The greed of Self-Love, say holy counselors, will often spawn Envy. As one who is discontented looks around and sees people blessed with better lives, fewer problems, greater gifts, more secure families and friendships, envy can occur. Much discontent produces envy even of the unborn, because they are free of pain, as the Preacher showed when he said, Rather than the living, I envy the dead; better than both of these is one who has not been born to have to see evil (Ecc. 4:2,3). Another said about his life: Cursed be the day when I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news, because he did not kill me, so that my mother might have been my grave…. Instead, I came out of the womb to see labor and sorrow (Jer. 20:14-18). For anyone gripped by dissatisfaction and pain, and hatred of the way life has gone, here’s a prayer that can lift a soul up from that discontent, if one faithfully stays with it.
Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me and deliver me from hating life.
—Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity
Category: ENVY
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Consider watching through a window as a family enjoys a home-cooked meal. You might imagine how it feels to be part of this group—their warmth and happiness, their sense of belonging as they pass dishes back and forth. Now imagine being part of this family. Maybe you do feel warmth and happiness, but those feelings are much more complex, less tidy. What came before the dinner? What comes after? Are you actually present, or thinking about something else? Your family is not a snapshot or a concept; it’s messy, in flux, evolving. It has depth and continuity. No matter how lovely the dinner is in reality, it can never really live up to what the observer imagines. Because what they imagine is actually just a symbol—an idea they’ve adapted from TV, movies, and marketing their entire lives about what it means to be part of a happy family.
#187: Drowning in envy
Haley Nahman -
Does God rule over me, or does the world rule over me? Does God rule over me, or does fear rule over me? Am I always afraid? Do I always the slightest thing brings me terror in my heart. Does God rule over me or does anxiety rule over me? I’m always anxious. Once more thing happens and I start crying, and that’s the end of the world. I’m anxious about my family, I’m anxious about my health, I’m anxious about my finances. I’m anxious about my children and their and their careers and their academic and their schooling and so forth. I’m anxious. I’m anxious. I’m anxious. What rules over me, that or anxiety, or, God, what rules over me? Pride. And pride is a funny thing, because pride has many, many faces. Sometimes pride can be arrogance, where you look at somebody and say, yeah, they are a prideful person. And believe it or not, pride can be something as simple as gossiping. Why do I gossip? Why do I talk about other people? Because something about them bothers me, something about them that maybe they have I wish I had, or they think they’re all nice because of a fancy car, or that’s gossiping. And gossiping comes from envy. And where does envy come from? Pride? Pride has money. Pride can even manifest as, forgive me, insecurity; insecurity in yourself, insecurity in your personality, low self-esteem. Why? Because you think that you should be better than the other person, and because you’re not, you feel bad about yourself. So pride can have many, many faces. So does pride rule over me? Does lust and pornography rule over me? Am I in that kingdom where that rules over my time and my thoughts and my actions and everything? What else rules over me? Could it be an anger? Does anger rule over me? The slightest thing makes me angry and resentful, and I don’t want to talk to that person. and I give them the cold shoulder.
—Fr. Benjamin Girgis
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Now, let’s delve into how harming others ultimately harms ourselves. Consider a person who wrongs, insults, or deceives another; whom do they harm first? It’s undeniably themselves. While the immediate damage might be financial, the deeper consequences affect the soul, leading to destruction and punishment. Envy is another example. When someone harbors envy, they injure themselves first. Injustice inherently causes immeasurable harm to its perpetrator. Yes, they may harm others, but the harm to themselves outweighs it.
Let’s examine in our own lives the consequences of certain actions, particularly when parts or functions within us overstep their proper bounds and assume the roles of others. Consider if the spleen, for instance, were to abandon its designated place and seize on the functions of another organ—wouldn’t this be considered a disease? Similarly, if the moisture within us were to fill every possible space, wouldn’t it result in conditions like dropsy and gout, ultimately harming itself and other parts? Likewise, if bile seeks an extensive area and blood is dispersed throughout the body without restraint, it disrupts the natural order.Applying this analogy to the soul, think about what happens when emotions like anger and lust exceed their proper measure. Just as excess is detrimental to the body, if the eye attempts to take in more than it should or receives an excessive amount of light, it faces ruin. In the soul, if we indulge in an excessive pursuit of food, the consequences can be severe.
—St. John Chrysostom
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Some people walk around all day with unexplained sadness, unreasonable anger, unreasonable hatred, unreasonable jealousy, envy—what is all this garbage from? Some walk around all day in the word of God, in the spiritual life, in the thoughts of the heavenly, in the desires of eternity, in fulfilling the commandments, in seeing light, in rejoicing always.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
Conversely, the vices of the soul are much worse than the passions of the body, both in the actions they produce and in the punishments they incur. I do not know why, but most people overlook this fact. They treat drunkenness, unchastity, adultery, theft and all such vices with great concern, avoiding them or punishing them as something whose very appearance is loathsome to most men. But the passions of the soul are much worse and much more serious then bodily passions. For they degrade men to the level of demons and lead them, insensible as they are, to the eternal punishment reserved for all who obstinately cling to such vices. These passions of the soul are envy, rancor, malice, insensitivity, avarice – which according to the apostle is the root of all evil (cf. 1 Tim. 6:10) – and all vices of a similar nature.
—St. John of Damaskos -
“If you praise your neighbor to one man and criticize him to another, you are the slave of self-esteem and jealousy. Through praise you try to hide your jealousy, through criticism to appear better than your neighbor.”
—St. Mark the Ascetic -
Shame over guilt; rage over anger; masturbation over sex; envy over greed; your future over your past but her past over her future…
The narcissist feels unhappy because he thinks his life isn’t as it should be, or things are going wrong; but all of those feelings find origin in frustration, a specific frustration: the inability to love the other person.
He’s a man in a glass box, unable to connect. He thinks the problem is people don’t like him, or not enough, so he exerts massive energy into the creation and maintenance of an identity: if they think of me as X…
But that attempt is always futile, not because you can’t trick the other person– you can, for an entire lifetime, it’s quite easy. But even then, the man in the box is still unsatisfied, still frustrated, because no amount of identity maintenance will break that glass box.
If the other person is also in a glass box, then you have a serious problem. If everyone is in their own glass box, well, then you have America.
— The Last Psychiatrist: A Generational Pathology: Narcissism Is Not Grandiosity
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All these afflictions are worse when, through hatred of their toilsome failure, men have retreated into idleness and private studies which are unbearable to a mind aspiring to public service, keen on activity, and restless by nature because of course it is short of inner resources. In consequence, when the pleasures have been removed which busy people derive from their actual activities, the mind cannot endure the house, the solitude, the walls, and hates to observe its own isolation. From this arises that boredom and self-dissatisfaction, that turmoil of a restless mind and gloomy and grudging endurance of our leisure, especially when we are ashamed to admit the reasons for it and our sense of shame drives the agony inward, and our desires are trapped in narrow bounds without escape and stifle themselves. From this arise melancholy and mourning and a thousand vacillations of a wavering mind, buoyed up by the birth of hope and sickened by the death of it. From this arises the state of mind of those who loathe their own leisure and complain that they have nothing to do, and the bitterest envy at the promotion of others. For unproductive idleness nurtures malice, and because they themselves could not prosper they want everyone else to be ruined. Then from this dislike of others’ success and despair of their own, their minds become enraged against fortune, complain about the times, retreat into obscurity, and brood over their own sufferings until they become sick and tired of themselves.
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It -
While the “knowledge that comes from men is strengthened by careful meditation and diligent exercise,” the knowledge “that by God’s grace has come to be within us” requires the virtues of justice, angerlessness, and compassion. “The first [knowledge] can be received by those still subject to passion; the second [knowledge] is received only by those [who have obtained] passionlessness—those who are also able at the time of prayer to contemplate the illuminating gentle radiance proper to their intellect.” Thus Evagrius heard from the mouth of his teacher Basil, “the pillar of truth.”
The “external wisdom,” that of the “wise of this world,” is only a question of intellectual accomplishment. Its preferred means, next to study and practice, is “dialectic.” An error in this domain is, so to speak, only a “technical failure,” which as such does not bring discredit to the “scientist” and likewise can hardly be imputed to him as a moral failure.
Standing in complete contrast to this is the knowledge that flows toward us “from God,” “from God’s grace”—to become a partaker of which intellectual accomplishments do not suffice.
The knowledge of Christ requires not a soul [skilled in] dialectic, but one that sees: for while impure souls may become dialecticians, seeing is reserved for the pure.
“Purity” means “passionlessness”: above all, freedom from “wrath, resentment and what follows these,” such as envy, suspicions, resentment, and the like.
Dragon’s Wine and Angel’s Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness by Gabriel Bunge
SO GOOD QUOTES 