Confronting Vice

Reflections on envy, avarice, and wrath

The center panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights

The distinctly human characteristic of self-determination floods the history of our species with good decisions and bad, and the consequences of both. Virtuous living is not our default setting at birth- in fact, virtue goes quite against a natural human instinct for immediate resolve even at the expense of another. The development of language that shapes our understanding of good and evil, ethics, and our pursuit of virtue is not a modern conversation. Rather, it is one of the oldest questions humans have asked: what is the Good, and how do I pursue it? 

Discussing the nature of vice, or the opposite of the Good (virtue), Rebecca DeYoung in Glittering Vices claims that “vices offer subtle and deceptive imitations of the fullness of human good, which we often simply call happiness”. While I would create a distinction between the Good and happiness, the truest happiness comes from the pursuit of what is ultimately Good and leads to our flourishing. We experience pleasure as a sort of side effect of specific activities done in a particular way- this is true for both our habits of virtue and vice, yet one produces a characteristically good fruit while the other does not. While the Bible and social rules of conduct can help determine what the Good is, a personal motivation and movement towards the Good comes with an examination of where the Good is lacking in our personal lives, or where we’ve attempted to “attain goods like love, friendship, provision and security, recognition and approval, comfort and pleasure, status and worth, all by ourselves (and, often, all for ourselves)”. Authenticity, maintaining a strict coherence between what we say and do, can lead to not just a personal flourishing but a flourishing of our communities. Plato argues a perfect achievement of virtue; of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance, yields internal harmony and integrity- it’s from this that a Christian framework would develop virtue further and claim harmony and integrity is the ground on which our truest self is built; the self made in the imago Dei where the Holy Spirit becomes present in both us and in our work. Vice prompts us to self examine and reflect on what needs to be left behind- the sin patterns, the lies, the unbelief that leads to a disordered desire. Putting language to our struggle of reshaping the habits of our heart and mind is the first step to accepting the empowering grace God offers us to pursue spiritual practices leading to true flourishing in Him, aligned with His desire for our lives. 

Envy is often overlooked as a vice because of the energy it gives us to drive ourselves towards self improvement. With enough self examination we can deduce what we think we are lacking in and what we observe in other people that is attractive to us. Envy, however powerful of a driver it is, is based on a much more problematic belief than simply desiring what someone else has (this would be jealousy). The motive of the envious might be correct in their desire of honor, standing, or status, but the underlying issue is an insecurity in the honor, standing, or status that the envious man already has. Ultimately, the envious person does not believe they are loved fully, equally, or unconditionally and this is made apparent to them in how they see the love they deeply want given to someone else. In discussing the predisposition to envy of the Four on the Enneagram, Ian Morgan Cron describes the Four’s wrestle with dissatisfaction. “They always want the unavailable. What they have is never what they really want, and what they want is always somewhere ‘out there’ just beyond their reach”. How does the habit of dissatisfaction shape a disordered desire expressed in envy? In my own life, envy has exercised an unhealthy habit of quickly measuring self-worth comparative to others. When left undealt with, the lie of unworthiness develops into a forest fire that either seeks to burn down what the other has or simmer away in the inner life where we destroy the love between ourselves and others and between ourselves and God. It is a willful separation from God that ends up justifying taking matters into our own hands, most likely at the expense of (or lack of care for) others. At the heart of my envy is a disbelief in unconditional worth based on the love of God that has been offered to me. The love the envious gives and receives is partial, unequal, and conditional. What love should motivate is the opposite of envy- a security in our own worth that allows us to freely affirm others without a threat of inferiority. The habit of the envious heart is one that draws us into ourselves for worse. It justifies what we think we deserve, and it resents what we think we lack and those who have what we want. Recognizing envy within me, a dissatisfaction with what I have and what I think I want, I return to the opening of Psalm 23 and repeat it over and over to my deceived and calloused heart- “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing”. A return to the truth of what Scripture tells us about ourselves is what should guide our minds from wandering down the path of envy. Do I have faith that God has adequately equipped me for a life he’s planned for me? The remedy of envy starts with a practice of gratitude, of recognizing good things as gifts. The more we practice and “celebrate the goodness that has already been lavished on us as the beloved of God”, our envy gives way to zeal- still acknowledging our own lack and inferiority, but in humility. It’s in this humility that our weaknesses help us recognize our security in God’s unconditional love and the strength of diversity in the body of Christ for the betterment of the whole.

Envy often goes hand in hand with the vice of avarice, or greed. Although avarice might express itself in the excessive acquiring, saving, hoarding or spending of good things, the heart of avarice is a fear of loss. If envy is a vice where one lacks and wants, avarice is the vice of having and not wanting to lose. Not only this, DeYoung supports Aquinas’ argument that the vice leads to a dire, endless need of getting more- that one is not ultimately satisfied with what one has, but what they could have. If we have worked and earned something on our own merit, it’s easy to justify holding things with closed fists and not in the open posture that God commands us to. The fear of the greedy is the same as the envious, a lack of trust in God’s provision. The true problem of avarice is the way it blinds us to the truth of God’s continual care and provision of his children- so much so that generosity becomes an active expression of our faith in God. In the words of Evagrius of Pontus, “Avarice suggests a lengthy old age, inability to perform manual labor, famines that will come along, diseases that will arise, the bitter realities of poverty, and the shame there is in accepting goods from others to meet one’s needs”. We can recognize our excessive attachments by meditating on the things we believe we deserve and in turn naming them as gifts and admitting the temporality of the comfort they provide. Augustine argues that we will never satisfy a deep human need for eternal good with merely temporal, imperfect goods. Vices, in themselves, are temporal, imperfect fixes to problems we believe we are responsible for fixing. For John Cassian, the grip of greed required a total renunciation of all personal possessions for those pursuing a monastic life. This wasn’t for monks to suffer for the sake of suffering, but for them to learn to depend on the monastery for their care. “Ascetic practice, though extreme, seeks to embody the truth that nothing is truly our own”. Learning to hold all things with open hands, our earthly treasures, our friendships, our finances, is a direct expression of communal trust and ultimately a dependency on God. The commands to fast and to tithe should not be seen as part of a religious checklist but as a willful, direct remedy to a naturally greedy heart. 

Wrath as a vice is difficult to identify because of how it latches on to anger usually concerned with justice. While Aquinas would say that anger in itself is not a vice (anger’s rightful target is injustice), anger has a tendency to transform into wrath based on two main characteristics that are inward looking- when injustice is happening towards me, and when my manner of expressing this injustice is excessive. Our understanding of wrath requires us to sort righteous anger from misguided, and expressing an appropriate response based on our evaluation. This is a practice easier said than done, mostly because the vice infers that we have a wrong understanding or a twisted sense of what is right and wrong, just and unjust. Instead of rehashing the evils of anger, I believe a right understanding of anger’s goods will draw us back to a reordered understanding of righteous anger and the problem with wrath. Anger, ultimately, is an expression of passion. As a gift from God with an intentional significance on the spectrum of human emotion, rightly ordered passion is our driving force towards what is good, right, beautiful and just. Together. Anger, in its disordered form, is powerful in how it motivates others' responses defensively and away from one another. When rightly ordered, anger can be an alarm for injustice- when disordered, anger transforms into a wrath that will drive us apart as we seek justice for where we believe we have selfishly been wronged. Wrath gives us an opportunity to see just how incapable we are at reordering our desires ourselves. Because we are able to justify from a twisted sense of right and wrong, it takes the gracious work of God to orient us away from our perverted understanding of justice and towards justice in the Biblical sense. Prayer as a spiritual practice is crucial to our battle against wrath because prayer is the place where disordered desires and injustice stick out like a sore thumb. In the presence of God, no wrongs can be made to look right, no sins left in the dark or grudges left ‘tolerated’ by God. Prayer is not just communing with God as the righteous, all knowing judge- the act of prayer itself requires a posture of humility, of recognizing our own depravity and our need for God to ultimately be the one to reorder our brokenness when we are unable to.

Character reform is not powered by our own efforts. It’s not as simple as reading about virtue and vice or self-examination simply for the purpose of knowing ourselves. Just as with knowing what it means to be made in the image of God, knowing the lies we have believed to be true motivating us to act in sin requires a prompt response. While cheap grace is stagnant, real grace is dynamic in how it leads us to an enriched understanding of both ourselves and our God, and what that enables in us as a result. Ultimately our response to sin should be confession- confession that moves us into the throne room of God to receive the grace upon which we begin to build a virtuous life. It’s in grace that we submit ourselves to the Spirit’s transforming work. The seven capital vices were developed for pastoral spiritual direction with practical ways for us to move towards virtue. We can deliberately make repeated choices and engage in regular practices that develop virtue. The habits of the heart and mind that shape our desires and behavior are just as true for virtue as they are for vices. A personal practice of virtuous living has direct effects on our communities and spheres of influence. The same humility and will that drive our pursuit of virtue are the same drivers that shape us into rightful Image bearers, who have influence not by simply exercising right judgment but living out of the joyful fruits that come with recognizing vice and choosing a virtuous, humble, grace-filled life.  Knowing that our hearts and minds are reoriented towards the Good- practiced in gratitude, fasting, charity and prayer- reveals that true fulfillment and flourishing does not come from our own means but as consequence to the work and presence of God in us, the imago Dei.