Article: The Seven Deadlies Revisited, Part One: Envy

MARY EBERSTADT

I was sitting in an unfamiliar church somewhere in Connecticut last weekend, watching one of our teenagers fidget throughout the homily.

Envy by Giotto 1302-1305

I couldn't blame her. The sermon was poor. It was pitched unseemly low, and meandered mightily. And with every long and winding paragraph, every phrase unconnected to the day's readings or anything else, my exasperation also climbed. Why can't our homilies have more meat in them? I wondered as the thing went on. Why don't we hear about something interesting from the pulpit once in a while -- like, say, the seven deadly sins?

As often happens, my peevishness boomeranged back in the dreaded words: do it yourself. And following that inspiration -- unwanted inspiration, to be sure, but writers are lazy and take it wherever we can get it -- today's column begins a series. In it, we'll briefly revisit each of the seven deadly sins -- hereinafter, the "Deadlies" for short -- in light of some current event or pulse of the Zeitgeist.

Let's start arbitrarily with the one that's occupying my own mind this week: Envy. Recently, a prominent friend of ours fell from public grace. Like numerous other financial leaders these past few weeks, he lost his executive position in what looks to be an increasingly troubled global market. I don't know much about business, or whether he was sacked for good reason or bad; that call, as one of our candidates likes to say, is beyond my pay grade.

What I know, and what readers might want to reflect on too, is the generic media ritual that attends the fall of any prominent person these days, deserved or not: i.e., the envy-driven, lip-smacking, finger-pointing, slobbering public feeding frenzy that people of power and influence have to look forward to should their hold on those commodities ever loosen. A rich man! With a big house! Who goes to a country club! Suddenly, everything about the lives of such people becomes public fodder, and the envy of it just can't be missed. Suddenly, the woodwork crawls with wannabe pundits taking potshots and lobbing smears -- including people who were holding doors and fetching coffee and otherwise fawning and flattering and enjoying the limelight of these alpha guys right up till the day before yesterday.

Watching this public spectacle with the eyes of a friend rather than those of a voyeur makes one thing marvelously clear. Envy, a capital sin, runs riot in America -- and with no penalty. Never mind the virtues that catapulted anyone to such heights in the first place, or the good works for which many are known. You won't be hearing about any of that, because the Envy tantrum is infinitely more gratifying to our baser selves.

Admittedly, envy is not the showiest of the Deadly Sins. It doesn't fly through the air like lust, say, or bare its fangs in public like anger. No, this little viper is content to hide coiled at the bottom of your throat -- arching just enough from time to time to choke a little, and remind you who's really in charge.

Such are the current rules of Envy, American-style, and they bear plenty more inspection than we Christians usually give them. The world loves a fall from higher up the ladder for the reasons Tom Wolfe painted in his Bonfire of the Vanities: because many people lower down envy what those higher-ups have. It loves a fall for the same reason that Melville has Claggart rubbing his hands and bringing down Billy Budd: not because Claggart lacks a conscience, exactly, but because his conscience is "the lawyer to his will." And so are our consciences lawyers today, when we envy and rejoice in the misfortunes of the envied -- all without so much as a twinge of conscience over our coveting.

Admittedly, envy is not the showiest of the Deadly Sins. It doesn't fly through the air like lust, say, or bare its fangs in public like anger. No, this little viper is content to hide coiled at the bottom of your throat -- arching just enough from time to time to choke a little, and remind you who's really in charge.

Such insidiousness is Envy's calling card. Maybe that's why fully two commandments warn against covetousness -- no other Deadly gets as many -- and why the Nazarene Himself had a thing or two or twenty to say about it. Also unlike the other Deadlies, this one wears two faces rather than one. Dante nicely captures the dual nature of Envy in the Purgatorio, sewing the eyes of the envious shut with wire -- fitting punishment both for resenting the good fortunes of others, and for rejoicing in seeing such people brought down.

Fellow Christians: So what if your neighbor is rich? So what if he or she went to a better school than you did, has a cuter husband or wife, is admired by more people, drives a car snazzier than yours? In our theology, to be perfectly bookish and technical about it, the rest of us just aren't supposed to give a damn. Think about that the next time someone rich denounces someone who's even richer on TV, or as a camera chases someone else's kids down the street to their nice school.

You may object that envy is simply human nature, but that telling formulation misses the religious mark. All the Deadlies have their roots in human nature; since when are Christians told to rest our laurels there? The answer is that we aren't. Thus endeth today's lesson.

And now let's all look in the mirror for that beam.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Mary Eberstadt. "The Seven Deadlies Revisited, Part One: Envy." The Catholic Thing (September 18, 2008).

Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@thecatholicthing.org.

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THE AUTHOR

Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review. She is the author of Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes and the editor of Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys.

Eberstadt focuses on issues on American society, culture, and philosophy. She has written widely for various magazines and newspapers, including Policy Review, the Weekly Standard, First Things, American Conservative, the American Spectator, Los Angeles Times, London Times, Newark Star-Ledger, and the Wall Street Journal. Between 1998 and 1990, she was executive editor of the National Interest magazine. From 1985 to 1987, she was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department, a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and a special assistant to Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. She was also managing editor at the Public Interest. A four-year Telluride Scholar at Cornell University, Eberstadt graduated magna cum laude in 1983. She is an associate member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

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