Shakespeare’s villain Iago hypocritically admonishes Othello “Beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”
In contemporary parlance, this “monstrous” vice of jealousy is often used interchangeably with envy. As an Eagles fan living and working in Giants and Patriots territory, I am used to employing both words fairly regularly this time of year without distinction.
Technically speaking, there is, however, a difference between the two vices. Jealousy is a distorted form of love; it seeks to possess. Envy is much closer to hatred; it seeks to destroy.
The Oxford English Dictionary calls envy “the feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another.” It does not necessarily want the advantages for itself, it is merely resentful they are accrued by or given to another.
I explain to my undergrads – jealousy is wanting to take your roommate’s iPod when he’s not looking or date his girlfriend because she is stunning. Envy is hoping the iPod breaks so no one can use it or the beautiful girl moves to Florida so neither of you can be with her. It is the serious and devastating embodiment of the familiar trope that “misery loves company.”
The sibling sins of envy and jealousy want to level the playing field – as Dorothy Sayers puts it, “if it cannot level things up, it will level them down…rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together.”
In the “Purgatorio,” the second volume of Dante’s Divine Comedy trilogy, the envious undergoing their purification before entrance into Paradise suffer one of the most arresting and memorable punishments of the entire work, at least to my mind. Wearing the penitential coarse hairshirts common in monastic disciplines (which made the individual itch relentlessly under their clothes to suffer for their sins), the envious can no longer look on others’ goods or successes with covetous desire – for now their eyes are sewn shut with iron wires. As they weep through the “terrible stitched seams,” they are tutored in the ways of selflessness by the words of Mary and Jesus: the Mother’s concern for the potential embarrassment of others at the wedding at Cana (“They have no wine”) and the overturning perfection of the lex talionis or law of retaliation (“an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”) where Christ instructed his followers to love those who would do them harm.
We can see the distorted reality of envy in two ways. Many times human beings agree with Gore Vidal’s statement “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something within me dies.” We somehow find sorrow in another’s triumphs or accomplishments.
At the other end of the spectrum, so many times we take secret pleasure in the downfall of others, be they celebrities or acquaintances. The Germans call this feeling “Schadenfreude,” literally “Joy at [another’s] damage.”
To counterbalance these disordered emotions, we need only look at the Scriptures for insight into how to fight envy: with admiration of our neighbors, our own talents (proportionally), and our Creator. Isaiah speaks for each man or woman when he says “All that we have accomplished, O Lord, you have done for us” (26:12), and the Book of Proverbs exhorts us “Rejoice not when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles” (24:17).
Rather, as an antidote to envy, we are called to unceasingly lavish misericordia – mercy, forgiveness, esteem, and tenderness – on our fellow travelers during the pilgrimage of life.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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