I bumped into some familiar quotations from Aristotle and St. Thomas over the holidays.
There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another.
I thinks it important to point out how Aristotle, St. Thomas, and most classical thought sees the business of the merchant/tradesmen to be "unnatural" (and this is still, if not even more so truer with our modern day 'corporate salesman') and how this will connect to one's supernatural virtues and life. That is if one is constantly doing that which is against or not inline with the natural order, they are unlikely to progress very far in the supernatural life, because one is the basis for the other.
You raise an excellent point. I also think, as matter of philosophical method, that it is interesting how for St. Thomas a thing can be unnatural and dishonorable, but not sinful of itself. In arguments among Catholics, even here, one frequently encounters the attitude that if a thing is not sinful, then nothing can be said against it. This is not so; and here we see clearly that strictly speaking non-sinful attitudes can nevertheless be ignoble, base, dishonorable.
Topic: Ignobility of the merchant - classic thought (Read 1603 times)