against this insidious flaw of character?

Solomon Schimmel reflects much conventional wisdom in advising envious people to compare themselves with those less fortunate rather than with those more fortunate, and also to reflect on the good things they have that those they envy do not. From my own personal and pastoral experience, I prefer to advise that we simply avoid, as far as possible, comparing ourselves to others at all. Comparisons are a slippery slope; they tend to be invidious (cf. invidia, Latin for "envy"), in effect even when not in intent. It’s more wholesome to just thank God for our blessings and ask Him to supply our wants, without making an issue of whether someone else is more richly blessed in ways that can make us feel less favored or disfavored.

As a corollary, I also recommend that parents, teachers, etc., be extremely careful about comparing children (especially siblings) to one another – "Why can’t you be more like Bobby?" Even though such talk is generally intended to encourage healthy "emulation" (even including healthy competition), it’s more likely in too many cases that children will hear themselves being put down in ways that provoke envy instead.

Along the same line, we need to repeat Aquinas’ observation that "indignation," albeit not identical with envy, is still not to be encouraged among Christians. This warning gains even greater force when we recall that real envy often masquerades as indignation; we easily persuade ourselves that we’re justly indignant when we’re really just envious. So, despite its ostensible justification, indulgence in the resentment we’ve called "indignation" (the whining complaint, "It’s not fair!") must be discouraged – in ourselves, first of all, and also in the children under our care.

Finally there is the all-important spiritual antidote to envy, which underlies and also transcends the other pointers I’ve just recommended. Since envy directly opposes charity, we need to cultivate that supreme virtue of charity, the attitude of benevolent love, which fosters friendship and, accordingly, drives out envy. (In the biblical story of David, cited above, Saul succumbs to envy but his son Jonathan avoids that pitfall by reason of his loving friendship for David.) Growth in charity / love / benevolence is, above all, something we must seek from God in prayer; for, as St. Paul affirms, "God has given us the Holy Spirit, who fills our hearts with his love" (Rm. 5:5).

"America, America,

God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea."

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