by Dr. Sebastian Mahfood
Published in the December 2025 issue of FiRST Principles, the journal of ITEST. CLICK HERE to view issues of the journal and our past Bulletin issues.
Poor people don’t understand how credit works. Let me explain. Credit is debt. Rich people borrow money to buy things that make them more money. Poor people use credit to buy things that lose money over time. Debt is modern-day slavery. . . . Act your wage.
— Frank Underwood, House of Cards
Over the past decade, En Route Books and Media has published a number of books on the Catholic understanding of money. The eschatology of such is underscored by Dante Alighieri in his Inferno as the pilgrim traveler witnesses hoarders and wasters crashing boulders against one another, debtors racing through dark woods before being ripped apart by the mastiffs in pursuit of them, usurers crouching toward the circle of fraud, simoniacs encased upside down in perversions of baptismal fonts, grafters ripped apart by demons, and counterfeiters and liars abusing one another.
On the fifth cornice of the Purgatorio, those endeavoring to embrace the virtue of liberality, which entails spending the right amount on the right people for the right reasons and at the right time, cleave their faces to the dirt. They gradually come to an awareness of what Christ meant when he reordered the logic of wealth acquisition in saying, “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:20-21).
Debtors are hard-pressed to engage the virtue of liberality or curb their use of money heavenward, enslaved as they are by their, in Neal Flesher’s terms, modern chains. Statius makes the point on Mount Purgatory when he explains that it was Virgil who taught him it was possible to spread one’s hands too wide in spending. The eschatological nature of obligation, therefore, makes our treatment of money one of eternal concern, which, to paraphrase Aristotle, makes no small difference in our lives; rather, it makes all the difference.
I. The Plastic Soul
Frank Underwood’s sardonic monologue compresses into a few sentences what Catholic social philosophy has spent centuries untangling: the moral anatomy of credit. Behind the cynicism lies a metaphysical diagnosis, such that the use of money reveals the orientation of the soul. In an order rightly constituted, credit serves creation; in a disordered one, it serves enslavement. Debt, in that sense, is never simply financial. It is moral. It is spiritual. It is, as Thomas Aquinas would say, actus voluntatis ordinatus vel inordinatus, a voluntary act ordered toward the good, or the distorted mirror of that order.
In Money, Markets, and Morals (En Route, 2024), Thomas Storck reminds us that every economic act participates in the moral order because it concerns the material means of human flourishing. The decision to borrow, to lend, or to advance credit is not morally indifferent; it shapes the relation between persons and therefore touches the eternal law. What Underwood calls “slavery” is the interior consequence of mis-ordering that relation, when acquisition supersedes stewardship and the sign of exchange usurps the substance of virtue.
II. Ethics before Economics
Donald Boland, in Economic Science and St. Thomas Aquinas (En Route, 2016), rebuilds the scaffolding that modern economics dismantled. For St. Thomas, he argues, the economic realm is a particular application of moral philosophy governed by the same hierarchy of causes that orders all practical reasoning. Wealth, as an external good, serves the perfection of the person; therefore, economic science is subordinated to ethics just as ethics is subordinated to metaphysics.
In Aquinas’s vocabulary, every practical art has its own proximate end (finis proximus) and its ultimate end (finis ultimus). The merchant may seek profit (lucrum) as the proximate reward for labor and risk, yet that profit must remain ordered toward the common good. When profit becomes the final cause — when accumulation becomes self-referential — the act degenerates into avarice, a sin against justice and charity alike. The same distortion structures the modern credit economy. A Merchant Cash Advance (MCA), marketed as an exchange of future receivables, disguises its formal object: profit without productive contribution, gain detached from work. Aquinas would recognize this as usura, the taking of payment for the mere passage of time.
Boland insists that time, being created, cannot itself be sold; only goods or services with intrinsic utility may be traded justly. To sell the use of money as such is to sell what does not exist, to convert duration into commodity. Here we discern the metaphysical root of Underwood’s cynical realism. The powerful learn to rent the future; the poor are induced to mortgage it. Either instance grates against the Catholic understanding of a universal destination of goods.
III. Market Disorder
For Storck, the detachment of markets from moral law is not an economic evolution but a fall. The market, he explains, does not contain within itself the principles by which it should be governed. When it claims autonomy, it enthrones appetite. MCAs and credit cards exemplify this disordered autonomy: instruments originally designed to facilitate exchange now function as engines of extraction. The lender’s profit no longer arises from participation in production but from the borrower’s endurance, the monetization of dependence, and the foreclosure on the default.
This is the precise inversion Aquinas warned against when he distinguished artes liberales (arts ordered to truth) from artes serviles (arts ordered to utility). The liberal art of economics, properly understood, liberates;1 it directs material order toward moral order. But the servile art of speculation enslaves, converting intellect to instrumentality. Storck thus echoes St. Thomas’s admonition that the human act is good when it accords with reason, for reason, not desire, defines man’s participation in divine order. A society that makes desire the measure of value replaces reason with ratio calculandi, mere calculation, and in doing so, loses its soul.
IV. A Moral Taxonomy of Exchange
In Economic Science and St. Thomas, Boland delineates the moral species of exchange with the precision of a scholastic anatomist. There are, he explains, three principal forms of economic action:
- Natural exchange, in which goods are traded for the satisfaction of need.
- Political exchange, in which surplus goods serve the maintenance of the household or the state.
- Artificial exchange, in which money becomes both means and end, producing gain from circulation itself.
The first two preserve order because they remain instruments of the bonum commune; the third perverts order because it severs acquisition from service. Artificial exchange is the birthplace of the credit card and the MCA. Both are structured to yield profit not from the thing sold but from the act of selling itself, the purest form of mutuum gone wrong. To take increase from what in its nature does not increase is, after all, to take where one has not sown.
Through this lens, Underwood’s dictum reads like a secular gloss on the Thomistic critique of usury. The poor, he observes, borrow for consumption, for that which perishes, while the rich borrow for production, for that which yields fruit. The difference is not intelligence but orientation toward the final cause: whether the loan participates in decay or in creation. Thomistically speaking, only the latter can be justified, for it alone aligns finis operis (the end of the work) with finis operantis (the intention of the worker).
V. Debt as Ontological Violence
Neal Flesher, in Modern Chains (En Route, 2025) gives existential flesh to this scholastic skeleton. “Slavery did not die,” he writes, “it was redesigned.” The instruments have changed, contracts instead of chains, balances instead of brands, yet the anthropology remains constant. To live on credit is to live under stewardship not one’s own, to trade the sovereignty of the will for the security of deferral. Debt thus becomes not only an economic condition but a metaphysical one: man alienated from the fruit of his labor, paying tribute to abstractions that bear no sweat and shed no blood.
For Aquinas, injustice resides precisely in such alienation. The moral evil of usury is that it demands fruit without seed, effect without cause. It treats money as fertile in itself, denying the created order in which only living things generate life. Flesher’s “modern chains” name this denial in contemporary form, the technological mediation of usury through digital systems that abstract the lender from responsibility and the borrower from reality. Here Boland’s scholastic clarity and Flesher’s prophetic imagery converge: both diagnose the same metaphysical disease — creatio ex nihilo claimed by the creature.
VI. The Eschatology of Interest
In my own book Radical Eschatologies (Lambert, 2009), I show through teleological eschatology, which orients all history toward its consummation, how the meaning of economics cannot be separated from its end. Time is not neutral but sacramental; it is the field upon which grace unfolds. To charge interest, therefore, is to monetize the eschaton, to sell participation in a future that belongs to God alone.
Aquinas’s metaphysics confirms this insight. The future, as potential being, cannot be possessed; to trade in it is to usurp providence. “He who sells what he does not own,” writes Boland paraphrasing Aquinas, “commits injustice.” Interest is thus the practical blasphemy of the modern age: it exacts payment for a gift not yet given. In theological terms, it transforms hope, the theological virtue ordered toward divine promise, into a financial instrument ordered toward human control.
This is why Storck expresses that a truly Christian economy must be eschatological in orientation. It must anticipate not perpetual growth but ultimate fulfillment, not the infinity of accumulation but the perfection of sufficiency. Only when money serves that final cause does it regain moral value.
VII. The Moral Value of Money
What, then, is the moral value of money? In Aquinas’s order of goods, money is an instrumental good, valuable insofar as it facilitates justice in exchange and charity in community. Its worth is relational, not absolute. Boland interprets this to mean that money has its place in the hierarchy of being: it is the servant of life, not its lord. Storck extends the thought: money crystallizes cooperation, for it is the external sign of trust. Flesher brings the point home: when money ceases to symbolize trust and begins to command it, it becomes an idol.
The MCA and the credit card reveal the idol’s face. Both promise liquidity, the ability to move freely, yet both achieve it by immobilizing the human person through perpetual obligation. They counterfeit communion by replacing mutual trust with algorithmic enforcement. The moral value of money is thus reversed: what should unite divides, what should liberate enslaves. Aquinas’s dictum holds: bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu, a good act requires the harmony of all its causes; evil arises from a single distortion. The distortion here is the detachment of economic means from moral ends.
VIII. Acting Our Wage: Thomistic Prudence in the Age of Credit
Underwood’s parting counsel, “Act your wage,” articulates the virtue of Temperantia, moderation in the use of temporal goods. Aquinas situates temperance as the guardian of freedom: it disciplines desire so that reason may rule. To act one’s wage is to live within the measure of one’s vocation, acknowledging the divine economy in which every gift carries responsibility. In Thomistic prudence, spending and saving are moral acts; they must be proportionate to one’s state and directed toward the common good.
Boland translates this into a contemporary imperative, that economic maturity consists not in maximizing returns but in harmonizing means with ends. Credit may be licit when it serves production or sustenance, but it becomes illicit when it serves mere appetite. The moral question is not can I pay? but should I borrow? The answer depends on whether the act contributes to human flourishing or corrodes it.
Storck would add that communal structures must reflect the same prudence: local credit unions, cooperative enterprises, and wage policies oriented toward stability rather than speculation.
Flesher would radicalize the conclusion: a civilization cannot remain free while its citizens are owned by debt. To act our wage is therefore to reclaim agency, to refuse the metaphysics of endless deferral and to re-enter the moral present.
IX. Toward a Redeemed Economy
If the disease is metaphysical, so must be the cure. The Thomistic path of redemption begins in the intellect, proceeds through the will, and culminates in grace. Intellect must recognize the truth: that wealth is stewardship. Will must consent to right order: that ownership implies obligation. Grace must elevate both, transforming commerce into communion.
In this redeemed order, the MCA and the credit card can be transfigured. They may still exist as instruments, but their logic would change from extraction to cooperation. Interest would give way to partnership; credit would become covenant once more. Such a transformation demands not merely reform of policy but conversion of hearts, a retrieval of the metaphysical humility that St. Thomas placed at the root of all virtue. “All created good,” he teaches, “is limited; it must be ordered to an end beyond itself.” The economy that forgets this becomes its own eschaton, a perpetual motion machine fueled through the consumption of souls.
X. Toward a Transformation of Persons
If our true relationship to money is a spiritual rather than material phenomenon, then what’s needed to right the ship is a spiritual rather than material transformation. Juan Pablo Stegmann, in his series Leadership: A Journey toward World Peace (En Route, 2023), shows that spirituality and leadership are the twin engines of a just economy.
Spiritual intelligence, he argues, unites reason and love, converting economic value creation into moral value creation. Leadership thus becomes a spiritual vocation that harmonizes intellect, empathy, and transcendence, aligning precisely with the Thomistic hierarchy of ends and with Boland’s insistence that economics must serve ethics and metaphysics.
Where Frank Underwood’s realism ends in cynicism, Stegmann’s realism begins in grace: the recognition that genuine prosperity arises not from leverage or speculation, but from interior greatness, the cultivation of beauty, goodness, and truth within the human heart as the first treasury of any moral economy. In this sense, spiritual growth precedes economic growth in a way analogous to how ethics precedes economics, and metaphysics precedes ethics.
XI. The Only Currency That Endures
I bring closure to this short essay by pointing out that while Frank Underwood’s monologue begins in derision, it ends in confession. “Just because you can afford the monthly payment,” he warns, “doesn’t mean you can afford the item.”
St. Thomas, through Boland’s lens, would translate this into the language of final causality. Every economy, like every soul, moves toward an end: either the temporal infinity of debt or the eternal sufficiency of charity. In that final reckoning, balance sheets dissolve, and only virtue remains in the black.
The eschatology of obligation is nothing less, after all, than the eschatology of the human heart, a question of whom we choose to serve, God or Mammon. The market will pass away, but the measure of charity endures. And that, perhaps, is the last line Frank Underwood never got to deliver.
1. The author is grateful to Thomas Storck and Donald Boland for pointing out that the art of economics is not classically among the liberal arts, so my analogy falls short on this point. See Donald Boland’s Economic Science and St. Thomas Aquinas for a full discussion of the necessary distinctions between natural and unnatural exchange.
