Avarice

Abstract

Avarice, or greed, is a capital sin that rarely emerges as such. Rather, from case to case it is dressed up as avidity, cupidity, covetousness, usury, lust for wealth, love of money, stinginess, meanness. From the annoyance that other people’s avarice triggers, the miser may infer how the others feel about him. Out of amour propre, the greedy man is induced to act as if he were not greedy. The capacity of avarice for camouflage is such that in some circumstances it may even resemble virtue, as Juvenal intuited. Prudentius, in his celebrated Psychomachia (405AD) – an allegorical poem narrating seven fierce battles for the conquest of souls, each pitting a deadly sin against the matching virtue – says of greed that when this sin fails to capture the souls of the faithful (including priests) by force, it does so by stealth. By feigning a certain nobility of the spirit, avarice conceals its true attributes, so that greed and stinginess are attributed to the laudable aim of providing for the needs of one’s children. Laying down its arms, avarice thus disguises itself as parsimony, becoming – Prudentius writes – “that virtue which is called economy” (in the end, however, operatio definitively defeats avaritia). There are many terms for avarice or greed, and if we want to understand its specific nature we must look into its many styles and consider its semantics as they have developed and have been articulated over time.