Envy begins as sorrow at the good that belongs to someone else simply because it is his and not mine. It does not stop at wanting the same kind of good for myself. It registers the other person’s possession as a loss to me. From that sorrow it is a short passage to covetousness, the settled desire to have what is already his. From covetousness it is another short passage to the assertion that I have a right to it. The assertion can be dressed in the language of fairness or necessity, but the movement is the same: the fact that he has more is treated as the reason I may take.
St. Basil the Great, in his Homily on Envy, defines the vice as distress caused by a neighbor’s prosperity and calls it the most pernicious passion implanted in human souls.¹ He traces it to the devil’s war on mankind and to Cain’s murder of Abel. St. Augustine calls envy the diabolical sin.² St. Gregory the Great lists among its offspring hatred, detraction, and pleasure at another’s misfortune.³ The tradition returns often to Wisdom 2:24, that death entered the world through the devil’s envy. Parallel witness appears in the rabbinic sources. The tenth commandment forbids coveting a neighbor’s house or anything that is his. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, Laws of Robbery and Lost Property 1:9–11, distinguishes the internal desire from the active pursuit that pressures the owner. He states that desire leads to coveting, and coveting to robbery, and even to bloodshed if the owner resists, citing Ahab and Naboth.⁴ Pirkei Avot 4:21 places envy among the things that drive a person from the world.⁵
When the taking is carried out by government, the moral question does not disappear. A statute or an administrative rule can rearrange titles and compel transfers. It cannot, by the mere fact of its enactment, convert an act of taking into an act of justice. Force changes who holds the thing. It does not change the prior question of whether the thing was owed. Much of the entitlement rhetoric associated with Bernie Sanders and others proceeds as if the second question has already been settled by the first. The presence of a public mechanism is taken to answer the moral claim. It does not.
In our family the ordinary answer to the desire for more has been to go to work. The goods we have received are recognized as gifts, and hard work is treated as a real virtue. Another person’s success does not establish a claim on his earnings. If the desire for what another has is met first by labor and gratitude, the further claim that his surplus is already mine requires an argument that has not been supplied.
Thomas Aquinas locates almsgiving in the Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 32, as an act of mercy and, through mercy, an act of charity. The motive is the relief of the needy out of compassion and for God’s sake.⁶ In the same question, article 5, he treats almsgiving as a matter of precept when the giver has surplus beyond what is needed for himself and those in his charge, and the recipient is in genuine need. This is a moral obligation. It does not by itself determine what civil authority may compel. Justice concerns what is strictly owed. Charity extends beyond debt, yet under the conditions Aquinas specifies it binds. An external act of giving can occur without the virtue, but the act done with the proper motive requires charity. The mere fact that another has more does not create an enforceable title in the poorer party.
In II-II, q. 66, a. 7, Aquinas addresses extreme necessity directly. When a person faces manifest and urgent need, has no other remedy, and takes only what is necessary for immediate relief, the taking is not theft or robbery. The distinction preserves the argument against entitlement based simply on disparity of possession. Ordinary surplus does not authorize seizure. Only the narrow case of otherwise irremediable necessity does, and even then only to the extent required.
The movement from “he has more” to “therefore it is owed to me and may be taken” is not supplied by the definition of charity. The definition requires a motive of mercy ordered to God, not a claim of title arising from inequality alone. When that motive is absent, positive law may still compel a transfer, but the compulsion does not inherit the name of justice from the virtue it bypasses. What another has is not, by that fact alone, mine.
¹ St. Basil the Great, Homily on Envy (PG 31).
² St. Augustine, as cited in Catechism of the Catholic Church 2539.
³ St. Gregory the Great, Moralia (on the offspring of envy).
⁴ Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Gezeilah va’Avedah 1:9–11.
⁵ Pirkei Avot 4:21.
⁶ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 32, a. 1 and a. 5; q. 66, a. 7.