WHAT IS AVARICE?
Avarice, Pieter van der Heyden.
Tech billionaires ascend to outer space while their employees lack healthcare, corporations strive to improve shareholder dividends while the planet warms, and wealth continues to rush up rather than trickle down. What is at the root of all this? From the gospels to today, Christians have named avarice as a disordered relation to wealth.
Avarice is a vice opposed to the virtue of generosity. Here we need to step back and ask what virtues and vices are. Virtues are names we give to particularly excellent kinds of human actions. (1) Whenever we describe someone’s action or decision with terms like courageous, fair, or wise, we are using excellence-talk. To say it was courageous for our coworker to speak out against the boss’s egregious favoritism is to say our coworker spoke up in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons—in other words, to name their behavior as excellent. Courage rightly names the kind of action we saw when our coworker spoke out.
Note that we often speak this way not only about actions, but also about people. Maybe our coworker’s act of standing up to the boss was a one-time thing, an excellent act called forth by extreme circumstances. Maybe, however, our coworker is known for courageous actions. Say they serve as a volunteer firefighter, helped remove a bat from the office while most everyone else fled the scene, and that they once helped everyone out of a burning car when the office carpool was involved in a tragic pile-up. Here we refer to our coworker themself as courageous. They have repeatedly acted in courageous ways and can be reasonably relied on to act courageously in the future. Hence we can describe them as courageous, not just their actions. Their character is marked by courage.
If virtues name excellent actions, then vices name bad or flawed actions. These bad or flawed actions are referred to as vicious. Like virtues, vices name not only actions, but characters marked by those actions. If our friend repeatedly lashes out and loses their temper, we can describe them as wrathful. They can be expected to react in the wrong ways, at the wrong times, to the wrong people in such a way that wrath becomes a mark of their character. Note that vices are often either excesses or deficiencies of a virtue. Consider the case of the coworker speaking out against workplace injustice. There is one way to speak out that is courageous and prudent, another that is rash and wrathful. All this is to say that virtues and vices are action descriptions. They are ways of describing actions as good or bad, and ways of describing the character of persons marked by such actions. (2)
What kind of vice is avarice? What are the sorts of actions it describes, the excellences to which it is opposed? Simply put, avarice names an inordinate desire for money and wealth. This is key because while there are several virtues and vices relating to material stuff, avarice is unique in concerning money—the thing that helps us get more things. This makes avarice particularly vicious because it has no natural limit. (3) You can always have more money. This is because money and wealth are not ends, but a means to acquire various ends: food, clothing, housing, boutique guitar pedals. What avarice does is treat money as an end in itself. If money is itself an end and not a means, then there is no end to the desire for it. Contrast this with other vices. If I am cowardly—a vice opposed to courage—then the end I seek is to avoid the situation which calls forth courage. To use our example above, while my courageous coworker confronts the boss's favoritism, I hide in the break room to avoid the confrontation until it is over. Avarice, however, doesn’t hide out until the end it distorts passes. Rather, avarice continually seeks more and more of its end, an end for which there is no end: money. To say someone has the vice of avarice is to say their actions and character are marked by an excessive desire for money.
As the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas theorizes it, avarice is a vice as opposed to generosity. For him, avarice is a lack of generosity and prodigality is an excess of generosity. (4) Generosity is the virtue in question, the excellence to which avarice is opposed. Consider a generous person. This person donates to charity, pays their debts, saves for their children’s future, and gives good gifts. The generous person deals with money excellently: they give to the right people, at the right times, in the right ways, and for the right reasons. To continue with Thomas, generosity is a part of the virtue of justice, which concerns giving others what is owed to them. This means that acting generously isn’t just an add-on to the moral life, something we should do when we feel like it. Rather, being generous is part of being just, giving to others what is due to them. Avarice is then not simply a lack of generosity, but a failure of justice. To hoard money, to desire more and more wealth, is to fail to ensure that others have what they are owed to live a flourishing life. Avarice affects not only the actions and character of the one marked by the vice but also the livelihood of those to whom the avaricious person ought to be generous. All this puts avarice in relief as the description of bad actions concerning wealth, particularly actions marked by inordinate desire for money. To say someone is avaricious is to say they fail to be generous to those to whom they ought, instead seeking more for themselves.
Let me make explicit how avarice is a problem. First, as already discussed, avarice marks a lack of the generosity God expects of us. I will not spend much time on this but suffice it to say that God continually calls Israel and the church to care for those in need and consistently marks out an inordinate desire for wealth as an obstacle to this call. Thus, Amos lambasts those who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (2:6), while 1 Timothy identifies the “love of money” as “the root of all kinds of evil” (6:10). As a vice, avarice short-circuits the generosity owed to others, leading instead to habitually unjust actions. (5)
Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, avarice marks a failure to place one’s hope in God as the one who gives and sustains all things. All that exists is gift. All that we have is received and to be used wisely. Apart from God all of us stand in the shared poverty of the grave. Consider the parable of the rich fool who builds ever larger barns to store ever more wealth yet who is struck dead before he can enjoy any of it (Luke 12:13–21). The rich fool is a case study in avarice. His folly consists in desiring more and more wealth and placing his hope in that wealth rather than in God. It is no mistake that in the next section of Luke’s gospel Jesus calls the disciples not to worry about material possessions, to trust in the God who provides for the lilies of the field and birds of the air, and to “sell your possessions and give alms” for the sake of “an unfailing treasure in heaven where no thief comes near and no moth destroys” (Luke 12:33). Avarice forecloses this calling, instead naming a failure to recognize God as creator and sustainer of all, a failure that issues forth in excessive desire for, and hope in, earthly goods.
Like any other virtue or vice, avarice is a central part of moral language, picking out actions and actors marked by excessive desire for wealth. For Christian moral theology, which is that grammar that describes human action within the drama of salvation, avarice plays a particular role. Here, avarice names a vice that distorts both “horizontal” and “vertical” relations. Horizontally, avarice is contrary to the virtue of generosity towards neighbors. Vertically, avarice corrodes hope in the God who gives all good gifts and who sustains all things.
Victor Lee Austin, Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), 67–86.
Elizabeth Anscombe, “Good and Bad in Human Action,” in Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. Mary Beach and Luke Gormally (Exeter, UK and Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2005), 195–206.
Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019), 332.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2.2 qq. 118–119. It may seem odd for Thomas, a Dominican who has taken a vow of poverty, to name prodigality a vice. What Thomas has in mind is someone who gives away too much stuff, to the wrong persons, and for the wrong reasons. For example, someone who buys a round of drinks for the whole bar just before placing a large bet on the local sports team is prodigal, while those who “give all their possessions with the intention of following Christ . . . are not prodigal but perfectly liberal” (ST 2.2, 119.2 ad. 3).
For numerous scriptural examples see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 65–131.
