Seven Deadly Sins: Greed
1.
Covetousness: From the Old French coveitier, 'to desire'; the Latin
cupiditas, 'desirousness', and cupere, 'to desire'; the Greek kapnos,
'smoke' (from which comes the Latin vapor, 'steam'); and the Sanskrit
kupyati, 'he swells with rage', 'he is angry', having to do with smoking,
boiling, emotional agitation and violent motion. In Mark 7:22, pleonezia,
'taking more than one's share', is included in the list of things
that come out of a man, thereby polluting him. In Luke 12:15, the
same term is used when Jesus points out that abundance in life does
not arise from possessions. This and similar terms for covetousness
occur about fifteen times in the non-Gospel portions of the New Testament.
(The term 'avarice', which is now often preferred to 'covetousness',
is not part of the vocabulary of the King James version. It is a Latin
term, avaritia, 'covetousness', from the verb avere, 'to long for',
'to covet', and avidus, 'avid', related to the Greek enees, 'gentle',
and the Sanskrit avati, 'he favours'. Similarly, 'greed', from the
Gothic gredus, 'to hunger', and the Old English giernan, 'to yearn',
and the Old Norse giarn, 'eager' or 'willing', is not a common term
in the King James and does not occur at all in the four Gospels. Its
Latin roots are horiri and hortari, 'to urge', 'to encourage' and
'to cheer', from the Greek khairein, 'to rejoice', or 'to enjoy',
and the Sanskrit haryati, 'he likes' or 'he yearns for'.)
2.
To want for the sake of possessing.
Of all the Seven Deadly Sins, greed is the one that changes name most
often: from covetousness to avarice to greed. The Bible often mentions
the sin of covetousness, and even warns against it in the Ten Commandments.
Later, the term avarice (from the Latin avarus, "greedy"
or "to crave") came into vogue, but the sin has always been
more or less the same thing: wanting more, or wanting what you don't
have, and wanting it only for the sake of possessing it rather than
for itself.
One commentator notes that 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas
expressed, unusually for him, the spirit of socialism when he wrote
of greed: "it is a sin directly against one's neighbor, since
one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man
lacking them." Plus, as Aquinas goes on to say, "it is a
sin against God, just as all mortal sins, inasmuch as man condemns
things eternal for the sake of temporal things."
In Dante's Inferno, the greedy are condemned to an eternity of performing
useless labour, reflecting the uselessness of a lifetime of greed.
There are two stereotypes of the greedy person: one is extravagant,
making a show of his possessions to impress others; the other is a
miser who has a lot of money but hoards it and delights in counting
it but not using it. For the greedy person, the getting and keeping
of money and possessions are more important than the things themselves.
It may come as a surprise to learn that Catholic teachings say that
greed, "if kept within the bounds of reason and justice and resisted
triumphantly in its inordinate," can be "positively meritorious."
The logic for this is that the desire for possessions is natural to
humans. However, if one offends God or one's neighbour by using unjust
or illicit means to acquire things, one has committed a grievous sin