Covetousness: Forgotten Word, Forgotten Vice
Recently when I was teaching a class and reviewing the Ten Commandments, when we went over the word “covet”, either for “your neighbor’s wife” or “your neighbor’s goods”, I was sad to find that most thought “covet” meant “cheat”. In other words, according to them, the commandment is not to cheat on your wife. Of course, that can’t be what it means, because how can you ‘cheat’ on your goods, in the sense of infidelity? Covet means something far more, even though in the context of a class for children, we can’t always get into all that means.
Loving words as much as I do, I absolutely love the English verb covet. It typically means a powerful yearning to possess something as our own. This often compels someone to do so by illicit means. Coming from the Latin word cupiditas, where we get the infrequently used word cupidity, we can see, if we are particularly attentive, a reference to the old pagan god Cupid.
The very name of the God “Cupid” was conceived (literally and figuratively) as the child of Aphrodite, God of Love, and Ares, God of War. We can see by his parentage, then, that his name, meaning desire, is the union of the erotic power of Aphrodite with the aggressive, martial power of Ares. Ancient Mythology can be deeply attuned to the darker psychological drives in humanity.
Although the word covetousness has almost completely passed from the modern English lexicon, its power is undeniable.
Consider one classic movie, the 1991 Silence of the Lambs, with the incomparable Anthony Hopkins. Notice how he even says the word “Covet”, hissing like a serpent. Playing Hannibal Lecter, he rightly identifies that the root cause of a serial killer’s depravity lies in his covetousness. So too I suspect covetousness is a hidden drive for a lot of what ails us.
Covetousness is one of the primarily sources of the human desire to do evil in the world. St. Gregory in his Magna Moralia tells us that covetousness arises either from pride (a desire to acquire so as to stand above our neighbor) or from fear (a fear of being poor or without comfort, and so illicit means to gain wealth gain force).
It’s good to reflect, especially this Lent when we give up a lot of things, on how much we have to battle the vice of covetousness. It is more subtle than one thinks. How many times do we desire to possess a whole range of things: this item, that relationship, a position at work, greater social status…and in so doing, tighten the noose around ourselves? Although Greed is a vice that seeks acquire greater and greater material possessions, covetousness is something in a sense more sinister. It produces its own putrid fruits, which St. Thomas, in the style of his era, calls the vice’s evil “daughters”: treachery, fraud, falsehood, perjury, restlessness, violence, and insensibility to mercy (Summa II-II Q 118. a. 8).
Especially with regards to the problem of restlessness, which Thomas says first starts in the affect of the covetousness man, is it any surprise that our particular age is so anxiety ridden?
I think we could all stand to recover the verb covet in our common usage, because a word unspoken is a thought unremembered.
