Envy and Charity

This article is significantly delayed not only because it's spring and there's lots of things that need doing at this time of year, but also because I was honestly stumped on this one. I've started this article many times without being able to work through any plausible logic. I've covered greed and generosity, so it's not a simpleminded issue of wanting something for yourself versus a willingness to give to others. Something else is involved.

The theological virtues are faith, hope and love. That last one, love, is the cornerstone of understanding these capital virtues. At the same time, the third theological virtue is often expressed as "charity". It would seem to suggest that envy is a pretty nasty sin, if it's the categorical opposite of a theological virtue.

The best I've come up with is this: the capital virtue of charity has to do with the ability to relish the fact that others have possessions, traits and abilities that have an inherent beauty and goodness to them. Envy, as the opposing sin, is the desire for you to have them - at the cost of whoever has them.

It's important to establish that envy is not just about wanting beauty and goodness for yourself. Everyone pursues that. We wouldn't want to get into heaven otherwise. Envy is about depriving others of it.

So we don't envy someone else's car. We want to have one just like it, but that's not envy. We can go buy an identical car. Envy has taken hold when there's a something that someone else has and you want it for yourself. That specific something that they have.

Let's say that you have a popular friend. Everyone likes her because she's so pretty and friendly. But nobody notices you because in the intense brightness of her personality, you just aren't seen. If you fall into the trap of envy, you start thinking that you should be the pretty one, not her. You should be the one that everyone notices, not her. Charity says that instead of wanting her gifts, you are thrilled for her. Whatever she has was given to her and you are happy that such a gift even exists in the world.

What's the root cause of envious thinking? A lack of love, of course. When we love those around us, we want only the best for them. We would no more strip someone we love of the beauty in their life than we would strike them. The difficulty that most people have with love, and that leaves us open to temptation the most, is not permitting ourselves to grasp the notion of love as applied to strangers. All too many people see their neighbors as competitors, rivals, non-entities, slaves, or oppressors. When that is the way we see our neighbors, we will naturally fall into sinful thinking and acts. If my neighbor is an oppressor, why would I love them? We start from the assumption that they are no worthy of our love, and then apply unloving thinking to them. We fall into the capital sins. Like envy.

I know that this is all repetitious, but all of our choices to do sinful things are rooted in the fact that we just don't believe that other people are worthy of our love or that we ourselves are not worthy to give love. Without a hope of real love, we turn to other things to fill the void. Greed, lust, envy and so on. The sins. We turn away from love and all we're left with is the capital sins.

The next installment of this series is about Pride and Humility, the final capital pairing.