Maximus on Money & its Relative Dangers

I remember musing in a conversation with my wife a year or two ago that there were two different ways of caring too much about money: wanting to have it in order to spend it, and wanting to have it in order to keep it. In my mind the difference was between hedonism and an obsession with security. It turns out that a 6th century Saint, Maximus the Confessor, bested me by one.

He writes that "there are three reasons for the love of money: pleasure-seeking, vainglory, and lack of faith. And more serious than the other two is lack of faith." [1]

If I remember correctly, our conversation was about the tendencies regarding the use of money encouraged in mine and my wife's respective upbringings and the relative dangers represented by each. I think most people assume that the misuse of money always equates with hedonism (and really, Maximus' category of vain-glory can be seen as a certain species of hedonism). At least this was the case for me.

It's too easy though to just look at the spendthrifts, the indulgers in decadance, the celebrities living extravagant lifestyles, and judge. I think Maximus is exactly right here. If we want to look for the most dangerous effects of money, we would do well to look at the old, retired couple, with every penny they've ever been able to pinch in the bank and well-invested, insured to the hilt, practically on death's door, but still unable to part with any of their treasure. This picture, usually deemed a respectable position to end up in, really shows a Gollum-like obsession with wealth. As the Good Book says: "where your treasure is...."

Now this is not to say that hedonism and vain-glory are not serious dangers. They are. But perhaps just because everyone agrees on this and because involvement in these vices is much more obvious, they are the relatively less dangerous tendencies to exhibit.

An excessive focus on pleasure-seeking can be a distraction from the life of faith but an over-reliance on material wealth and resources for our security goes directly to the heart of the life of faith, undermining the trust we should have in none but God.


1. Quoted in: The Monastic Way edited: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, Eerdmans 2006

Original source: Maximus the Confessor, from The Four Hundred Chapters on Love, Third Century 16-19, trans. George C. Berthold in Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 63.