GREED: Presented on 10/8/01 at The Newman Center by Rev. Bruce Williams, O.P. as part of the series on the Seven Deadly Sins.

In the last session, to begin this series, I pointed out that the Seven Deadly Sins / Capital Vices tend to generate lots of other sins and vices. Tonight I have to precise that a little more by explaining that among the Big Seven themselves there tend to be some causal relationships. Pride and Vanity, which we covered last week, have a certain general influence toward all manner of vice. More specifically, Pride and Vanity are often incentives toward Greed, which is tonight’s subject. Vain people are frequently intent on making an impression with their money or with their possessions. Proud people are apt to seek wealth as a means to secure their sense of "independence" from others and even from God; instead of relying on God to provide for their needs, they feel it’s entirely up to them to provide for themselves. Greed is the result.

But Greed, in its turn, has a significant bearing on many other vices. If you take Greed in its most generic sense, as just "wanting / desiring too much" of something, several of the other items on the list of the Big Seven can even be understood as forms of greed. For instance, gluttony designates a greedy appetite for food, anger a greedy appetite for revenge, lust a greedy appetite for sexual gratification. In fact, there’s a New Testament verse (Col. 3:5) in which the word for covetousness or greed has sometimes been translated as "lust," causing no little confusion to readers and even preachers. (The text is referring to something tantamount to idolatry. In their 1986 pastoral letter on economic justice, the US Bishops cited this verse and correctly translated the word as "greed.") John Paul II, for his part, has suggested that the notions of "greed" and "lust" may help define each other. Greed involves a "lusting" after wealth and possessions; this is a frequently noted temptation of celibate clergy, i.e., compensating for their mandatory sexual abstinence by indulging in another form of "lust." On the other hand, the pope also points out that lust itself partakes of the malice of greed in that it treats persons as objects, things to be possessed or used or exploited for pleasure. In line with this insight, others have commented that the really significant failures of celibate clergy and religious in regard to chastity are more often likely to involve possessiveness and dependent relationships rather than specifically sexual misbehavior.

As a capital vice, greed is understood not in the generic sense of excess that I’ve just elaborated, but as a distinct vice specified by the inordinate love of money and material wealth. As the famous New Testament verse has it (I Tim. 6:10): "Love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs." On the basis of this celebrated text, the formative writers in our tradition have attributed to greed a certain supremacy among the other capital vices (though subordinate to pride), as the "root" which nourishes the other vices by providing the wherewithal for them to be pursued and indulged.

Note that what is identified as "the root of all evils" is the love / craving for money, not money itself. Jesus did call some of his followers to renounce all wealth, but he didn’t propose this to everyone. Jesus himself, and his companions, didn’t live on nothing. They accepted support from wealthy women who are named in Luke’s gospel (Lk. 8:2-3), and there’s no indication that Jesus ever attempted to discourage these people from supporting him. Remember too that one of Jesus’ company was appointed as treasurer, so there were evidently some funds for the treasurer to manage. (The treasurer, of course, ended up sadly, and at least some material in the gospels suggests that greed was his undoing – the payment he accepted for betraying Jesus, and see also Jn. 12:4-6; yet there has also been speculation that other motives may have been involved.)

Clearly, in any case, our tradition recognizes that we can’t live without some material sustenance, and that normally we have to make use of money to provide for our needs. In fact, the tradition has identified a vice at the opposite extreme from greed, i.e., the vice of expending our resources too freely to the point of carelessness, recklessness. This would be the vice of prodigality or wastefulness. The apostle Paul expressly told the Corinthians that he didn’t expect them to impoverish themselves in the process of trying to relieve the poverty of others (II Cor. 8:13). The right of private property, or the right to acquire and keep things as one’s own, has been upheld throughout the tradition (scholars explain the seemingly contrary witness of Acts 4:32 by suggesting that this narrative presents an idealized picture of the infant church). Modern popes for over a century have strongly defended this right, in opposition to Marxism.

The issue here, to put it in terms of a respected biblical word, is one of stewardship – how we use the resources we’ve been blessed with. From the age of the church Fathers all the way down to our own, Catholic teaching has insisted that while the ownership of goods may rightfully be private, the use made of these goods must be regulated by just norms pertaining to social well-being. This goes directly against an idea that has, sadly, become a common assumption in our society today, the extreme individualistic idea that I’m entitled to amass as much wealth as possible (by lawful means) and to do simply whatever I want with what is "mine," unhindered by any social obligations. That idea, actually, is typical of what we’re calling the vice of greed.

Greed and prodigality are both vices against responsible stewardship, but greed is much more profoundly so. We can see this in several ways, and perhaps most easily, to begin with, in practical terms. In the very nature of the case, prodigality will eventually exhaust itself; if you keep on dissipating your resources over a long enough time, sooner or later all your resources will be spent and you won’t have anything left to continue being prodigal with. Greed, on the contrary, feeds on itself. There’s no limit to how much we can seek to acquire in our greed; the more we have, the more we want, and our greed just keeps on expanding.

A deeper way to appreciate the contrast between greed and prodigality is to consider the virtues they’re opposed to. The virtue most directly at stake here is generosity, also called "liberality" because it’s the disposition to give freely (liberally) of what is rightfully mine in order to benefit others.

Prodigality and greed are both opposed to generosity, but in very different ways. Prodigality exaggerates and distorts generosity by wastefulness; ultimately it’s self-defeating, undermining the good that generosity would promote. But greed is radically contrary to the very idea of generosity; it’s the vice that has me preoccupied with getting and keeping for myself. Simply put, prodigal people are generous to a fault whereas greedy people are ungenerous. That should make it clear enough which of the two vices is worse.

But ungenerosity is only the beginning of greed. As I persist in my preoccupation with getting things for myself and holding on to what is mine, I tend to develop exaggerated notions of "what is mine," of what rightfully belongs to me. I progressively inflate my "rights" and I come to minimize and even negate your rights. And so, what I’m so assiduously acquiring and holding on to as "mine" may often not really be rightfully mine at all; it’s yours! At this point, my greed has made me not only ungenerous but downright unjust. In the end, greed violates not only generosity but justice itself.

Examples of this abound. On the personal level, just think of the countless petty thefts, and also thefts that are not so petty, made from offices and other workplaces by employees who rationalize their conduct by supposing that they’re somehow justified in helping themselves in this fashion. On the grand social scale, consider the vast accumulation of wealth alongside dire poverty. The church Fathers adamantly insisted that the relief of the poor is an obligation of justice, not simply of generosity or charity. In other words, there is simply no right to retain superfluous wealth and withhold relief from starving people; those who do so are denounced by the Fathers as not just thieves but murderers.

Two years ago when I spoke here on "Moral Leadership and Business" (9/28/99), I quoted from John Paul II’s 1979 address at Yankee Stadium during his first visit to our country as pope. Expounding on the gospel parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus (Lk. 16:19-31), the pope reminded wealthy America: "The poor of the world are your brothers in Christ." It is not enough just to throw them a few crumbs from the table. "You must give from your substance, and not only from your abundance, to help them." The pope acknowledged that our country has given foreign aid in lavish quantities for many years, but he was clearly challenging us to a higher level of generosity. Though he himself did not expressly say this, we might at least ask whether our level of giving, notwithstanding its magnitude in terms of absolute quantity, amounts to anything more than "crumbs from the table" in relation to our over-all economy. According to statistics cited by Fr. Robert Drinan, SJ in a recent article for the National Catholic Reporter (9/21/01), US foreign aid amounts to a smaller percentage of its economy than the percentage given by any of the other 22 donor nations.

In the special edition of Time magazine devoted to the attacks of last September 11, an article by Nancy Gibbs begins as follows: "If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can’t be safe. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, planted at the base of Manhattan island with the Statue of Liberty as their sentry, and the Pentagon, a squat, concrete fort on the banks of the Potomac, are the sanctuaries of money and power that our enemies may imagine define us. But that assumes our faith rests on what we can buy and build, and that has never been America’s true God."

While we would readily say Amen to that final statement, we ought to do so with a prayer to be spared, by the help of God’s grace, from yielding at all to the temptation to make money and power our god in practice. That would be the covetousness, the greed, which the author of Colossians refers to as idolatry.

Now I trust that these last few remarks are not going to be misunderstood. I’m not intending to say, or to come anywhere near to saying, that our country’s problems with amassed wealth and our susceptibility to greed put us in a position where we deserved to have these atrocities visited on us. Any such suggestion would be obscene. Having clarified that, I submit that it is still permissible and germane to ask ourselves, in all humility and with all compassion, whether it’s possible that our problems with greed would provide a partial answer to the question that has been on so many lips during these weeks: Why are we so hated?

In my earlier presentation, already mentioned, on "Moral Leadership and Business," I cited some reflections of Fr. Jack Haughey SJ who has been involved for many years with ethical issues regarding the acquisition and use of wealth. He treats the capital vice of greed, in its personal and social dimensions, as a profound spiritual malady which he terms "mammon illness." The vivid biblical illustration which Haughey offers is the sad story in Marks’s gospel (Mk. 5:1-20) about a town’s adverse reaction to an exorcism which Jesus performed on one of its citizens, because the outcome of the exorcism involved the destruction of a herd of pigs and this was disruptive to the town’s economy. In Haughey’s terms, that town’s inverted social values – placing economic stability above the welfare of its citizen newly released from demonic possession – were clearly symptomatic of its affliction with mammon illness. Arguably the town itself was even sicker than the possessed man had been.

It’s characteristic of mammon illness that greed is not perceived as the vice it really is. Greed can even come to be seen as a virtue; as mentioned before, many in our society now consider it a right – and I’ll add here, even an imperative – to amass as much wealth as possible and to keep and use it all for oneself with no sense of obligation toward other people who are needy. Not surprisingly, the symptoms of mammon illness which Haughey goes on to list show a striking correlation with the offspring of greed which are identifed in the tradition of the capital vices. Although I elaborated on this more extensively in my earlier "Moral Leadership in Business" presentation, it’s useful to summarize it briefly here.

The first mammon-illness symptom listed by Haughey is what he calls "running," exemplified in many instances of workaholism and, more generally, in so much anxiety over material security as well as in the over-all driven quality of our lives. It correlates rather closely with the preoccupied and restless spirit which Christian authors have traditionally pointed out as an offspring of greed.

Next there is the symptom which Haughey calls "numbness," whereby one is oblivious of family and friends and, a fortiori, of other people beyond one’s immediate circle – especially the needy. This symptom correlates with that callousness toward the poor which Christian authors also identified as an offspring of greed.

The third and last symptom Haughey proposes is "split consciousness" – the effort to be "devoutly religious and devoutly avaricious at the same time," as I described it in my earlier address. In a basic way this involves dishonesty, typically in the form of self-deception. Traditional Christian writers did not explicate this particular type of dishonesty as an offspring of greed; but they did see greed as generating dishonesty in other forms, especially in the proneness to deal with others in ways that are underhanded, deceitful, fraudulent – i.e., to take unfair advantage of others for one’s own gain. It might be tempting to admire such behavior as clever or astute or "prudent." But Aquinas expressly spoke of this astutia as a type of False Prudence, and he pointed out that it characteristically stems from greed.

Greed is so pervasive in our society that Solomon Schimmel, for one, is quite pessimistic about the prospects for any effective remedy against it. He is among those who think that greed is built into the fabric of capitalist economy, and suggests that the best we can hope to do is restrain the more destructive excesses of this vice. Pope John Paul, on the other hand, appears more hopeful that capitalism can function effectively without the incentive of greed. He continues to defend the legitimacy of private property and entrepreneurship, and even extols the superior merits of a free market economy, though he emphasizes that the free market is in need of regulation so as to promote and not hinder the broader common good.

Some of this regulation he envisions as coming necessarily from the government, which is directly charged with safeguarding the general welfare. But the most important regulation must come from a renewal of the human spirit in love and justice, especially as expressed in the virtues of generosity and munificence. I’ve already spoken here of generosity as the virtue most directly opposed to greed. The other virtue, munificence, is a kind of extraordinary generosity – joined with a wholesome boldness or courage – exercised by those with more abundant means who invest their resources heavily in undertakings of significant value for the community. This applies to philanthropic individuals and corporate institutions, and also to wealthy nations such as our own that are called to share their rich blessings with the world.

Both generosity and munificence express and also foster a sense of solidarity with our fellow human beings as well as with the world we all share. Pope John Paul even regards solidarity as a virtue in itself, and as the key to the realization of humanity’s noblest earthly potential. Greed, like the other capital vices in various ways, isolates and alienates us from one another. Its remedy must involve a new spirit of community solidarity, which can make possible a real peace and thus true security instead of the illusory security of amassed wealth.

"America, America,

May God thy gold refine,

‘Til all success be nobleness

And every gain divine."

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