Jerry DeNuccio unpacks the religious and literary history behind anti-materialism:
Invariably, anti-stuff screeds are extreme and offer only glittering abstractions in place of the isness, the thisness, of things. “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage,” says Thoreau, punning on the word “sage” to imply that sagacity, and not an often crushing depravation, somehow inheres in poverty. Easy to say, perhaps, for one who never married and has no encumbering family responsibilities; one who does a bit of day-labor surveying when the spirit moves him; one who refuses for six years to pay taxes, is jailed, and released the next day when someone pays them for him; one who, squatting on land owned by Emerson, can support himself by spending six weeks growing beans for sale. “Absolutely speaking,” Thoreau proclaims, “the more money, the less virtue.” The “moral ground” of a man with money “is taken from under his feet” because it makes his life too easy, “comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him.” I guess Henry forgot he’d just worked six weeks out of fifty-two to get the money to obtain his objects, meager though they be. And I guess it slipped his mind that he’d been “in haste to buy” Hollowell Farm simply to “be unmolested in my possession of it.”
A more reasonable approach:
That’s why I agree with Emerson: Money may be, he observes, “the prose of life,” but he’s surely correct in saying that it can be, “in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.” And I agree, without proviso, with Ishmael, who comes to realize that “attainable felicity” is not located “in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country” — all tangible things, the first held close by the second, a doing and being, its laws and effects the poetry of life; the others–more prosaic but beautiful nonetheless–purchased stuff.
The Dish 