Envy

3. Envy

The Latin word invidere, from which our words ‘envy’ and ‘invidious’ come, is a compound of the word videre meaning ‘to see’ or ‘to look at’. The prefix in- here gives the sense of ‘to keep one’s eye fixed on an object (with sentiments of secret jealousy)’. Similarly, inaudire, a compound of audire ‘to hear’, means ‘to hear (as a secret)’.

Because of this secret jealousy—this desire to possess the thing or person seen—the object of envy has been looked upon wrongly or askance by the seer and has therefore been distorted in some way. That image is then kept alive in the mind’s eye, like food in a warm cupboard, and goes bad. This action of envy constitutes ‘wrong looking’ or ‘not seeing’ because the subject does not see what is behind the image. Instead, the object is fixated by the eye in what quickly becomes an obsessive, restless dynamic. As Francis Bacon points out in his essay ‘Of Envy’, Invidia festos dies non agit (‘Envy keeps no holidays’).

It is easy to see both why envy used to be thought of as the ‘evil eye’ and why invidere can also be translated ‘to look upon with the evil eye’. Indeed, envy was seen to have something in it of witchcraft. To avoid ruin, the spell of the envier had somehow to be removed from its target and placed upon another.

If invidere meant ‘to unsee’, which would be permissible philologically, in the sense of seeing something anew, then the word could possibly contain its own antidote. Envy would be the spear that both wounds and heals. It would not simply be a ‘seeing fixedly’ but a ‘seeing through’ as well. As it is, however, keeping an image in the mind’s eye long after the thing itself is no longer in view, is envy’s stock in trade.

The great arena of envy today is social media, where the image is everything and, unless deleted, remains forever before the eye of the envier. In Bacon’s time it was thought that envy caused ‘an ejaculation or irradiation of the eye’ and Bacon himself refers to ‘the stroke or percussion of an envious eye’. In other words, the eye of the envier could cause actual damage to the object of envy. This is undoubtedly true, as is the reverse. The envier’s loss of true perception clouds his or her perspective on life, breeding ‘unkind division’ (in the words of Shakespeare’s Duke of Exeter) between the seer and the seen.