Caritas, humility, gratitude, and goodwill toward others are always a healthy society’s answer to the ancient curses of covetous envy and haughty pride.

Covetous Envy: 

The Forgotten Deadly Sin

by Russell Nieli

Modern rhetoric of income inequality is driven by covetous envy that betrays America’s tradition of applauding those who succeed. Caritas, humility, gratitude, and goodwill toward others are a healthy society’s answer to the ancient curses of envy and pride.

When a financially struggling Mario Puzo learned that the publishing rights to the paperback edition of his third novel, The Godfather, had bid up to a record $410,000, the not-yet-famous writer was ecstatic. Like any good Italian boy, he sought to share the good news with his Sicilian-born mother. “Don't tell nobody!” his mother responded to her son’s sudden windfall, passing on in her broken English the folk wisdom she and other southern Italians had learned from long experience in an envy-cursed society. Malicious envy,Schadenfreude, and hostility toward strangers—particularly strangers who come upon good fortune—was the law of life in the society in which Puzo's mother had been raised, and it was always best, she knew, to keep good news within the family lest the Evil Eyes of envious neighbors “get ideas” and try to do one in.

Envy of the kind southern Italians like Puzo’s mother knew so intimately is well-described in the entry under that term in the old standard Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics:

Envy is an emotion that is essentially both selfish and malevolent. It is aimed at persons, and implies dislike of one who possesses what the envious man himself covets or desires, and a wish to harm him. . . . There is in it also a consciousness of inferiority to the person envied, and a chafing under this consciousness. He who has got what I envy is felt by me to have the advantage of me, and I resent it. . . . Envy is in itself a painful emotion, although it is associated with pleasure when misfortune is seen to befall the object of it.

The advice of Puzo’s mother strikes us as amusing today because it reflected, like the ungrammatical English in which it was expressed, the limited ability of an uneducated foreigner to grasp the actual ways of American society and American life. Unlike in southern Italy, success in America, whether in terms of money, honors, or educational achievement, has usually not been something to be hidden or concealed but something to be celebrated with others. It has often served as the basis for public admiration and acclaim.

More discerning foreigners have recognized this as a characteristic feature of America, one distinguishing it from the Old World in which aristocratic contempt for the “upstart,” combined with the envy and grudging hostility of the poor toward the success of their peers, were the dominant features of a rigidly class-structured and tradition-bound society. In part because of the open market economy and the many opportunities for upward socio-economic mobility, and in part because those coming to America were largely a self-selected population with a common desire to get ahead, economic success in America has often been viewed as an indication of what could be accomplished by many rather than an occasion for covetous envy. The successful often served as role models for the aspiring, not simply objects of hatred or spite. “If he can make it, I can make it” was a common response negating the necessity for the “don’t tell nobody!” style of secrecy and concealment dominant in many European feudal and peasant cultures.

Envy of the Old World kind—which Aquinas described as “sadness at the good of others insofar as it is superior to our own”—has hardly been eliminated in America, but it often coexists with an admiration for, and encouragement of, the success and well-being of others.

The very word “envy” in modern American English has often taken on a secondary meaning, one radically different from the traditional one (where envy – invidia in Latin – was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins). Envy in this secondary sense has a more benign character that involves the expression of praise and goodwill toward someone else’s admirable talent or achievement. The statement “I envy your academic ability, athletic talent, business skills,” is universally understood as a friendly gesture, one suggesting not anger, spite, or malice, but sincere admiration and acclaim. The vicarious pleasure in the well-being and good fortune of others expressed by this latter usage is always the strongest antidote to the social poison of covetous envy. It is also a necessary ingredient to any decent, harmonious society, as well as to any happy or contented personal life. Discerning foreign visitors have often noted that Americans display this quality in abundance, at least in comparison to the more class-conscious and envy-ridden Europeans.

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