WEALTH. - Things that are useful, limited and material are called w. The usefulness and the limitation of a thing are understood in a subjective sense, with respect to the needs of the individual. Unlimited things, however useful, are not w.
I. ECONOMIC-SOCIAL ASPECT
The notion of wealth has undergone profound changes over the centuries, in relation to the predominant economic system.
Substantially these changes can be traced back to three main phases. In the Greco-Roman age, the rudimentary state of productive technique confers the character of wealth only on the possession of immovable goods (houses and lands) and of that particular form of human capital which is constituted by slaves. The attribution of the character of wealth to land, as an economic good capable of spontaneously producing other goods, is prolonged throughout the entire medieval period. In the centuries closer to the modern age, however, the spread of manufacturing craftsmanship with the ever more advanced techniques of working the same natural products brings about an initial change in the notion of wealth: it extends to include also instrumental goods, that is, the instruments capable of producing or transforming other goods, as well as the materials needed by man. In the modern age, finally, the gradual and total industrialization and mechanization of the productive process and the wide margins of profit connected with such activity transfer the notion of wealth in large part from the possession of land to that of financial capital.
This happens all the more decisively the more that capital is found concentrated and endowed with higher profitability in relation to its power of control and supremacy over the market. In this sense one speaks of the concentration of wealth as a characteristic aspect of the capitalist economy. Such concentration is an inevitable product of the successive industrial revolutions which from the eighteenth century to today have required an ever stronger availability of financial means, a risky immobilization of them, a progressive elimination of the holders of minimal shares of them to the full advantage of the strongest monopolists.
The means invoked and put into action to remedy these negative results of the economic order are various and often conflicting. It is general, however, wherever it is held that such results must be contained, neutralized and eliminated, that there be an orientation toward a social control over the economic activity that employs and produces wealth, a control carried out either by the public authorities, or by the economic and professional groups of citizens.
In the extreme position of this critical attitude is found the Marxist doctrine, with its consequences (v. PROPRIETÀ).
It is nevertheless possible (and historically experienced) to draw appreciably close to a process of formation, distribution and employment of wealth that reduces negative results to a minimum. This happens when individual and national income (that is, the flow of goods and services annually produced by a collectivity and expressed in money, which is precisely equivalent to the current, most common notion of wealth) is formed and distributed within the framework of a rationalization of economic life. The cornerstones of this rationalization, according to Christian social doctrine, are the continuous reform of customs and of structures: that is, it is a matter of finding ever more perfect instruments and techniques of production, distribution and use of goods and services (reforms of structure and reforms within a given structure) and of leading men to use them in the best way for the advantage of the human person (reform of consciences).
Here there return, as regards reforms within structures and of the structures themselves, all the problems of productivity (from the standardization of products to human relations; to the various forms of incentive wages, team wages, proportional wages; profit-sharing, etc.), of the reform of the enterprise, whether through the insertion of workers into the ownership of the firm (worker shareholding, etc.), or through the transfer of ownership to the workers (various forms of cooperation, loan of capital, etc.), or through the initiation of associative forms (for example, the capital-labor association); moreover all the problems of reform of the market economy itself, with the passage from economic liberalism to a directed economy (planned economy in its various meanings); and finally all the problems of distribution of the wealth produced, whether on the company level (equitable division of wealth among those who have contributed to producing it), or on the national level (problems of distribution of national income, the tax problem, the problem of social security, etc.), or on the international level (the problem of raw materials, of the exchange of information, of depressed areas, etc.).
As regards, instead, the reform of consciences, there returns the problem of the demands of natural law and of revealed law (problems of the development of philosophy and of moral theology), with all the means established by Christian tradition and offered by continuous human progress. Therefore «it will be easy to perceive» - as Pius XII says (Radio message for the fiftieth anniversary of Rerum novarum) - that the economic wealth of a people does not properly consist in the abundance of goods, measured according to a pure and mere material computation of their value, but rather in what such abundance really and effectively represents and offers as the material base sufficient for the due personal development of its members. If a similar just distribution of goods were not carried out or were procured only imperfectly, the true purpose of the national economy would not be attained; for however much a fortunate abundance of available goods might assist, the people, not called to share in it, would not be economically rich, but poor.
II. RELIGIOUS-MORAL ASPECT
Here two points seem to bear most directly on the problem of wealth: the connection between wealth and the moral life in the Old and New Testaments (the doctrine of retribution in Christian Revelation); and the moral value of wealth.
1) The idea of retribution in the first books of the Old Testament tends to take on an immediate and earthly character; the affirmation that good will be rewarded and evil punished tends to be translated into these others: good will be rewarded immediately, in this life, indeed materially; evil will be punished immediately, in this life, indeed materially. See, for example, chapter 26 of Lev. and chapter 28 of Deut.: "If you walk in my precepts and observe my commandments and put them into practice, I will send you rain in its seasons, and the earth will yield its produce..." (Lev. 26:3-4; cf. also the story of Job and chapters 3 and 4 of Wisdom). Hence a singular concentration of poverty and wealth, as if the former were the counterproof of a situation of inner immorality and the latter, in turn, the counterproof of inner moral goodness: the poor man tends to be identified with the wicked man and with one abandoned by God; the rich man tends to be identified with the good man and with one protected by God.
Things change considerably as one draws nearer to the New Testament and, in any case, with it. The idea of a correspondence between good and reward, evil and unhappiness is strongly emphasized; not, however, necessarily in the sense of an immediate correspondence, much less a material one (cf., for example, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man Epublone; the former does good and yet suffers in this life; the latter does evil and yet lacks nothing in this life: Lk. 16:20 ff.). Thus the idea of wealth as the reward of good done and of poverty as the punishment of evil committed is gradually abandoned: both are presented as conditions that can accompany virtue as well as vice, situations that one can use and abuse.
2) As for the relationship between wealth and morality, the concept of wealth must be defined more precisely, and the historical behavior of the rich man must then be examined. Wealth could be defined either in terms of the magnitude, today usually translated into money, of the goods one possesses, or in terms of the profit that accrues to the owner. In the first sense wealth is identified with a considerable mass of goods; in the second sense it is identified with an abundance of economic resources. Into this abundance of economic resources two components enter: a) the quantity of profits received in a given period of time (e.g., a month, a year); b) the capacity to endure over time.
The second component is the more important. Even a very large profit may not represent wealth, if there are well-founded reasons for believing that it will not last at all or only with great difficulty; conversely, even a not excessive profit may represent genuine wealth if one has moral certainty of its long duration. Now, speaking concretely, wealth in the sense indicated behaves substantially in the following ways: a) it stimulates more easily and more frequently to idleness than to work. That this is truly so is amply shown by history; that it should be so follows obviously from the state of wealth. What stimulus to work can the rich man have? However things go, since his income is secure, he will always have more than he needs. Why wear out one's existence to increase one's patrimony and one's income? Nor should the figure of the miser be objected, with his insatiate craving to increase his goods: in the first place he does not represent the rule, but the exception; and then he does so only insofar as (through illness or fault) he does not consider himself secure enough, that is, is not "rich." His attitude is born of the conviction that he is not rich, not of a behavior of wealth different from that described. It could be put another way: wealth strongly stimulates the pursuit and enjoyment of pleasure (cf. Lk. 12:17-19). And it is inevitable that in the pursuit of pleasures the appeal of earthly enjoyments is stronger (cf. Mt. 13:17-22); b) it often constitutes an incentive to vice and an instrument for oppressing the freedom of others. Whoever possesses gold in notable measure can open almost every door. Wealth therefore allows, always concretely and historically speaking, even doing what morality and the laws do not always permit. On the other hand, for the same reason, wealth also sometimes allows one to dominate the will of others, bending it easily to one's own desire; c) it makes trusting confidence in God more difficult. It is well known that recourse to him is all the easier the greater one's perception of one's own insufficiency. One has proof of this in the greater religiosity of the child and the old man compared with the adult man, of primitive peoples compared with civilized peoples, of moments of individual danger (e.g., illnesses) or collective danger (e.g., war) compared with moments of tranquility. The same must be said for economic conditions. Whoever does not have a secure life is more inclined to recognize that everything depends on God, that we can do nothing without his help and his protection. For the rich man, by contrast, the necessary and indeed the superfluous arrive on a fixed schedule, often in the familiar form of the banknote or the check, almost with the regularity of atmospheric phenomena and the certainty of physical phenomena, so that he has the impression that for him the future is in his hands. The counterproof is in a certain religiosity that is noted in the holders of wealth when clouds gather on the horizon and no other means is seen to drive them away except divine intervention: then religious feeling is reborn and the invocation of God becomes almost spontaneous. One can therefore say: although not evil in itself, wealth constitutes in fact, concretely and statistically speaking, an occasion of evil. In particular, wealth behaves antithetically to the motives for which the institution of private property is defended in the Christian tradition. It constitutes not an incarnation of it, but a corruption of it.
Being a danger to the moral life, an incentive to fail in one's duties, everyone must avoid placing himself within it; must seek, as far as he is able, to get out of it, and, when there are reasons for not doing so, must seek in every way to neutralize the evil consequences that wealth normally brings with it. This must be said especially of those who find themselves in wealth without personal effort, by virtue of more or less fortuitous events (social upheavals, wars, descent, etc.): they in particular must remember that, if they find themselves in a "humanly" enviable condition, they are "Christianly" in a dangerous condition. In this sense the frequent alarms of Christ against wealth must be understood. Jesus lived in an economic-social structure founded on the regime of private property and did not condemn it; indeed he condemned theft (cf. Mt. 19:18 and parallels). He taught repeatedly that wealth can be an instrument of good and of eternal life (cf. the parable of the ten talents, the episode of the Magdalene, etc.). Wealth, however, is not the greatest good (cf. Mt. 16:26). Indeed it is a danger so grave that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mt. 19-22). The heartfelt warning against the dangers of wealth does not therefore by that very fact mean an exaltation of poverty as such (cf. Prov. 30:8-9).
It is now possible to answer an objection that may easily arise, namely that the Christian attitude toward wealth constitutes an obstacle to progress. Let us point out first of all that for us progress is a drawing near to the human ideal and to the conditions for truly realizing it; for that ideal and for the approach to it, goods are a component, not the only one, nor the most important; and that the Christian diffidence toward wealth is born precisely from the fact that it, rather than constituting a stimulus to work, constitutes an incentive to idleness, that is, from the fact that, rather than acting in a productivist and progressive function, it operates in an antiproductivist and indeed regressive sense.