THE PATRISTIC BACKGROUNDS OF OLD ENGLISH GREED (AVARICE, CUPIDITY, VICE)

Scholars who have examined avarice have generally focused their attention on the late Middle Ages. I have supplemented, and in some cases corrected, their conclusions by investigating the first millenium of moralists' reflection on avarice and the influence of such thought on Old English literature. This dissertation is the first step towards writing a history of the vice to the end of the Middle Ages.;I have used methods common to the history of ideas and, in literary studies, historical criticism, concentrating not only on the terminology expressing the concept of greed, but on the spectrum of ideas denoted by these terms, and their accompanying imagery, in discursive and literary texts. Chapter I deals with avarice in the early Cardinal Vice tradition and chapter II with the beginnings of greed as a Deadly Sin, from the earliest Christian texts to Lactantius. Chapters III and IV, respectively, examine the deadly sin in the fourth/early fifth century in the East and in the Latin West. Chapter V investigates the merging of the Cardinal Vice and Deadly Sin traditions in the early Middle Ages. Finally, chapter VI applies the results of these historical analyses to the interpretation of some Old English poetry (Almsgiving, The Riming Poem).;The patristic and early medieval understanding of avarice included the narrowest sense of "the love of money" and the most comprehensive definition of it as a desire to possess anything, even an intangible object, not leading to God. The same extremes will also be found in the Old English poems chosen for analysis. The widest definition of the vice is a result of theological concerns of the fourth and fifth centuries and it remained an important component of moral thought on avarice to the end of the medieval period. The High and Late Middle Ages can no longer be seen as the eras during which moralists first concentrated their attention on avarice, for theologians of late antiquity had already recognized in greed the most dangerous opponent to the well-being of society and the individual.