What the Saints Say About the Fight Against Avarice

“The love of money”: Saint Paul’s verdict

The entire Christian perspective on avarice arises from a verse in the First Letter to Timothy. Saint Paul warns his disciple against those who see religion as a matter of gain, and he states the formula that will run through all the Fathers’ treatises.

“For the love of money is the root of all evils. Some, by becoming attached to it, have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”
— First Letter to Timothy 6:10 (trad. AELF)^[5]

The Greek word is precise: philargyria, the love (philia) of money (argyros). Paul does not condemn the possession of goods nor their use, but the attachment that makes them an end in themselves. And he immediately describes its double fruit: the loss of faith—because one cannot serve two masters—and “many pains,” that anxiety which gnaws at the one who has made money his support. A few verses earlier, the Apostle had given the remedy in a formula that monks would make their own:

“Of course, there is great gain in religion if we are content with what we have. Just as we brought nothing into this world, we can take nothing out of it. If we have enough to eat and to wear, let us be content with that.”
— First Letter to Timothy 6:6-8 (trad. AELF)^[6]

Saint Thomas Aquinas’s definition: a disordered love of possessing

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) gathered this entire tradition in question 118 of the Secunda Secundae, entirely devoted to avarice (De avaritia). His definition is brief and authoritative: avarice is a disordered love of external goods, and above all of money, which represents them all.

“[...] it is defined as ‘an immoderate love of possession.’ [...] Consequently, it is a sin against God, like all mortal sins, inasmuch as eternal good is despised for the sake of temporal good.”
— Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 118, a. 1 (body of the article, Cerf trans.)^[7]

The key word is disordered (immoderatus). Thomas does not regard wealth as evil — foresight, reasonable saving, and care for what is necessary are virtuous. Sin begins when the love of goods exceeds the measure of reason: when they are acquired unjustly, kept when they should be given, or simply when one becomes attached to them to the point of placing one’s heart in them. Avarice, he specifies, is “twofold” opposed to virtue: by excess of acquisition (against justice owed to one’s neighbor) and by lack of generosity (against liberality)^[8].

Distinguishing Avarice, Right Foresight, and Liberality

Spiritual masters emphasize a distinction that conscience often confuses, because avarice excels at disguising itself as wisdom and prudence.

Note: the virtue of liberality holds the golden mean between two contrary vices, avarice which withholds too much and prodigality which wastes. The test is not the amount possessed — a poor person can be avaricious, a rich person liberal — but the place of the heart: am I master of money, or its servant?

Why Avarice Is Idolatry

If the saints so feared avarice, it is because they saw in it, behind its prosaic appearance, a true worship rendered to a false god. Saint Paul writes this twice, in explicit terms.

“Put to death therefore what belongs only to the earth: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and this craving for possessions, which is idolatry.”
— Letter to the Colossians 3:5 (trad. AELF)^[12] The miser truly has another god. Mammon — the Aramaic name for wealth, which the Gospel almost personifies as a power — receives what is due only to God: trust (“my money guarantees me”), love (“where your treasure is, there your heart will be,” Mt 6:21), the service of an entire life. That is why Christ presents His alternative not as advice, but as a metaphysical impossibility:

“No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
— Gospel according to Saint Luke 16:13 (trad. AELF; cf. Mt 6:24)^[13]

A “foreign” vice: the lesson of John Cassian

One of the most penetrating analyses comes from the Desert Fathers. Saint John Cassian (c. 360–435), who transmitted the wisdom of the Egyptian monks to the West, devotes Book VII of his Institutions to “the spirit of avarice” (De spiritu philargyriae). He makes a decisive observation: unlike gluttony or lust, which arise from needs inscribed in the very nature of the body, avarice corresponds to no natural need. It is a vice coming from outside, grafted onto the soul by a depraved will.

Cassian draws a formidable yet consoling consequence from this: since this vice has no root in nature, it should be “the easiest to cut out” — one can live perfectly well without hoarding. But if it takes root, it becomes “the hardest to uproot,” because it has no limit: the stomach is satisfied, avarice never. He calls money a “cruel king” who, as soon as one yields a little, soon demands everything, and makes the monk a slave whom nothing satisfies^[14].

This insight aligns with common experience: one never has “enough.” This is exactly what Qoheleth said, and what the saints will repeat endlessly — avarice promises security that it never gives.

"Whoever loves money never has enough money"

The first trait the saints highlight is insatiability. Avarice is the only appetite that its own satisfaction worsens: the more one possesses, the more one fears losing it, and the more one wants to possess even more. The Old Testament had already established this truth in a book of wisdom frequently cited by the Church Fathers.

"Whoever loves money never has enough money, and whoever loves abundance reaps nothing. This too is but vanity."
— Ecclesiastes 5:9 (trad. AELF)^[15]

This is the central paradox of the vice: it seeks rest by the very means that forbid it. The miser hoards to be at peace but never knows peace, for there is always more to gain and always more to lose. Saint Paul expressed it differently — the love of money brings "countless troubles" (1 Tim 6:10). Possession was supposed to bring security; instead, it brings the anxiety of keeping it.

The Foolish Rich Man: "This very night your life will be demanded from you"

Christ painted the miser in a parable that the saints have continually commented on: that of a man whose lands yielded so much that he decided to tear down his barns to build bigger ones, and said to himself: "You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." But God’s sentence falls that very night.

"You fool: this very night your life will be demanded back from you. And what you have accumulated, whose will it be? This is what happens to the one who stores up for himself instead of being rich toward God."
— Gospel according to Saint Luke 12:20-21 (trad. AELF)^[16] Christ had introduced the parable with a warning aimed directly at the vice: “Be on your guard against all covetousness, for a person’s life, even in abundance, does not depend on what he possesses” (Lk 12:15, trad. AELF)^[17]. There lies the lie of avarice: making people believe that life depends on goods. The rich man of the parable is not punished for having managed well, but for having placed his security in his barns instead of God, and for having forgotten the poor and death. “Rich toward God”: that is the only fortune the night does not take back.

Saint Basil: "The bread you keep belongs to the hungry"

No Father has commented on this parable more forcefully than Saint Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379), in his homily Against Avarice (“I will destroy my barns...”). Basil turns the miser’s objection—“Whom do I wrong, since I only take what is mine?”—on its head by showing that the surplus withheld is already a good stolen from the poor.

“The bread you lock away belongs to the one who is hungry; the garment you keep in your chests belongs to the one who is naked; the shoe that rots in your house belongs to the one who has none; the gold you bury belongs to the one in need.”
— Saint Basil of Caesarea, Homily Against Avarice^[18]

The argument is unassailable: what I let rot in my stores while another dies for lack of it, I have taken from him. Basil then describes the soul of the miser as a bottomless pit—“the desires of avarice can neither be satisfied nor quenched”—and warns him of the fate of the foolish rich man: “Fool, this very night your soul will be demanded of you; and what you have stored up, to whom will it belong?”^[19] The granary once thought to be a safeguard becomes, at the hour of death, the witness to all that was not given.

Saint Ambrose: “You do not give from your own goods”

Saint Ambrose of Milan (c. 340–397), in his treatise De Nabuthe (“The Story of Naboth”), takes the biblical account of the poor Naboth stripped of his vineyard by King Ahab (1 Kgs 21) to deliver the most famous indictment of Christian antiquity against the avarice of the rich. His formula, echoed even in the Church’s social teaching, overturns the very idea of almsgiving:

“It is not from your own goods that you show generosity to the poor: you return to him what belongs to him. For what was given in common for the use of all, you appropriate to yourself alone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.”
— according to Saint Ambrose of Milan, De Nabuthe^[20] For Ambrose, the earth and its fruits were created “in common” for all men. The rich man who keeps his surplus while another lacks does not make a generous gift when he gives: he restores. “Nature does not know the rich: she gives birth to us all poor,” he writes again^[21]. This statement, quoted by Paul VI in Populorum progressio, has nourished the entire doctrine of the universal destination of goods: property is legitimate, but it is burdened with a social mortgage; the surplus is owed to the indigent in strict justice, not by mere favor.

Saint John Chrysostom: “not sharing is stealing”

In the East, Saint John Chrysostom (c. 349–407), the greatest preacher of the Greek Church, hammered the same truth in his homilies on the poor Lazarus (Lk 16). His phrase was retained by the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself, at the heart of the doctrine on love for the poor:

“Not sharing one’s goods with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their life. These are not our goods that we hold, but theirs.”
— Saint John Chrysostom, quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2446^[22]

The Catechism draws from these Fathers a demanding rule: “Love of the poor is incompatible with the immoderate love of riches or their selfish use” (CCC 2445)^[23]. Chrysostom does not preach contempt for goods in themselves, but for their use: wealth is entrusted as a deposit, to be shared. To keep it for oneself alone while Lazarus dies at the door is to commit the injustice of the rich man — not because he took Lazarus’s goods, but because he gave him nothing.

If avarice is so formidable, it is because it never remains alone. Saint Thomas, following Saint Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), ranks avarice among the capital vices — that is, the vices that give rise to a whole lineage of sins^[24]. He describes its genealogy with his usual precision, distinguishing the sins that avarice causes to be committed in thought from those it causes to be committed in action.

“The daughters of avarice are: betrayal, fraud, deceit, perjury, anxiety, violence, and the hardening of the heart against mercy.”
— according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 118, a. 8^[25]

Thomas explains the order of this lineage. Regarding the unjust acquisition of another’s goods, the miser sometimes employs force — this is violence; sometimes cunning: by words, this is deceit (fallacia), confirmed by oath, this is perjury; by acts concerning things, this is fraud; concerning persons, this is betrayal — “like Judas, who betrayed Christ out of greed.” As for the use of goods, the miser is tormented by restless anxiety, “for the lover of money never has enough money” (Eccl 5:9, trad. AELF); and regarding the refusal to give, he hardens his heart to the point of insensitivity to mercy^[26].

Reading: avarice almost never bursts forth all at once. It begins with anxiety — that anxious care to keep — and ends, if left unchecked, with the betrayal of Judas. In between, it teaches the heart to lie, to cheat, to swear falsely, and above all to close itself off: “hardness against mercy” is its surest mark, for the miser sees the poor and then no longer sees them.

From Anxiety to Betrayal: The Case of Judas

Tradition has seen in Judas the culmination and ultimate fruit of avarice. The evangelist Saint John notes this without restraint: before betraying Christ for thirty pieces of silver, Judas was already stealing from the common purse.

“He spoke thus, not out of concern for the poor, but because he was a thief: as he held the common purse, he used to take what was put into it.”
— Gospel according to Saint John 12:6 (trad. AELF)^[27] The scene is revealing: Judas protests against the perfume “wasted” by Mary at Jesus’ feet, in the name of the poor — and it is avarice speaking under the mask of charity. The Fathers saw in this the entire slope of the vice: one begins by stealing a few coins, and ends by selling God. Avarice, as Thomas said, “delivers a person”; and there is no person it is not capable of delivering, even the Savior.

The rich young man: “he went away sorrowful”

No scene in the Gospel better shows the paralyzing power of avarice than that of the rich young man. He has done all that is good, he seeks perfection; but when Christ asks him to detach himself from his possessions to follow Him, attachment prevails over the desire for the Kingdom.

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you own, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. When the young man heard this, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”
— Gospel according to Saint Matthew 19:21-22 (trad. AELF)^[28]

This is one of the few passages in the Gospel where someone, directly invited by Christ, refuses — and the cause is named: “he had great possessions.” What follows is the sentence that the saints have so often meditated on: “I tell you again: it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Mt 19:24, trad. AELF)^[29]. Not that wealth damns by itself — “what is impossible for men is possible for God,” Christ immediately adds — but because attachment to goods makes the heart too heavy to rise. The young man’s sorrow is the very diagnosis of avarice: he possesses so much that he is no longer free to give all.

The rich man and Lazarus: the closed door

The parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Lk 16:19-31) shows the other extreme of the vice: not the brutal act, but the omission. The rich man did not strip Lazarus; he simply ignored him, day after day, lying at his gate. And it is this indifference — Thomas’s “hardness against mercy” — that condemns him.

The Gospel reproaches the rich man for no spectacular crime: neither theft nor violence. His sin was living in abundance “feasting sumptuously every day” without seeing the poor man at his door. Avarice did not need to make him commit a glaring injustice; it was enough to make him close his eyes. This is why the saints so fear this discreet vice: it does not always make great sinners, but it creates blind hearts, who believe themselves just because they have taken nothing, yet have given nothing.

Against such a deep vice, the saints do not oppose a mere effort to “care less about money”—that would still be focusing on money. They oppose a turning of the heart: moving from possession to giving, from security in goods to trust in God. Each root of avarice corresponds to a precise weapon.

Liberality: Making Money a Servant

The primary weapon is the opposite virtue: liberality, which does not primarily consist in giving much, but in having a free heart, so that money serves instead of commanding. Saint Paul gives the evangelical rule:

“Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
— Second Letter to the Corinthians 9:7 (trad. AELF)^[30]

Liberality heals avarice at its root: it loosens the grip. Where the miser holds back, the liberal gives—and discovers that money, returned to its function as an instrument, ceases to be a master. This is the constant teaching of the saints: one does not free oneself from money by thinking about it less, but by passing it through the open hand. Saint Thomas indeed classifies liberality among the parts of justice: it restores goods to their true order, which is to serve man and, through him, the common good.

Almsgiving: “Give what is inside, and all will be clean”

The concrete means of this liberality is almsgiving, which the entire tradition holds as the proper remedy for avarice and even as a “ransom” of the soul. Christ said this in direct response to the Pharisees attached to their gold:

“But give as alms those things that are within; and behold, everything is clean for you.”
— Gospel according to Saint Luke 11:41 (trad. AELF)^[31]

The Old Testament had already made almsgiving a power that “delivers from death” (Tob 4:10; 12:9)^[32] and a means to “redeem one’s sins” (Dan 4:24)^[33]. The Fathers, Saint Cyprian foremost in his treatise On Good Works and Almsgiving, saw in it the exact antidote to avarice: what the vice folds inward, almsgiving opens outward toward neighbor and God^[34]. Giving is not losing: it is “storing up treasure in heaven” (Mt 6:20), placing one’s goods where “neither moth nor rust destroys.” Almsgiving is thus the daily expression of the battle: each act of sharing is a blow struck against the idol.

Poverty of Heart: The First Beatitude

More profoundly, the radical remedy is poverty of heart — not necessarily material destitution, but that inner freedom of the poor who place their security only in God. It is the first of the beatitudes and the gateway to all the others.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
— Gospel according to Saint Matthew 5:3 (trad. AELF)^[35]

Poverty of heart is the exact opposite of avarice: where the miser says “my treasure, my security,” the poor in heart say “the Lord is my portion” (Ps 15:5). One can be rich and poor in heart — like Abraham, like so many lay saints who used great wealth without attachment — and one can be destitute yet consumed by avarice. The key is to know where one has placed one’s treasure: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Mt 6:21)^[36]. This is the whole path of detachment, which we will follow in What the Saints Say About Detachment.

Trust in Providence: “Do Not Worry”

Avarice is ultimately fed by the fear of tomorrow. Its ultimate antidote is filial trust in Providence, which Christ contrasts word for word with the worry of the miser, in the same discourse that forbids serving two masters:

“Look at the birds of the sky: they neither sow nor reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? [...] Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you besides.”
— Gospel according to Saint Matthew 6:26, 33 (trad. AELF)^[37]

The miser hoards because he trusts only himself; the trusting person rests on a Father who knows what he needs. That is why trust is the decisive weapon: it cuts the root of worry, the first daughter of vice. As long as one believes life depends on barns, one hoards; as soon as one knows it depends on God, the hand opens. Here we return to the spirit of thanksgiving that knows how to receive everything from God: What the Saints Say About Gratitude.

Saint Francis of Assisi and “Lady Poverty”

No saint has gone further in victory over avarice than Saint Francis of Assisi (1181–1226). The son of a wealthy cloth merchant, he publicly returned even his clothes to his father so as to have no other wealth than God, and made poverty the spouse of his entire life — the “Lady Poverty” (domina Paupertas) whom he sang and served as a queen^[38]. In his Rule (1223), confirmed by his Testament (1226), he asks the brothers to possess nothing of their own, so as to remain free and joyful as “pilgrims and strangers” in this world.

In the end, the voice of the saints on avarice says one constant thing: it is the vice that believes itself most reasonable. The miser never admits to being a miser; he calls himself prudent, wise, responsible. That is why the first battle is to recognize it—in that tightening of the heart at the thought of giving, in that secret preference given to security over charity, in that way of seeing the poor at one’s door without really seeing them. Avarice is the sin that disguises itself as virtue, and it is this disguise that makes it so tenacious.

But this clarity is not despair: it is the threshold of freedom. For the remedy is within reach—it is in the hand, precisely, that only needs to be opened. It is not a question of despising goods, but of restoring them to their place: servants and not masters, instruments of good and not idols. “The root of all evils is the love of money”: the whole struggle consists in uprooting this love and transferring it to God and neighbor. Where avarice closes and withers, liberality opens and expands; where avarice isolates the rich man in his anguish, almsgiving makes him a brother to the poor. The saint is not one who has never possessed, but one who, possessing or not, has kept his heart free—free enough to give everything, because he has understood that his only treasure is in Heaven, and that “where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”

• What the Saints Say About Detachment — the inner aspect of the same struggle: detaching oneself from possessions to have a free heart, without necessarily giving up everything.
• What the Saints Say About the Fight Against Pride — the common root: avarice is often a way of securing oneself against God.
• What the Saints Say About Temperance — the virtue that moderates all appetites for possession and enjoyment.
• What the Saints Say About Justice — giving each their due: withholding the surplus is a debt owed to the poor (Ambrose, Chrysostom).
• What the Saints Say About the Fight Against Envy — the vice related to comparison, where the possession of others inflames covetousness.
• What the Saints Say About Gratitude — the antidote for a heart that knows how to receive everything from God instead of hoarding for itself.