Mammon Is the Fear of Loss
Another Brick Out of the Wall
I’ve argued in Original Hope that Augustine’s doctrine of inherited guilt rests on the Latin Vulgate’s rendering of Romans 5:12: in quo omnes peccaverunt, “in whom all sinned.” The Greek phrase under that Latin is ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον (eph’ hō pantes hēmarton), and it does not require Augustine’s reading.
The Greek Fathers, reading the Greek directly, took it the other way: death spread to all, because of which all sinned. Not in whom. Because of death. What we inherit from Adam isn’t guilt but mortality. I’ve argued in Patient or Defendant? that Theodore of Mopsuestia makes this anthropology explicit: Adam’s sin introduced mortality and mutability into human nature, and we sin because we are dying creatures.
The problem is ontological before it is moral. We are sick before we are guilty.
That anthropology leaves a question I haven’t answered yet. What does a dying creature do with its mortality?
In the Western theological tradition, from Augustine to Aquinas to Calvin and even John Milton, the creature rebels. Puffs itself up. Shakes its fist at God. Satan in Paradise Lost says it out loud: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. The root of sin, in this tradition, is pride, because pride is what a guilty defendant does in the courtroom.
But some of the West’s best poets knew that diagnosis was wrong. Shelley (expelled from Oxford at eighteen for publishing The Necessity of Atheism, a lifelong adversary of everything Milton’s theology held sacred) still wrote Mutability. Nought may endure but Mutability. The creature of Shelley’s imagination is not a guilty rebel deserving hell. The creature is, in his images, a cloud that veils the midnight moon, or a lyre whose strings give different sound with every passing wind. A thing whose whole condition is change and loss. Shelley would have refused every label Theodore of Mopsuestia claimed. But on the question of what a creature is, the Romantic poet and the Antiochene bishop are saying the same thing.
The Fathers say it with more precision. If the creature isn’t a guilty defendant (if the creature is a sick patient, a dying thing that knows it’s dying), then rebellion isn’t the instinct you’d expect. Pride isn’t the first move.
Fear is.
Consider Genesis 3. The first human emotion recorded after the fall is not pride and not shame. When God walks in the garden in the cool of the day and calls out to Adam, Adam’s answer is this: I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. Fear first. Then hiding.
A creature that knows, in its bones, that everything it has is on loan will organize its entire life around not losing the thing. It grasps at fig leaves. It hoards and hides. It builds cities and cultures to facilitate the hoarding and hiding.
The scriptures name it plainly: Mammon.
The Reframe
Everyone reads Mammon as greed: the desire for more. But Mammon is the desperate clinging. Greed is at least an appetite, moving toward something. Fear of loss just builds fortifications.
Mammon is not a category error committed by the especially covetous. Mammon is exactly what a dying creature builds when it doesn’t yet know it’s loved. The gated suburb, the retirement portfolio curated to the dollar, the political philosophy built entirely around “don’t take my stuff”: all of it is just an expression of the same creaturely instinct, the fear of loss.
The Corporate Temple
Mammon is most recognizable when the fear is institutionalized. When we fearful creatures manage to amass some capital, our first instinct is exactly what the rich fool does in Luke 12: tear down the barns and build bigger ones.
Once large sums of money are involved, the fear sets in. And the larger the enterprise, the greater the fear. The further money travels from the person who earned it to its actual purpose, the more layers of emotional insulation get installed.
When the rich fool decides to “build bigger” (οἰκοδομήσω, oikodomēsō), Luke is using the Greek verb that gives us, through Latin, the word “edifice.” That is exactly what we do in service of Mammon. We build edifices, both physical and philosophical, to sometimes display but always secure the thing we are most scared of losing. The corporate temple rises and casts its shadow everywhere.
The Shelf Life of an Urn
The most trenchant critique of Mammon isn’t in a theological text or an economics tome. It’s the Romantics.
As the First Industrial Revolution was remaking Europe, William Wordsworth lamented: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers... We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”Wordsworth looks at his environment and concludes that society is actively trading away its soul in the name of “progress.” He intuits that there is bait and switch at the heart of our relationship with Mammon. It promises relief from the fear of loss. Instead it amplifies the anxiety.
John Keats’s poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, makes the same diagnosis. The lovers on the vase cannot grow old. The musicians cannot fall silent. Cold Pastoral, Keats calls it. Permanence at the price of the living encounter. The same trade Mammon offers in every one of its forms: you can keep the thing you love safe from time, but only if you trade away the living version of it.
But the thing Keats says by not saying is that even the urn has a shelf life.
He is writing in 1819. His brother Tom died of tuberculosis the previous December. Keats trained as an apothecary-surgeon at Guy’s Hospital; he nursed Tom through the disease; he knows what it does to a body. Within two years he himself will be dead of it, at twenty-five.
Keats understands that the urn where the lovers are suspended in permanent anticipation is made of clay. And the Christian tradition says, so are the hands that made it.
Clay breaks. It erodes. It eventually decomposes and returns to dust. So does humanity. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return (Genesis 3:19).
Keats’s poem is written by a clay vessel trying, with all the beauty a clay vessel can muster, to make a permanence out of clay. It cannot be done. The permanence the urn offers is not permanence. It is only a very long delay.
The Slavery Has a Name
The author of the letter to the Hebrews names this thing exactly. Writing in Greek, writing to a community trying to hold its nerve under pressure, the author explains in Hebrews 2:14-15 why Christ had to become flesh and blood in the first place. Not to make a legal transaction. Not to satisfy an angry father. To free slaves.
Through death, the author writes, Christ renders inoperative the one who holds the power of death. And the purpose clause names the slavery itself: to set free those who, through fear of death (φόβῳ θανάτου, phobō thanatou), were all their lives held in slavery.
The whole of a human life lived under the weight of mortality is called, in that sentence, slavery. Yes, we are enslaved to sin and death. But the overseer is fear. Fear keeps us in chains.
What the Cross Actually Did
In Patient or Defendant? I argued that the cross is medicine, not payment. Somewhere between Augustine and Anselm, Luther and Calvin, the hospital became a courtroom, and we’ve been trying to pay for the medicine ever since. Hebrews 2 is the same argument in an older key. Christ came to liberate slaves. The mechanism is κατάργησις (katargēsis): the decommissioning, the rendering inoperative, of the one who held the power of death.
In Original Hope I put it more plainly: when sin killed Jesus, Jesus killed sin right back. And when death tried to claim Jesus, when the grave tried to claim Jesus, Jesus said all right, fine and then destroyed them both.
That is what Hebrews means by ἀπαλλάξῃ (apallaxē): set free.
John says it plainly in his first letter: perfect love casts out fear. What John calls perfect love is what Hebrews calls being set free. They are the same event described twice. The creature is still dying, still mutable. What’s evacuated is the terror. The walls can come down — the thing they were built against has already been defeated.