Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

142 THE ENVY OF THE GODS AND THE CONCEPT OF FATE
others, to survive. If (others) had not died, he would have had to; if he
had not survived, someone else would have. '
Anyone who is alive, who feels or knows himself to be healthier, to eat
better, to have a more flourishing crop or herd of cattle, will inevitably
feel a faint sense of guilt towards those who have died or who are less
fortunate. To restrain himself and to forestall such behaviour as ostentatious
enjoyment or irresponsible boasting-so that envy could not
even raise its head-man evolved ideas of a god, deities or powers who
pursue him with the eye of envy and who punish him when he exceeds
the limits.
Clearly it is very difficult for man in whatever culture, our own
included, to localize and to define envy and the envious man. As Nilsson
stresses, the ancient Greeks hardly ever attributed envy to one particular
god or supernatural being but rather to a divine principle, a general,
vaguely conceived power. There may well have been good reasons for
this. It has sometimes been observed, as by Francis Bacon, or in the
witchcraft beliefs of some primitive peoples, that envious man becomes
really envious and malicious only when he sees that he has been detected
by the object of his envy; this fact is due to the shame he feels at the
inferiority which the discovery of his envy discloses. Hence the Greeks
were careful not to ascribe envy to any particular god, daring to do so
only sometimes in the case of Zeus, probably because he was too
majestic to be accused of petty envy; his motive was seen to be, rather, a
sublime sense of justice; he punished the over-powerful in the interests
of compensating justice and not because he was himself envious.
The case of dualistic religions is somewhat different; these have little
difficulty in ascribing envy as a motive to the principle of evil, Satan, as
can be seen in Manicheism, in which Satan is moved by envy to pit
himself against the light. Among the Persians, demons were believed to
be responsible for envy in man. It is surely not far-fetched to suppose that
a civilization of unequal citizens was able to arise under the aegis, as it
were, of the Christian religion because the latter early condemned envy,
which was personified in the devil, whereas God and all the saints
were represented as, by definition, utterly incapable of envy towards
mankind. 2
2 F. Berthoiet, article on the envy of the gods in Die Religion in Geschichte und
Gegenwart, Tiibingen, 1930, Vol. 4, p. 488.