Coveting and Christian Desire

Commandment 10

“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col 3:5).^[1]

In the verses preceding this exhortation, the Apostle reminds the Colossians that they have been united to Christ in his resurrection and ascension. No longer are they slaves to the old order of things, inaugurated by the primordial sin of Adam and Eve. They are to seek heavenly things. Their lives are no longer confined to the earthly sphere; their true life is Christ who is at the right hand of the Father. Therefore, Paul exhorts, they are to put to death earthly desires of various kinds, culminating in that startling warning against “covetousness, which is idolatry.”

Here, in the tenth commandment’s prohibition of coveting, the Decalogue comes full circle. The tenth commandment decisively unites the two tables of the Law and points its hearers in the direction of the Law’s great summary and fulfillment in Christ’s twofold love command. Before considering the implications of this Pauline saying for a theology of the Law as a whole, I will outline a definition of coveting. Finally, I will conclude with an exploration of the primacy of love in Christian moral life and the enduring place of the Decalogue in Christian ethics.

Covetousness: God or Mammon

The Ten Commandments seem to address the community of the faithful at the level of their deeds: proscribing idolatry, stealing, and other harmful activities, prescribing Sabbath observance, and piety toward superiors. These regulations were necessary to form the life of Israel’s political community – in this sense, the Decalogue is not radically different from certain kinds of positive law which regulate our societies today (notwithstanding the theocentric character of the Decalogue). Yet, the tenth commandment poses a challenge to this merely political-social horizon for understanding the Decalogue. Rather than simply a communal charter, it appears that the formation of the Israelites’ moral character is the final purpose of the Decalogue.^[2]

So what is going on in the proscription against coveting? In the first place, the commandment belongs to the second table for a reason. The prohibition of coveting instructs the Israelites to exercise a certain restraint in their desire, especially as it relates to those things which belong to their neighbor. The neighbor’s wife, house, servants, livestock, and anything else that is his is off limits at the level of one’s desire.

This is all well and good. Things that belong to your neighbor do not belong in your own desire to possess. How, we should ask the old Apostle, does this illicit form of desire represent idolatry? In the New Testament, it is clear that the seed of human iniquity lies in malformed desire. In the midst of a dispute with the Pharisees over ritual traditions, our Lord told his disciples, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matt 15:19). Note well that he listed the entirety of the one’s second-table obligations in his list.

Where do breaches of the second table come from, according to Christ? Misshapen desire. Thus, the tenth commandment propels us back up the list of commands to consider ways we break the commandments in heart, ways our desires breed sins against the second table. We Christians have come to expect this. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord taught that harboring disordered anger towards one’s brother is akin to murder, the lustful gaze to adultery, and oath-swearing to idolatrous evil.

Yet, we must not allow our reflection on the tenth commandment to stop us from reading still further backwards: disordered desire appears to be the root of breaches against the first table as well. Nowhere is this more explicit than in Christ’s exhortation for his disciples to lay up treasures in heaven rather than earth: “for where your treasure is,” he preached, “there your heart will be also.” He continues a few verses later: “No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt 6:24).

Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Said another way: covetousness is idolatry. How can this be? To answer, a fuller account of the Bible’s depiction of human sin is in order. According to St. Augustine, there are two great rival loves at work in the human will: the love of the world and the love of God: “the love of the world must depart, the love of God come in to dwell.”^[3] Before our good theological instincts object (“the world is God’s idea, isn’t it? What makes loving the world so bad?”), we must hang with Augustine for a second. He is, indeed, working with the very language of the First Epistle of St. John:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 Jn 2:15-17)

In this passage, the great African Bishop finds a synopsis of all that is wrong with fallen human desire. “Apart from these three things, you will find nothing that tempts human covetousness – nothing but desire of the flesh or desire of the eyes or pretensions of this life.”^[4] Indeed, St. Augustine believed these three temptations are precisely those presented to our Lord by Satan in the wilderness. Stones to bread (lust of the flesh), casting himself down off the precipice to “see” that God would save him (lust of the eyes), all the kingdoms of this world (pride of life).^[5]

Even if you find the details of Augustine’s account unpersuasive (I find it rather compelling myself), he is indeed spot-on in considering Christ’s temptation in the wilderness to be archetypal. His public ministry begins with this confrontation with temptation in the wilderness in order to undo the original sin of Adam and Eve in the garden. For, indeed, something very like this threefold temptation (lust of flesh, eyes, and pride of life) was at play in the seduction of Eve by the serpent. Augustine’s claim is that this threefold division adequately reduces all that is wrong with human longing. Therefore, it is no surprise that he finds in Christ’s wilderness victory the undoing of the primordial human disorder.

Consider further, then, Christ’s response to each of the devil’s temptations. He cites, each time, a passage from Deuteronomy. First, to the effect that man’s true sustenance is not material bread but the word of God. Second, that God is not to be put to the test. Finally, and climactically, that God alone is to be worshipped. It is hard to miss the direct theological implications of each of the devil’s temptations. The point is this: all the disordered desires of humanity bottom out in a refusal to serve God alone. That is to say, disordered desire turns out to be akin to idolatry. At last, we are back to St. Paul’s stunning saying: covetousness is idolatry.

The Tensions of Love

Let us return to the objection you may have felt when I cited Augustine’s contrast of the love of the world and the love of God. He appeared to understand our loves as a zero-sum competition between the love of God and the love of this world. Is this the right way to think of it? Is the solution to the problem of human desire, our breaching of the tenth commandment, the absolute refusal of any creaturely love? Indeed, it would appear that the easiest approach to avoiding the illicit desire of creaturely goods is the refusal of all such goods in the first place. This is an age-old problem and one much commented upon in the Christian tradition.

The most ardent natural form of love was called eros by the Greeks (cupiditas by the Romans). This love, of course, refers to the passion between two romantic lovers. Eros is unitive; it is drawn to the joy of union with its beloved. It was, then, the love of passion, the intoxicating love of the fertility cult and divine ecstasy. Certain nineteenth-century critics of Christianity pined for a return to this Dionysian affirmation of erotic ecstasy and squarely blamed the impotence of Christians for sucking the classical world dry of this ecstatic element in human love.^[6]

One may phrase this critique in the form of our question to St. Augustine: is it really true that the love of God and the love of this world are opposed? If so, wouldn’t we expect that to lead to the pervasive low-level guilt at enjoying the world which seems a dime a dozen in Christian experience? Christianity claims to be a religion of “glad tidings,” but what are we to make of “the joylessness, the cramped scrupulosity, the narrowness of spirit that seems to us to be the most telling refutation of what Christianity claims to be”?^[7] The objection seems to be related to the primordial situation of man. In the words of Benedict XVI, “Did not Christianity forbid us the tree in the middle of the garden and, in doing so, really forbid us everything?”^[8]

A Christian response to these objections must turn, in the first place, to the reality of human desire “on the ground.” Is it not in fact the case that untrained desire is a recipe for human misery? Is not unchastened desire the cause of all manner of human exploitation and wretchedness? “An intoxicated and undisciplined eros,” Benedict XVI wrote, “is not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure.”^[9]

Eros that remains at the level of cupidity to possess pleasures of sense ends up reducing man to the earth: he becomes, as it were, just another beast. In order to arrive at a fully human account of love, eros must be supplemented by agape: the ecstatic love of desire must mature into the self-emptying love of charity. This is the very logic of conjugal love: the unitive end of marriage, the ecstatic love of the spouses, is ordered to the procreative end in the sacrifice of childrearing.^[10]

Thus, eros and agape belong on a spectrum, and both are necessary for a fully developed love. An eros that never gives way to the self-offering of agape is guilty of self-destructive selfishness. An agape that cannot receive the gift of the beloved fails at the level of self-understanding: we are creatures whose fulfillment lies outside of us, in the gift of another. It falls to us next, then, to consider the implications of this account of love for a Christian reflection on the tenth commandment.

Coveting and Christian Desire

A number of implications of this Biblical and theological account of love present themselves for our consideration of the tenth commandment. The central point is as follows: Christian desire must be catechized. It is one of the principle tasks of the church’s office of catechesis to aid in the maturation of Christian desire. I will attempt to do so here by outlining a few practices ordered to such maturation.

Gratitude, Contentment, Abstinence

The first practice in the catechesis of Christian desire is the discipline of gratitude and contentment. The New Testament has much to say about the way thanksgiving should predominate the Christian life, which at its most basic is the simple recognition that all things – including one’s very existence – are unsolicited gifts from God (see Jas 1:17, 1 Thess 5:16-18, 1 Tim 6:6-7, etc.). Christians should pay attention to the things they have been given and demonstrate that gratitude in acts of service. Slowly and meditatively pray through the “General Thanksgiving” from the Daily Office. Consider specific acts of gratitude you could take up that would manifest your awareness of the good things you have been given.

As a corollary, Christians are exhorted to practice periodic abstinence from even the good things of this world as a way of recalibrating our desires and weaning them off an inordinate love of created things. Christian fasting has nothing to do whatever with a belief in the badness of created things. If the things we forgo in fasting are bad in themselves, there would certainly be no merit in temporarily fasting from them! In the words of David Bentley Hart, “[Christian asceticism] is, rather, the cultivation of a pure heart and pure eye, which allow one to receive the world, and rejoice in it, not as a possession of the will or an occasion for the exercise of power, but as the good gift of God.”^[11] Such should be the goal of our periodic abstinence; that is, a renewed vision for the things of earth as gifts of God.

Prayer and Charity

It is hard to overstate the challenge of fidelity to the tenth commandment in our age of acquisitiveness. We must not naively think that a mere change of mind is going to address our infidelity to the prohibition against coveting. Rather, a reorientation of our basic habits of life is in order. Mammon lurks on every billboard, smartphone, and media outlet seeking our obeisance. If we are going to resist its rule, we must restructure the priorities of our schedules, our technology usage, our involvement in the community, our imagination of the role and rhythms of the home. Here fidelity to the tenth commandment and fidelity to the fourth commandment are related. I have already discussed some of these connections at length in my reflection on the fourth commandment regarding the Sabbath.

For now, let’s consider the dramatic way the early church resisted the rule of Mammon. The rule of Mammon, the fathers of the Church often warned, can manifest in ostensibly prudent forms of reasoning: we must save money to provide for our children, we must give them the means to a happy future, we must be wise stewards of our money. These are all, of course, very good things to say. However, they fall short of the genuinely radical break our Lord calls us to be ready for in our baptisms. Such prudential reasoning alone will leave us unprepared should fidelity require a greater sacrifice of us than is “reasonable” (consider the first Christian martyrs). The early Church was deeply attuned to this, which is why so many of them took the counsel of the Lord to the rich man seriously (Matt 19:21) and literally sold everything they had to follow Christ.

Some would argue that calculating and prudent use of money can coexist with the Christian responsibility to the common good. Christians can and should support programs of poverty relief and institutions aimed at helping the less fortunate. However, these programs themselves will never address the heart of the matter. We can support charities all we’d like and still be dominated by the demands of Mammon. “For this reason,” R.R. Reno notes, “one consistently finds that the old writers endorse forms of personal and to our minds ‘irresponsible’ charity.” This is one form of contemptus mundi, contempt of the world, advocated for by writers such as St. Augustine, following the words quoted above from the First Epistle of John. Reno continues, “The nobleman is not just to set up a poorhouse. He is to throw a springtime banquet for all. The former involves an attempt to work within the constraints of worldly affairs, because it seeks to do a good that will endure. The latter is an act of contempt for the world, for it is an act of celebration that cares not for the morrow.”^[12]

This same writer advocates, in this vein, that we “take up a discipline of ‘irresponsible’ or ‘foolish’ charity. Give and do not try to control the outcome of your giving.”^[13] I must admit that this makes me as uncomfortable as the next guy, and all the rationalizations of prudence rush forward in my mind, but the words of Christ in the Gospel stand. We don’t do well by trying to avoid the tensions created by Christ’s teaching. This is true if for no other reason than that they come to us in the form of Christ’s loving invitation. Consider Luke 12: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old” (Lk 12:32-33). In order to overcome our avaricious and disordered love of things, at least some form of disciplined contemptus mundi is in order.

The final practice I will discuss here is the contempt of the world embodied in the discipline of prayer. Reno, again: “The discipline of prayer is a stick in the eye of worldly necessity. The morning and evening offices are pure and perfect opportunities to waste time. The sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving involves a spiritual contempt for the world, because it snatches our lips and hands from the maw of Mammon and redirects them toward God.”^[14] Thus, we should rearrange our schedules, as best we can, around some form of disciplined prayer.

The Anglican tradition provides for us richly in the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. This disciplined prayer should include not only the public offices of the church, but even private prayers and meditation upon Holy Scripture.^[15] These practices should be thought of as a part of the maturation of Christian desire. The final way to avoid the fate of illicit coveting is filling oneself with holy desire. “If we are greedy,” Augustine writes, “we should be greedy for eternal life.”^[16] A merely proscriptive approach to the tenth commandment will not do.

At the end of the day, the reason why fidelity to the tenth commandment matters is because of the power of human desire. Untrained desire will lead men round and round in circles looking for the next pleasure. In the end, it would seem, everyone gets what he desires. In the words of St. Augustine, “the being of every man is according to his love. Dost thou love the earth? To earth thou shalt return. Dost thou love God? . . . A god thou shalt be.”^[17]

Love and the Decalogue

The tenth commandment brings the Decalogue to its end. I mean this in two respects. The prohibition against coveting completes the Ten Commandments. Furthermore, it brings them to the doorstep of their true fulfillment: the law of love. In the words of St. Paul, “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom 13:10). The solution to evil covetousness, as we have seen, is the proper love of God and neighbor. Desire replaced with desire, love surpassed by an even greater love.

At the end of the law which hangs like a chandelier, as it were, on the twofold love command, we are confronted with the face of Jesus Christ. In his person and ministry we find the fullest of all expressions of the twofold vocation of love. Of course, gazing upon such dazzling righteousness has not always been a comfort for conflicted consciences. Any honest soul gazing into the perfection of Jesus’ charity must feel the sting of dissimilitude. But in Christ we have not only an exemplar of the Law’s fulfillment, but also an Advocate in our failure to measure up. “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sin” (1 Jn 2:1-2a).

We cannot stop there. For the Law is not only a tutor to bring us to Christ in contrition, but it is also a teacher to help us to follow him in repentance. We have seen that the Decalogue is a fruitful point of departure for Christian moral reflection, adequately summarizing our duties toward God and neighbor. We must take up the Decalogue in order to see not just the face of Christ and in that mirror our sin, but also the face of him whom one day we will resemble. “When he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:3).

In this light, we might even hear the Decalogue as a promise which we should embrace by faith and hope. Not just “thou shalt have none other gods but me,” but “thou shall have none other gods but me.”^[18] Then, we must not only believe, but begin living, like the fulfillment of that promise is even now underway in our stumbling attempts to live out the commandments: “for this is the love of God,” St. John writes, “that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 Jn 5:3). Love transforms them from a duty into a delight.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, biblical references in this post will be taken from the The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway, 2001. ↑
2. I could imagine an objection to this statement along the lines that proscribing coveting does indeed have a political-social horizon (just one domino prior to the domino addressed in the sixth and seventh commandments, if you will). I would not want to deny the truth of the political implications of the tenth commandment; however, taken in light of the development of reflection on the Law in the OT canon, it would be hard to deny that the formation of moral character is one of the chief goals of the Decalogue. The proscription against coveting is the beginning of this development in the OT canon. ↑
3. Augustine, “Second Homily: I John 2:12-17,” in Homilies on I John, in Augustine: Later Works, ed. and trans. John Burnaby, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 274. ↑
4. Augustine, “Second Homily: I John 2:12-17,” 277. ↑
5. Augustine, “Second Homily,” 277. ↑
6. I am thinking, of course, of Friedrich Nietzsche. See Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, [Encyclical Letter on Christian Love], The Holy See, December 25, 2005, §4-8, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html#_ftnref1. ↑
7. Benedict XVI, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D., (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 76. ↑
8. Benedict XVI, Principles of Catholic Theology, 77. ↑
9. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §4. ↑
10. This maturation process in human love must cannot be confused with a repudiation of eros altogether. Unfortunately, this is a mistake as common as it is fatal. In “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis notes that a subtle shift in the language of Christian discipleship has taken place. The highest virtue appears to many contemporaries to be unselfishness. Yet, Lewis asserts, the traditional Christian position on the question would have unequivocally stated that love is the highest virtue. The problem with this change, he reckoned, is that a negative has been substituted for a positive, giving the impression that Christianity is fundamentally about self-denial. “The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial,” he said, “but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.” He concludes the first paragraph of the sermon in the following words:Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Essays, (1949; New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 25-26. ↑
11. David Bentley Hart, “God or Nothingness,” in I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, ed. by Carl E. Braaten and Christopher R. Seitz, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 74. ↑
12. R. R. Reno, “God or Mammon,” in I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, ed. by Carl E. Braaten and Christopher R. Seitz, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 234. ↑
13. Reno, “God or Mammon,” 234. ↑
14. Reno, “God or Mammon,” 235. ↑
15. A very accessible starting point for some of the disciplines of the spiritual life is Brant Pitre, Introduction to the Spiritual Life, (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021). ↑
16. Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms, Exposition 2 of Psalm 90 [12], cited in Reno, “God or Mammon,” 235. ↑
17. Augustine, “Second Homily,” 278. This is, of course, referring to the classic Christian teaching of deification or union with God. Not some sort of strange polytheism! ↑
18. This insight comes from Gilbert Meilaender, “Hearts Set to Obey,” in I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, ed. by Carl E. Braaten and Christopher R. Seitz, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 274-5. ↑