The Drama of Envy and its Symbolization in Religion

Abstract

This article first presents a phenomenology of envy. It is shown that envy combines intentionality (striving) and reflexivity (suffering from oneself), representing a form of self-relation. It is suffering from oneself in the endeavor of appropriating the happiness of the other: the desire to take the place of the other. It turns out that envy is as related to love as it is opposed to it: envy always includes admiration; envy is the desire to take the place of the other without the other; love, according to Hegel, is the desire to be oneself in unity with the other. In the second part of the essay, an attempt is made to interpret God – the summum bonum – as an object of envy and thus to read the Christian understanding of sin (the attempt to be like God) as an envy phenomenon. In this way, Lutheran Christology (communicatio idiomatum) and its underlying soteriology (Luther’s “fröhlicher Wechsel”) can be interpreted as a way of dealing with the structure of envy: the happy exchange between Christ and the sinner opens up the possibility of being oneself in the other, of sharing in divine life and thus in the happiness of Christ.