What can I do about jealousy?
12 April 2023The holy Elder [Saint Païsios] was once asked: ‘What can I do, Elder, about the fact that I get jealous and I’m often happy when brothers who have made more progress than me make a mistake?’. He answered: ‘Say: “God, please help each of my brothers to reach the stature of the saint whose name he bears, and help me to reach the stature of my brothers”. Do that and you’ll see the action of God’.
According to the great Saint Païsios the Athonite, for Christians, God’s grace as the activation of the sacrament of baptism demands a struggle to overcome the passions, particularly jealousy and the Schadenfreude or guilty pleasure associated with it. Jealousy is considered to be the outstanding expression of egotism, that is, it exists when people are pathologically introverted, to the extent that they can’t love other people properly, much less God. Jealousy and love are different, opposing spiritual states, as Saint Paul bluntly points out in his famous hymn to love (1 Cor. 13): ‘love is not jealous’. So, jealousy reveals the sin and transgression of people and unfortunately, as often happens, it also engenders other wickednesses and passions, such as, for example, envy, hatred, anger, sorrow, and a taste for revenge. The offspring of envy, as the fruit of jealousy, is what the monk confessed when he asked Saint Païsios: ‘I’m often happy when brothers who have made more progress than me make a mistake’. In other words he took pleasure in the sins and transgressions of holy people (because however saintly people are, they can’t escape the rule that somewhere they slip and sin, either in word, deed or thought). Our Lord Jesus Christ alone is holy and sinless.
From this point of view, this jealousy and the guilty joy associated with it reveal people’s spiritual blindness. Because of their egotism, jealous people aren’t able to see the virtues and gifts of others, much less can they see them and connect them with their source, who is God. And so they are even more estranged from God because of the unfairness with which they act. Imagine what an impression it would make if we were striving to do the will of God and, at some stage, through weakness, we went astray; if thereafter we repented and somebody else, who was jealous of us, drew attention only to the transgression. Would this not be a great disservice to us? This is why Saint John of the Ladder considers such people to be brainless. Because, ‘whereas intelligent and prudent people carefully note any virtues they find in others, those who are brainless look for faults and indictments’.
Saint Païsios lovingly guides the monk with this particular passion. And he does so because he sees that the man’s striving. ‘What can I do?’, he asks; and ‘I’m often happy’, which means not always. The saint’s answer is surprising in its wisdom, as well as its practicality. A similar answer was given by the great Saint Porfyrios: when passions start to act, people should react in the only way which, generally, gets rid of them: they should turn to what’s good. ‘Overcome evil with good’, as Saint Paul tells us. This means a struggle of prayer on behalf of these people. A struggle for love, with Christ as the reference-point. According to the holy Elder, in this case, love means that we include others within Christ and fortify their spiritual perspective, which is union with him. The specific way is through the mention of their saint. If we follow the saint whose name we bear, don’t we follow Christ? Isn’t every saint of our Church an ‘imitation of Christ’.
Therefore the antidote to our jealousy is the activation of our love. And if we act in the way indicated by the saint, we also point vindictive people towards humility. On the one hand, those who are jealous are urged to follow the footsteps of their saint and the Lord, through prayer, and, on the other, they place themselves in second position, after others: ‘May I also reach the stature of others’. Humble love really is the solution for every passion, even for the great passion of jealousy.
