Just, Not Charitable
+ Essay: Entrusted, Not Given. Just, Not Charitable: Gregory and an Ancient Christian Ethic of Ownership
Maria Refugio (Cuca) Mendez-Robles was a devout Christian who wore an elastic band as a wedding ring. She migrated north to Indiana with her husband, Juan, as he transitioned from working in the fields to the factory. Her six children were reared in a home without an indoor toilet, using an outhouse to go to the bathroom. These realities are not exceptional nor extreme. She is one of a great multitude, many of whom endured greater disparities. The few words that follow are dedicated to her, my grandmother, and the poor like her, whom God has chosen to be “rich in faith and inheritors of the kingdom he promised."
When José Porfirio Miranda writes of a systematic exclusion that has theologically and morally impaired much of the Church, he’s referring to the exemption of a central fact within Scripture: “‘To give alms’ in the Bible is called ‘to do justice’.” Sacred text does not bifurcate giving to the poor from justice. Rather, it sees the act as a just restitution, not charity, returning to the one in need that which is rightly their own. In this paper I will attempt to show that this position was commonly held by the early Church and the ancient voices, such as Saint Gregory the Great, who shaped much of Her theological and ethical framework. While this subject tends to stir up ideas and issues that are imbued with complexities, my aim is to simplify the focus and hone in on what the Fathers taught concerning wealth, ownership, and giving to the poor. I’ll then try to dance with why they taught it, offering some more contemporary voices on the matter. Finally, I’ll attempt to explore how we might live with the gifts that have been entrusted to us.
Born Gregorius Anicius (A.D. 540) in the Eastern Roman Empire, Pope Saint Gregory I has become a voice who remains held in high ecumenical regard. Even reformers such as John Calvin, whose staunch polemic against the papacy was so strong he went as far as to call it the “seat of the Anti-Christ,” viewed Gregory as the last fair pope with a cause he deemed “good and honorable.” This admiration is anchored to Gregory’s story and witness. The son of aristocratic parents who owned estates in Sicily and Rome, his socioeconomic location was one of wealth and privilege. Upon his father’s death, he inherited the estates, placing a vast amount of wealth into his possession. However, he soon experienced a beautiful crisis,
“After a profound inward struggle, he decided once for all to give these far-flung properties to the poor. He completely disavowed both wealth and power. In 574, at the age of thirty-four, taking the oath of poverty and celibacy, he became a monk according to the pattern of St. Benedict. Through his energy and beneficence six monasteries were established in Sicily and one remarkable monastic experiment in Rome, St. Andrew, from which so much of the seventh century leadership of the church was destined soon to come. He gave all else to the poor”
(Thomas Oden, Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition: Ch.2 Why Gregory?)
Gregory experienced a dynamic which is at the center, not the margins, of Christian praxis; the detachment from possessions. This was a common Christian ethic that transcended monastic life. Unique to Gregory, however, was his capacity to repurpose papal patrimony to this end. He regarded himself as “as an administrator of this property for the sake of the poor” coming close to emptying the treasury. This release of wealth and material goods to the poor was not seen to be charitable, nor lauded as gratuitous kindness. Instead, it was an act of ‘return’ as those who give, “must be admonished to acknowledge that they have been appointed by the heavenly Lord to be the dispensers of temporal means, and to display their humility the more, inasmuch as they realize that what they dispense belongs to others.” Expounding upon this widely held patristic belief, translator Henry Davis comments, “God has entrusted, not given, wealth to certain people, that they be wise custodians and dispensers of it to the actual owners, the poor and needy. . .”
A survey of the Fathers reveals a significant condensation of the belief that to give to the poor is an act of restorative justice, returning to them what is their own. St. Ambrose consolidates this understanding when he states, “You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.” St. Augustine’s, “Justicia est in subveniendo miseris” conveys the same position; “justice is in helping the poor.” Conversely, it was also held that to not give to the poor that which is hoarded in excess is to steal from them. The strong words of Basil’s homily on the “The Rich Fool” have rendered hearts tender since the fourth century and no doubt would serve to influence Gregory and the like. In it, Basil draws attention to one who is not willing to rest content with what is sufficient, confusing stewardship with ownership. Applying this same principle he identifies those who, like the rich fool, “build bigger barns” and store superfluously, as thieves and robbers.
“Now, someone who takes a man who is clothed and renders him naked would be termed a robber; but when someone fails to clothe the naked, while he is able to do this, is such a man deserving of any other appellation? The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong”
(St. Basil, Homily on the saying of the Gospel According to Luke, ‘I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and on greed.’ §7 p 31, 276B – 277A, http://shorturl.at/fNW17 )
In his “Sermon to The Rich,” Basil’s words become more pointed, offering a delineated threshold upon which the second greatest commandment is to be measured, “Therefore, however much you exceed in wealth, so much so do you fall short in love: else long since you’d have taken care to be divorced from your money, if you had loved your neighbor.”
Perhaps some of the most potent admonitions come from St. John Chrysostom. Chrysostom served as archbishop of Constantinople (A.D. 398), after being seized by soldiers and taken to the capital, where he was ordained as archbishop against his will. Later on he would come to accept it as divine providence. While giving a homily on 1 Timothy, he pauses to consider the “mammon of unrighteousness” mentioned in Luke’s Gospel. Then, turning his attention to the gross inequity of his time, he challenges the existence of righteous wealth.
“Tell me, then, whence are you rich? . . . But can you, ascending through many generations, show the acquisition just? It cannot be. The root and origin of it must have been injustice. Why? Because God in the beginning made not one man rich, and another poor. Nor did He afterwards take and show to one treasures of gold, and deny to the other the right of searching for it: but He left the earth free to all alike. Why then, if it is common, have you so many acres of land, while your neighbor has not a portion of it?”
(Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 13., Christian Literature Publishing Co., Ed. Kevin Knight, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/230612.htm)
The recurrent theme of unjust overabundance among the rich, and the just recompense to the poor, created a cohesive disposition for an ancient Christian ethic towards wealth and giving.
This did not happen in a vacuum, it was no invention, but was born because of a particular Trinitarian response to the Incarnation, Scripture, and early tradition. If the fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell in the Son, the very Son who took on not only the flesh of humanity but “the poverty of humanity, emptying himself so much that he takes on the poor in humanity in himself and makes himself one with the poor,” the Church then must grapple with the ontological relationship “between God and the poor.” Maximus the Confessor threads this reality between two eschatological sayings of Jesus, “the poor you will have with you always” and “I am with you always . . .” He writes, “if the poor man is God, it is because of God’s condescension in becoming poor for us and in taking upon himself by his own suffering the sufferings of each one and ‘until the end of time’. . .” This resonates heavily with Christ’s parable of the “sheep and the goats” of which Simone Weil points out the same truth with a sharp critique; that giving to the poor is an act of eschatological justice.
Christ does not call his benefactors ‘loving’ or ‘charitable.’ He calls them ‘just.’ The Gospel never distinguishes between love of neighbour and justice . . . We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why. Our notion of justice excuses those who possess [wealth] from giving.
(Simone Weil, Awaiting God A new translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre à un Religieux, trans. Bradley Jersak, Kindle Edition p 49.)
If Christ is with us because the poor are with us, the question then becomes, “what are we to do with Christ in our midst and the gifts in our hands?” To this, the Church has historically directed the baptized to return to Christ in “the least of these” what is his own. But we know that those who do give, do so genuinely unaware, without conscious thought. Justice for the poor, returning to Christ that which comes from him, can never be fully actualized through the force of law, nor the shaming of a soul, but through the compulsion of the heart animated by the Spirit of God. This doesn’t mean that justice is reducible solely to individual responsibility. There is a corporate, collective reality that can flow from it. It does infer, however, that this type of justice is not calculating. “God is not present, even when invoked,” writes Weil, “where the afflicted are simply an occasion for doing good, even if they are loved on this account.” It is a sad reality that the poor are frequently objectified directly through the act of giving, often by their benefactors. Is it justice if those in need must be humiliated in order to receive what is rightly their own?
The collective voice of saints, past and present, on this matter of justice can cause inner discomfort in many cases. It sheds light on the fact that to be bound up in modernity implies some basic level of complicity in systems and structures of consumption, acquisition, and injustice. For example, can anyone have moral high-ground who owns a smartphone? That means no matter who reads these ancient voices, their words can be a challenge to receive. It is not my heart to throw anyone from any socioeconomic status under the proverbial bus, but instead to invite everyone collectively to examine the “bus” itself by placing it juxtaposed to the teachings of the Church. Perhaps when we do, we may find ourselves moving towards an immeasurable host of others throughout history, like Gregory, who were brought into an inner-knowing that what they had in excess did not belong to them but instead to the disinherited one in need. The dispossessed poor experience the dehumanizing outcomes fostered and tolerated by those of us who are “possessed by our possessions,” who desire to “act on behalf of the poor, without having to lose our possessions.” It is my hope that the Word made flesh, through the witness of his Body and the means of grace, may exorcise this curse by us being so drawn into “the givenness of all things” that we find God's gifts to be restless in our hands “until they are given again” back into the rightful hands of whom they belong. May we prayerfully work to return to the ancient Christian ethic where, “the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little."