Greed / Avarice (Avaritia)

Avarice, avaritia, is the inordinate desire for wealth and possessions, and it is one of the eight logismoi of Evagrius, who observed that the monk tempted by it begins to worry about his old age and his future needs and so builds up stores against a providence he claims to trust. Aquinas defines it as an immoderate love of possessing, and follows the Pauline text at 1 Timothy 6:10 that the love of money is the root of all evils, though he is careful to say that the text means the root of many evils rather than that avarice replaces pride as the first cause. The tradition distinguishes avarice from a legitimate care for one's household, and from the sin of prodigality, its opposite excess; the virtue set against it is liberality or generosity, which is the mean between them, and in the popular seven-contrary-virtues scheme it is charity.

Dante's Divine Comedy gives avarice unusually elaborate treatment: in Purgatorio the avaricious and the prodigal lie face down together on the terrace, their eyes fixed on the ground they loved too much, while in Inferno usurers, treated as a distinct and graver species of the same disorder, are placed with blasphemers and sodomites among those who do violence against nature and art, on the reasoning that lending money at interest perverts money's proper, sterile function into an unnatural fruitfulness. Medieval preaching manuals, following this logic, frequently singled out usury as avarice's most socially destructive form, a concern that fed directly into the church's long, if unevenly enforced, prohibition of interest-taking.

Avarice is the vice whose treatment has changed most visibly with economic conditions. Medieval Christian moral theology, following Aristotle and a line of biblical texts, condemned usury, the taking of interest on a loan, as a species of avarice and as unnatural, since money was held to be barren; canon law prohibited it, and Jewish communities in Christian Europe were pushed into money-lending precisely because the prohibition applied to Christians, with consequences that fed centuries of antisemitism.

Islamic law maintains an analogous prohibition of riba, and modern Islamic finance is built around it. From the sixteenth century Christian theologians began to distinguish interest from usury and the prohibition eroded, though it was never formally repudiated in the way it is often assumed to have been. The history is a good corrective to the idea that the list of vices names fixed and self-evident wrongs; what counts as avarice has been argued over continuously.