The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature (review)

Richard Newhauser. The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature. Cambridge Studies in Early Medieval Thought and Literature 41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 246. $64.95.

It is often a delicate matter when an established scholar revisits earlier work or moves into less familiar areas of study. So it is with this book, paradoxically in both of these cases. Richard Newhauser is an accomplished textual critic, expert in the literature of the High Middle Ages, with an enviable list of publications and fellowships. In this work, however, he returns to the topic of his dissertation and the Christian literature of the first five centuries with disappointing results.

Newhauser's aim is to counter the traditional view that the sin of avarice only became a focus in Christian literature only in the later Middle Ages, with the rise of a money economy. He seeks to establish its place in early Christian thought, most especially in the writings of Ambrose, for whom it became the foremost of all vices (xiv). Five chapters discuss, in order: the first three centuries of Chris-tianity, eastern asceticism, western asceticism, the fourth and fifth centuries in the West, and the early Middle Ages from Gregory the Great to Charlemagne. A brief epilogue outlines the continuity in thinking and writing about avarice after the Carolingians to ca. 1000 C.E. There follows an intriguing appendix that indexes the imagery used in connection with avarice (e.g., gaping mouth, rich youth, wolf), by both image and author.

From the beginning, one wonders if Newhauser is asking the right question. His notion of avarice and of vice or sin in general seems framed by the medieval penitential tradition, a conception that fits early Christianity poorly. The focus is cast narrowly on vice and sin per se, not on the broader context of ways of life, decorum, and the classical philosophical tradition that frames patristic thought on such moral issues. By limiting himself to Christian sources almost exclusively and to a literary/theological framework, Newhauser misses a great deal of both the import and nuance of early Christian thought on this subject.

His first chapter jumps hit and miss through the early centuries with no sys-tematic development or any clear indication of the relative importance of Paul, Hermas, Clement of Alexandria, Epiphanes, Irenaeus, or the other authors he mentions. What Newhauser perceives as a lack of systematic development in the sources does not absolve him from a systematic analysis of those sources. Specifically, the pivotal role played by Philo and his reduction of the tenth (or ninth and tenth) commandment(s) to the simple is not even mentioned. Since Clement in particular developed this concept within a Christian and Stoic context, its absence from the discussion results in a major lacuna in understanding Clement's view, and one can only be puzzled that the sole allusion to the Decalogue here is a dated reference to an article by R. M. Grant (7, n. 25). Nor is this the only source of puzzlement. That the first three centuries can be dispatched in a mere twenty-one pages; that in the end, "The early centuries of Christian literature provide nothing more systematic on avarice that what is seen in rudimentary form in Lactantius, nor do they show the more orthodox positions on greed and the affluent affirmed by all writers on these issues" (21); and that corruption was felt to be rampant in the late Empire (22) will give pause to students of early Christianity.

The chapters devoted to asceticism are vitiated by the absence of any reference to a number of major works written in the past twenty years. It is an appalling oversight that Elizabeth Clark is not even mentioned in the bibliography. New-hauser discusses Egyptian asceticism without...