Some fifteen to twenty years ago Katharine and I went to England via a junket provided by one of the insurance companies I represented. Rather than hang around the convention center for a week and listen to the unbearable sales rah rah speeches, we decided to rent a car, sneak off, and tour on our own. We spent several days in the Cotswolds mostly touring some of the more famous gardens there. The first place we went was Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s ancestral home, a gorgeous marvel constructed with the unique honey colored Cotswold stone. The grounds and gardens were equally magnificent designed by the famous landscape architect of the eighteenth century, Capability Brown, which featured sweeping vistas and gentle alleys. Off the west wing of the palace was the “family chapel”, which was the size of All Saints! Just to the side of the narthex was a statue dramatically depicting a warrior figure with a lance killing a serpent figure under his(or her) feet, reminiscent of the numerous depictions of St. George slaying the dragon. Inscribed below this stunning statue were the words… “the vanquishing of Envy the first and last enemy.
I was floored at the thought. I over the years have thought and re-thought about the myth of Creation in Genesis, and about the so-called “fall.” I have come to the conclusion that the man and the woman’s partaking of the tree of knowledge is no fall at all, but an evolutionary coming of age, a necessary advancement of the human race, that is, to know good from evil. It was of necessity that the humans partook of the “forbidden fruit”… a giant step towards their full humanity. Where the trouble begins is later in Genesis where Abel and Cain make their sacrifices to God and God chooses Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s. And you know the story…Cain murders his own brother…Why? Out of envy. So the overarching message in this story is that envy begets violence. This is a myth as to how violence entered our world, our knowledge of good and evil notwithstanding.
Anthropologists and even artists have been studying the phenomenon of envy for centuries. Rene Girard, (whom I have often quoted) retired professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Stanford argues that every single society on earth since roughly 7000 B.C.E. to the present day was born from envy and the violence begotten therefrom. This motif in art has been present since the earliest literature we know of: In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides; in Plutarch; in Dante and Shakespeare; in Faulkner….envy is the dark engine of tragedy that pulls at the human aspiration for good. We know that all too well in our own families, and envy is deceitfully well hidden among the structures of our society as well.
The Gospels and the apostle Paul teach us that the only way to undermine this insidious evil, the first evil in our world, is through acts of loving sacrifice…to serve the good of the other first and foremost….that obviously is easier said than done…but would that we as individuals, as communities, as nations, come to our senses and understand that envy and the violence it begets only engender more envy and more violence….a pattern that must be broken… The promise within God’s commonweal is that when we sacrifice for the good of the other, eschewing self-interest, then we create abundance for all, an abundance in which envy is rendered powerless….and therefore violence as well….Pray and give and work for such a world.
