Where Greed Begins and What It Breeds

When this vice has taken hold of the slack and lukewarm soul of some monk, it begins by tempting him with a small sum of money, giving him excellent and almost reasonable excuses for keeping some money for himself. He complains that what the monastery provides is not enough, and that even a sound and sturdy body can hardly bear it. What is he to do if illness comes on and he has no store of his own to support him in his weakness? The monastery’s allowance, he says, is meager, and the sick are treated with the greatest carelessness. If he has nothing of his own with which to see to his body’s needs, he will die miserably. The clothing allowed him is not enough, unless he has put something by with which to get more. Lastly, he says that he cannot possibly stay long in the same place and monastery. Unless he has secured money for his journey and the cost of crossing the sea, he will not be able to move when he wants to; held back by the compulsion of want, he will drag out a wretched and weary existence from then on without making the slightest progress. He cannot, he says, be supported by another’s means without loss of dignity, like a pauper and a man in want. [a]

So when he has fooled himself with thoughts like these, he racks his brains to think how he can get hold of at least one penny. Then he anxiously looks for some special work he can do without the abbot knowing anything about it. He sells it secretly, and so secures the coin he coveted. Then he torments himself worse and worse thinking how he can double it, puzzled where to put it or whom to entrust it to. Then he is weighed down by a still heavier care: what to buy with it, or by what deal he can double it. When this has turned out as he wished, a still greedier craving for gold springs up, and it is stirred more and more keenly as his store of money grows larger and larger. For as wealth increases, the mania of greed increases. Next he begins to foresee a long life and a feeble old age, and illnesses of every kind, drawn out at length, which will be unbearable in old age unless a large store of money has been laid by in youth.

And so the wretched soul is shaken and held fast, as it were, in a serpent’s coils, while it tries by still more unlawful care to add to the heap it has unlawfully gathered. It gives birth to plagues of its own that inflame it more painfully still. Wholly absorbed in the pursuit of gain, it pays attention to nothing except how to get money with which to flee from the discipline of the monastery as quickly as possible, and it never keeps faith wherever there is a gleam of hope of getting money. For this it does not shrink from the crime of lying, perjury and theft, from breaking a promise, or from giving way to harmful fits of rage. If the man is disappointed at all in his hope of gain, he has no scruple about overstepping the bounds of humility. And through it all, gold and the love of gain become his god, as the belly does for others.

That is why the blessed apostle, seeing the deadly poison of this plague, not only says that it is a root of all kinds of evil but also calls it the worship of idols, saying, “And greed (which in Greek is called philargyria), which is the worship of idols.” You see, then, to what a downfall this madness leads step by step, so that the apostle’s own voice declares it to be the worship of idols and false gods. For it passes over the image and likeness of God, which one who serves God with devotion ought to keep undefiled in himself, and chooses to love and care for images stamped on gold instead of God.