Wealth / riches
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
money · riches · abundance · gold and silver · possessions · wealth
in the texts
Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?
Material riches and possessions, treated throughout as morally neutral instruments whose value depends on the disposition of the soul that uses them.
and treacherous, because, although abundance is of itself enough to puff up the souls of those who possess it, to corrupt them, and to turn them aside from the road by which salvation may be reached, these men still further confound the minds of the rich by exalting them with the pleasures of immoderate praise, and by preparing them to despise everything whatsoever except the wealth for which they …
but the spurious rich man is the one rich after the flesh, who has transferred his life into outward possession—the possession that passes and perishes and belongs now to one and now to another, and in the end to no one anywhere.
Since some things are within the soul, and some without, and if the soul use them well these too seem good, but if ill, evil—the one who bids us alienate what we have, does He deprecate those things which, when removed, the passions still remain, or rather those things which, when removed, the possessions also become useful?
Letters to Lucilius
Money and material riches, the object of avarice critiqued at length
Our parents have instilled in us an admiration of gold and silver, and the craving poured in while we were tender has settled deeper and grown up with us.
Then come in besides the verses of the poets, which apply a torch to our passions, in which riches are praised as though they were the one glory and ornament of life.
"The axle was of gold, the pole of gold, of gold the rim of the topmost wheel, and the row of spokes of silver.