Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘wealth’ is not treated as a simple economic category but as a charged psychic phenomenon whose meanings ramify across questions of justice, desire, the soul, and the constitution of the self. The most sustained scholarly attention comes from Seaford, whose analysis of the early Greek mind traces how monetisation transformed the concept of wealth from a concrete, symbolically bound accumulation of precious objects into an abstract, unlimited, and psychologically destabilising force — one whose unlimitedness generates an equally unlimited desire. Against this stands the archaic moral tradition represented by Hesiod and Solon, as recovered through Sullivan: wealth given justly by the gods endures; wealth seized violently is temporary and corrupting. The Platonic dialogue Eryxias pushes further, questioning whether wealth possesses any intrinsic use-value at all, and subordinating it to virtue and wisdom. Theological voices — Cassian, the Philokalia — read wealth as a spiritual snare, emptying it of positive content entirely. Moore and Sardello, working from a soulful psychology of economics, attempt a rehabilitation: money and wealth are not merely rational instruments but carry the soul of communal life. Keltner’s empirical observation — that wealth undermines everyday awe — provides a modern psychological counterpoint. The central tension is between wealth as an instrument of flourishing and wealth as a pathological, boundless hunger that corrodes justice, kinship, and the inner life.
god-given wealth is much better; for if a man take great wealth violently and perforce, or if he steal it through his tongue… the gods soon blot him out and make that man’s house low
Hesiod establishes the foundational archaic distinction between divinely sanctioned wealth, which is lasting, and violently or fraudulently seized wealth, which is temporary and brings divine punishment.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700thesis
What kind of wealth is best? How can one maintain it? What brings about its loss?… he is convinced that there is one force at work in human affairs that is inevitable: justice.
Sullivan reads Solon’s poetry as a systematic inquiry into wealth that subordinates it entirely to the overriding moral force of justice, enforced ultimately by the gods.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
the desire for unlimited numerical units (purchasing power) makes more sense than the desire for an unlimited number of tripods or textiles… to the unlimited accumulation and apparently unlimited power of money there belongs the unlimited desire for it
Seaford argues that the abstraction of money as pure numerical quantity generates a uniquely unlimited desire for wealth, a pathological dynamic without precedent in earlier gift-exchange economies.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
wealth (and the pursuit of wealth) has no limit, so that men accumulate money and land, enslave others, and destroy the polis.
Seaford identifies the limitlessness of monetary wealth as the social and political pathology that Solon addresses, with the concept of ‘measure’ (metron) proposed as its civilising corrective.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
Wealth that comes from Zeus with justice will last; riches attained unjustly will eventually be lost as the ‘mind of the gods prevail’.
Sullivan’s synthesis of Theognis concludes that just wealth is divinely guaranteed to endure, while for the inner-directed good person the presence or absence of wealth is ultimately irrelevant to character.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
What is the use of wealth, and for what purpose has the possession of riches been invented… whatever constitutes wealth must be useful, and… we have to enquire, What is the use of those useful things which constitute wealth?
The pseudo-Platonic Eryxias subjects wealth to Socratic analysis, reducing it to a category of instrumental usefulness and thereby questioning its independent value outside the context of genuine human need.
, Eryxias, -370thesis
alongside money is needed virtue and knowledge; that money is powerless to prevent a military conflict, or against death; that it is not to be preferred to a trouble-free life, a good wife, a genuine friend, the fatherland, wisdom
Seaford catalogues the tragic tradition’s sustained insistence on the limits of monetary wealth against virtue, wisdom, and authentic human goods.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
Creon has all three of the tyrannical features… he is much concerned with money, abuses the sacred, and comes to grief entirely isolated from his kin.
Seaford reads Creon’s tragic fate in Sophocles’ Antigone as the dramatic exemplification of the tyrant-type constituted by obsessive concern with monetary wealth, sacrilege, and social isolation.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
an unjust and evil man, avoiding the anger of neither man nor gods, acts with insolence, satiated with wealth, but the just are worn away, wasted with grievous poverty
Theognis, as read by Sullivan, articulates the perceived injustice of the world in which wealth accrues to the evil while the just suffer poverty, threatening to undermine the entire theological framework of divine justice.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
Money is not just a rational medium of exchange, it also carries the soul of communal life. It has all the complications of soul, and, like sex and disease, it is beyond our powers of control.
Moore reframes wealth and money as expressions of communal soul rather than mere economic instruments, positioning them within depth psychology’s concern with the irrational, the compulsive, and the shadow.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
when wealth comes, it proves itself to be nothing, since its possessors, unless they are brought to their senses by experience, still thirst after it as though they lacked it.
The Philokalia identifies wealth as a spiritual illusion whose very attainment fails to satisfy, diagnosing the insatiable desire for it as a form of folly that diverts the soul from true spiritual commerce.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Money (chrēmata) creates friends, honours, tyranny, physical beauty, wise speech, and pleasure even in disease… Wealth is ‘all alone the source’
Seaford assembles ancient testimonia attesting to wealth as a universal means in Greek culture, capable of purchasing virtually every human good, a totality that itself generates the problem of unlimited desire.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
the god Wealth ‘… for he is very blind, has never come to my house and said “Hipponax, I give you thirty mnas’
Seaford cites the archaic personification of Wealth as a blind divinity to illustrate the early Greek perception that the distribution of wealth is arbitrary, indifferent to merit, and resistant to human agency.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
The question ‘what is best for humankind?’ could easily be answered with ‘money’, but better with the permanent happiness promised by the makarismos uttered in the Dionysiac mysteries.
Seaford shows how the Midas myth pits the Dionysiac promise of immortal happiness against monetary wealth, with mystic initiation explicitly superior to and a redemption from money’s power.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
Money is the soul of the world… it is possible to find soul when we shift from money as quantity to money as quality, from money as noun to money as verb.
Sardello, drawing on Norman O. Brown, proposes a qualitative, soul-centred reimagining of wealth and money that recovers its commemorative and communal dimensions against its reduction to mere quantity.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting
wealth infects even the believing community with neglect of the poor… To seat the rich person in comfortable accommodations… while shooing the poor to the margins… is to take the world’s perspective on poverty and riches.
Thielman reads James’s epistle as a sustained prophetic critique of wealth as a social and theological pathology that distorts communal values, violates the love commandment, and exposes the wealthy to divine judgment.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Theognis speaks disparagingly of these people now honoured as ‘good’, probably because of their wealth and political power.
Sullivan documents Theognis’s critique of the social confusion produced when wealth and political power substitute for genuine moral goodness in the public recognition of worth.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
wealth undermines everyday awe and our capacity to see the moral beauty in others, the wonders of nature, or the sublime in music or art. Our experience of awe does not depend on wealth.
Keltner’s empirical research supports the depth-psychological suspicion of wealth by demonstrating that greater material affluence correlates with diminished capacity for awe, wonder, and perception of moral beauty.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
we were speaking, not of trivial matters, but about wealth and virtue, which are deemed to be of the greatest moment
The Eryxias frames the inquiry into wealth as inseparable from the inquiry into virtue, establishing from the outset that the question of riches cannot be answered without a prior answer to the question of the good.
, Eryxias, -370supporting
The (potentially alarming and relatively novel) man-made inexhaustibility of money is envisaged in terms of the natural inexhaustibility of the sea — whether through reticence or anxiety or the need for a concrete analogue for a difficult abstraction.
Seaford traces the archaic Greek attempt to comprehend the unprecedented unlimitedness of monetary wealth by analogising it to the sea — itself homogeneous and inexhaustible — revealing the cultural anxiety surrounding this new phenomenon.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
the term ousia, which in philosophical terminology means being, substance, also means patrimony or wealth. But… this connection serves only to underline the opposite directions taken by philosophy
Vernant notes the Greek philosophical tension between ousia as ontological being and ousia as material wealth, arguing that philosophy deliberately moves away from the economic meaning in order to constitute a realm of pure being.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
You will see how many relationships have been disrupted by the love of money: how many marriages it has broken up, how many friendships embittered
Easwaran applies the law of karma to illustrate how the desire for wealth progressively corrupts the psyche — generating suspicion, violence, and relational dissolution — even in those who begin as decent individuals.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting
the richest must be in the worst condition, since they seem to be most in want of such things.
The Eryxias concludes its reductio by suggesting that the wealthiest are paradoxically the most needy, inverting the common equation of wealth with sufficiency.
, Eryxias, -370aside
the inner man shall reject and scatter those sinful riches which he gathered during his earlier way of life
Cassian extends the category of wealth inward, identifying ‘sinful riches’ of a corrupt heart as the interior correlate of external material possession, both requiring renunciation for spiritual progress.
, Conferences, 426aside
Wealth is accumulated in temples by this practice, which in the eighth century acquired massive proportions. And yet there are in Homer only eight mentions of the practice.
Seaford notes Homer’s systematic marginalisation of temple wealth accumulation as evidence of epic’s deliberate suppression of monetary and commercial realities in favour of aristocratic gift-exchange.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside
Theognis complains that the thing preferred above all others is wealth.
Seaford cites Theognis as evidence that, within the archaic Greek value-system under monetisation, wealth had displaced all other goods as the primary object of social preference and honour.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside