The Betrayal of Charity: The Sins that Sabotage Divine Love

4--Envy and God-Reliance

63 CHAPTER 4 Envy and God-Reliance Introduction Remarking upon the presence of ambition in each human being, Ralph Waldo Emerson states, “We honor the rich because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace, which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.”1 Throughout his career, Emerson responds to the impulse to honor others by urging us to honor our true selves.We must seek perfection within ourselves : “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion. . . . Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”2 For Emerson, envy is the sign of cowardly lack of “self-reliance.”3 I want to contest this portrait of envy as a cowardly underestimation of one’s own resources. Indeed, when we rely upon our own resources, we set ourselves up for envy. We soon find that we cannot attain to the status we think we should attain and that we see in others around us. What we require instead is an understanding of the good of others as participating in the goodness of the divine 64 — The Betrayal of Charity giver, whose love for each of us is superabundant. By learning to rely upon the divine giver who pours forth a diversity of gifts and calls us to eternal communion in him, we can learn to love the good we see in others rather than sorrowing that others possess more good than we do. In exploring the sin against charity that is envy, I begin with the book of Genesis. Reading the stories of Cain and Abel and Joseph and his brothers (among others), Jewish and Christian scholars have proposed valuable ways of avoiding and overcoming envy. In light of Genesis, I turn to a detailed reading of Thomas Aquinas’ theology of envy. Aquinas teaches God-reliance as the solution to envy, a God-reliance rooted in love of God and neighbor as modeled by Christ Jesus, who reverses Cain’s murderous envy. Overcoming Envy: Beginning with Genesis In a recent popular handbook of Jewish ethics, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin devotes a chapter to envy in which he examines various stories from Genesis.4 The most well-known is that of Cain and Abel: when the Lord approvesAbel’s offering but does not approve Cain’s,“Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell” (Gen 4:5). Envious of his brother, he murders him. Telushkin also mentions the Philistines’ envy of Isaac’s great possessions (Gen 26:14), Rachel’s envy of Leah due to Leah’s having many children while Rachel remains childless (Gen 30:1), Leah’s envy of Rachel because of Jacob’s greater love for Rachel (Gen 30:15), and the jealousy of Joseph’s brothers because of Jacob’s greater love for Joseph (Gen 37:11). According to Telushkin, entirely avoiding envy is not possible. In support of this position he cites two texts from the Talmud, one of which suggests that only God can preserve us from envy (both our own and that of others toward us), while the other states that we will envy everyone except our children and our students, whose success we can bear with equanimity. The biblical example of lack of envy for our children is David’s assent to his servants’ prayer that Solomon’s reign be greater than David’s (1 Kgs 1:47); the biblical example of lack of envy for our students/disciples is Elijah’s consent to Elisha’s prayer to receive a “double share” of Elijah’s spirit Envy and God-Reliance — 65 (2 Kgs 2:9). But if only our children and our close disciples escape our envy, how can we avoid the corrosive and violent consequences of envy in our lives? This question is the main burden of Rabbi Telushkin’s chapter. Following Daniel Taub, he observes that the reason why we often do not envy the success of our children and close students is that we feel that we have contributed to, and thereby share in, their success. The first way to diminish envy, therefore, is to focus on helping others, so...