Greed, by any name, is the mother and matrix, root and consort of all the other sins." So says Phyllis A. Tickle in Greed (Oxford University Press, 90 pp., $17.95), her contribution to The Seven Deadly Sins, a series sponsored by the New York Public Library. Tickle's book uses visual imagery—from Breugel's paintings to the 1987 film Wall Street—to map Western civilization's evolving concept of greed from the time of St. Paul to the present.
According to Tickle, a Millington, Tenn., resident who is a former religion editor and current contributing editor for Publishers Weekly and a frequent source of commentary for PBS and National Public Radio, greed is primal, a universal part of human experience. In the West, she argues, the experience of greed has mirrored the development of thought—what Tickle calls the "physical, secular and spiritual imaginations." The book is a natural history of avarice, beginning with medieval notions of greed as a spiritual enemy against which we physically do battle, and moving through Reformation and Enlightenment ideas of greed as an existential enemy that can be overcome by secular rationalism. It ends with Tickle's look at Mario Donizetti's chilling yet compassionate painting Avarice (1996), which she sees as evidence of an emerging, spiritually complex perception of greed as mysterious and eternal.
Because it relies on paintings and film for its evidence, instead of texts and scripture, Greed's thesis, which began life as a library lecture, seems more like a discussion than an argument. This lightens Tickle's heavy subject matter considerably and makes her argument more inclusive. The 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein said that "the master of the language is the master of us all"; historically that master has been male and, most often, white. Tickle's use of visual imagery, by contrast, promotes a visceral response that is inherently more idiosyncratic and less dogmatic than textual evidence—a response that transforms the act of reading into something more like a dialogue and less like attending a lecture.
Greed is a short book—of its 90 pages, over one-third are endnotes. Its language is academic but breezily so, full of winking asides that counter any textbook-like tendencies: "Hieronymus Bosch," she writes, "was absorbed with sin his entire life (as are most of us, but his was a professional as well as a personal absorption)." Despite its brevity, the book is convincing, although with a few caveats: Tickle's fundamental assumption here—that perceptions of greed are necessarily religious—is open to debate, though it's admittedly hard to define any evil without resorting to religious language. More troubling is her sense of greed as "a numinous spirit, elegant and trembling"—a comment that she follows with Isaiah 45:7: "I make peace and create evil." If this conjunction means what it seems to mean—that God is complicit in suffering—then Tickle is going to need a whole lot more than 90 pages to make that one stick.
—Paul V. Griffith
