The Tenth Commandment

You shall not covet your neighbour’s goods …

Why is ‘the love of money’ the root of all evil (1 Tim 6:10)? Certainly an undue attachment to things causes problems but people have to live in the ‘real world’, care for their security and prosperity, and store up something for rainy days.

The vice of covetousness (also called avarice or greed) seeks to possess material wealth beyond what is necessary. It is a matter of proportion, of using material things reasonably, in line with what one really needs. Questions of justice and charity also come into it. It is impossible, St Thomas Aquinas thinks, for one person to enjoy extreme wealth without someone else suffering extreme want.

If people find their sense of meaning and identity in external goods then reality is being distorted and we are faced with a serious vice. The scriptures are clear that covetousness is a radical thing. Eph 5:5 and Col 3:5 describe it as idolatry. Other biblical texts associate it with injustice and with sexual immorality (Sir 14:9; Ezek 22:23-31; Amos 5:10-15; 1 Cor 10:6).

In the gospel we find Jesus saying ‘blessed are you who are poor’ and ‘woe to you who are rich’ (Luke 6:20, 24). He says ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Luke 18:25). He does not talk about ‘undue attachment to wealth’ or ‘disproportionate interest in wealth’: riches themselves are a problem, it seems.

If what one owns becomes the source of one’s meaning and identity, providing one’s sense of self and of purpose and becoming the final goal of one’s life, then something has gone seriously wrong. If the possession of things is no longer just about security and comfort but becomes a matter of identity and meaning then we are serving Mammon. But God is to be our only treasure and our entire security. This is not a recommendation that we become impractical about the necessities of life, just that we live our lives within a radical, God-centred perspective.

We must be sensible, reasonable, and prudent. Different kinds of relationship with material things are appropriate for people with different responsibilities. One who is rearing and educating children obviously needs more resources than someone living the life of a hermit. At the same time every Christian is called to follow ‘the poor Christ’ and to lay up ‘treasure in heaven’.

Anything we can ‘have’ or ‘own’ can function as a way of being rich and to the extent that it does so our attachment to it can become idolatrous. We find our security and identity in something less than God.  Knowledge is such a thing, and so is power, fame or high position. Saint John of the Cross says there is even ‘spiritual avarice’, where people become discontented with the spirituality God has given them. They want nothing except to listen to talks and read books about spirituality instead of doing penance and perfecting inward poverty, they become collectors of religious objects and even of religious experiences and it is all just a form of covetousness.

Covetousness drives us to find our security and identity in possessions. It is a way of becoming self-sufficient and so is a root of sin (Acts 14:15-17; Rom 1:19). Anger may arise from tiredness and lust from uncontrolled passion but covetousness is cold and hostile.

Aquinas says it is a capital sin not because it is obviously very bad in itself but because it provides the means for so many other sins to be carried out. John Cassian identifies these ‘children of avarice’ as lying, fraud, robbery, perjury and violence, and Gregory the Great adds treachery, deceit, restlessness and hardness of heart. We know how much corruption money can bring in its train.

Aquinas says it is the most deforming sin because it makes human desires subject to external things. Gregory the Great sees the tragedy in covetousness: ‘when the disturbed heart has lost the satisfaction of joy within it seeks for sources of consolation without, and is more anxious to possess external goods, the more it has no joy on which to fall back within’. The solution, then, is to find the source of true joy and to desire to ‘own’ it above all other things.