Virtue of Detachment (Part 1)

By Engr. Carlos Cornejo

Let us talk about the vice of greed and its opposite, the virtue of detachment.

We will understand more the virtue when we talk first of the vice, in the same way that we will only appreciate health if we get to know first what sickness is.  Greed is defined as an intense and selfish desire for wealth.  Its old name is “covetousness”.

Christian tradition ranks it even ahead of lust and second only to pride in the list of all-time spiritual villains or the seven capital sins.  St. Paul calls it “the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10).  It is greed, the love of money, “the immoderate desire for temporal possessions which can be estimated in money”, as St. Thomas defines it in his book the Summa Theologiae.

Money is ubiquitously tempting because of a kind of umbrella principle, covering everything money can buy.  It also is (or rather falsely promises to be) a security blanket against change.

Acquiring medical insurance for example is supposedly to make sure you have enough finances to spend for your medical expenses in the future.  But this only protects you from financial fear, how about the fear of getting sick or the fear of dying?  Do we have some kind of insurance for that too?  The answer is yes, but it is not monetary but spiritual in nature.

There is nothing wrong to desire possessions for it is natural for man to desire external things as a means or as tools to live our lives.  But greed is turning these means into an end, into a goal, a goal that becomes the most important thing in life or turning goods into gods.  And when a created thing is made into a god it becomes evil.

Jesus spoke more about greed than about any other sin.  Just count the number of times He talked about money— “riches”, “possessions”, and “mammon” in the Gospels.  He shocked his disciples with many hard sayings about detachment from worldly goods and about how hard it would be for a rich man to enter his Kingdom.

St. James even discovered the root of war through greed when he wrote: “What causes wars and what causes fighting among you?  Is it not your passions that are at war in your members?  You desire and do not have; so, you kill.  And you covet and cannot obtain; so, you fight and wage war” (James 4:1-2).

This is a more accurate diagnosis on the root of wars versus the diagnoses of war experts who often attribute it to politics or ideology.

Greed for money is at the root of most crimes in our society.  It comes in the form of graft and corruption, robbery, theft, swindling, tax evasion, smuggling, etc.  There would not be a day that you would not read or hear news of a crime that is not related to it. More on this virtue in the next article.