The Three Forms of Greed

So this disease, this unhealthy state, is threefold, and all the fathers condemn it with equal abhorrence. One form is the one whose taint we described above: it deceives wretched people and persuades them to hoard, though they never had anything of their own when they lived in the world. Another forces men later to take back, and desire once more, the things they gave up in the early days of their renunciation of the world. A third springs from a faulty and harmful beginning and makes a bad start. Through fear of poverty and lack of faith, it does not let those whom it has once infected with this lukewarmness of mind strip themselves of all their worldly goods. And those who keep back money and property that they certainly ought to have renounced and forsaken, it never lets arrive at the perfection of the gospel. [a]

We find in Holy Scripture examples of these three disasters, and they were visited with no light punishment. When Gehazi wanted to get what he had never had before, not only did he fail to receive the gift of prophecy, which would have come to him from his master by inheritance, but on the contrary he was covered with a perpetual leprosy by the curse of the holy Elisha. Judas, wanting to take back the wealth he had once thrown away when he followed Christ, not only fell into betraying the Lord and lost his rank as an apostle, but was not even allowed to end his life by the common lot of all; he ended it by a violent death. And Ananias and Sapphira, keeping back part of what had formerly been their own, were punished with death at the apostle’s word.