other private, one taking thought for the common good because of the compan
Book XI 439
lntermezzo on pride and avarice
15, 19. Rightly has scripture designated pride as the beginning of all sin, saying, The beginning of all sin is pride (Sir 10: 13). Into this text can be slotted rather neatly that other one also from the apostle: The root of all evils is avarice
( 1 Tm 6: 1 0), if we understand avarice in a general sense as what goads people to go for anything more greedily than is right because of their superiority and a kind of love for their very own property. The Latin—and English—languages have given such property a very shrewd name by calling it "private," a word clearly suggesting loss rather than gain in value; every privation, after all, spells diminu tion. And so the very means by which pride aims at pre-eminence serve to thrust it down into sore straits and want, when its ruinous self-love removes it from what is common to what is its own property.15
There is a particular sort of avarice, though, which is more usually called love of money,16 and it was by this name, signifying the general by the particular, that the apostle wished universal avarice to be understood, when he said, The root of all evil is avarice. It was through this also that the devil fell—not of course that he loved money, but his own personal power. Accordingly his twisted love of self deprives that swollen, puffed-up spirit of holy companions, and confines him, so eager to sate himself through wickedness, in an ever hungry wretched ness.
Thus it is that the apostle, after saying in another place, For there will be people who love themselves, added straightaway, lovers ofmoney, coming down from that general avarice, of which pride is the source, to this particular kind which is proper to humanity. Not even human beings, after all, would be lovers of money, unless they thought that the richer they were, the more superior they would be too. In contrast with this disease charity does not seek her own, that is, does not rejoice in private pre-eminence and superiority; and rightly therefore is also not puffed up (1 Cor 13:5.4).
20. These two loves—of which one is holy, the other unclean, one social, the other private, one taking thought for the common good because of the compan ionship in the upper regions, the other putting even what is common at its own personal disposal because of its lordly arrogance; one of them God's subject, the other his rival, one of them calm, the other turbulent, one peaceable, the other rebellious; one of them setting more store by the truth than by the praises ofthose
15. For further reflection on this point, seeThe Trinity (1/5 in this series) X11,9,14, and note 42 there, where 1 remark that any notion of the sacred rights of private property would have been abhorrent to Augustine, and that he would regard the desire for private possession as "a kind of mark of Cain, the stigma of man alienated from God."
1 6. The Greek word rendered by avaritia in the Latin is in fact philargyria, "money-love." Hence the Authorized Version's "The love of money is the root of all evil," almost invariably misquoted as "Money is the root of all evil."