Greed and idolatry

Victoria of Gaudete Theology wrote a bit about today's reading in the Catholic lectionary.

In reference to this text:

Νεκρώσατε οὖν τὰ μέλη τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, πορνείαν, ἀκαθαρσίαν, πάθος, ἐπιθυμίαν κακήν, καὶ τὴν πλεονεξίαν ἥτις ἐστὶν εἰδωλολατρία...

Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).

Col 3:5 (trans. NRSV)

...she says:

What I’m pondering is the nature of the equivalence Paul made between greed and idolatry. Is it the stuff that constitutes the idol? Have I made myself the idol, sacrificing (in its original sense of “setting aside”, “setting apart”, “making holy”) all the stuff for myself so nobody else can have it? Is it the sense of security that having all that stuff gives me, making me feel self-sufficient when in reality it is only God that suffices us? Does the stuff fill an emptiness in me that is only meant to be filled by God?

She notes that when she has questions about a lectionary reading, she goes to the other readings. I found her line of examination illuminating (take a look here), but I found myself wondering about the Greek text. What word is Paul using here that is rendered as "greed"?

The answer is πλεονεξία (pleonexia), which is a compound of πλέον (pleon, "more") with ἔχω (echo, "to have"), plus a noun-forming suffix. The LSJ (the standard Ancient Greek-English dictionary for classicists) defines it as "greediness" but also "assumption", "arrogance", "excess", or even "gain derived from a thing" or "undue gains". It's more commonly used in prose than poetry—Logeion gives the most frequent users as mostly orators and historians.

I am particularly struck with an appearance of the word in Thucydides, a Greek historian who wrote on the Peloponnesian War:

Ἐν δ' οὖν τῇ Κερκύρᾳ τὰ πολλὰ αὐτῶν προυτολμήθη, καὶ ὁπόσα...οἵ τε μὴ ἐπὶ πλεονεξίᾳ, ἀπὸ ἴσου δὲ μάλιστα ἐπιόντες ἀπαιδευσίᾳ ὀργῆς πλεῖστον ἐκφερόμενοι ὠμῶς καὶ ἀπαραιτήτως ἐπέλθοιεν.

Therefore in Corcyra these many [evils] of them were done first, and the rest...which men, not for greed but attacking each other on equal terms, totally carried away by stupidity of their anger, would cruelly and inexorably accomplish.

Thuc. 3.84.1 (trans. mine)

So, in contrast to the purge-style free-for-all of evils that Thucydides describes in Corcyra, πλεονεξία is a focused, calculated sort of evil. In usage, it seems to me to have reference to others: not desire to have enough, or even more than enough, but to have more than one's neighbor. Tellingly, the Brill-Montanari Dictionary (less standard than the LSJ, but newer and also well respected) renders this particular reference as "for desire to have the most". Not more; the most.

The idea that a greed which not only demands but compares creates a sort of idol seems coherent to me. That sort of feeling does something terribly odd to the person of whom you're jealous. Perhaps this is just me being conditioned by watching the wild politics of performance and desire that is Instagram culture, but I can absolutely see how greed with an element of covetousness creates an idol out of a person. I doubt influencers are precisely what St. Paul had in mind, but I do think that this dynamic predates the internet, and that social media only gave it gas.