Greed | Description, Deadly Sin, History, Bible, & Facts (2024)

greed, in Roman Catholic theology, one of the seven deadly sins. Greed is defined as the immoderate love or desire for riches and earthly possessions. A person can also be greedy for fame, attention, power, or anything else that feeds one’s selfishness. As a deadly sin, greed is believed to spur other sins and further immoral behavior. According to Catholic theology, it can be countered with the heavenly virtue of charity or generosity.

The seven deadly sins were first enumerated by Pope Gregory I (the Great) in the 6th century and were elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Along with greed, the deadly sins include pride, wrath, lust, envy, gluttony, and sloth. In the Bible, greed is forbidden by the Ten Commandments, which prohibit coveting the goods of another. There are also several other admonishments against greed throughout the Old Testament, such as “Those who are greedy for unjust gain make trouble for their households, but those who hate bribes will live” (Proverbs 15:27). In the New Testament, Jesus uses the parable of the rich fool to caution against amassing wealth, prefacing the story with the warning, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (Gospel According to Luke 12:15). Love of money is also cautioned against in the First Letter of Paul to Timothy, where it is called “a root of all kinds of evil” (6:10).

Greed’s propensity to lead to other vices and sins is called out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which says coveting the goods of another is the root of theft, robbery, and fraud. In Summa theologiae St. Thomas Aquinas writes that although it is natural for humans to desire external or material things as a means to sustain life, covetousness exceeds this in its immoderate desire to acquire things, and it is therefore a sin. He also named other vices that are “daughters of covetousness” because they arise from greed: treachery, fraud, falsehood, perjury, restlessness, violence, and insensibility to mercy.

In art, the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder made allegorical drawings of the seven deadly sins. In Avaritia greed is portrayed as a well-dressed woman who sits at the center of the drawing with coins piled in her lap and a toad at her feet. Other examples of avarice play out all around her. At the bottom of the scene is an inscription in Latin that reads, “Scraping Avarice sees neither honour nor courtesy, shame nor divine admonition.” Another of his allegorical drawings of greed is Big Fish Eat Little Fish, which depicts a grotesque scene that includes smaller fish falling out of the mouth and stomach of a giant beached fish.

In Dante’s 14th-century work Inferno, the sin of greed is assigned to the fourth circle of hell, where those who hoarded wealth on earth joust with those who spent it lavishly. The two groups are guarded by Plutus (possibly Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld or the god of wealth) as they spend eternity pushing great weights at one another with their chests to symbolize their selfish drive for wealth. Dante included in this group of sinners many monks, cardinals, and popes, “within whom avarice works its excess.”

A modern secular representation of greed in the world of rampant capitalism is found in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987). In one of its most famous scenes, the character of Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas), a ruthless, unscrupulous corporate raider, tells a room of shareholders, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI called greed the root of the global economic crisis of 2008. Pope Francis frequently denounced greed throughout his papacy, linking it to consumerism and the “throwaway culture,” describing it as an addiction that drives many of the world’s wars and conflicts and contributes to the climate crisis.