The Third Part - Vices and Virtues
Envy
Its Malice and DestructivenessI. "Peace of mind is health of body; more than all else, envy wastes the frame." (Prov. xiv, 30)
There is nothing like envy for spreading sickness of mind and heart throughout the whole body, until it eats into the very marrow of the bones. Envious people, we may say, adapting a quotation from Shakespeare,
. . . like serpents are, who though they feed
On sweetest flowers, yet they poison breed.
Let us see how this is.
We know, from that very human and consoling Dogma of the Communion of the Saints, that Christian charity, in rejoicing over another's well-being, makes it part of one's own possession. You do a good work, and I, through the medium of my sympathetic rejoicing, convert its supernatural substance into something which belongs to me as well; I appropriate to myself something of its satisfactory and impetratory value, and, in a certain sense, even its personal merit, on account of my noble attitude towards your well-being. You see? It is the bee sucking honey from sweetest flowers; it is health of body from a sound heart and a peaceful mind.
On the other hand, if I envy you for the good you have done, my envy not only misses the opportunity of making that good my own, it is likely to destroy whatever good you possess. Envy would rather your good did not exist, did not give glory to God or service to the neighbour; it begrudges you the merit of climbing a step higher up the path of moral goodness and perfection. And yet everyone else rejoices at the good you have done: God, His holy angels, the just, the sound of mind and the upright of heart. Only two beings are sad, only two people fret and consume with anguish - the devil and envious me!
What blindness! To perish by what brings health to others! To waste away on the strength of what imparts life and joy! What a dreadful calamity: another's gain, my loss; the good tidings of others, my sentence of doom!
Envy is certainly the dark secret of those
"who though they feed on sweetest flowers, yet poison breed."
The miserable process continues. Because you did well, I am filled with grief; therefore, how I should rejoice if you did wrong, if you were incompetent and wicked and a stumbling-block to others! I rejoice at your misfortune. My joy feeds on what the Vulgate calls
putredo ossium, rotten bones; your own undoing.
How very low envy can thrust me! How envy can befoul the heart of man, the heart created to fill with God and to say with Him:
Well done! thou good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of thy Lord!
II. Envy is a fire devouring and destroying every germ of life. Envy, by its very nature, is death and deals death, being born of Satan, who
was a murderer from the beginning. (John viii, 44.) It was envy that instigated him to bring about the fall of our first parents, and by
the envy of the devil death came into the world. (Wisdom ii, 24.) Envy was the evil genius which inspired the first human murderer to assassinate his own brother, on the noble score that this brother of his was a better man than he. It is envy that has put weapons into the hands of man, and so blinded man as to make him commit the foulest crimes that have ever stained the face of this earth. It was envy which challenged God Himself, persecuted Him, calumniated Him, nailed Him to the wood of the Cross
For he (Pilate) knew that for envy they had delivered him. (Matt xxvii, 13.)
No other passion could go to such an extreme; only in envy does there remain not a trace of common humanity. Our Lord's enemies saw that He preached better than they, though they were supposedly the sole custodians of the Law; they saw that the people admired and revered Him more highly than them; they could not hope to reproduce, much less surpass, the wonders He wrought, the admirable holiness of life that was His, His greatness of mind; and so they found but one expedient:
to kill Him. Had it been in their power to reduce Him to His lowly station in life as a carpenter, perhaps they would not have thought of crucifying Him.
O the Satanic love of self, self above all else, what power it can command! In order to defend its own interests, envy would sweep everything away, would annihilate even God Himself. No wonder the serpent of envy is lothe to come out in its true colours, but seeks every possible device of camouflage, and hides itself in the grass among the flowers! Thus, for example, the Pharisees donned the mask of zeal for the Law of Moses and the common good of the nation:
This man is not of God who keepeth not the sabbath. (John ix, 16.)
The Romans will come, and take away our place and nation. (John xi, 48.)
If with courage and determination I probe the inner recesses of my own conscience and tear away every mask, I may well discover twisted round many of my ambitions and my bitter disappointments the serpent coils of envy.
III. Envy, as a passion, is a specific form of zeal. To be "jealous" is closely akin to being "zealous", the difference being that jealousy is brought about by vehement self-love, or the love of someone whom I identify with my self-love; whereas zeal is born of my intense love for a fellow-creature or for God.
We are envious or jealous, essentially, because we wrongly feel that the prestige or wealth or welfare which might be ours is enjoyed by another. The effect of envy is an impulse and an endeavour proceeding from the irascible appetite against any person whose possession of something we should like for ourselves seems unjustly to deprive us of it; in short, the effect of envy is an instinctive snatching from another for ourselves, or at least for the satisfaction of seeing the other person without the thing we begrudge him.
If I am envious of another priest, I shall be saddened at his enjoyment of prestige and power: the prestige that comes to him for working harder than myself, for winning more souls to God than I do, for establishing pious and social Associations, for being respected as a holy, humble, and learned priest. All this becomes for
me a source of bitter regret; and, in consequence, my irascible appetite becomes irritated, devises ways and means of bringing all those good things to nought.
And if I should succeed in my aims, I shall take a vile complacency in seeing my rival priest less virtuous and less highly esteemed; I shall stand by and gloat on the spectacle when that priest's works come crashing down and his power over souls diminishes. My grief will turn to delight - the delight experienced by Satan at the sight of Adam and Eve become enemies of God, the satisfaction that puffed up the perverse heart of Cain when he saw his brother Abel, the preferred of God, dead and bathed in his blood.
And all these horrors, the natural outcome of envy, arise when I am not guided by the prinicples of faith, when I care not a straw for God's glory and the welfare of souls; that is, when I foster but one love, self-love; the cruel idol at whose altar I have slaughtered every other love.
A very sombre picture, but a very true one, of the envious priest; even though he himself may fail to recognise his own resemblance, even though he may cast about for specious motives, religious motives perhaps, in order to disguise his grovelling passion.
IV. Let us probe still deeper. How many works of zeal have miscarried because of envy! How many excellent priests have been scared to undertake these works for fear of dire persecution which envy had plotted against them, or have called off the good begun in view of the fury excited thereby in envious hearts or because of the unjust denunciations - all, of course, under the mask of zeal for the House of the Lord! - in which vile emulation had involved them!
In every age - and there is no reason to exempt our own - envy has proved itself to be a diabolic steriliser of the holiest of priestly endeavours. Satan knows this well, he is the father of envy, and his triumph is secured once he has found a collaborator among our own priestly ranks. It is enough to poison a priest's heart with his own envy, and the corrosive will be a death-blow to the most glorious works of Christ's most saintly ministers.
Can I solemnly swear to Thee, O Jesus, that in the whole course of my ministerial life I have never been chosen by the infernal monster to collaborate in any of his evil designs?
Resolutions1. The hardest resolve is that of owning up to the fact that we are envious and jealous. We may readily confess to being proud, overbearing, sensual, etc., but who acknowledges himself to be envious? Who is ready to admit that he has been tarred with the black brush of envy? No vice more intent on disguise. How difficult and rare it is to say: "Father, I'm jealous, the good qualities of another fill me with envy; in such-and-such circumstances I criticised him out of pure jealousy; I bore him ill-will because I envied him."
Lord, I promise Thee that I shall open my heart wide in order to detect any hatred or antipathy that may be nestling inside it, and in order to know exactly which and how many of these sentiments are nothing but the products of envy.
2. I will not speak ill of those against whom this passion blinds me.
3. With my own hands I shall suffocate the first promptings of envy, and, under the guidance of faith-inspired motives, I shall not withhold my approval and even my active support, if I can be of help, from any priest who is working fruitfully in the Lord's vineyard.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.###
Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!
