Catholic Commentary
The Vanity of Pursuing Wealth
4Don’t weary yourself to be rich. In your wisdom, show restraint.5Why do you set your eyes on that which is not? For it certainly sprouts wings like an eagle and flies in the sky.
Proverbs 23:4–5 warns against exhausting oneself in pursuit of wealth, which ultimately lacks enduring value and will vanish like a fleeing bird. The passage teaches that organizing one's life around the accumulation of riches dissipates vital energy better directed toward eternal goods and proper spiritual orientation toward God.
Wealth dissolves the moment you make it your target—the harder you chase it, the faster it vanishes, leaving you wearied and staring at nothing.
The Spiritual Senses
Allegorically, the "eyes" set upon wealth represent the intellectus — the faculty of the soul that directs desire. When the intellect fixes on a finite good as if it were ultimate, the will follows into disordered love. The Fathers read this "gaze" language as a map of the interior life: what we look at, we move toward; what we move toward, we become. The sage's question — Why do you set your eyes on that which is not? — is thus a question about the soul's fundamental orientation, its telos. The anagogical sense points toward the One who is — the divine I AM of Exodus — as the only object of desire that does not dissolve under the gaze of the heart.
Catholic tradition brings a distinctively rich lens to these two verses through its integrated understanding of the human person, virtue, and the theology of desire.
Avarice as Capital Sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church identifies avarice (greed) as one of the seven capital sins — a capital sin not because it is the worst in isolation, but because it generates a brood of other sins (CCC 1866). What Proverbs 23:4 diagnoses behaviorally — exhausting, self-wearying pursuit of riches — the Catechism names structurally as a disorder of the will that subordinates eternal goods to temporal ones.
Disordered Attachment and the Affections. St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle and Scripture, taught that wealth is an instrumental good — ordered to sustaining life and enabling virtue — and becomes a vice only when desired beyond measure (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 118, a. 1). The sage's warning is precisely Thomistic: the problem is not wealth per se but the wearying, unlimited, restless pursuit that treats an instrumental good as a final end.
The Fathers on Illusory Goods. St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on Matthew, repeatedly returns to the image of wealth as smoke — present one moment, gone the next — drawing directly on the biblical wisdom tradition these verses exemplify. St. Basil the Great in his Homily to the Rich cites the fleeting nature of riches as the primary argument for almsgiving: you cannot hold what was never truly yours. St. Augustine's restless heart (cor nostrum inquietum est) is the positive counterpart to Proverbs 23:4 — the weariness of pursuing wealth is simply misdirected restlessness that finds its only rest in God (Confessions I.1).
Papal Teaching. Laudato Si' (Pope Francis, 2015) and Centesimus Annus (John Paul II, 1991) both identify the reduction of the human person to an economic agent — defined by production and consumption — as a spiritual crisis. Proverbs 23:4–5 is the ancient wisdom diagnosis of what these documents describe in modern economic terms: the human heart, when ordered entirely toward material accumulation, suffers a kind of self-annihilation.
The modern economy is, in many respects, an industrialized system for making Proverbs 23:4 a way of life. The Catholic reader encounters these verses against a cultural backdrop of hustle culture, productivity optimization, and the equation of self-worth with net worth. The sage's question — Why do you set your eyes on that which is not? — deserves to be asked concretely: Why are you checking the market at midnight? Why is Sunday rest colonized by work anxiety? Why does your child's memory of you involve a screen and a spreadsheet?
A practical Catholic application begins with the Ignatian discipline of indifference — not apathy, but the freedom to use material goods without being used by them. The Examen prayer, practiced daily, is a direct tool for catching the moment when legitimate financial prudence tips into disordered preoccupation. Monthly examination of one's relationship to money — specifically, how much mental and spiritual energy it consumes — is a concrete form of heeding the sage's warning.
Further, these verses invite a reckoning with the gaze: What do I look at first in the morning? What do I orient my planning around? What would I sacrifice for financial security? The Catholic answer is not poverty for its own sake, but the ordered freedom of a heart whose gaze rests, ultimately, on the One who does not fly away.
Commentary
Proverbs 23:4 — "Do not weary yourself to be rich."
The Hebrew verb yāga' ("to weary," "to toil to exhaustion") is deliberately physical. The sage is not counseling mere moderation in ambition; he is depicting a man who has ground himself down — bones aching, vision narrowed — in single-minded pursuit of wealth. The reflexive force of the construction ("weary yourself") underscores that this is self-inflicted harm. The very energy God gave for worship, relationships, and virtue is being hemorrhaged into the accumulation of silver and grain. The command is unambiguous: cease. Not "balance your portfolio." Not "pursue wealth wisely." Stop the wearying altogether.
This verse belongs to a longer didactic section (Proverbs 23:1–11) addressed to a young man navigating the seductions of powerful patrons and material prosperity. The sage has already warned against the "deceitful food" at a rich man's table (23:3); now he broadens the warning from one meal to an entire life-orientation. The parallelism with surrounding verses is instructive: the glutton (v. 2), the miser (v. 6), and the drunkard (v. 20) all share the same root disorder — appetite turned tyrant.
Proverbs 23:5 — "Why do you set your eyes on that which is not?"
The rhetorical question is more devastating than any proposition. The sage does not say wealth is wrong; he says it is not — it lacks the ontological weight the pursuer attributes to it. The Hebrew phrase hă-ta'ûp 'ênekā bô carries the image of the eyes flying toward an object ("to cause your eyes to dart/fly upon it"), as a bird of prey stoops on quarry. The irony is immediate: the wealth itself then sprouts wings and flies away "like an eagle toward heaven" (the full verse in most Hebrew manuscripts includes this imagery). The pursuer becomes the pursued — or rather, the prey becomes the predator, escaping while the hunter is left staring at empty sky.
The phrase "that which is not" ('ayin) is a profound ontological claim. Riches are not nothing in an absolute sense, but they possess no stable, enduring being when set against eternal goods. They participate in existence contingently, conditionally, and temporarily. To set one's eyes on them — to make them the orienting object of one's vision and desire — is to organize one's life around a kind of nothingness. This anticipates Qoheleth's hebel ("vanity/vapor") and the New Testament's language of "moth and rust" (Matthew 6:19).