Within the depth-psychology corpus, avarice occupies a distinctive structural position: it is the one capital passion consistently identified as exogenous to human nature rather than rooted in the body’s constitution. John Cassian, transmitting the Evagrian taxonomy to the West, singles it out as a ‘demon clearly foreign to our nature,’ gaining purchase only through deficient faith—yet, once established, more intractable than the bodily vices. Evagrius himself places it among the three ‘major principalities’ alongside self-indulgence and love of praise, grouping it with the appetitive faculty of the soul. The Platonic tradition anticipates this psychology in the Republic’s portrait of the oligarchic man, where avarice enthroned displaces reason and spirit alike, reducing the soul to a divided servitude. In Thomas Moore’s Jungian reading, avarice signals the loss of money’s inherent ‘soulfulness’—the collapse of communal exchange into compulsive accumulation. William James, always alert to sudden conversion phenomena, documents avarice as a organizing passion capable of restructuring an entire personality around a single resolution. The patristic writers of the Philokalia consistently define freedom from avarice as a cardinal virtue, treating it as the misuse of material things rather than condemnation of matter itself—a nuance that separates their moral psychology from mere ascetic world-hatred. Across all these registers, the term functions as a diagnostic marker for a psyche that has substituted a fetish object for genuine interiority.
avarice, a demon clearly foreign to our nature, who only gains entry into a monk because he is lacking in faith… it is ‘the root of all evil’ (1 Tim. 6:10).
Cassian’s foundational thesis that avarice is uniquely exogenous among the passions, entering from outside rather than arising from embodied nature, yet capable of becoming more destructive than all other vices once established.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not esteem but self-esteem.
Maximos the Confessor articulates the Philokalic principle that avarice is the misuse of created things, not a condemnation of matter itself, locating evil in the will’s distortion rather than in the object.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
Avarice is enthroned as his bosom’s lord, and assumes the style of the Great King; the rational and spirited elements sit humbly on the ground at either side.
Plato’s portrait of the oligarchic soul demonstrates how avarice usurps sovereign authority over the psyche, subordinating both reason and spirit to a single tyrannical passion.
, Republic, -380thesis
To master the mundane will of the fallen self you have to fulfill three conditions. First, you have to overcome avarice by embracing the law of righteousness, which consists in merciful compassion for one’s fellow beings.
Nikitas Stithatos positions avarice as the first of three principal ruling passions to be conquered, linking its cure specifically to righteousness and compassionate relation with others.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
Greed, avarice, cheating, and embezzlement are signs that the soul of money has been lost. We act out the need for wealth of soul through its fetish, gathering actual sums of money without regard for morality.
Moore reframes avarice psychologically as a symptom of soul-loss, an acting-out of the need for inner richness through the compulsive accumulation of its material surrogate.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
In John Foster’s Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to quote.
James cites avarice as a paradigm case of sudden psychological conversion, demonstrating how a single crisis can restructure an entire personality around the organizing principle of accumulation.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
through their purity they had destroyed the enemy, but because of their hardness of heart, which is engendered by avarice, they drove the enemy’s sword through their own bodies.
Neilos the Ascetic identifies avarice as the generator of hardness of heart, a passion that undoes spiritual victories already won by turning the soul toward coveted external prizes.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
the man who has conquered this vice has cut out care, but the man who has it can never pray with a pure mind to God.
John Climacus links the conquest of avarice directly to the possibility of pure prayer, establishing an intrinsic psychospiritual incompatibility between acquisitive attachment and contemplative attention.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600supporting
I have already described the causal connection of thoughts of vanity and fornication, and the sequences in thoughts of poverty, avarice, and vanity.
Sorabji, drawing on Evagrius, documents the causal sequencing of avarice within the logismoi system, showing how thoughts of poverty generate avarice which in turn generates vainglory.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
freedom from avarice, compassion, mercifulness, generosity, fearlessness, freedom from dejection, deep compunction.
The Philokalic enumeration of soul-virtues positions freedom from avarice as a discrete attainment nested among the virtues of compassion and generosity, defining it as a positive spiritual state rather than mere absence.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Gluttony is the mother of lust… Ie. (in the Evagrian scheme) of gluttony, vainglory and avarice. But Climacus does not in fact mention avarice in the present passage, although he treats it as one of the three chief vices in Step 17.
Climacus’s editorial note reveals his own triadic schema of chief vices, placing avarice alongside gluttony and vainglory as a primary generative source of the passion-lineage.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600supporting
Gluttony, and avarice are more especially linked with the appetitive aspect; dejection, anger and despondency, with the incensive power; vainglory and pride, with the intelligent aspect.
The introduction to the Ladder maps avarice onto the appetitive faculty of the soul within the Evagrian tripartite scheme, and records Cassian’s editorial transposition of anger to clarify the sequence between avarice and dejection.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600supporting
in the face of avarice, ‘this avarice which is only equalled by his licentiousness, the which is only exceeded by his dishonesty.’
Lacan cites an extreme characterological portrait in which avarice, licentiousness, and dishonesty form a triadic structure of moral pathology, contextualizing avarice within an analysis of calculating desire.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015aside
Judas, who wished to acquire money which he had previously abandoned on following Christ, not only lapsed so far as to betray the Master and lose his place in the circle of the apostles.
Cassian deploys the biblical typology of Judas as the paradigmatic case of avarice as apostasy, demonstrating how the reactivation of acquisitive desire annihilates the spiritual attainments already made.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Evagrius called these traps logismos—thoughts that bewilder and befog the mind so that slowly, bit by bit, we drift away into a world of self-destructive fantasy.
Kurtz contextualizes the Evagrian logismoi framework within which avarice operates as one of the bewildering thought-traps that distort spiritual vision, though avarice is not named explicitly in this passage.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994aside