Search Results

This chapter offers an account of the evolution of self-control. The capacity for self-control tends to increase as people grow older. Individual differences in self-control have been found to be stable over time, and to be correlated with measures of success and social adjustment. Research on self-control conducted by developmental psychologists can be integrated in an evolutionary framework. The ability to exert self-control pays off biologically by enabling animals to delay gratification and to constrain selfish urges such as those that define the Seven Deadly Sins (gluttony, avarice, sloth, pride, wrath, envy, and lust).

This book concludes by arguing that, without question, Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich drove the theological renascence discussed here. In addition to their talent, energy, and charisma, the likes of which have yet to be seen again in a public religious figure, all three brought the explanatory power and commonsense appeal of the doctrine of original sin to bear on the Age of Anxiety. They believed that the doctrine of original sin was the most accurate description of the human experience. The long record of destruction, avarice, violence, licentiousness, and animus in human history made arguments for the goodness of humanity seem empirically questionable, even unsustainable. This reality of human corruption was as undeniable as the sordidness of history—and was, in fact, the reason for it—and it was confirmed for them by the readily observable manifestation of unbelief, hubris, and concupiscence in all people.

Dante's representation of hell is unique in its rich and uninhibited blending of these remarkably heterogeneous constituents into a personal—multicultural—vision; while, for instance, scholastic philosophy was rooted in Aristotle, so that Aquinas cities the Nichomachean Ethics in his discussion of sin, and the vision authors knew the Bible. In a move that allows his syncretic perchant greater latitude, Dante resists providing a uniform template for sin; by offering one taxonomy for hell and another for purgatory he is able to widen the cultural resources available to the Commedia. The sins of inconsistence are sins of impulse, brought about by immoderate passion uncontrolled by reason; they are lust, gluttony, avarice/prodigality, and anger.

Dante's poetic apprenticeship, both formal and ideological, occurred while he was a writer of lyric poems. The ninety or so lyrics that Dante wrote harbor the wellsprings of his ideological convictions with the result that we must turn to these poems to analyze the paths that Dante took to becoming the poet of the Commedia. The lyrics contain implicit and at times explicit debates on cultural and societal issues of great immediacy for Dante's mercantile audience: issues such as the nature of chivalry and nobility, the desire for wealth and its relationship to avarice, the limits and constraints of political loyalty, and—intertwined with everything else—the role of women and implicitly the construction of gender.

This chapter traces the development of ideas about property throughout the Hellenistic period, most crucially in Stoic and Roman thought. Romans developed ideas about the centrality of private property that are quite different from those of their Greek predecessors. This is clear above all in the work of Cicero and Seneca. In Cicero, we find the idea that the state exists in order to protect the private property of its citizens. In Seneca, we find the belief that it is avarice rather than the existence of private property itself that may be sinful. In Seneca, we also find the idea that while the common possession may once have been the more perfect way, given the fallen nature of humankind the public peace is better preserved by private ownership. These ideas were to have a profound on the early Christian tradition that followed quite directly from them.

This chapter surveys views of private property in the official teaching of the Christian Church in the five centuries following Jesus’s life and death. The New Testament left a deeply ambiguous account of the morality of private property, both in the explicit teachings of Jesus and in the ‘communal’ life of the early church. This critical approach was reflected in a number of authorised and unauthorised Christian sources. But the alternative view—that private property was needed to preserve the peace amongst a sinful humanity and that it was avarice and not wealth that was sinful—came to predominate, definitively in the teaching of Augustine.

What explains the anti-Jewish pogroms of summer 1941 that broke out in the eastern borderlands of Soviet-occupied Poland in the wake of the Nazi invasion? This chapter introduces the competing theories and approaches to the problem. Most scholars highlight either revenge for the Soviet occupation, antisemitic hatred, avarice, or the German extermination effort itself. The authors offer an alternative hypothesis rooted primarily in the logic of competing nationalisms. Where Jews sought national equality with their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors, they were more likely to fall victim to pogrom violence.

The Introduction sets out the rationale of this book. It presents the present study as a ‘backstory’ to Molière’s L’Avare, or, more accurately, as a pre-history to that work: an account of ‘what precedes a given threshold’ (Terence Cave). The Introduction traces the origins of the French term avarice, from the Old Testament to the French Renaissance. Augustinian understanding of avaritia is given prominence, as are the seven deadly sins, medieval venality satire, and the passage of avaritia to avarice in the French vernacular. A particular focus is Poggio Bracciolini’s De avaritia (1428), a treatise which shows the first signs of mobile thinking about avarice. The final section of the Introduction sketches out major lines of enquiry vis-à-vis avarice in late Renaissance France. A brief overview of each chapter is provided.

This chapter introduces basic Renaissance definitions of avarice. It provides a study of the French terms avarice and avare across a broad range of genres. An initial survey of ancient sources is followed by a detailed examination of avarice in three basic modes: passion, vice, and sin. The middle section of the chapter investigates social gradation of the concept of avarice, in other words, how people of different social ranks might be described as avaricious. Efforts to define what avarice was and who were the avares were fundamental responses to traumatic moral and socio-economic upheavals of the late French Renaissance. The particular shape of avarice depended significantly on the social standing of the avare; yet such thinking was not unproblematic. This is shown in a case study of Guillaume Bouchet’s Les Serées-a text which struggles to reconcile clashing views as to whether usurers are necessarily avaricious.

Money goes to the heart of the Rose’s central problematic—the relationship between art and nature. This chapter engages closely with thirteenth-century Parisian philosophy and theology in its analysis of money, usury, and avarice. In considering the reception of Aristotle’s Politics by Albert the Great, Aquinas, and Giles of Rome, it shows how the Rose engages with the idea of an Aristotelian teleology of money, using it to put the principle of infinity that categorizes the avaricious acquisition of wealth in tension with the end-directed principles of nature that inform the whole poem. The twinned ideas of infinity and of natural acts as teleological are shown to link the two practices condemned most severely in the poem: sodomy and usury.

After reviewing Machiavelli’s inconsistent application of tyranny to princes, Chapter 10 theorizes his association of tyranny with corruption and contends that the kind of tyranny that particularly interested him is the collective tyranny of wealthy elites. In Discourses 1.16–18 he says that cities that gain their freedom have a better chance of maintaining it if corruption has not affected the entire body politic; if it has, there is no hope of preserving liberty. Even if corruption extends only to those who profited from their privileged status in the defunct regime (“feeding off the riches of the prince”), these partigiani will be enemies of the newly free state and seek to restore the former regime (as the sons of Brutus did). Machiavelli considers several theoretical possibilities for how a totally corrupt city might regain liberty, ultimately considering them all unrealistic or impossible. The origin of tyranny in Rome was the office of the Decemviri (451 BCE). In Discourses 1.40 he shows how antagonisms between patricians and plebs, manipulated by the ambitious Appius Claudius, nearly destroyed the young republic. Tyranny happens, Machiavelli says, when either the plebs or the nobles—but more often the nobles—look to a strongman to subdue the rival class. But tyranny needs no strongman. His culminating example of the privatization of power by elites is Genoa’s association of wealthy communal creditors, called [the Banco of] San Giorgio, which over time appropriated the republic’s finances and even much of its territorial dominion as collateral for loans (Histories 8.29).

Especially after the British Parliament formally adopted the gold standard in 1821, economists reinforced its legitimacy by building on Adam Smith’s account of value in The Wealth of Nations, which followed gold from its decorative uses to its use as a basis of credit. They also sharpened his distinction between gold’s minimal use-value and its exchange-value; and, under newfound conditions of scarcity, they focused attention on the diversion of gold away from ornamental purposes. In laying out this multipronged elaboration of gold’s value, political economy shared space with numerous other discourses—evident in novels, poems, essays, and sermons—that used gold as a metaphor for Christian virtue, artistic genius, and class; or that emphasized gold’s poisonous potential, building on a long history of the metal as an object of monstrous desire.

This chapter juxtaposes praise of the city against critiques of it, and in doing so acknowledges the vast spectrum of urban experiences available. It demonstrates how counter-claims to the Good or Holy City were abundant. Fundamental criticism of urban living coexisted with endorsement of it, and understanding this divergence produces a more comprehensive perspective of urban praise. This chapter therefore offers a consideration of some of the more prominent critiques of the city, focused, for example, on ideas about the link between the city and avarice, deviancy, disorder, and violence. It also delves into some particular works of urban panegyric to identify elements of lamentation and critique, and what objectives these served, and concludes that, by the thirteenth century, those critiques were being absorbed into (and indeed were contributing to) an ideological framework which conversely valorized cities.

Although avarice is associated with many notorious evils, there is a peculiar ambiguity about its matter, specification and even aspects of its moral status. Assuming that the essential mark of avarice is an excessive desire for money or monetary value, its virtuous counterpart might appear to consist in a straightforward path of moderation. This chapter argues that attempts to define this moderation as a rational mean cannot succeed, however, not only because of the complexities of monetary flow, accumulation and dissipation, but because the true root of what makes avarice a vice is its moral prosopagnosia, the way it disposes someone to inhibit, crush or betray second-person relatedness. The antidote is the liberality by which one gains freedom by subsuming one’s stance towards money into a broader framework of second-person relatedness, the flourishing of which is incommensurate with financial value and which promotes light-heartedness, generosity and even humor about possessions.