1. Pride is excessive belief in one's own abilities, that interferes with the
individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from
which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.
Envy is the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situation.
Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.
Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.
Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury.
It is also known as Wrath.
Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the
spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.
Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.
Greed: The Mother of All Sins
Many world religions say greed is the stuff the other deadly sins are made of.
BY: Phyllis Tickle
39 17 13 0
This article first appeared on Beliefnet in 2002.
Although death claimed Kenneth Lay before he served a day in prison, the
convicted former CEO of the Enron Corporation will forever be an icon of
unbridled greed. The son of a Baptist minister, Lay--who in May was found guilty
of fraud and conspiracy charges in one of America’s biggest corporate scandals--
maintained his innocence until he died. "We believe that God in fact is in
control, and indeed he does work all things for good for those who love the
Lord," he said after the verdict. Despite Lay’s protestations of purity,
evidence presented during his trial painted a picture of wretched material
excess that included a $200,000 yacht for his wife’s birthday, as well as $100
million in personal debt, all of which Lay defended by saying "[I]t was
difficult to turn off that lifestyle like a spigot."
Lay’s extravagance may fuel our collective outrage, but our righteous
indignation runs smack up against a steady barrage of countervailing cultural
messages: that greed--well harnessed and regulated--is good not only for
corporations, but society as a whole, even the poor. In truth, we’ve come to
think of greed as an ambiguous quality--sometimes good, sometimes bad.
The world's major faiths have no such illusions about greed. Greed, say many of
them, is not only unambiguous, it is the Mother of All Sins.
In the ancient Hindu epic "The Mahabharata," Bhishma, son of the holy river
Ganges and one of Hinduism’s great yogis, delivers Hinduism’s great treatise on
greed, naming it for the faithful as the matrix out of which all other evil
arises:
"Yudhisthira said: 'I desire, O bull of Bharata’s race, to hear in detail the
source from which sin proceeds and the foundation on which it rests.'
Bhishma said: 'Hear, O King, what the foundation is of sin. Covetousness alone
is a great destroyer of merit and goodness. From covetousness proceeds sin. It
is from this source that sin and irreligiousness flow, together with great

2. misery. This covetousness is the spring also of all the cunning and hypocrisy in
the world. It is covetousness that makes men sin....'"
Bhishma isn't alone in naming greed as the preeminent sin. Buddhism, in essence,
rests on a practiced abhorrence of the ways of desiring. The Visuddhimagga
explicitly counsels: "Greed is the real dirt, not dust ’The wise have shaken off
this dirt, and in the dirt-free man’s religion, live."
The Tao Teh Ching, too, tells us that, ’There is no greater calamity than
indulging in greed;’ and The Guru Granth Sahib or Adi Granth, the holy book of
the Sikhs, delivers the same news: ’Where there is greed, what love can there
be?’
Here in the West, it is Judaism and, by declension, Christianity that has
appointed greed as the matriarch of all other sins. Long before Sinai and the
giving to Moses of the Law, there was Noah and the seven laws or mishpathim that
are presented, one by one, incident by incident, in the first 11 chapters of the
book of Genesis. Known as The Seven Laws of Noah, they were the governing
principles of Judaism before the Ten Commandments, and sketched in the first
parameters of Jewish moral and religious thought.
In order of their biblical occurrence, the first of these seven mishpathim is
blasphemy; the second is idolatry; the third, theft; the fourth, murder; the
fifth, illicit sex; the sixth false witness or duplicity in adjudication; and
the last, the eating of flesh torn from a living beast. Many rabbis came in time
to teach that theft was the greatest, because all the others come from it: To
commit adultery is to steal another’s partner. To blaspheme is to steal the name
of G-d for human purposes. To commit murder is to steal another’s life, etc.,
etc. And theft comes out of greed.
This idea--that greed is the source, not the substance, of sin--continues to
inform Judaism. In his book, "The Nine Commandments," Donald Neal Freedman
argues that the last two commandments, against coveting one's neighbor's goods
or wife," don't name a sin as the other commandments do, but forbid an attitude.
Jesus of Nazareth, irregular rabbi that He was, erased the traditional moral
distinction between committing an act and intending. He taught that desire
itself is a sin, that the thought is enough. The early Christians shaped their
evolving theology around this principle, but even in this new scheme of sin, the
primacy of avarice (avaritia, which we translate somewhat inadequately as ’the
love of money’) remained. Avaritia, the Apostle Paul warned, is the root of all
evil; and the early Church took up his cry. The devout took to writing Paul’s
doctrine as an acrostic, making it a kind of cartoon about the corruption of
Rome as well as a cautionary dictum:
Radix (the root)
Omnium (of all)
Malorum (evils)
Avaritia (avarice.).
We in the new millennium understand this kind of graphic punning. Our own
version might look like this:
United (in the)
Sin (of)
Avarice
Does this seem harsh? The current tear in our national self-confidence, which
our Fed chief put a name to this week, arises in part from a loss of naivete.
That would have come as no surprise to Bhishma, who says that from greed spring
"loss of judgment, deception, pride, arrogance, and malice."
We are good people, we want to object--as are ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay, supporter of
many good causes; Joseph Berardino, head of a system of accounting that was the
system; Dennis Kozlowski, appreciator of the arts; Bernard Ebbers, proof-
positive that a poor boy from Mississippi can make it big. We say to ourselves,
because we need to, that these are not ’bad’ people, just greedy ones. As

3. stockholders’more Americans own securities today than ever before--we profited
from their greed, enabled them, and we are certainly not impious!
Brishma puts the lie to this conceit as well. ’When wicked-souled persons," he
tells the king, "under the domination of covetousness, apparently practice the
duties of righteousness, the consequence ’ is that the desecrations committed by
them soon become current among men.’
Desecrations and habits of desecration, both theirs and ours, current among us?
Our times, if not our selves, made impious? If that be true (and we know in our
hearts that it is), then the sin amongst us must be pulled up in the same manner
as it took root, one citizen at a time. And thus it is perhaps good that we turn
ourselves, and our leaders, for the first time in many decades, to the study of
Greed.
The Farm in Lucy
July, 2002