Envy: My Inner Basilisk
Grace Hamman
5 min read ⭑
Medieval writers loved to compare the soul to a garden, a greening and ripening place as one grows in love. But as the fourteenth-century pastoral work “The Book of Vices and Virtues” describes, into this holy verdancy slithers envy, a basilisk who seeks to “restrain” this lush abundance. An enormous serpent with a crest, or a cock with a snake’s tail, the basilisk kills with one glance. It is so overwhelmingly venomous that its breath scorches the earth: “No greenship can endure near him neither in grass, nor bush, nor trees.” The basilisk of envy desires another’s holy green to crackle and stiffen in death.
In college, I was stung by a stingray in the warm waters off Puerto Peñasco. As I bled in the ocean, I thought it was an ordinary cut — until I passed out amid the molten sharpness of venom creeping up my toes toward my heel. I had a similar experience years later in a disorientingly different context. Scrolling through social media, I discovered that an author further along in their career than I am was publishing something that included Julian of Norwich, my favorite medieval writer whom I have studied for years. Promptly, I began grousing in my spirit.
Bold of you to write on Julian as a non-medievalist.
Stay in your lane.
I hope it sucks.
Deep Trivedi;Unsplash
The last thought in particular twanged dissonantly, which caused me to pause. Why would I want someone else, a talented and thoughtful person I respect, to fail? Then, a scalding moment of clarity: I am envious. Envy initially felt like an ordinary cut, something my mind could justify. But the vicious wishes spread without check, as venom in a bloodstream, smoldering and necrotic.
Like covetousness, envy entails the desire for something one does not possess. But this desire does not stop there. John of Damascus (d. 749), the Arab monk and polymath, wrote the most enduring definition of envy, used by nearly every prominent writer of the later Middle Ages. Curiously, he describes envy as a kind of pain: “Envy is pain over the good fortune of others.” Along with some other medieval thinkers, Thomas Aquinas describes this pain as “sorrow.” The English Carmelite friar Richard Lavynham, in his little treatise on the vices, puts it like this: “Envy is the sorrow which one creature has when another fares well — or the gladness that he fares evil.” (Like my pathetic “I hope it sucks.”) The envious person is not content simply to observe that the grass is greener on the other side; envy wishes that grass to wilt in the exhale of its poisonous breath.
This element of inward or outward sorrowing and rejoicing is the key to understanding envy. Envy extends into something personal, a sideways statement about the respective values of the envier and the envied one. Envy compares. This is also why envy feels so wretched, like a cheese grater taken to the soul. My superiority is proven through your failure. You don’t deserve that car/job/spouse/ trip/recognition, but I do. Envy distracts the envier from their own feelings of inadequacy. In other words, envy hits too close to home for us to wish to examine it, for it is wrapped up in our deepest personal discontents or insecurities about our lives. It’s easier to lash out at another person than to deal with one’s own feelings and fears.
I used to pretend I wasn’t an envious person. The colorful fifteenth-century penitential aid “Jacob’s Well” tells me I am not the only one. The anonymous author observes that envy is seldom confessed to friends or to spiritual advisors because its hold on our spirits is tight. Even from ourselves, we hide envy, shrouding it in other, more reasonable, less humiliating emotions or rationales. Such cloaking is relatively easy because envy promotes stupidity or an excess amount of “false judgments,” in the words of “The Book of Vices and Virtues.” One begins to begrudge things that are ridiculous objects of grievance — I don’t own Julian of Norwich. In envy, judgment sours and curdles like old milk. If it weren’t so painful, it would be funny.
Because of our ingenuity in masking this humiliating vice, envy can be hard to identify. To counter this blindness, medieval penitential manuals have lists of envious behavior meant to act as mirrors to our hearts and minds that goad readers into recognition of our envious behavior. Envy proceeds along a well-worn human path: causing certain ways of speaking and bitterness of heart; unbinding friendships; sowing discord, scorn, accusations; putting impediments in the way of those who wish to do right; and finally, inspiring acts of malignity like property damage or public slander.
“The devouring and comparative self-loathing of envy is destroyed only by the creative capacities of love.”
For many of us, rarely do things progress so far in our envy that we burn down the house we long for, steal the boyfriend or car we want for ourselves, or murder the person we’re jealous of, though the envious do all those things. Instead, we idly wish these or lesser evils in our hearts or with our lips, which is, as Jesus reminds us, still the sin (Matt. 5:22). Envy tends to surface in the way we think or talk about other people when they are not around. Medieval writers divided these modes of thinking and speaking into a marvelous triad of envious language: backbiting, grouching and murmuration. Grouching and murmuration both sound exactly like what they are: ongoing low-level resentment of someone else’s success, voiced either in loud complaints to a friend (grouching) or malicious sideways whispers couched in quiet (murmuration). Chaucer’s Parson explains at length the habits of the envious backbiter:
Some man praises his neighbor but with wicked intent, for he always makes a wicked knot at last end. Always, he makes a “but” at last end, which is worthy of more blame than is worth all the praising. The second species is that if a man be good and does or says a thing to good intent, the backbiter will turn all that goodness upside-down to his malicious intent. The third is to reduce the bounty of his neighbor. The fourth species is if men speak goodness of such a man, then will the backbiter say, “by my faith, such a man is yet better than he,” in dispraising of the man that men praised. The fifth species is this: to consent gladly and harken gladly to the harm that men speak of other folk.
Chaucer’s list makes me laugh and cringe. The “but” we add to the end of the sentence after Trojan horse praise, the comparisons snuck into conversation, the silent pleasure in others’ trash-talking — they are all too familiar. One Latin fourteenth-century preacher’s handbook describes it well: “Honey in mouth and words of milk / But gall in heart and fraud in deeds.” And to think that neither Chaucer nor our preacher compiler had ever seen backbiting, grouching or murmuration in their perfected form on social media!
Envy weeps when others rejoice and rejoices when others weep. In envy, there is no fruit or fellowship or growth — only opposition. The primeval paradigm of envy, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, still haunts us (Gen. 4). Envy is the “mother of death.” In stark contrast, love is the giver of life (1 John 3:14).
The devouring and comparative self-loathing of envy is destroyed only by the creative capacities of love. Love weeps with those who weep and rejoices with those who rejoice (Rom. 12:15).
Grace Hamman is a writer and independent scholar of late medieval poetry and contemplative writing. She is the author of Ask of Old Paths and Jesus through Medieval Eyes. Her work has been published by academic and popular outlets, including Plough Quarterly and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Grace hosts a podcast called Old Books with Grace, which celebrates the beauty and joy found in reading the literature and theology of the past. Grace lives near Denver, Colorado, with her husband and three young children.
Taken from Ask of Old Paths by Grace Hamman. Copyright © September 2025. Used by permission of Zondervan.
