DIVERSITY IN SYSTEMATIC TREATMENTS OF AVARICE

The various systematic contexts that included avarice which have been examined so far were to be supplemented by a plethora of others throughout the early stages of the medieval period, and the burgeoning of these new systems demonstrates that in the West paradigms of immorality were still very much in a formative stage. The continuing transformation of Europe's social structure from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages is reflected as well in the state of flux in which one finds the responses moralists were developing to avarice and the rest of the sins. Even where an authoritative work on the Capital Vices, such as that by John Cassian, was well known to authors of the fifth and sixth centuries, it was not universally accepted as the context most suited for formulating a response to avarice. Caesarius, for example, who was a monk at Lérins (a monastic foundation which did much to promote and transmit Cassian's writings in Gaul) and who later became Bishop of Arles (c. 470–542), preached frequently against avarice without once referring to the octad, though he drew readily enough on other material from Cassian. Caesarius used any number of groupings of vices in his homiletic works; in one sermon borrowed in large part from Augustine he also fitted avaritia into an elaborate analysis of the parallels between violations of the Decalogue and the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians before the exodus.