Avarice

AVARICE. – Avarice is an excessive love of riches, that is, a love that goes beyond the rule of reason, which requires that means be subordinated to the end and therefore that man seek riches insofar as they are necessary to his condition of life. Excessive love of riches is a sin, and a special sin, because this love concerns riches, that is, the useful good, as distinct from the honest good and the pleasurable good.

Although frequently opposed to justice, because the miser often desires to seize and retain—or rather, seizes and retains—the riches of others, avarice is always and directly opposed to liberality, since excessive love, desire, or pleasure in riches does not necessarily aim at the riches of others, but also at one’s own riches; it is therefore opposed to liberality by defect, just as prodigality is opposed to it by excess. As contrary to justice, the sin of avarice is mortal ex genere suo, like theft and robbery. But as opposed to liberality, it is only a venial sin, since, although someone may love riches to the point of making them his ultimate end—and thus sin mortally—he may also love them, albeit excessively, without placing them before the love of God, that is, without wishing, on their account, to do anything against God or his neighbour.

But even when it constitutes a mortal sin, avarice is not the gravest of sins. The gravity of sins is in fact inferred from the dignity of the good of which they directly deprive one, and it is clear that the sins which directly deprive one of a greater good are those which, like infidelity and blasphemy, etc., are directly against God, or which, like murder, are directly against the person of man himself. Avarice is, however, a baser sin, inasmuch as the enslavement of the soul to lower goods entails greater shame; now riches are inferior goods when compared with the divine good, the goods of the soul, and those of the body. S. Gregorio (Moralia, XXXI, 37) numbers avarice among the spiritual vices, since it is consummated not so much in the pleasure or sensation of the flesh—as are gluttony and lust—as in the pleasure or perception of the soul. The same Saint (ibid.) then places it among the vices

capital vices, that is, those from which other sins arise, and lists seven daughters of avarice: obduratio contra misericordiam, inquietudo mentis, violentia, fallacia and periurium, fraus and proditio, because through excessive love of these riches man is led to retain the wealth he ought to give to the needy, to seek it out, and to seize it, whether with excessive anxiety or by illicit means, that is, through violence and deceit in word or deed.