Greed

Catholic New Times, Sept 26, 2004 by Rebecca Cunningham

Greed by Phyllis A Tickle. Oxford University Press, 2004, 97 pp.

Deceiving in its modest size, with its cheerful yellow cover, Greed is one of the more sober and demanding reads of the summer. It stems from a lecture, delivered in October 2002, one of seven commissioned by the New York Public Library and Oxford Press. The author, Phyllis A. Tickle, a former religion editor for Publishers Weekly, adeptly leads us through the major representations of greed in Western literature and art.

She begins with St. Paul, the author of Christianity's first imaging of greed with his dictum: "Radix omnium" Fans of The Da Vinci Code will appreciate Tickle's attentiveness to the political message revealed when the words are stacked in acrostic form to spell the name of the corrupt and failing empire--ROMA.

Tickle continues with a fascinating look at the psychomachia or "soul battle" of the fifth century poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, a work that established the popular notion of Greed as a woman, with a chilling image of her setting out onto the battlefield of virtues and vices in order to harvest the dead for trinkets.

The essay includes a fascinating look at the 15th century paintings of Pieter Breugel and Hieronymus Bosch. Unfortunately, the book uses small black and white reproductions to illustrate its points.

Tickle moves quickly to the Reformation period and into the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perhaps this abruptness is due partly to Tickle's point that there are few images after Breugel that provide a picture of popular notions of greed. Sadly, she dismisses Dickens' Scrooge as more of a caricature than a cautionary tale, and deals with important others like Dostoyevsky and D.H. Lawrence in footnotes.

The book ends with a look at the work of Italian contemporary artist Mario Donizetti whose mystical paintings powerfully portray gwreed as a tragic and beautiful figure.

Tickle moves swiftly through the major faiths and major historical periods with insight and attention to detail.

However, the essay left me wanting more. Tickle acknowledges the restrictions entailed in delivering a lecture, and her work includes more than 30 pages of footnotes for those with an appetite (might I say greed?) for more.

Rebecca Cunningham writes from Toronto.