Money, Love, Greed

The popular precept 'Money is the root of all evil' is a gloss of 'The love of money is the root of all evil', from 1 Timothy.  But despite the significant nuance, the actual quote, like many popular precepts, still does not stand up to closer scrutiny.  For, to begin with, any of many counter-examples, e. g. jealousy, falsifies it.  Furthermore, as is, there is nothing obviously evil about loving money.  It thus may be to correct that vagueness that Luther renders the passage as 'Avarice is a root of all evil'.  But, while Avarice is a more clearly defined traditional Vice, and applicable to more than Money, the two quantifiers, 'a' and 'all', in combination with the singular term 'evil', is incoherent.  For example, avarice might lead to stealing, and jealousy to murder, without avarice being a root of the latter murder, and without stealing and murder being the same evil.  So, even pluralizing 'evil' to agree with 'all' does not make avarice the root of a murder out of jealousy.  Regardless, there is also a substantive problem with Luther's equating love of money and avarice.  As Aristotle argues, the latter is a Vice in two respects--a lack of self-control of the one who is greedy, and a deprivation of another.  In contrast, the love of money, or Chrematistic, as Aristotle characterizes it, is symbolized by Midas, i. e. the love of an inanimate object such as money de-humanizes a person, independent of those characteristics of Vice.  In other words, the self-de-humanization in the love of money gets lost in translation, and remains lost in modernity--even Marx seems to miss it.