Article

Creed

Economics

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin

24 July 2023

6 min read

Greed: “No, I’ll never have enough”

In the third of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Jane Williams highlights how Greed destroys both individuals and societies.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

In the old Humphrey Bogart film, Key Largo, the villain, played with a vicious childishness by Edward G. Robinson, is asked by Bogie what he wants. Rocco, Robinson’s character, thinks for a bit and then says that what Rocco wants is MORE! ‘Will you ever have enough?’, Bogie asks, and Robinson thinks about it for a moment before replying, ‘I never have so far. No, I’ll never have enough’.

That is Greed, in a vivid nutshell. Rocco doesn’t want anything particular, and he doesn’t value anything in itself; he just has a vast, unspecific, insatiable desire for anything and everything, particularly if it belongs to someone else.

Rapacious greed does not love what it desires; it is driven to possess; it does not value what it has.

Greed, like all the Seven Deadly Sins, is a ‘capital’ or ‘cardinal’ sin, meaning it is a disposition from which destructive, abusive actions flow. Having this over-mastering tendency to Greed makes us act in a whole variety of ways that are damaging and abusive to others and to ourselves. Greed leads to a variety of ‘sins’. Rapacious greed does not love what it desires; it is driven to possess; it does not value what it has, because while there is ‘more’ out there somewhere, greed must have it. It does not care what or whom it attacks or destroys: anything that stands in its way must be obliterated. It does not want to admire or use what it seeks, it merely needs to possess it, and the moment the sought after thing is achieved, all-consuming greed moves onto the next thing, always seeking ‘more’, always despising what it has, as not enough.

Greed is destructive both on the personal front and also as it shapes societies. Individuals ruled by greed cannot maintain love or friendship or loyalty: their eyes are always on the next thing, always hungry for what they have not got. They leave behind them, without a backward glance, hurt and broken friends, family, colleagues, jobs. And if the fallout is clear for all the people around someone driven by greed, it is also obvious that it destroys the greedy, too.

Overpowering greed empties even the greedy of worth; they can never be successful, because they do not have what they want – everything.

Nothing can ever satisfy someone consumed by greed; there is no rest, no peace, no pleasure, because the world is full of things still to be grabbed at. Jesus is quoted as having said, ‘Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be’. It’s a warning to beware of what you long for, because we are so powerfully shaped by our desires. But if all Greed longs for is ‘more’, then, in the end, the greedy person or society has no heart at all. It is shaped only by a drive for possession, opening up a vast and echoing emptiness where an actual longed-for being or thing should live. Overpowering greed empties even the greedy of worth; they can never be successful, because they do not have what they want – everything.

It is obvious how Greed is deadly for individuals, but it is also deadly when it becomes a motivating force for society at large. The media have recently been talking again about ‘greedflation’. The theory behind the term is much debated, but the word itself is instantly memorable. Institutions that are governed primarily by the need for ‘more’ drive an insatiable economy, always needing more consumers, more profit, more rewards. Dissatisfaction and envy are the necessary tools of a society, an economy, of Greed. Individuals and groups that try to opt out of this out-of-control consumerism are viewed as a threat, and must be diminished, dismissed, cast out. It is dangerous in such a society ever to ask, ‘Do we really need more?’ That is the Emperor’s New Clothes question, which must be avoided at all costs. Surveys that ask people at different income levels whether they feel that they have enough nearly always find that everyone would like just a little bit more. Everyone would like to be at the next level up of income and possessions; but if they achieve that next level, then, strangely, they find that it is actually the level above that that really want.

Contentment lays an axe to the roots of Greed. It allows us to see what we have and value it.

The World Happiness Report, which has been regularly updated for the last 10 years, works with a complex set of definitions of what makes for happiness, for individuals and for societies. Finland regularly tops the chart of Happiest Countries in the world, which Finns find a bit puzzling, apparently. They don’t see themselves as cheerful, jolly people, but they do speak of a national characteristic that might be described as contentment. Contentment lays an axe to the roots of Greed. It allows us to see what we have and value it, rather than despising it because there are things we do not have.

One of the values that The World Happiness Report notes as making for greater happiness is altruism – doing good and receiving goodness from others makes both parties happier. The Christian tradition has known this for a long time. Cardinal Sins have their opposing Cardinal Virtues, dispositions that we can cultivate to help us to free ourselves from enslaving habits, like Greed. ‘Charity’ is the Cardinal Virtue that undermines the sin of Greed. When we give to others from our own resources, of time, money, attention, care, prayer, help of any kind, we begin to loosen the deadly grip of insatiable Greed upon ourselves and our world. Greed can’t live alongside Charity, or altruism; charity sees real people and situations in need, and supplies what it can from its own resources; Greed sees only more and more objects to be acquired, never able to see what it already has, never able to share or be content.

Deadly Sins lead to behaviour that makes for misery, both for those driven by them, and for those on the receiving end of them. That is why they are called ‘deadly’. They are not just a bit naughty; they are actively destructive of human flourishing, both personal and communal. There is so much in our society that positively encourages Greed, the reckless desire for More, which can never be satisfied. But there are ways of combatting this most pernicious of habits.

One is the practice of gratitude: instead of thinking about what we haven’t got, or would like to have, or what someone else has, we can think of what we have got, and think of it as gift, something to say thank you for. It’s a good habit to build into every day, perhaps as we go to bed, taking just a few minutes to think about the good things that have come to us that day: a child’s smile, a gleam of sunshine, a hug from a friend or partner, a delicious piece of bread; everyday things that we can take for granted, in which case they go unnoticed; or we can see that they are gifts to be grateful for, which enlarge our spirit and our wellbeing. Gratitude is a virtuous circle: it is lovely to be on the receiving end of gratitude, as well as to practice being grateful. And gratitude often leads to another excellent practice for undermining Greed, which is charity, or altruism. If we are learning how to say thank you for what we have, we may also want to share what we now notice that we have. If we’ve given the gift of gratitude, and seen how it makes us and the receiver feel, we may want to extend that further and further. Worth a try?

Interview

Belief

Books

Creed

28 August 2025

15 min read

Marilynne Robinson: “an ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar”

The self-confessed daydreamer and slacker talks with Graham Tomlin

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of best-selling novels including Housekeeping, the winner of the Hemingway Award, and Gilead, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written numerous non-fiction works, including her most recent book, of which the New York Times said: ‘Reading Genesis is alive with questions of kindness, community and how to express what we so often struggle to put into words’. Rowan Williams has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists".

This interview is an edited transcript of a Seen & Unseen Live event.

Graham
I've got a number of your books on my table here. I've got my copy of Gilead, Housekeeping. I've got Jack, all the novels. I also have a whole series of other books of essays you've written, like When I Was A Child I Read Books and The Givenness of Things - I love that title. You write a lot of different things, but you're primarily known as a novelist, and I wanted to ask how and why you became a novelist. Did you always want to write stories? Was that always part of your kind of your mind? Was it made up when you were a child growing up? Was storytelling always part of your life?

Marilynne
You know I have very vague ideas about that. I was encouraged by teachers, and so on, to feel that I could write well. That if I made a choice I could follow up on it. I took a writing class in college, a workshop. I felt I had come to Brown [University], which is in Rhode Island, from Idaho - which is definitely not in Rhode Island! I listened to people talking about the West, basically where my ancestors had settled, and it reminded me of how differently I experienced it than the way that people talked about it. So, in a way, I wanted to create a West as I felt it as a child. Especially with the importance of women in that culture, which was very great. It gave me an opportunity to just recover the sense of the strange loveliness of a very wild place, and this richness of being there. So that was my first try at fiction.

Talking about Gilead for a moment, which is the first novel of yours that I read and probably the one I still enjoy the enjoy the most. It's always struck me it's a kind of unlikely novel to become very well known. It's the story of an elderly pastor writing a long letter to his son. It's a book in which, in one sense, not many things happen. It's doesn't have big plot changes. It's not set against seismic events in history like a war or an earthquake, or a disaster. It's small-town America, quite local in many ways. Was it a real surprise to you that it became so popular? Why do you think people resonated with it in quite the way that they did?

You know, those are the kinds of questions that I hesitate to ask myself. I feel as though the ordinary with which I am identified is extremely rich, and it has a very important place in any life. An ordinary moment in its own way is sort of metaphysically unaccountable as the most spectacular moment at least as we perceive these things. An ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar. I mean, there's no point pretending that we can make gradations of interest, I think, among people. And, if I have one aesthetic banner that I fly, basically, that's it. That anything that is looked at closely, and with an eye to the fact that the beautiful is sort of the signature of reality, there's everything to be done there.

There’s a sense that everything matters, even the small things are of real significance if you look at them closely enough. And that's one of the things that comes out of the book. And rereading it recently, that focus on ordinary things came out for me. Maybe because I was aware of some close friends who died recently, the theme of death also struck me. It's a novel that is kind of anticipating death. It's about an elderly man, 76 years old, who thinks he's probably going to die soon, writing a letter to his son. Did you sense that it was a meditation on death when you were writing it?

Well, I started it simply because I had a voice in my head, and the voice in the head was saying, you know I'm going to die soon. That was the the situation of the voice that was central to the novel for me. And so it necessarily became a meditation on death, whatever death is - the cessation of life in any case. Which is a profound retrospect on things that seem trivial as we pass through them, and are amazing in retrospect, just voices and gestures, and other people.

One of the lines that stays with me from the book is one from John Ames, the main character. He says something like: ‘I've been trying to think about heaven. But I found it quite difficult to do so. But then again, I wouldn't have been able to describe this world if I hadn't spent the last 70 years walking around on it’. Has writing the book helped you think about death in a different kind of way? As we get older, I suppose it becomes more part of not our experience, but of our anticipation. Do you find you think about these things more?

I think that one of the things that's wonderful about writing novels or poetry is that it makes coherence, it puts things in relation to each other. It lets you explore your mind and understand what you read and what you are attracted to, and all the rest. I think that just the fact of writing has sort of transformed my ideas of both life and death. The need to make them, as it were, palpable or visual in one's own imagination. You have to make choices in terms of what is beautiful or what matters, So, yes, my sense of death is no doubt very much modified by having written that book and also my sense of being alive.

The other book I wanted to talk about is your latest book, Reading Genesis. It a bit of a departure for you. You've mainly written novels, essays and books of cultural commentary. You suddenly find yourself writing a book about a book of the Bible. What led you to do that? Why did you focus on Genesis rather than one of the Gospels, or the Psalms, or any other book within the Bible?

Genesis establishes so much that becomes an assumption for the rest of the Bible. It establishes the basic metaphysical circumstance of humankind in relation to God. You find it echoed everywhere. It's so basic to the whole literature that the fact is that it is very much underread and it's been exposed to centuries of criticism that was very condescending to it, as if it were a primitive literature when, of course, ancient people were capable of extremely sophisticated thinking and perceiving. I thought that in order to clarify anything subsequent to Genesis, you had to clarify Genesis. It seemed to me as if it functioned so beautifully in terms of self-referential qualities, structure, the argument was there to be made. it's not recherché or anything. It's in the text that it is literary and that certain meanings are developed by literary methods through the course of the of the book.

How did you find coming at it as a as a novelist? Most books I've read on Genesis have been technical commentaries by Biblical scholars who've researched the history of the times, and the texts around it. You come at it as a storyteller, as a novelist. Did that give you an advantage in telling the story of Genesis, looking at again, or a different angle than you'd find in many of the commentaries?

I have my limitations. I looked at it, of course, in the way that was natural for me to look at it. But I felt as if it was badly treated by critics. I asked a friend of mine, a theologian, if people still used JEDP, the old 'documentary hypothesis'. He did a poll of people that he knew that wrote in the area, and one of them said any self-respecting scholar uses the documentary hypothesis. So, I thought, well, that's not me, you know. I'm not a scholar. The documentary hypothesis is very old at this point and however many ways it's been modified its impact is essentially the same. It makes the text incoherent in its most crucial parts.

This is the hypothesis that breaks it down into different sources, and tries to identify which part of the book comes from J, or E, or D, or P?

Yes, exactly, exactly. And they question the reality of Moses, but they believe deeply in J or D. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, and they proceed as if they were a kind of documentary evidence that really does not exist. So, I thought the fact that scholarship has been manacled to this one theory for 150 years does not oblige me to be shackled to it also.

If you ask the average person their view of the God of the Old Testament they might imagine a kind of vengeful, capricious, angry character who smites people because he doesn't like them. Yet your depiction of the story seems to say, actually, no it’s God who is faithful and good and patient. It's the humans in the story who are angry and vengeful and capricious. You're turning that on its head. Some people may not be convinced by that, and are still wedded to this idea, that that the God of the Old Testament is this vengeful character. How do you respond to that when you read people who depict God in that way?

This is a very ancient thing, this making the sharp distinction between the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament, giving Moses horns and all the rest of it. This is dualism, it's a violation of the assumptions of monotheism. which I think are very beautiful and important. I'm very ready to defend monotheism, but in any case, I think that if there's a punitive structure in the narratives of the Old Testament, what they are telling us is that most of the world's evil is created by human beings and there are certain points at which it becomes intolerable under almost all circumstances. The evil that is insupportable is violence against human beings. It is the tendency of human beings who are images of God to act revoltingly badly toward human beings who are images of God. If you think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war and famine and plague, and so on, all of these things are humanly created in the vast majority of cases, perhaps every case, and I think it's an evasion of of the fact of human moral competence to say that you know God is to blame for the violence that we do.

And letting ourselves off the hook by doing that....

Yes, exactly.

You make quite a contrast between what the Book of Genesis says about humanity, for example, and some of the Babylonian myths of the time, similar creation stories like the Gilgamesh epic or the Enūma Elish. You contrasted them because they seem to give a very different understanding of humanity from what you get in in Genesis. Why does the view of humanity in Genesis have much more nobility and grandeur than these other origin stories?

Well, the idea that human beings are images of God, that is utterly Biblical. There is nothing to compare with it. Human beings are made in the Babylonian myths to do groundwork basically, to spare gods having to do work that would fall to them because they lost the war among gods. A certain number of people are created. They are not named. They are no objects of any god's devotion or anything like that. Brilliant as the Babylonians were, they're not assumed to be a creation of the status of an Adam. ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ The way that Genesis sets up, so that the beginning is this wonderful explosion of being, and at the end is this human being that reflects it all basically, that is the adequate second presence in this amazing moment. And you find that picked up in the Gospel of John. That's just very beautiful, and I know of nothing that is comparable to it in any way. Certainly not myths that were current in antiquity. Certainly not in our very declined anthropology since then.

Genesis probably is one of the most influential books in the whole of Western intellectual history, given that it's given us a whole language for thinking about the way the world is, the way we are, who God is, how we relate to one another as human beings, how human society works. Would you pick out other themes or ideas apart from that anthropology, that you think were revolutionary in the Book of Genesis?

One of the things that is amazing about it is that the people upon whom God's attention rests are very ordinary people. Abraham is not a king, or a magnate, or anything like that. He's just a wandering herdsman. The idea that the whole of history and meaning can rest on the person of someone who would have seemed quite unexceptional to the people around him as he lived. That means any of us. That's a way of re-understanding the fact that the Adamic figure at the beginning of Genesis is simply humankind. You know the grandeur and the the ordinariness are simultaneous.

The significance of each individual as a significant moral actor within the world.

Yes, exactly.

So, if Abraham has had such a role, then you and I can. And everyone listening to this or reading this conversation can do the same.

And assume that we do it. One of the things that I think is very clear historically is that people are morally competent, for one thing, and then deeply consequential. When you have an election and you make a very appalling choice, 51% of the individuals in the United States made that choice. They truly did. We can't hide behind the idea that what we do does not matter, that we're minor figures, and so on, that God knows what the ultimate consequences of these kinds of things might be. :

In writing the book, did you find yourself reflecting on the kind of current situation in America and what was going on in it? You were writing it before the recent election, but did it have any reflections for you on where your nation is right now?

Well, it necessarily has reflections on history in general, because it is about what human beings are, and how things happen among them. I would not have anticipated anything of our present circumstance, even a re-election of Trump. This is horrifying, astonishing.

I want to ask one more question. I was reading recently one of your essays, and I think it started with the line ‘I reached the point in my life when I can see what has mattered’. I wondered if you wanted to reflect back on your life as a as a novelist, as a writer, as a thinker, as a Christian? What do you find has mattered more as time has gone on, and what has mattered less? What are the things that really do matter for you now, as you look back and you see what has mattered?

I have found out how important teaching was to me. No doubt you know things become radiant in memory. I think I enjoyed the interaction of my life, and my mind, and my literary interest in that particular moment more than I've ever done in any other circumstance. One of the most important things to me was my first experience writing Housekeeping when I was in isolation more or less. Trying to remember things that had happened two decades earlier, experiences I had had, and finding out in those circumstances that I remembered them, that I knew what kind of flower bloomed, in what place, at what time, that my memory was much more active and alert than I think my conscious attention was. I found out that from that that I had lived a much broader life, a much more intense life than I realised. I would never have known that if I hadn't made the kind of demand on myself that writing that book made, writing any book makes really, but fiction especially, because you're trying to conjure a sense of reality. Even from the point of view of when I talk to my students, I say, don't imagine that you know your mind. It is much larger. There's it's almost another life beside your life. The finding that out was just incredibly important to me, not just because it helps me write, but also to find out something about what I am as a human being.

Linking that to the previous point about the the significance of each individual as a moral actor, it also maybe says something about that each of us lives much richer lives than we think we do.

Absolutely.

Maybe memory brings those things to the surface in a way that that we don't often recognize?

Exactly, and that we don't normally access. I was in a kind of an extreme situation, trying to remember Idaho while I was living in France - kind of an eccentric project. It's finding the place at which the past is evoked in the mind. Very powerful.

I'm noticing the things that otherwise you might not see which is, again back to the point about the ordinary, the ordinary being significant.

Yes.

Are there things that seemed very important to you when you were younger, that now don't seem quite so important?

You know I think of myself as a sort of a slacker. I think I have friends who could affirm my view of things as a slacker. I've always enjoyed just simply being in my own head. To the extent that it's a distraction for me. I know people who have lives like mine, who are much more productive than I am. Where did my time go? Well, daydreaming, thinking, watching, just being in my head. I was told when I was a student when I was in high school. that I should give myself a mind that I wanted to live in because I would live in it for the rest of my life, and I did that, and I have done that. And you know it's been a great pleasure, finally. Maybe I should have done more!

Well, the the daydreaming has been a very beneficial thing for the rest of us who've been able to read some of the product of that daydreaming. So, we're very grateful, Marilynne. Thank you.

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