Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

The Tenth Commandment: “Thou Shall Not Covet” : Desire and Love of Neighbor

Exodus 20:17 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox or his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.
Introduction

The word “covet” may have been familiar to most western people, when The Ten Commandments were taught in the schools, at home and in Sunday Schools. Those days are largely past. We live in a secular society, one in which even those who attend church regularly may have only a weak grasp of the theological and ethical teachings of classical Christian faith. For such persons, the meaning of “covet” may be quite vague. In this essay we study the Tenth Commandment, which prohibits coveting. Because the word is hardly used in daily speech today, our first task is to define what coveting is. We will see that the meaning of “coveting” is difficult, not only because we live in a secular culture, but also because coveting is a kind of desiring, and desiring is very complex.

Even after we are confident that we have hold of the Bible’s meaning, we need to ask why coveting is wrong. Why does Yahweh forbid Israelites to covet? And, since Christianity received the moral teaching of the Old Testament as valid for its own faith, we must ask why coveting is wrong for a Christian? Here again, the variety of traditional answers shows that even this aspect of our task is not easy.

The general path of this essay will lead us from a study of the meaning of coveting toward the link between coveting and idolatry. This is a link which the New Testament makes, and a link which is implicit in the Ten Commandments itself and throughout the Old Testament. Along the way we will also address whether coveting may be simply assumed today as a good and necessary motor for our modern market economy and also as a cause of international friction.

But first we have to define coveting; then, we will study coveting is wrong.
Defining “Covet”

What exactly does this Commandment forbid? What is “to covet”?

According to the dictionary, to covet is to long for, want, crave, envy, and wish. Clearly, then, coveting is an activity, something someone does. More importantly, coveting is a form of wanting, desiring, wishing, or craving. To covet is a form of desiring. However, there are many kinds of desiring, and they don’t all seem to be acts of coveting. . For example, one can yearn for the presence of a loved one who has died. It seems that such desiring is not what the Tenth Commandment forbids. Also, Jesus commands his disciples to desire several basic things, for example, that God’s Name be glorified, that God’s Kingdom may come, that God give us our daily bread, that God not lead us into temptation. To pray for something assumes that one desires it, wants it. But surely these desires are not coveting.

A further consideration complicates the picture. Modern language usage in English allows for a generous form of coveting. In English usage today, we can say: “I covet good health for my mother.” The meaning is that I hope that my mother enjoys good health; I desire good health for her. The Tenth Commandment surely does not forbid this generous kind of desiring good for another person.

Given these examples of God-willed desiring, we must return to the full statement of the Commandment for some more guidance. The distinctive feature that distinguishes covetous desire and craving is that the object of desire belongs to someone else, to my neighbor. To covet is to want, to long for, to crave what belongs to another, to my neighbor. We will see that this added information does not suffice to tell us why coveting is wrong. But at least it helps define coveting more precisely, helping us to see coveting not as any kind of desire, any sort of wanting, but as a specific kind of craving, wanting, desiring.

Acknowledging Another Problem

Before we continue trying to define the forbidden coveting, we must face another problem with the Tenth Commandment. The Commandment assumes something that collides with our modern moral sensibility. We may as well deal with this problem right here and now, so that it does not dog us throughout the essay.

The problem is that the Commandment refers to people in the same way as things, and to people as possessions. The Commandment forbids coveting a man’s wife, his maidservant and his manservant along with his house and his ox. Part of the problem is that the Hebrew words translated in English as maidservant and manservant actually mean slave. Slavery existed in Israel; Israelites owned slaves, just as it was common for an Israelite man to have more than one wife. The main problem here, however, is putting persons on the same level with objects that are owned, such as a house or a donkey. Further, the Commandment is clearly directed exclusively to men; the Commandment does not forbid coveting another woman’s husband. Thus, a clear inequality between the moral status of men and women, and between slaves and free persons is built into or simply tacitly assumed and accepted by this Commandment. If all we had of the Old Testament Law was this Commandment, we could conclude that Yahweh accepted slavery and condoned regarding a man’s wife as a possessed object.

Now, I think there is a proper Christian ethical sense to affirming that a man and women married to each other do “belong to” each other as husband and wife. This “belonging, ” is very different from the relation a person has to something he has bought. The first difference is that the belonging of spouses to one another is mutual. This mutual belonging is built not on the model of an acquisition but of a personal, shared, self-commitment each to the other. That mutual commitment is expressed in the Christian marriage service in the public acts of consent to marry, in the exchange of vows, in the exchange of rings, and in the acts of one-flesh (sexual) union. This mutual belonging is also reflected in the western legislation that outlaws bigamy, being married to two persons simultaneously. Part of the evil of adultery or marital infidelity is the betrayal and violation of this mutual belonging. Since this belonging is a gift of the whole person, each to the whole person of the other, to have other sexual partners or even to cultivate deep romantic relationships outside one’s marriage is morally wrong and deeply destructive, not just for the couple’s relationship but for others also.

We will discuss why coveting is wrong in the next section. But here we can simply say that coveting a neighbor’s spouse is a desire that violates, in principle, the bond of unity between spouses, between married partners. To covet someone’s spouse is, whether acted on by flirting, by attempts at seduction or other ways of undermining their relationship, to want to destroy something whole, and in Christian understanding, something holy.

Thus, the issue of the moral status of a man’s wife, servants and slaves in the Old Testament is an important ethical topic. But to focus on that topic in this study of the Tenth Commandment would lead us away from the center of our subject. It would lead us into the important issues of slavery, of the nature of possession, the nature of marriage, the difference between persons and things. In this essay, however, our task understands the Commandment against coveting. At this point, we are trying to determine just what coveting is. So far, we have determined that coveting is a desiring, a craving, a wanting of something that belongs to one’s neighbor.
Why is Coveting Wrong? A Unallowed Question?

Having named a problem with the Tenth Commandment (that it refers to people as possessions), and saying we will not deal with it here, we return to our announced task. Why is coveting wrong? One could argue that this question is not an acceptable one for Christian theology and ethics. This position rests on the principle that coveting, or anything else that the Commandments forbid, is wrong simply and alone because God prohibits it. After all, what does the word “God” mean if not that God’s word and will is law; that God has the exclusive right to determine right and wrong?

This position (that coveting is wrong simply because God prohibits it) has been labeled as “theological voluntarism,” because it equates God’s divinity with God’s absolutely sovereign will. Theological voluntarism grounds God’s moral commandments totally in His divine free will. And, theological voluntarism equates God’s essence as will. This view has been associated with late medieval Nominalist theologians, e.g., William Occam, and with John Calvin among the Protestant reformers, and some passages of the Holy Scriptures could be cited to support this view of God’s divine nature.

This theological/ethical option has a serious problem, however. It assumes that an act is wrong for no other reason than that God has prohibited that act. So, if God had chosen to declare that marital fidelity was immoral, it would be wrong for married persons to remain faithful to each other. Or, if God had decided to demand that humans covet, then coveting would be good, for the only basis for calling something good or evil is that God has decided so.

That implication—that acts are evil or good only because God, for no other reason than His arbitrary choice or act of will, has declared them wrong—has inclined theologians and ethicists to the other option: God prohibits certain acts and commands other acts because some quality of these acts in themselves make them right or wrong. For the sake of the further discussion in this essay, we follow this second option.

What is Wrong with Coveting? Two Major Views

If we reject this theological voluntarism, the question of why coveting, in itself, is wrong remains. The Commandment prohibits desiring something good that the neighbor possesses. The wrongness of coveting could lie either in the wanting and desiring as such or in the fact that what is desired belongs to someone else. These are the two directions ethical reflection has taken. That is, one views says we should we look for the badness of coveting in the wanting itself, i.e., the act of desiring earthly good. The badness of coveting has more to do with our immediate relation to God than it does to our relation to our neighbor. That is, the Tenth Commandment protects our relation to God.

The second major path has been to locate the evil of coveting in that what the covetous person wants belongs to someone else. This view holds that the badness of coveting is that it endangers our neighbor in some way? In that case, the Commandment protects my neighbor from me and my avarice and greed.

Of course, the best answer to why coveting is bad may include both perspectives. Because for Christian faith and life love of God and love of neighbor are closely related, we can presume that truth lies in both perspectives. But for the sake of clarity, we will explain each of these two major perspectives in turn.

A. The Tenth Commandment Protects Our Relation to God

First let us explore the possibility that God in this Commandment want to protect me in my relation to Him. Here it may help to reflect a moment about the structure and dynamics of human desire.

The Dynamics of Desire

Desire is awakened by seeing or in some way becoming aware of something good. If we already have that good, we wouldn’t covet the good my neighbor has. This is the problem: good things, especially by perceiving good things that we don’t have. The only possible way our desire can be awakened is when we see this desirable thing possessed by someone else, my near or distant neighbor. If desiring something good my neighbor possesses is coveting, then coveting appears inevitable.

We are trying to determine why God forbids us to covet. We are exploring the possibility that God wants to protect our relation to Him by forbidding us to desire some good that the neighbor possesses. We have run into the problem that the very nature of desire of creaturely goods seems to make coveting inevitable. Either we must covet or we must become Buddhists and stop desiring, wanting anything.

Let me try to illustrate this problem by an example that is not really farfetched, if one thinks of German society in 1946 or some contemporary Aids -ridden African countries. Let us assume a neighborhood where almost all the children had only one parent, and let us say this parent is a mother. In this neighborhood there are no fathers around ; all the children are growing up with just one parent, the mother. Question: would these children desire having a father, would they want fathers, crave having a father? Probably not, if they never saw a friend who had a father. If none of the other children had a father, if everyone is in the same boat, having one parent: a mother. None of the children would desire what they never saw.

Now, imagine how this situation would become disrupted when a couple, a husband and wife, with kids, moved into this neighborhood. We can imagine other children saying, “Wow, how neat, two parents, a father and a mother. Gee, I wish I had a Dad, too.“ If the child uttered that last statement, he or she would betray the sin of coveting. The child wants something the neighbor has, but he or she doesn’t. But someone could properly object, “Wait a minute! The child is not sinning; he or she is acting naturally; it would be natural to want two parents if one could.“ The point of the example is that coveting arises when one sees another enjoying what one does not have. But desiring itself only arises when one sees another enjoying what one lacks. How can we avoid coveting?

a. Is Coveting Wrong Because We Should Only Love God?

Since perceiving something as good awakens desire, perhaps all earthly desires are wrong, because they take away from our whole hearted love of God. Does God want me to want nothing else but Him? Does God want me not to want any creaturely good, and therefore prohibits me from coveting?

The wording of Jesus’ First and Great Commandment could give that impression. “Love God with your whole heart, soul and strength.” The word “whole” in this Commandment could mean that we should love nothing else but God, and God alone. Does this Commandment mean there should be no desiring, no loving of creaturely goods at all? Several passages of the New Testament quickly rule out this possibility. For example, the second Commandment, “Love your neighbor,” clearly implies that we should seek our neighbor’s good. And, while Jesus taught us to seek first the Kingdom of God, he added that other goods would be given us also.

But if it is not wrong to wish for good things, health, sufficient money to live, education, friends, beauty, then why does God forbid coveting?

b. Coveting As Rebellion Against God

A second explanation of why coveting is morally wrong, and therefore forbidden by God in the Tenth Commandment, is that coveting betrays a human soul in rebellion against God. What is meant here is that a person who covets what belongs to his or her neighbor is clearly dissatisfied with the amount and kinds of goods that God has chosen to give him or her in this life. If I covet my neighbor’s big house with its swimming pool, I am implying that I am unhappy with the lot that God has given me and my family, namely, a much smaller house with no swimming pool.

But being dissatisfied with what God has chosen to give me in the way of worldly goods is actually dissatisfaction with God; implicitly, my covetousness is charging God with neglect and mistreatment. If I covet, I , the pot, am criticizing the potter.

This kind of analysis of the evil of coveting fits, I think, wholly within the framework of the Bible. More exactly, one could say that the structure of this argument is implied in every monotheistic religion. Monotheism holds that there is only one Supreme Being. The Supreme Being, to be truly supreme, must be superior in every, or at least in some ways, to any creature. Classically, in Christian theology, this superiority was expressed in the omni attributes of God: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. God, by implication, caused all there is, not only that it exists, but that it exists as it does. From these premises follows the idea that God decides the fate or the lot of every human being.

Of course this notion of God’s omniscience and omnipotence had to be coordinated with the human experience of freedom, the freedom of self-determination (to decide not to smoke or not to take vengeance) and the freedom of choice (the freedom to choose this person as spouse and not that person.) Thus, all the monotheistic religions had a perennial theological issue: the freedom of the will and the omnipotence of God.

Within the matrix of this experience of God’s ultimate power and our limited power existed another contrasted and tension, that between things we could not change and things we could change by our efforts. My height, my tendency to health or ill health, my brainpower or lack of it, these are things over which I have little control and which I tend to think of as the lot which God has given me. But within this tension there can be extreme positions. One is a tendency to passive acceptance: what I have and am, this is what God has chosen that I have. To want something that I do not have is, in fact, to rebel against God’s inscrutable will. The other extreme, usually found outside of religious faith, is extreme self-actualization. A person says, I can be whatever I want to be, if I want it strongly enough and work hard enough at it. The sky’s the limit. (One thinks of the story of the Tower of Babel!) Within the structure of these ideas built on the belief that there is one God and that this God is omnipotent and omniscient, the argument against wanting what one does not have arises.

Christianity, Fate and Islam

Before we explore this further, however, we must contrast the biblical notion of God’s all powerfulness with an analogous notion of divine control over human life that, in fact, is very different. In the archaic Greek work, belief in fate or destiny existed. Against this force, human beings ultimately had no power at all. Que sera, sera , What will be, will be. In the Greek world, although fate or destiny may have been personified as a god or goddess, basically, it was an impersonal force. This impersonality made protest and rebellion against one’s fate fruitless and meaningless. One could complain about one’s fate, but fate or destiny could not hear one’s complaining; it was a deaf (impersonal) force.1

In the Old Testament, by contrast, Yahweh could be addressed. If one were unhappy with one’s lot, one could voice one’s complaint. A classic case was that of women whose womb, Yahweh “had closed.” The first two chapters of I Samuel recount the story of Hannah, whose womb God had closed. She went each year to the sanctuary at Shiloh and complained bitterly to God. God heard her request and granted her wish for children. Hanna complained about her “fate” and God changed it.

This is only one argument against the theory that coveting is wrong because it betrays rebellion against God. Challenging God’s decisions is common in the Old Testament; in many cases, Yahweh is shown to change his decisions. Granted, Jesus prayed on the Mount of Olives, that his Father remove from him the cup of suffering and, if so, one cannot cite Scripture to support the idea that coveting is bad because it implies dissatisfaction with God. In this case God did not change His will for Jesus. But Jesus’ prayer that his Father change his will validates such a prayer and negates the argument that it is always wrong to challenge the lot which God has given us. Thus, coveting cannot be wrong simply because it implies a rebellion against God’s will for us.

A second reason this explanation is unsatisfactory is the Christian belief that God wants our good. To say that it is wrong, per se, to wish for some good that we don’t have, is to say that is wrong to enjoy needed goods as such. But we have already rejected the view that wishing earthly goods is, per se, wrong. We have affirmed that God wants us to desire good health, sufficient income, safety, access to education, health care, love and friendship, if we don’t have these. These are goods that make human life human. To not want them is to not want our own human fulfillment, and that would be a sin against God the Creator.

A third argument against the idea that coveting is wrong because it betrays dissatisfaction with the lot God has given us is that such an argument can and has been politically misused for political repression. White slavers in the American South told their slaves that God meant for them to be a slave now. Some believed this interpretation of the Bible and dreamt of a “glory land in the great bye and bye”. The white slavers were quite happy that they held this view of heaven. Many, in earlier centuries, interpreted the Bible, including the Commandment we are discussing here, to imply that a man’s wife belonged to him like a piece of property. Peasants in South America have been told by church leaders that God’s will is that they be poor, have no access to health care, etc., while God also wills that a small percentage of the rich own the great majority of the land. Here obviously, church teaching was used, with the direct complicity of the Church, as a weapon of economic, cultural and political oppression and repression. To teach that coveting is wrong, because wanting what you lack is per se wrong, a form of rebellion against God’s providential ordering of the society is so fraught with political immorality as to discredit it as an argument.

c. Coveting Is Covert Idolatry

Having criticized the idea that coveting is wrong because desiring any worldly good is wrong, or that coveting betrays a rebellion against God, we turn to another major reason given why coveting is bad. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Tenth Commandment “unfolds and completes the eighth.” [Thou shall not steal].2 The Tenth Commandment forbids greed and avarice, the Catholic Catechism teaches. To desire things we need is not wrong, per se. However, wishing to amass goods without limit or to obtain them unjustly is wrong, says the Catechism. Note that the Catechism actually says coveting is wrong for two reasons. One is the danger of mistreating the neighbor out of greed or avarice. We will deal with that below. Now we focus on the link between coveting and idolatry.

According to the Catechism, a sign of immoral desire is that a person’s desiring is unlimited, i.e., is a desiring related to actual need but which wants as much as it can attain.3 Thus, each person needs enough money to buy the essentials for eating, housing, clothing, health care, etc. But some people can never get enough. Typically such an unlimited desire focuses on money, a medium of exchange for any good that can be bought. Some people appear driven to amass as much money as they can lay their hands on, an amount of money that bears no connection to any real need they have which that money can meet. This sort of desire for money cannot be satisfied, the desire cannot come to rest. The Catechism suggests that covetousness is closely connected with greed, envy and avarice and that these vices betray something even worse: an unlimited desire for earthly goods.

In linking covetousness and idolatry, the Roman Catholic Catechism is following a lead given in the New Testament. “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth: fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence and covetousness, which is idolatry.” (Colossians 3:5). In what sense can covetousness be idolatry? This question is very important, because the first four Commandments directly or indirectly intend to rule our idolatry, the worship of other gods than Yahweh. Further, idolatry was seen in the Old Testament, both in the writings related to Moses and those of the Prophets, as the chief danger and sin.

The connecting link between coveting and idolatry could be exactly that unlimited desire about which the Catholic Catechism warns. A person who looks greedily and enviously at his neighbor’s goods may be driven by an unlimited desire. In fact, the covetous person may want not only one neighbor’s goods but every neighbor’s goods. But, desiring anything except God with an infinite desire, is to love it with one’s whole heart, mind and strength; which we should do only in relation to God. This is the possible connection between coveting and idolatry.

The mark of a disordered desire is the absence of any correlation between desires and needs. Disordered desire for creaturely goods is unanchored from any real basis in a person’s life. Just as the glutton doesn’t stop eating when his or her hunger is satisfied, but eats and eats, or as we say, lives to eat rather than eats to live, so the covetous person wants to amass more possessions than he or she could reasonably ever need or more than could be justified by any notion of a just society. Covetous desire, then, can be thought of as a free-floating craving. Covetous desire is oriented to good things, but not to good things because of a specific real need, but to earthly goods in infinite, measureless degree.

I want to deepen this analysis of covetous desire as a form of idolatry by connecting it to a profound analysis in the Christian tradition of ethics. The greatest architect of this reflection was St. Augustine.4 The key themes in St. Augustine’s analysis are the soul’s natural affinity for God; the distinction between enjoyment and use, and the dynamics of false love of things. This theological/ethical construct was definitive for Christian understanding for all of Christianity in the west and continues to hold rich spiritual insight.

In the first chapter of the first book of his Confessions, Augustine states the key principle of the soul’s affinity with God. The way he states this principle: “You have created us to yourself (ad se) and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” 5

This statement declares more than that God is the creator of human beings. It also implies that this divine origin stamps the human soul with a longing, a desire for reunion with God, a desire that can only be satisfied when humans are able to see God, to contemplate God, and in contemplative union with God, be reunited with God.

Behind St. Augustine’s notion of the soul craving reunion with God lays the larger Platonic tradition, and more specifically the Neo-Platonist philosophy of Plotinus. To describe Plotinus’ important philosophy would take us beyond the boundaries of this essay. Needless to say, St. Augustine and other early Christian theologians who found Plotinus’ philosophy a resource for Christian theology, made significant changes in the philosophy they accepted. But one idea they accepted was that the soul was made to know (contemplate) the divine, and in this contemplative vision to become united with God, to become assimilated to God.

This understanding of human nature, this anthropology, was then joined by St. Augustine to a distinction between enjoyment and using (frui and uti) . To say that God alone could satisfy the human soul’s craving for happiness means that God is the Highest Good, the Supreme Good; a Good so rich, so intense, so inexhaustible, that this Good, God, could satisfy the human craving for happiness eternally. The important point for Augustine is that only God, God alone, is this Supreme Good (Summum Bonum). No other good, by definition, no created good, no creature, nothing in this world, no matter how beautiful, how interesting, how full of being, truth and goodness, could satisfy the soul’ hunger for God. Why: Because God had created the soul for Himself, and the soul will be restless until it finds its rest in God. Thus, Augustine taught that although humans are finite and limited, God created them with an infinite longing, a longing for Himself. 6

This contemplative love of God is what St. Augustine means by frui, enjoyment. To delight in something, to enjoy it, is to love it for its own sake; to enjoy it as an end in itself. And this is the love that befits God. God alone can meet our craving for the Absolute Good, the Summum Bonum. Therefore, the meaning of the First of the Double Commandment, to love God with the whole heart, mind and strength, is the love of enjoyment, loving God for God’s own sake.

What about the good things in this world, which God has made—other people whom we love, professors of theology, pancakes with maple syrup? St. Augustine does not deny they are good. But they are finite goods, limited goods, created goods. We should respectfully use them as we ourselves seek to direct our love to God, and use them to help others direct their love to God. For, to love the neighbor or ourselves truly is not to heap an unlimited amount of creaturely goods on him or her. Why? Because no limited good can truly satisfy a human being’s desire, which only God can really satisfy. To truly love our neighbor and ourselves is to want the best for him or her. That best is God, because God is the neighbor’s Highest Good as well as our Highest God. So we love our neighbor by helping the neighbor to freely order his/her life toward God.

So far so good. However, the human situation is corrupted by the Fall and Sin. St. Augustine accepts (and here his biblical faith required him to break from some of the optimism of classical Greek ethics) that the human will does not naturally love God as the highest God. For some perverse reason (Augustine thought the origin of sin is so irrational that no real cause / principle can even be thought) humans (like the fallen angels) turned their love from God as the Highest Good and fixated love on earthly things, and ultimately themselves. This is the famous notion of the will turned in upon itself and away from God that passes from St. Augustine through the scholastic theology of St. Bonaventura and St. Thomas Aquinas and reappears in Martin Luther (who began his religious life as an Augustinian monk).

Given human fallen and perverse wills, peoples’ search for happiness is deeply corrupted. Remember that the fallen human will, in St. Augustine’s view, still seeks some good to love unconditionally; humans do not stop having an infinite longing. They do, however, direct that will to creatures rather than toward God. Humans still seeks a Supreme Good. But being fallen, the sinful will is locked into looking for satisfaction in finite goods, creaturely goods. These, by definition, cannot satisfy the infinite cravings of the human heart.

St. Augustine, a master of spiritual psychology, observes at least two ways the sinful humans try to cope in this situation. One is the strategy of accumulation. Discovering that the first million dollars did not bring the perfect happiness one sought, one goes for two million, and then four million, and then ten million, and on and on. Or, on another line of quest, one adds circles of power to ever-larger circles of power and control. Being CEO of a small company didn’t make me happy, so I try to move up to a larger corporation.

The second strategy of the frustrated soul is variety. If my first spouse did not make me deliriously happy, I move on to a second and a third, etc. If my job as a manager leaves me restless, I start a new career, perhaps as a lawyer. When that begins to pall, I become a member of the FBI, etc. A culture built around this strategy of variety will be a culture that elevates freedom as ability to select from as many options as possible to its highest value. Does that sound familiar?

The relevance of St. Augustine’s analysis of love (amor) to our study of covetousness should now be clear. One who covets what belongs to another may do so because he or she is caught in the dynamics of a frustrated will. The will is created to enjoy an infinite good. But, sinful and fallen, the human will seeks this infinite good in things. But things, because they are finite and limited, cannot, by their very nature be infinitely good and satisfying. Even an infinite amount or variety of creaturely goods cannot satisfy the human soul. Fixated7 in this dynamic of seeking an infinite happiness in finite goods, the fallen will becomes the covetous will, wanting goods he or she sees the neighbor enjoying.

For this Augustinian analysis, the primary evil of coveting is not the injustice (robbery or fraud) which coveting may lead to; rather, it is the state of sin itself, the frustrated dynamic of seeking fulfillment where it can never be found: seeking the infinite goodness of God in the finite goodness of things.

Therefore, for Augustine, healing the covetous will cannot come from moralizing, from shaking the accusing finger at the covetous person. For the covetous person is trapped in the dynamic of seeking infinite goodness where it cannot be found. Until the sinful person has regained a glimpse of God’s infinite goodness, he or she is locked into, is addicted to, seeking to satisfy his or her infinite craving for supreme goodness in things that cannot provide it. Evangelism, not moralistic blaming, therefore, is what the sinner needs. In the short run, the neighbor who may become the victim of the covetous person’s greed, envy, jealousy and covetousness, may need protection from the covetous person. But this external restraint, while helping the potential victim, does nothing for the sinner caught in the coils of his or her disordered love. This is why preaching the Gospel is more important than moralizing.

B. Coveting Endangers My Neighbor

We turn next to the second major direction of ethical discernment into the wrongness of coveting. We saw it mentioned in the Catholic Catechism. This view focuses on the neighbor, whose goods I covet. Covetousness is wrong, in this analysis, because coveting is an attitude of the heart that can lead to evil actions against my neighbor, such as thievery, fraud and injustice generally. If a person covets what belongs to another, he or she could be motivated to steal that good from his neighbor, or out of envy and jealousy to do worse.

Here may be the best place in this essay to look at the famous story of Cain and Abel. 8 This story of Cain killing his brother Abel stands at the beginning of the Old Testament, and, like the creation stories themselves, my give us paradigms of the human situation before God. Cain, a farmer, and Abel, a sheepherder bring offerings to God. God looks with favor on Abel’s offering, “but for Cain and his offering, God had no regard.” The story immediately speaks of Cain’s great anger. God asks Cain why he is angry, and says to Cain, “If you do well, will not you be accepted.? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” The story proceeds with Cain killing his brother, with God asking Cain where Abel was, and with God cursing Cain but also protecting him by a protecting mark.

That this story of fratricide is about coveting is not immediately clear. The story leaves important questions unanswered. Why did God not regard Cain’s offering favorably? What was the nature of Cain’s anger? Was he angry with God? Did he murder his brother because he redirected his anger against his brother, who had done nothing to hurt Cain? If God promised Cain that Cain could find favor by “doing well,” why was Cain still angry? What do God’s words mean, “If you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it”? Is the “sin lurking at the door” the temptation which the neighbor presents who seems to be favored more by God than oneself? In any case, Cain’s killing his brother strongly suggests that his anger was caused by Abel’s offering receiving God’s favor, but not his own. Clearly, Cain directed this anger not at God but at has brother. At the very least, this story portrays the neighbor, Abel, (in this case a brother) causing, through no fault of his own, another person’s deadly anger. And the story portrays the neighbor, Abel, as a victim of the lethal hatred of another. And the story also means that this dynamic of temptation to evil and victimization can occur within a family.

More clearly involving covetous desire is the story of David and Uriah, the Hittite is often cited. David coveted Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. This coveting motivated David to arrange Uriah’s death in battle. The story illustrates a link between coveting and injustice, indeed a link between coveting and premeditated murder. When Nathan tells his parable of the poor man with one lamb, David sees the injustice, and when Nathan reminds David that he acted the same way, David gained insight into his sin. (II Samuel 12:1-13).

The key point in this analysis is that inner attitudes, tendencies and dispositions of the heart can lead to good or evil actions. This analysis, therefore, connects directly to Jesus’ teaching as presented in the Gospel. For Jesus consistently focused not on specific, eternal actions but on the inner person, the “heart” from which evil actions proceed.9

Christian ethics has analyzed both good and bad moral actions, therefore, by tracing their roots in a good or evil heart. Traditionally, both Catholic and Protestant ethics do not think it is enough just to look at external actions. While civil and criminal law has to focus on deeds, without leaving motives entirely out of account, Christian ethics must seek the roots of evil or good actions in the human soul or spirit. Following Jesus’ teachings that evil actions proceed from a corrupt heart, Christian ethicists have tried to describe the link between the inner person and his/her external actions. The key terms in this traditional analysis is virtues/vices and specific actions.

Virtuous moral acts proceed from virtuous principles in the soul, i.e., the virtues. Evil moral acts proceed from vicious principles in the soul, i.e., the vices. As is well known, traditional Catholic moral theology has a list of seven heavenly virtues (chastity, moderation, generosity, zeal, meekness, charity and humility) and seven deadly sins or vices (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy and pride). In this list covetousness is closest to envy. In this moral analysis, acts of injustice, such a robbing and fraud, are motivated or caused by the underlying vicious habit or tendency of coveting.

Christian Analysis Indebted to Greek Classical Ethics

In analysis, Christian ethics appropriates a non-biblical ethical tradition, namely classical Greek ethics. The reason Christian theologians drew on Greek ethics was that Greek tradition provided terms and ideas that helped describe Jesus’ rooting evil actions in an evil heart. Greek classical ethics was largely an analysis and investigation of the meaning of the virtues and vices, those roots in the human soul of good and evil acts. In this analysis, Aristotle followed the lead of Plato, in whose Dialogues, fundamental virtues, such as justice, were explored.

Underling the ethical analysis of moral acts as proceeding from vices or virtues likes the Greek approach to ethics as a science. And, behind this lay the Greek view of what a science is. For Plato and Aristotle, following the Pre-Socratic philosophers, to understand a phenomenon in any disciplined, “scientific” way, means discovering the principles, causes or grounds behind or beneath the phenomenon. When one discerned the ground or cause or principle of something, he or she had “understood” it scientifically. Thus, viewing coveting as wrong because it caused or could cause unjust acts, like robbing or defrauding the neighbor, is a Greek, classical kind of moral analysis. This kind of analysis exists also in the Anglican moral theology tradition, and its widely employed in Roman Catholic ethics today. Using this Greek way of thinking scientifically about the moral life brought problems, which we cannot discuss in this essay. But the Greek approach helped Christian thinkers to follow Jesus’ teaching in connecting outer actions with the human heart.
Covetousness and Consumer Culture

In the first two parts of this essay we have examined what coveting is and discussed several explanations why coveting is wrong. We conclude this essay, as announced at the beginning, by looking at a possible link between coveting and advertising in our global, market economy.

The members of the Christian community should address the question of the possible connection between covetousness and our economic practices. Obviously, if covetousness contradicts the will of God, and this is what the Tenth Commandment says, Christians should want to ask to what extent they live in and are part of a society whose economy may depend on teaching and affirming coveting. If a connection between being part of our consumer culture and covetousness exists, preachers should help their congregations discover that connection. Christian teachers and spiritual directors should help members of the Church recognize and struggle against the coveting-inducing forces in our society.

Advertising as Inducing Covetousness

Many people focus on “consumerism”, the attitude that buying things is a good in itself, to link covetousness and our modern culture. Consumerism can be said to obey the principle that “more is better.” Related phrases, pointing to this principle, are “I buy, therefore, I am” and “shop ‘till you drop.” We may best see the link between coveting and consumerism by focusing on advertising.

Central to our consumerist culture is advertising. Ads, many say, invite us to us to envy those who have more than we do and to be greedy in our accumulation of possessions. A contemporary cultural anthropologist, Rene Girard, identifies an element of copying in modern advertising. Many ads show famous people purchasing or using things. The device of the ad is to lead the viewer to say: If he/she (the famous person) likes/wants/buys this item, I will to. Thus the ad teaches us to covet what the prominent person has. Other ads induce covetousness by saying that we should keep up with our neighbors. Let us look at this advertising device.

Many ads imply that it is natural or good to obey the law of “keeping up with your neighbor.” This desire to “keep up with the Joneses” may be deeply rooted in the competitive instinct, which is deep in human nature.. In so -called archaic cultures, feast-givers try to outdo other members of the village in the sumptuousness of their feasts. Or a family may go into debt to design a wedding ceremony that competes with those held by others in the community. But in the United States, other factors beside competitiveness are probably at work.

One of these cultural factors is how man Americans today obtain a sense of their worth, identity and prestige. Social status in the United States is not, on the whole, inherited from one’s parents. In fact, an essential element in “the American dream” is that one’s children “do better” than their parents. Indeed, very few “markers” for objective social status, and subjectively, for a sense of self-worth and personal identity, exist apart from income, the job that brings income, and the consuming of goods and services that job and income enable. If my neighbor, Mr. Jones, drives a larger car, goes on expensive vacations with his family, has a more expensive/more modern entertainment center in his house than I do, I begin to wonder whether I am lacking in my basic human ability or identity. It may comfort me very little that my forefathers/mothers arrived on the Mayflower or were Daughters of the Revolution. Family heritage doesn’t carry much bragging rights in the US. So, in the US consumer society, what else do I have to judge my worth and my identity except what I possess — my job, my spouse and children, my car, my house? Naturally, I look with envious and jealous eye to the more expensive, more numerous goods of my neighbor. For many Americans possessions are closely linked to self-worth and identity; hence, the sin of covetousness lurks at the door.

A second cultural factor that links American life style with covetousness is the economic engine that supports political stability in the US and increasingly in other nations, e.g., especially contemporary China. For almost all nations today a growing economy is essential to political stability; this is certainly true in the United States. A growing economy holds out the hope to each American that he or she can “do better”, i.e., earn more; obtain a more prestigious job, etc. A declining economy, i.e., an economy marked with increasing unemployment, or inflation, or both, is the death knell for the political administration in power. Therefore, consumerism, that buying and using more goods and services is a good in itself, is strongly supported by a concern for political stability.

This is even more obvious in contemporary China. In the People’s Republic of China, The Communist Party has, since Deng Xiao Peng’s turn to a more market economy, in the early 1980’s, made a kind of deal with the nation’s over one billion Chinese citizens. In exchange for political passivity (no sustained protest against the one- party system of government; no sustained protest against corruption; no multi-party elections) the Party promises rapid economic growth. In exchange for political passivity, the Party holds out the possibility for more and more Chinese to increase their income, giving them access to consumer goods and to educational opportunities and good health care. Thus, economists agree that China must sustain its 9-10% growth rate each year for the Communist Party to pacify the Chinese people and keep its monopoly of political power. One might turn a phrase of Karl Marx’s and say that in China today, economic growth is the opium of the people.

Looking beyond the United States and China, a link also exists between the covetousness imbedded in consumerism and international unrest. Ads display relatively wealthy western people enjoying not only basic household goods but also luxury goods, like consumer electronics and famous brand items. Beaming ads of westerners and wealthy Asians enjoying “the good things of life,” even if these were the good things of life for a previous generation (TVs, autos, refrigerators) to Africans and rural Asians invites and induces covetousness. And if a person’s income does not allow purchasing these items, anger and resentment naturally follow. Yet, awakening these desires for consumer goods is essential for the profitability and growth of international corporations. These multinational corporations survive and succeed by this “marketing” and “expanding old markets/ opening new markets.” Our global economy, and its engines –marketing and advertising—sow the seeds of covetousness left and right, so far as the TV and radio signal extend, i.e., everywhere around the globe. Modern consumerism has turned covetousness into a virtue, because it seems necessary to consumerism, and consumerism seems necessary to the stability and growth of the global market, and this in turn seems necessary to preserve political stability at home and abroad.10

Because many people think that an expanding market economy is necessary for political stability at home and abroad, Christians should beware of simply moralizing about consumerism and the covetousness it promotes. Actually, the loudest criticism of consumerism came not from the Christian Church, whose members in the US seldom criticize the US market economy or consumerism. The criticism came especially in the 1960s and 70’s from the “Counter-Culture” and today from those critical of the IMF, the World Bank, as the structures promoting global capitalism. If Christians shake their moralizing finger at, say consumerism in the U.S. they should not be surprised at being dismissed as superficial moralizers. Not only are most Protestant Churches relatively silent about consumerism. The dismissive reply will also point out that political stability and the spread of democratic institutions demand an expanding market economy, and an expanding economy requires American consumerism. As usual, the moralistic approach, with from within the churches or from outside the Churches is superficial and ineffective.
Conclusion

In this essay we have focused on the Tenth Commandment, prohibiting coveting. We have defined coveting by way of an analysis of human desire. We have discussed various views of why coveting is wrong. These discussions have led us to some of the rich veins in Christian ethical tradition. We have also examined the link between covetousness and our modern market economy and consumerist life style.

This essay concludes a series of essays on the Ten Commandments. This series began in 2005. I wish to thank The Rev. Dr. Leander Harding, of the Trinity School for Ministry and John Anderson for posting these essays on their Internet sites.

The Rev. David Scott, Ph.D.

Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and Murnau, Germany,

August and September 2006