Covetousness: The Most Unnatural Vice

John Cassian on Our Possessions and Their Troubles

Continuing on with John Cassian on the unnatural vice: covetousness.

The Alien Vice: Covetousness

If the vice of fornication is that which piggybacks off of that which is actually good, i.e. desire, then covetousness has the opposite problem: it’s the least natural vice for us, and because of that, the hardest one to get rid of:

Our third conflict is against covetousness which we can describe as the love of money; a foreign warfare, and one outside of our nature, and in the case of a monk originating only from the state of a corrupt and sluggish mind, and often from the beginning of his renunciation being unsatisfactory, and his love toward God being lukewarm at its foundation¹.

Whereas all other vices, such as lust or anger build off of a good thing which is natural to us, covetousness is a longing for that which is not natural to us, but always alien to us: other goods. It’s here that the lines get a little blurry, for how do we properly draw that line? There’s a real sense in which the body is always made up of that which is not properly “human”: we contain billions of microbial bodies, are always filtering food and water through us in order to convert it into the stuff of being human. To be human at all is to be enmeshed and dependent on a world that is precisely not human².

What makes the turn here for Cassian is that loving that which is proper to us is understandable: we are to love ourselves in moderate and appropriate ways. No one hates their own body (or should), but should see what we are—with all its limits and creaks—as God’s good gift which makes you into you. And as such, vices like lust and gluttony are just corruptions of desire, and without desire, nothing in our life happens.

But desiring that which is not natural to us is a trickier thing. To love that which is not natural to us—money or possessions— is to confuse that which is essential with that which is incidental: though needing bread for living, we are not bread and shouldn’t value bread as much as our own bodies or our souls.

It’s for this reason—the sheer unnaturalness of attachment to wealth—that makes it so hard to get rid of. It is, Cassian notes, the root of all kinds of evil, creating “a regular nest of sins”³: covetousness, once taking root in us, builds up a house inside us, gathering all sorts of supporting vices to help us be sustainable. Think of it like a traveler who has become shipwrecked: in order to survive an inhospitable place, they need not only food, water, but shelter as well. The traveler cannot survive alone, but needs an ecosystem capable of sustaining them.

The same is true with covetousness: for it to take root in us, we have to begin accomodating it with justifications, new supporting habits, new lines of thought, new spiritual practices and language. It begins to build a new world in the shell of the old, making use of what is already there to make sure that uprooting the love of money is hard to dislodge. It is the rat king, working its way into our lives, making itself indispensable to our functioning.

Blessed among you are those who understand.

The Destruction of Habitats, Inside and Out

But in addition to building up an internal habitat, covetousness corrupts out external worlds as well. Using the example of a monk who abandons a vow of poverty in their heart, Cassian walks us through how its pretty inevitable that a monk will sooner or later leave the monastery entirely.

First, it starts with getting a hold of a little bit of money apart from the others: the rejection of the notion that our goods should be used for the common good. After that, the monk begins to justify why they should in fact keep it. This justification begins to creep into other places: that the clothes they have, the food they eat, their future as a monk dependent on the good will of others—all of these things need to be more adequately secured than by trusting God and trusting their brethren. These complaints give rise, in turn, to new practices: the monk begins seeking out side gigs, securing for themselves a future apart from the community, and soon enough—having committed themselves to a life apart from the community in mind and habit—leaves the monastery⁴.

Interestingly, Cassian describes them as one who is “unable to stay” in a monastery. It’s that they become ill-fit to be there: they become one who is unable to live under the discipline of a rule, but is now always driven like “a wild beast” from the rest of the herd, now seeing himself as “an animal fit for prey”, a being all on their own, having to sustain themselves by their own work and their own resources. It’s a fairly miserable picture, and one easily reminiscent of Gollum: covetousness—not of power, but of the gold itself—drives him to murder, to isolation, to embrace a life of fish bones and shadows, no longer in society but seeking to defend himself against any and all outsiders.

It is for this reason that Cassian juxtaposes the apostles in Acts 2 over against Judas, whose explicit motivation is given as one who helped himself to the common purse⁵. Judas, having been trusted with the apostles’ common money, became overcome by this external thing, corrupting him internally, adding betrayal, deception, and lying as the “nest” within which covetousness could live. And when the internal house became too small, the money was used to buy a bigger house: a field within which he spilled out his guts⁶.

Dislodging the Alien Vice

In Acts 2, we find an explicit reversal of Judas: members of the church sold fields and gave the money for the common good. Cassian links Anninias and Sapphira to Judas here as members of a type, but that Anninias and Sapphira were further down the road than Judas:

For the one (Judas), in order to escape poverty, desired to take back what he had forsaken; the others (A&S), for fear lest that they might become poor, tried to keep something back out of their property, which they should have either offered to the Apostle in good faith, or have given entirely to the brethren

What Cassian wants us to see is that the fear of not having enough is already a sign that the vice has taken root, and that their subsequent actions were several steps downstream. Following Cassian, one can surmise that perhaps—if the root was there, and if the fruit of deception of the apostles was there—the property they gained (the result of covetousness and that defended by lying) was not gained licitly either.

If covetousness creates its own world to defend not just the property, but the vice, then the way forward is to cut the whole thing down. In the last year, I’ve written a good bit on scarcity, and find it intersecting here: that perhaps the only way forward—the only way through covetousness—is by becoming very comfortable with having enough, embracing scarcity instead of trying to always defend against it.

Such a proposal is easier said than done.

1. Cassian, Institutes, Book VII, ch. 1

2. Norman Wirzba’s book Food and Faith has some particularly good meditations on this conundrum.

3. Institutes, Book VII, ch. 6.

4. Ibid., ch. 7.

5. Ibid., ch. 23. The question of Judas is one which I find perenially interesting, given that the reason for money doesn’t show up apart from Matthew. John tells us Judas was possessed. Others more recently have made a case for Judas as pushing Jesus toward a more politically active life. To be honest, the covetousness explanation seems more plausible now than the Godspell account, if only because it seems the most ordinary reason.

6. Dante, in his treatment of avarice (a rough equivalent) likewise offers a cogent warning: the love of wealth can be done for meager and noble reasons alike. The most noble reason for avarice? Providing for one’s children. (Purgatorio, Canto 20, the story of Hugh Capet).