Few vices are so frequently misnamed as envy. In ordinary conversation, we routinely confuse envy with jealousy and covetousness. Yet the distinction is not merely semantic, because each disorders our relationship to the good in a different way. Covetousness reaches for a good we lack; jealousy guards a good we claim; envy grieves because another person possesses a good. At its worst, envy would rather see that good destroyed than enjoyed by someone else.
First, envy is not the same thing as jealousy. In common conversation, the two are often confused, but the difference is not inconsequential. Jealousy is ultimately derived from the Greek word zelos, meaning, among other things, ardent love or fervor. For that reason, you can be jealous of something that you already possess, like a car or your good reputation. Jealousy, unlike envy, does not necessarily refer to another's possessions.
Jealousy is fundamentally a desire to protect one's possession of a good and, far from being necessarily opposed to reason, may arise from a legitimate claim upon something. This is how God can be referred to as jealous in Exodus 20:5 and elsewhere in Scripture: His jealousy expresses His rightful covenantal claim upon His people and His demand for their exclusive worship.
Like any passion, jealousy can become vicious, and this is the primary way in which we speak of it. In the Summa, St. Thomas distinguishes between the zeal arising from the love of friendship and that arising from the love of concupiscence. He explains that zeal arises from an “intensity of love,” and that, as intensity grows in any power, that power more vigorously withstands opposition. This zeal becomes twisted when it is focused inwardly, such that one is “moved against all that hinders his gaining or quietly enjoying the object of his love.” Hence, the trope of the jealous spouse. Vicious jealousy arises from a disordered desire to protect what one possesses, or what one imagines one ought to possess. Anyone familiar with unrequited love can relate to feelings of jealousy upon seeing their love interest fall for someone else. This feeling is an example of the vice of jealousy insofar as one wrongly wishes to protect a good that is not one's own.
Jealousy is still different from the vice of covetousness, which is a lust after goods we do not possess.
Envy is not primarily concerned with desire; it begins in sorrow at another's good and tends toward hatred. The Latin word from which envy is derived is invidere: to look against someone, or to look upon someone with ill will. While covetousness inordinately desires some good, and jealousy seeks to protect a good, envy breeds malice toward anyone enjoying what we lack. Envy does not merely desire to possess; at its worst, it wants to dispossess. As it matures, envy acts out of a desire to harm.
Aristotle says envy is “pain at the sight of good fortune [...] not with the idea of getting something for ourselves, but because the other people have it.”
The popular audio series, Adventures in Odyssey, illustrated envy with a short story I will roughly paraphrase. Once upon a time there was a market. In it was a cobbler's stall, and across from his stall was a weaver. Each day people bought the weaver's goods, and it was rare for anyone to buy his shoes. One night, a fairy appeared to the cobbler and promised him one wish. However, the fairy warned him that whatever he wished for, the weaver would receive twice as much. Upon reflecting, the cobbler wished that half his business would be destroyed.
Envy makes someone else’s success loathsome simply because they have it. Envy defines goods comparatively and competitively: if I can't have it, no one can. In his book Envy, Joseph Epstein writes:
“[The envious] also have a restless competitiveness, which will not cease nagging away at them until they feel themselves clearly established as first among unequals.”
Envy also corrupts our disposition toward ourselves, since it prevents us from enjoying our own goods except comparatively: what we possess ceases to satisfy us unless another possesses less.
Like the cobbler, envy can make us desire our own injury for the sake of hurting another. We have fully inverted the will; good has become evil, and self-destruction becomes fulfillment. Envy is the diabolical imagination. Scripture itself makes this connection: “Through the envy of the devil, death entered the world” (Wisdom 2:24). The devil, who has renounced his place with God, seeks to destroy the Sons of God out of envy. If he will not enjoy paradise, neither shall we.
In De Malo, St. Thomas says, “Envying implies something contrary to charity by the very relation of the act to its object.” This is because friendship requires us to wish good things for our friends just as we wish them for ourselves.
Many of the other vices continue to pursue some legitimate good, albeit by disordered means or to an inordinate degree. They may yet beget violence against others, and in this way we see them starkly contrary to reason. Envy is distinctive, however, because it can make another's injury appear good in itself, even when securing that injury requires us to sacrifice our own objective good.
Envy moves us to consider goods competitively, seeing another's gain as our loss, and likewise his loss as our gain. Following this logic, the envious man will even damage his own objective good to harm another, even a friend, as he sees this ultimately as his gain. This is the particular way in which envy is contrary to reason, standing out even among the other vices such as jealousy or covetousness. We need not consider it the worst or most contrary to reason among them absolutely, but it is nonetheless unique in the way that it makes its bearer willing to harm himself to sate his malice against another.
As we witness a rise in public support for socialism, we should recognise envy as a principal cause. Someone motivated by envy will desire the destruction of another’s good even if he must also suffer loss himself. This helps explain why the catastrophic record of past socialist regimes does not always dissuade their modern adherents. Those revolutions may not have brought about utopia, but, for a mind governed by envy, they at least cut down the “rich.”
Ultimately, what we need is love rooted in gratitude. Principally, we need charity, which teaches us to rejoice in our neighbour’s good, together with the virtue of religion, by which we render to God the worship and gratitude He deserves. Every good is first a gratuitous gift from our Creator. Envy, covetousness, and disordered jealousy all arise from a misapprehension of reality: we treat goods as though they were owed to us and their possession by another were an injustice against us. In truth, we cannot claim God’s gifts as our due; if we speak only in terms of what we deserve, our sins make us deserving of judgment rather than entitled to reward. Only gratitude rooted in metaphysical and moral realism—in the recognition that goodness is first received as gift—can undo the malice that envy creates toward our neighbours.
