Avarice does not love money. It fears the future, and hires money to stand guard.
The Tradition
Avarice (philargyria, love of silver) was third on Evagrius's list of eight thoughts, and his portrait of it is startlingly psychological: the thought whispers of a long old age, sickness to come, famines that might arrive, the shame of dependence — and proposes hoarding as the answer. Gregory the Great kept it among the seven as avaritia and gave it a large family of daughter-sins: treachery, fraud, restlessness, violence, hardness of heart. Paul's line that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil kept it near the top of every medieval ranking.
The Disordered Desire
Beneath greed is the entirely reasonable desire for security, bent into the conviction that enough does not exist. Evagrius saw it clearly: avarice is fear wearing a ledger. It is not really about gold — it hoards money, time, knowledge, energy, whatever can be stockpiled against a future that feels like a threat. The miser's tragedy is that the hoard never delivers; the sense of scarcity is internal, so no external quantity closes it. And because everything clutched must be guarded, greed contracts the whole person around the vault — the open hand becomes anatomically impossible.
In Purgatorio
Dante's fifth terrace holds the avaricious — and, in the same penance, the prodigal, since squandering and hoarding are two failures of the same measure. They lie face-down in the dust, bound hand and foot, weeping: having loved earthly goods above the heavens, they now cleave to the earth itself, unable to look up. It is here that the mountain quakes for the liberation of the poet Statius, and here Pope Adrian V explains the penance in a line of perfect economy: what avarice did to the soul, the terrace does to the body.
The Remedy
The counter-practice is Charity — the open hand as discipline. Giving is the one act avarice cannot metabolize, because it treats the future as trustworthy and the neighbor as kin rather than competitor. The tradition prescribed almsgiving less for the receiver's sake than for the giver's release.
The Enneagram Passion
In the Enneagram, avarice is the passion of Type 5 — hoarding transposed from gold to the inner life. The Five stockpiles knowledge, energy, privacy, and competence against a world that feels depleting, withholding the self the way a miser withholds coin. It is Evagrius's diagnosis exactly: scarcity-fear, managing the future by contraction.
Related
- Charity — the remedy
- Seven Deadly Sins — the full catalogue
- Type 5 - The Investigator — avarice as passion
- Sloth — the terrace below
- Gluttony — the terrace above
Face-down in the dust, the hoarders finally hold everything they loved.