Freedom from Thoughts 4
The Demon of Avarice: Possessing vs. Belonging
This is the fourth in a series of posts exploring Evagrius Ponticus’ teaching on the eight kinds of evil thoughts. The previous posts were an introduction, on gluttony, and on lust.
Avarice or greed is the next mental obsession that Evagrius explores.
Avarice suggests to the mind a lengthy old age, inability to perform manual labor (at some future date), famines that are sure to come, sickness that will visit us, the pinch of poverty, the great shame that comes from accepting the necessities of life form others.1
Gluttony is a preoccupation with food specifically, and consumption generally, as a means to fill an insatiable emptiness and fear that there is not enough and I am not enough. Lust is a preoccupation with the objectification of bodies and a desire to possess them. Avarice is a preoccupation with the accumulation of wealth or the possession of objects. Here, one’s identity is derived from material things. I am what I own.
Evagrius associates avarice with fear of the future and the drive to eliminate any sense of vulnerability. This fear reduces life to striving to have the most toys; not just as a status symbol but as a hedge against need and death. It is a fruitless attempt to become invulnerable that ultimately leads to self-centeredness, isolation, and callous indifference to the needs of others. There is only possessing; not belonging. The reality of mutual interdependency is seen as a threat rather than a necessary condition of life, community, and joy.
In a sense, avarice is a fear of intimacy and is akin to lust in that regard. In both cases, personhood is objectified in bodies or things and separated from the relational nexus in which personhood finds its fulfillment. Greed tries to substitute the desire to possess for our longing to belong.
John O’Donohue perceptively observes that
Our hunger to belong is the longing to bridge the gulf that exists between isolation and intimacy. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Everyone longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen, and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement, and possessions, yet without a true sense of belonging, our lives feel empty and pointless.2
We lose our soul in the process of trying to possess the world. Evagrius counsels charity as the antidote to greed.
Just as death and life cannot be shared in at the same time, so also it is an impossibility for charity to exist in anyone along with money. For charity not only gets rid of money but even of this present life itself.3
Charity is the love of neighbor that seeks their good and responds to their need. This is not restricted to charity in the narrow sense of making charitable donations, but the larger project of letting go of our attachment to money and possessions so that we are free to love. We are advised not merely to get rid of money, but of the life built on its acquisition so that mercy can flow again in our relationships.
This return to love acknowledges our longing to belong and our need for others as intrinsic to human life and happiness. There is a saying in Ireland, Is fearr comharsa maith ná máilín airgid: “a good neighbor is better than a bag of money.”4
Our present cultural crisis is in large part a failure to recognize this truth. It is a crisis of belonging. We no longer feel that we belong to each other. We take refuge in our possessions as a poor substitute for taking refuge in one another. We have replaced community with consumerism, and now wonder why we are so lonely, afraid, and angry.
Our possessions cannot save us. Love is the only sure shelter that can give shape and protection to our longing to belong. There is another Irish saying that might serve well as a mantra for our contemplation. When asking a child who they are, the child is not simply asked for her name, but Cé leis thú?: “To whom do you belong?”5 There is perhaps nothing more tragic than a child who cannot answer this question with gratitude and confidence.
And so it is with us. A person consumed with greed belongs to no one, not even herself, because we only discover ourselves in the eyes of the lover. “Grace,” as Rowan Williams has described, “is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.”6 It is grace, divine and human, that restores us to our self, and to life.
To whom do you belong? The search for identity, security and fulfillment is bound up with this question. In the words of St. Anthony of Egypt, “Our life and our death are with our neighbor.”
Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 9.
John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes (London: Bantam Press, 1998), p. xvi.
Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 18.
O’Donohue, p. 45.
O’Donohue, p 29.
Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace” at https://www.anglican.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/the-bodys-grace.pdf.