Sometimes we hear pieces of conventional wisdom that seem to contradict one another. Do actions speak louder than words, or is the pen mightier than the sword? Should you look before you leap, or strike while the iron is hot?
When you hear each maxim, you think it sounds right; but later you realize that both can’t be true.
If you ask, “What does Scripture say is the root of all evil?” you might be surprised to find there are two different answers. 1 Timothy 6:10 says, “the love of money is the root of all evils.” Yet Sirach 10:15 says “the beginning of all sin is pride.” Which is it? It’s Scripture contradicting itself?
As St. Paul would say, “By no means!” As is often the case in our Catholic faith, we find that the answer to an either/or question is actually both/and.
Both
How can the root of sin be both pride and the love of money, also called avarice? St. Augustine gives us the key in one of his homilies on the First Letter of St. John. Noting these two passages, St. Augustine points at what pride and avarice have in common: grasping.
St. Augustine writes,
“We find that in pride there is also avarice, (or grasping;) for man has passed bounds: and what is it to be avaricious, to go beyond that which suffices.”
In other words, in both pride and avarice, we reach beyond what naturally belongs to us, or what is being given to us. We try to seize what isn’t ours.
The saint points out that the sin of Adam was itself a sin of pride, of grasping: “What more grasping, than he whom God could not suffice?” In taking the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam tried to seize that which God had forbidden. Though God had man in His image, man was still inferior to God. God wished to give Himself to humanity through grace, raising humanity up to Himself to share in His own life. Adam grasped for equality with God, to seize that which God wanted to give as a gift. Adam tried to raise himself up, and fell.
We can call this grasping the root of all sin because we can see how every sin, at its foundations, is a kind of grasping. In idolatry, we try to seize divinity and insert it into objects we can control. In swearing oaths, we take God’s name and use it for our own purposes. In failing to keep the Sabbath, we take the time God has given us to spend with Him and use it for other purposes. In failing to honor our parents, we seize for ourselves the respect or deference due to them. In murder, or adultery, or lying, or coveting, we take what we owe to another – safety, or fidelity, or truth, or respect – and place it beneath our desire for power, pleasure, or possession. We grasp for what doesn’t belong to us.
The solution to this is found in the Incarnation – not only in Jesus’ saving mission, but in the very fact of the Incarnation itself. Philippians 2:6-7 says that Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself.” Whereas Adam fell by grasping after godhood, Jesus knew equality with God could not be taken. Man fell through prideful disobedience. Jesus saved us through the opposite: humble obedience, emptying Himself of His divine glory and taking upon Himself our human nature. Humanity and divinity were united in the person of Jesus, so that He could offer to us by grace what He has by nature: unity with the Father.
By doing this, Jesus enables us to have a new relationship with God, one in which He gifts us with His own life – the very gift for which we were made, which God desired to give us before we tried to seize it. Man grasped for divine life and fell; Jesus stooped down to pick us up, offering us the very thing we had tried to steal, yet giving it as a gift.
And today we celebrate...