Matthew 25:40 and Connections

 (Some parts of this presuppose my previous entry.)

I have been trying to make sense out of the Book of Matthew and I might communicate my thoughts about it later. Trying to forget the heat in my non-airconditioned place, I also did something dangerous for mental health this morning: checked the news (usually AP).  Some unusual reporting there, an article about a textile worker also suffering in the heat. There used to textile workers in my home region of Kentucky, but those jobs were “outsourced.” The article reported on a man named Sibaram Pradhan, a 35-year-old textile worker who left his home in Odisha and traveled about 2,000 kilometers to Surat in western India to find work. Farming in his home region has become increasingly difficult because of floods, cyclones, and unreliable weather, so he supports his family by working in a large textile factory. He lives in a crowded dormitory with many other migrant workers, sharing a small room with up to nine men. The building houses hundreds of workers, and many people share only a few toilets. The rooms are hot and poorly ventilated, and he often wakes several times during the night because of the heat. During the day he works twelve-hour shifts supervising textile machines that weave polyester fabric. The factory is extremely noisy, hot, and humid. He spends much of the day drenched in sweat while moving between machines, replacing spools of thread, and watching for problems. The work requires constant attention because accidents can happen when workers become tired, and injuries to hands and fingers are not uncommon. Despite the long hours, he earns only a modest wage, much of which he sends home to his wife and two children. Although the work allows him barely to support his family, he hopes his children will have different opportunities. He wants them to stay in school and find safer, more secure jobs so that they will not have to endure the same hardships he faces every day. Well, I did’t feel like whining about the lack of AC after reading this.

 

     Reading the news is dangerous because it inevitably leads to a further breakdown of my defense mechanisms, and I think about the heat wave now (global warming / cars, computers, planes, etc.); the mention the phenomenal corruption of the current administration, it’s attempts to install a pop-fascist regime, and the rise of populist-fascist movements all over the place: the cruelty to suffering people who immigrate; I just wrote of the fate of the animals under human control; at another level, working people put through “austerity” for the sake of "growth" i.e. the getting bigger of the gigantic piles of money that are multinational corporations and the billionaires who control them; the never-ending Russian war to colonize Ukraine; a UN report on the horrors inflicted on the children of  Gaza by the Israeli military/government, supported by American tax dollars (and all the other dead children and innocents everywhere in that cursed part of the world – the girls school in Iran). Etc. It’s just overwhelming. I want to crawl back into my little world and forget it all so that I can do something life-affirming with this day.

 

    What does this have to do with Matthew? One passage: What you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me (Matthew 25:40-45).  That passage might be the most powerful in the Bible. In any book. Ever thought. What does it mean practically?

. . .

 

     I want to make a point but for myself need to lay out the theological background, grossly over-simplified. In Judeo-Christian understanding (not, interestingly, in Islam, which insists on the complete otherness of Creator and Creature, as I understand it) the human being (Adam) is created in the image of God. Obviously, not in a physical sense as God is not a physical creature. The imago Dei (image of God) means that creatures uniquely participate in divine life through their capacity for truth, freedom, love, and relationship with God, Creation, and other people.

The imago Dei is both a gift and a vocation: every person possesses an inherent dignity that transcends utility or social status but is also called to become more fully what he or she already is through participation in truth, goodness, and divine love. The doctrine means that every human being is more than a biological organism, consumer, worker, citizen, or social role; each person bears a depth and sacredness that points beyond the finite world toward God. In my words, drawing on a long tradition of interpretation, I am an image of God in that I share God’s being (finitely): I have the potential to understand and to love. Sin, which, restricting the concept to self, is to say, separation, disconnection, alienation from this capacity, my ego-consciousness in other words, darkens the image but cannot destroy it. In Christian thought, Jesus is the perfect image of God, the perfect Adam.

    And now the radicality of Matthew 25:40 bites: what you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me, to Christ, to God. You cut yourself off from God by cutting yourself off from other human beings, from textile workers like Sibaram Pradhan. We’re connected in reality even if we are blind to it in this life due to the wounded relationship. Christ is thus present – however darkened – in the face of every suffering human being. However much you train yourself to try to see Christ/God in the face of others, suffering or not, you can never succeed. It is the relation of the circles we draw to the ideal geometrical circle that judges all real circles, which necessarily fall short. But you can try to get better, if you take that image seriously, which I guess few do, few can. Not sure I can or do.

    There are secular ways to express solidarity with other human beings, but I will just assert they wouldn’t be fully intelligible with something like this theological background.

 

      This is theology. It is abstract, a mere skeleton without the flesh of experience.  Consider a few examples in addition to the AP reporting.

 

A dying parent with advanced dementia no longer remembers your name, cannot reason coherently, contributes nothing economically, and may not even recognize his own children. Yet many people who love him – and that love can be the love of a saint as well as a family member – experience a powerful conviction that he remains someone to whom reverence is due. Not merely a living organism, but someone. The dignity seems to survive the collapse of the very capacities often cited as constitutive of personhood. That experience is one place where many encounter what Christians mean by the image of God.

 

Or the moment in Dead Man Walking that has moved so many readers and viewers. A murderer awaiting execution has committed terrible crimes and appears to have forfeited his humanity. Yet Sister Helen continues to address him as a person whose worth has not been exhausted by his deeds. She does not deny his unimaginable guilt. Rather, she refuses to identify him completely with it. Something remains that deserves love even there. That "something" is very close to what the tradition is trying to express.

 

One sees a photograph of a wounded child in a war zone. What is striking is not merely that suffering is occurring. Animals suffer too. Rather, one experiences the suffering as a violation, as though something sacred were being desecrated. The response is not only pity but a sense that "this should not happen to a being like this." The language of rights, utility, or social contracts often seems too thin to capture the depth of the reaction.

 

Primo Levi's account of Auschwitz is another negative revelation of the imago Dei, perhaps the most moving I know of. The camp did not merely inflict suffering or death; it systematically sought to strip away everything associated with personhood. Prisoners were reduced to numbers, deprived of names, possessions, families, privacy, meaningful work, and even the ability to care adequately for their own bodies. Just too terrible to imagine. Hunger, exhaustion, fear, and humiliation became instruments of domination. The aim was not simply to kill but to transform persons into things to make the killing industrial. Yet Levi's testimony is filled with moments in which humanity reappears: a shared piece of bread, a remembered poem, an act of kindness, the refusal to betray another prisoner. These moments matter because they reveal something the camp could not completely extinguish. From the perspective of the imago Dei, Auschwitz represents denial the sacred worth of the human person, while the survival of compassion, memory, and moral responsibility testifies to a dignity that persists even amid radical degradation.

 

And then there is the Cross, which is also a revelation. It says something sublime about human worth. Christianity claims that God identifies himself not with the successful, healthy, beautiful, and powerful, but with a tortured, humiliated, abandoned victim. That is why the Cross and Matthew 25:40 belong together. If Christ is found in the crucified one, then the image of God is revealed not only in human excellence but also in human vulnerability. A healthy child running through a field bears the image of God. So does the dying prisoner. So does the refugee. So does the lonely elderly woman in a nursing home.

So does the person who has become dependent, confused, frightened, and weak. The image is not what remains after suffering is removed. It is what suffering cannot finally destroy. The image of God is disclosed whenever a human being appears to us as more than a thing, more than a function, more than a role, more than an “identity,” as someone whose reality exceeds every description, whose worth cannot be measured, and whose suffering feels like a wound in the fabric of the world itself. The theology is rooted in our deepest experiences. In the Christian story, that image is revealed most fully not in triumph but in the face of the crucified Christ, who identifies himself with "the least of these." (Aristotle, Nietzsche, others would find this slave morality.)

 

     There is also a quieter side of the imago Dei, which appears in moments that have nothing directly to do with suffering: a father watching his sons sleep, a student suddenly grasping a difficult idea, a Bach fugue, a line of Dostoevsky that sheds light on one's life, a walk through woods at dusk, gratitude that seems larger than any object for which one is grateful. In such moments one senses not merely survival but participation in truth, beauty, and love. These, too, are traces of the image of God, for they reveal the soul's orientation toward realities that transcend utility and self-interest. They remind us not only what human beings must be protected from, but what they are for and why it matters that the image of God in us gets darkened.

 

Any instance of lucid, non-sentimental love reveals the image of God, whatever that mystery amounts to. Otherwise, as science assures us, we would be nothing more than a collection of elements obeying bio-chemical and physical laws, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound of fury, signifying nothing.

 

. . .

 

     Back to the common experience I suffered through this morning – being overwhelmed by all the evils of the world of which one senses one is somehow a part of without being able to do much of anything about them, so blocking them out to function and even to preserve some sense of the love of life and the world, of joy. For me, space for my children, philosophy, teaching, literature, enjoying food, a Sunday nap, the beauties of nature that still remain, friends, less walking these days due to my health but maybe one day that again.

 

    It is hard not to connect the evils I mentioned, among many others, to the structure of whatever global capitalism has mutated into. It is not a matter of whether markets or property are useful, of whether some real human goods are being produced in this system, or of going back the socialism that existed in the USSR. Markets are useful as long as they stay in the marketplace and don’t take over the whole city including the family.  Property is human in the form of, say a family farm; it means something totally different when we’re talking about controlling a huge share of stock in a giant tech corporation. I am talking about the real-existing system behind all the evils I mentioned above, from the heating up of the earth to the oppression of working people to the corruptions of politics to the horrors inflicted on animals to the to the pollution of the oceans to the loss of topsoil to the immiseration of perhaps billions of human beings. And people who have carved out a decent life in this system, as I have, are at some level implicated in it, by choice, against one’s will, mostly blindly, thoughtlessly. Which brings me to the powerful passage in Matthew: 19:40. And to the Psalm de profundis. Hyper-moralism?

 

. . .

 

      What you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me. Globalization has made visible connections that were invisible to previous generations. The Indian textile worker, the child in Gaza, the migrant at a border, the elderly person living alone in Berlin, the sweatshop worker making electronics, the victims of climate change all can suddenly appear as neighbors. The difficulty is that Matthew 25:40 was written for creatures with finite powers but infinite responsibilities. We can now know about suffering on a planetary scale while remaining unable to do much about most of it. Which creates a moral burden unknown to earlier ages. Overwhelming.

    There is a distinction between responsibility and culpability. We may have some responsibility toward a suffering child in Gaza or an suffering worker in South Asia, but we are not equally culpable for that suffering. We may be entangled in structures that contribute to exploitation, but that does not make us morally identical to those who designed, profit from, or deliberately perpetuate those structures.

    One reason Christians developed doctrines about sin, prudence, vocation, and limits was precisely because otherwise Matthew 25:40 becomes psychologically unbearable. The point is not that we are guilty of every suffering we cannot prevent or are implicated in. The point is, I think, that our relation to God (or the Good) cannot be separated from our relation to the vulnerable. Simone Weil knew that no individual can answer all the world's suffering. The obligation is absolute; our capacity is not. Wendell Berry argues that our responsibilities are universal but our actions must be local. We are responsible for the whole world in one sense, but we can only faithfully act within particular relationships, places, and communities. And yet my purchase of the shirt I can afford draws Sibaram Pradhan into my world.

 

. . .

 

    I think of another important very in Matthew – 19:24:  And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.  The rich young man who occasioned this wisdom is not condemned for personal cruelty. His wealth itself has become a barrier. The camel and the eye of the needle should be disturbing because riches are form of spiritual blindness. One begins to live protected from the realities of others. That is the fuel that drives capitalism. In that sense Matthew 19 and Matthew 25 belong together. The one concerns the effects of too much money on the soul; the other concerns the blindness to the suffering of Christ in the other.

       To me – perhaps there is better perspective – no one who takes these truths seriously can think that global capitalism, or whatever label one attaches to this complex, mutating creature of Mammon, is anything in overall tendency but a systematic desecration, a reduction of any and everything naturally good. Christians who do not oppose it are either blind, or ignorant, in the grip of a powerful ideology, or hypocrites. I see no rational way to affirm it as it is. Perhaps it can be tame and brought under rational, political, moral control. Perhaps he needs to go the way of the socialism of the USSR. In any case, the problem is not commerce per se but the subordination of all other goods to commerce, to the enrichment and political power of the 1% at the expense of the world and the Creation.

     What about this argument. Some of the goods I cherish have themselves depended, in part, on the very system I condemn. Reading presupposes books, which presupposes a certain kind of economy. (Of course, socialism produced book, more affordable ones too. Just the damn censor.) In raising my children I benefit from a very good infrastructure here in Potsdam, much better than pre-industrial ones. Again, the best socialist economies, even the bad ones under Soviet domination, had a passable infrastructure.  I suppose having access to the medical care that has kept me alive through several recent setbacks is the main thing I have for this system, which used to be somewhat tamed in Germany to the benefit of people who work for a living. A defender of the present capitalist system would ask: "Would this life have been available to an ordinary person in 1300? 1700? 1850?" The answer is probably not. That doesn’t refute my criticism but it does introduce an element of tragedy, the prospect of losing genuine goods to save even more fundamental ones. The same industrial order that produces sweatshops also produces antibiotics. The same globalization that exploits workers also reduced certain forms of poverty in parts of Asia. These benefits have come at too high a cost and I think most can be preserved in a more decent economy, but one must acknowledge this. But no benefit justifies evil done. I recall I have heard people defending Hitler by saying he built the autobahn, gave the unemployed work and allowed Germans to feel national pride again – yes, all the glorious pride parades. I don’t want to go down to road of justifying evils as the price paid for some set of benefits. And is oppressing workers like Sibaram Pradhan as necessary price for antibiotics? I feel compelled to try to imagine alternative.

    The Christian does not posit the absolute dichotomy of the Kingdom of God versus Mammon. The world is fallen, even if it retains some of its original beauty and goodness. Perhaps I should hesitate before saying that Christians who do not oppose global capitalism are necessarily blind, ignorant, ideological, or hypocritical. Some certainly are. But others may be focused on the genuine goods brought about by the same system that is destroying so much good. OK, bring the beast under rational, political, moral control; make it responsible to local communities; make it respect human dignity unconditionally. Then we can talk. Right now I feel that capitalism (as it currently exists in the USA at least and globally in a sense) is very close to Mammon. And we can’t serve two masters.

 

. . .

 

Yet, my (not only my) normal mode of consciousness is to block all this out, to function and to leave some space for Lebensfreude (joy of being alive), for my sons, philosophy, good food, companionship, teaching, reading, writing,  trees, water, sky, light. Part of me hate all this not because I am a saint who loves God and humanity in any pure sense but because it prevents me from innocently enjoying my private life and all the little pleasures I hang on to. I suspect this is the normal mode of consciousness of almost everyone who remains psychologically functional. Imagine, for a moment, that Matthew 25:40 were not simply believed but experienced continuously. Imagine walking through life feeling vividly present, at every moment, the suffering of every child in Gaza, every lonely elderly person, every exploited worker, every animal in industrial agriculture, every refugee, every victim of war, every person dying alone. Perhaps the saint could endure it but the saint is very rare. The psyche has filters for a reason. We all block things out. The ego blocks things out, in other words, and mine is as fat and relentless as the average person, if not as insanely inflated as some.

    There is a forgetting that becomes indifference but I hope there is also a forgetting that creates room for fidelity. My sons. If I spent every waking moment contemplating the world's suffering, I would have less attention available for them. Less attention for the student sitting before me in a classroom. Less attention for a friend. Less attention for philosophy, literature, and those moments of delight that make life worth living. Love is finite in its concrete exercise even if its horizon is universal. I cannot feed every hungry child; I can only prepare dinner for my sons. I can’t comfort every lonely person but I can be attentive to the person actually before me. I cannot save civilization but I can teach students to think honestly and compassionately. That may sound like a retreat into the local and a justification for my participation in a system I know tromps on the face of God in millions and billions of my fellow mortals. I do not mean it that way, or don’t want to mean it that way. It is simply an acknowledgment of creaturely limits.

    I don’t think the things I mentioned under the heading of Lebensfreude (joy of life) are frivolous distractions from morality. My children, philosophy, teaching, literature, walking, etc.  These are not merely pleasures but goods whose polluting I am lamenting when I criticize Mammon. The system I criticize is objectionable precisely because it threatens forms of human flourishing such as friendship, contemplation, beauty, family life, care for place, and genuine education. If one sacrificed all those goods in order to maintain uninterrupted awareness of suffering, one would paradoxically be surrendering some of the very things one is trying to defend.

     Attention to suffering is morally essential. But reality contains more than suffering. There is also goodness, beauty, friendship, affection, gratitude, wonder, and joy. To attend truthfully is to attend to all of it. Even Matthew itself is not only judgment. It contains wedding feasts, lilies of the field, birds of the air, children, forgiveness, shared meals, friendship, and the promise that burdens can become light. Perhaps joy is one of the things suffering threatens and therefore one of the things worth preserving. A father laughing with his sons, a good class discussion, a walk through the woods, a great novel, a Bach fugue, a conversation with my friend – none of these solve the world's misery. But neither are they acts of betrayal. They are small participations in the good whose violation makes the misery tragic in the first place. But that doesn’t help me with my affordable shirt and its connection to people like Sibaram Pradhan, my chili and the animals in the industrial meat system – and on and on and on. I wanted to deal with that, but honestly I am no closer to an answer now than when I started.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another Stab at Theses about my Economic Views

 

Another Summary of My Economic and Anthropological Position

 

The approach I represent is not fundamentally an economic theory at all. It is a philosophical and moral vision from which certain economic conclusions follow. It is based on these principles:

 

"So God created man in his own image." (Genesis 1:27)

 

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.  (Matthew 25:40)

 

 

1. The economy exists for people, not people for the economy.

 This is the foundational principle. Human beings are not primarily producers, consumers, labor inputs, units of human capital, or bearers of preferences. They are persons, living souls. Therefore, economic systems should be judged by how well they serve genuinely human goods rather than by how efficiently they increase production, consumption, or GDP (=corporate profits). I do not deny that production matters. I deny that production is the measure of all things.

 

2. Human flourishing is richer than what can be economically quantified. 

I reject the tendency to equate well-being with income, consumption, or choice. A good human life includes such things as meaningful work, family bonds, friendship, rootedness in place, participation in a community, stewardship of nature, cultural continuity, meaningful education, opportunities for contemplation, moral and spiritual development. Many of these goods are difficult or impossible to quantify. Consequently, a society can become wealthier while becoming poorer in more important respects. My great-grandparents' farm serves as a concrete example. They were not rich in money, but many of their genuine needs were met through family, land, skills, community, and meaningful work. An economist focused primarily on monetary measures might misdescribe their situation. My father had to uproot us to make a decent living.

 

3. Economics rests on an implicit anthropology. 

Economic theories smuggle in assumptions about what a human being is. If people are understood as utility-maximizers, consumers, or preference-satisfiers, then certain economic arrangements appear natural and desirable. But if people are understood as beings ordered toward truth, love, community, beauty, and transcendence, as in Aristotle, Aquinas, Christian theology, Murdoch, Berry, or Schumacher, then economic life must be judged by different standards. The disagreement is therefore anthropological before it is economic.

 

4. Markets are legitimate but limited. 

I do not oppose markets as such. (I would never socialize my favorite restaurant, Old Hickory BBQ in Owensboro, Kentucky, in the same family for generations.) Nor do I embrace a simple socialism-versus-capitalism framework. The best economic order is likely some form of mixed economy in which different spheres of life retain their integrity. Markets may be appropriate for many goods. But markets should not determine the value of everything. Education, family life, religious life, citizenship, culture, health care, and the natural world should not simply become commodities governed by the same logic as consumer goods. Different spheres of life should be governed by different principles. The power of market actors - corporations - must be limited in strict ways, and taken away where necessary.

 

5. The contemporary global economy tends toward commodification. 

My criticism is directed less at exchange itself than at the tendency of modern global capitalism to treat more and more aspects of life as commodities. Labor, land, community, education, and even human attention are commodified. The result is that human souls appear as instruments serving economic processes rather than economic processes serving living souls. Does a person’s labor lead to some rich stanger’s profit – the only question that matters. A deep moral distortion.

 

6. Globalization pits worker against worker, farmer against farmer, region against region, country against country, humanity against the earth and its particular places. 

I am skeptical of accounts of "development" that focus primarily on aggregate measures such as GDP, wages, productivity, consumption, and economic growth. These measures may reveal something - roughly how much profit is being made - but they do not tell us  whether people are flourishing, communities remain intact, the nature of places are healthy, people retain meaningful control over their lives, relationships are strengthened or weakened, or people themselves regard the changes as improvements. For these reasons I find anthropology, history, literature, and local testimony more illuminating than abstract economic models. I would rather hear the voices of the people undergoing change than simply read a statistical summary of the change.

 

7. Poverty and exploitation are distinct questions 

I readily acknowledge that a factory job may be preferable to starvation. I do not romanticize subsistence agriculture or traditional societies: some work, some may not, some may have been damaged by external forces. (Eastern Kentucky up until King Coal took over is a tragic case for study.) Nor do I deny that industrialization has reduced some forms of suffering. But I reject the inference: Better than starvation, therefore morally acceptable. A labor arrangement may be less bad than the alternatives while still being exploitative or unjust. The fact that a multinational corporation provides employment does not settle the moral question of whether the relationship is ordered toward human dignity or toward maximizing profit from vulnerability.

      And benefits alone do not justify a system. How often did one use to hear: But Hitler built the autobahn and got Germany out of the depression.

 

8. Global corporations distort trade 

    Mainstream economics treats comparative advantage as if goods move internationally while capital remains relatively rooted. German trades its excess cars to South Africa and South Africa exchanges what it has too much of for this. This no longer describes the real world according to the economist that makes most sense to me, Herman Daly. When capital is mobile and labor is not, corporations are not simply participating in mutually beneficial exchange between places. They are able to play places against one another, seeking absolute advantage: cheaper labor, weaker regulations, lower taxes, cheaper land, and less resistance. The root evil is not trade as such. It is the commodification of labor and place. Human beings become “labor costs,” and communities become interchangeable production sites. This lets capital threaten one place with abandonment unless it accepts the conditions of another. What appears in theory as free trade can become, in practice, a system in which mobile capital disciplines relatively immobile workers, communities, and governments. Whole communities, regions, and countries are at the mercy of corporate power.

     Thus I reject the claim that contemporary globalization simply realizes the logic of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage presupposes relatively rooted capital and trade between distinct communities; but when capital itself is globally mobile, corporations increasingly seek absolute advantage by playing one labor force, legal regime, and place against another. The deepest evil is not exchange itself, but the treatment of labor and place as mere commodities.

  

9. Human beings are implicated in distant suffering. 

I reject simplistic notions of collective guilt. Yet I also reject the idea that we are disconnected from the suffering that sustains aspects of capitalist life. The clothes we wear, the phones we carry, the food we buy, and the energy we consume are linked to vast global networks of labor and extraction, controlled from the center of the multinational corporation. Much of the labor involved is oppressive; all is exploitative. I am talking about oppression and exploitation too vast to really imagine. The proper response is not sentimental guilt but the moral acknowledgment that our lives are connected to lives we do not see and doing whatever is in our power to respect the lives of others and indeed the planet. 

    The main danger is meaning-blindness. Modern systems allow people to enjoy benefits while remaining insulated from the human costs that make those benefits possible. Thus the concern is less with guilt, with wrong I personally to do others, but forcing oneself to see the world as it is, to see truthfully. As opposed to living thoughtlessly, allowing the ideology to imprison the mind.

 

10. Imago Dei is the ultimate foundation. 

   Beneath everything lies a theological conviction. Every human being possesses a dignity that exceeds every economic description. A person is never merely a unit of production or a consumer, a migrant or a cost factor. The doctrine of imago Dei – created in the image of God – means that every living soul is more than any function they perform. Economic systems are therefore morally evaluated by the extent to which they recognize, honor, and protect that reality. Or in philosophic terms for non-theists, Immanuel Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative (also known as the Formula of Humanity): we must act in a way that treats humanity, whether in our own person or in any other, always as an end in itself, and never merely as a means to an end.

 

Conclusion     

Human beings are bearers of intrinsic dignity whose flourishing consists in far more than material consumption. The purpose of economic life is to serve those genuinely human goods rather than to maximize production, profit, or growth. Markets are valuable tools but become destructive when they colonize spheres of life governed by other values. The moral test of an economy is not simply how much wealth it creates but what kind of persons, politics, communities, and relationships it makes possible.

 

I consider this in harmony with Catholic Social Teaching, even if the Church does not like to point out how radically the present economic system is in conflict with it.

 Further Biblical Passages / Economic Principles – All of which are meant to be taken literally, as I understand them. 

"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." (Psalm 24:1) 

"You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy." (Deuteronomy 24:14) 

"The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out." (James 5:4) 

"Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one else." (Isaiah 5:8) 

"What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36) 

"What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7)

 “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” (Matthew 6:24) 

“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

 

 Two Ideal Forms of Life

 Every form of life presupposes a picture of how the world must be to justify if, what the human being must be to make it right and natural. 

Worldview of the Dominant Capitalist Culture

    One way of describing the implied metaphysics of modern capitalism, especially in its contemporary American form, is that reality or nature consists in raw material awaiting transformation into wealth (or set aside to be consumed as “scenic”). Human beings are discrete individuals pursuing their own preferences within this world understood primarily as a stock of resources. Human beings are conceived first as autonomous choosers, consumers, producers, and owners rather than as members of communities ordered toward shared goods. Place is secondary to mobility; tradition to innovation; limits to growth; stewardship to control. Anything and everything can be bought and sold given formal consent. The highest social good becomes the expansion of choice, production, consumption, and economic growth. Human relationships are mediated by contracts, markets, and institutions rather than by obligations rooted in family, neighborhood, or inheritance. Value is determined by preference, success by accumulation, and reality itself by what can be measured, priced, and exchanged. What cannot readily be commodified – contemplation, beauty, play, fidelity, holiness, rootedness, love – is tolerated but increasingly marginal to the dominant logic of the system. (The top 1% own roughly three times as much wealth as the bottom 60% of Americans combined. And increasing.)

 

Worldview of Christian Economy

 In an economy shaped by Scripture, Aquinas, Berry, and Schumacher (among others), the world would be understood not as a collection of resources but as a creation, a gift possessing its own integrity and meaning. Human beings would be seen not primarily as consumers or producers but as souls created in the image of God, ordered toward truth, love, worship, and community. Economic activity would therefore be judged according to how well it serves these higher ends. Land would be treated as a trust rather than merely an asset; work as participation in creation rather than merely income generation; wealth as a means rather than an end. The virtues of stewardship, gratitude, prudence, justice, and temperance would take precedence over endless expansion. Communities would seek a degree of self-reliance, preserving local knowledge, local culture, and the health of particular places. Such an economy would still permit trade, property, enterprise, and markets, but all would remain subordinate to the common good and to the conviction that neither people nor nature exist for the economy; rather, the economy exists to support the flourishing of persons, communities, and creation under God. Well, it is a dream but hopefully one that will not die out.

 These two visions of reality and economy are radically antithetical.

  

Works 

Benedict XVI. Caritas in Veritate: Charity in Truth. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009. 

Berry, Wendell. "Christianity and the Survival of Creation." Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, Pantheon Books, 1993, pp. 93–116. 

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. 3rd ed., Counterpoint, 2004. 

Berry, Wendell. "Two Economies." Home Economics: Fourteen Essays. North Point Press, 1987, pp. 54–75. 

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Orbis Books, 1997. 

Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb Jr.. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. 2nd ed., Beacon Press, 1994. 

Francis. Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015. 

John Paul II. Laborem Exercens: On Human Work. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981. 

John Paul II. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis: On Social Concern. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1987. 

McMurtry, John. Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Kumarian Press, 1998. 

McMurtry, John. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. Pluto Press, 1999. 

McMurtry, John. Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy. Pluto Press, 2002. 

Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Harper & Row, 1973.

 

 

The Pleasures of Eating, Veganism, and Industrial Meat and Diary

 

Animal cruelty. Both in the capitalist food industry and in general, to dogs and cats and many other creatures. That is one of those things that is too horrible for me to think about. If I were king of the world and could stop it, I would.  But horrors that only send me into deep depression and revulsion over my species, I have to block to function. Horrors I can't change at all. Or horrors I could opt out of but can't bring myself to without depression. Actually, there is a big difference between the two. "I cannot bear to contemplate this constantly; therefore, I continue to participate in it" – the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Simone Weil calls this the  limits of attention, Raimond Gaita the inability to remain fully present to every instance of suffering, and I am guilty of it. If I buy factory-farmed dairy, my individual abstention changes almost nothing, true. Yet it is still true that I am participating in the practice. I have long thought and made many arguments for doing what is right even when our action has almost no measurable effect. 

. . . 

Still, it is complex.  Centuries and centuries of dietary habits and culture, natural to our species in the sense that animals and diary were essential parts of people's diet. True, tradition by itself is not justification. The obvious analogy is slavery, for centuries slavery was woven into ordinary life, which in no way justifies it of course. The point I want to make is different. Human beings evolved within mixed agricultural cultures where relationships with domesticated animals formed part of ordinary life. Human beings did not merely consume animal products for millennia; they developed forms of life in which husbandry, dairying, cooking, feasting, and the pleasures of eating became woven into family life, hospitality, celebration, memory, and culture. These are not merely biological habits but elements of human flourishing. To relinquish them is therefore not like changing brands of toothpaste. It can feel like relinquishing part of one's way of inhabiting the world. I could go on and on about the meaning of food in my life and how it connected and connects to my great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, whole family, local culture. It gives roots. It is a part of who I am, who we are.

     You can live biologically without diary, say, just as you can live without physical love just fine or only engage in it to procreate. But the pleasure of eating is a part of Lebensfreude (joy of life) for most people (as the pleasure of physical love is for others, apart from its biological function). I just made the point that this pleasure can go deep, that such people are not pure selfish hedonists, that the pleasure is bound up with meaning and flows into the love of life and the world. Giving up those pleasures can therefore depress people, which is also not a justification of them, strictly speaking. There are people that get nothing from sex and so celibacy takes nothing away from life. I almost want to say some people know no such pleasure in food as I have described, are celibate with respect to food, so to speak.  Such people could condemn without knowing exactly what they were condemning. They could condemn out of resentment even. Which again, doesn’t entail their veganism is wrong.

     Some vegans no doubt act against meat-eating from deeper moral sources, the love of animals, the hatred of cruelty, the love of the world and even humanist. They may move us sinner to have a guilty conscience, as did the Abolitionists those who tolerated slavery. Some advocates communicate in ways that express moral superiority, and that often provokes resistance rather than reflection; their self-righteousness makes most sinners hate them, seeing it as an “I am better than you” thing. Regardless, there is a deeply moral and theological issue there. (Of course, there are also self-righteous Christians, environmentalists, conservatives, and progressives. That is not peculiar to veganism. That is just human-all-too-human.)

  I am saying that the human pleasure of eating is a complex personal and cultural good. That is compatible with saying that sometimes genuine goods should nevertheless be sacrificed. But again, it is not like changing toothpastes. Sharing meals, cooking, the wonders of taste, celebration, memories, and more – this belongs to human flourishing. But why should pleasure outweigh animal suffering? I do not claim that it does.  The tragedy is that industrial agriculture has placed these two goods of the care for animals and the genuine pleasures of eating  in conflict. Eating cheese in itself is not what troubles me. What troubles me is that the cheese available today is often produced within a system that is, objectively, morally compromised.

. . .

      Gluttony – love of food superseding love of higher things – is a sin. I’ll spend a million years with the Gluttons in Purgatory, no doubt – and I don’t intend that to be flippant. I am guilty of gluttony to some extent and that does detract from, alienate me to an extent from, my life with food, my culture of food.

     Moving the world toward organic farming and much less meat and diary is a reasonable goal for me. I cannot see that “meat is murder.” I think of Cora Diamond’s thought of the horror at seeing chickens in cages on a truck transport, but then the qualitatively different horror of seeing a human toddler in one of those cages. It is simply not intelligible for me to confess before a priest to the murder of a chicken after eating chicken soup for a cold, or be tried by a jury and sentenced to prison. It is intelligible to confess for participating in what I witnessed of a factory slaughterhouse for chickens when I was eleven years old. That was a desecration. Despite seeing with my own eyes those horrors, I still eat chicken soup, often not with organic chicken because I cannot afford it and yet am not willing or able to live without it.

     I think, if things go well, in 100 years or so people will recoil in horror from our treatment of animals as we recoil from the medieval practice of torture. Think of how we now regard public executions, slavery, child labor, bear-baiting, or certain medical experiments. I suspect they will judge factory farming in the same way.

      To me this is really about two competing intuitions. One is almost Platonic or Christian: namely, love should widen until it includes vulnerable creatures. The other is that we are also creatures of this world, creatures of the flesh, who need to love life and the world to flourish. And bodily pleasure, subjected to cultural restraints, to moral restraints, to community and ecological restraints, bind us to the earth and to life. Hard for us alienated folk dominated by capitalism to grasp that.

   In me there is a tension between two extremes, moral purity and moral complacency. I believe that there is real guilt, real tragedy, and real human weakness in these matters, and that we must try our best to live honestly in the lives we were thrown into to, so to speak. A critic may conclude that this honesty does not excuse continued participation in factory farming. But I do not think they could accuse me or people like me of indifference. This is moral disagreement and not rationalization.

    Again I think of  Wendell Berry. Berry criticizes industrial animal agriculture like few others but he would resist reducing eating to nutrient intake. A meal belongs to an ecology of home, land, friendship, gratitude, and memory. I also think of Aristotle, who does not think the pleasures accompanying good activities are embarrassing additions to life. Rather, the right pleasures complete the activity. The pleasure of a shared meal, like the pleasure of friendship or music, is part of the flourishing life. That does not settle the ethical question, but it explains why asking someone to give it up is asking for a genuine sacrifice, not merely a dietary adjustment.

 

There is also an important distinction between asceticism from puritanism. The Christian tradition has always valued fasting and renunciation. But the purpose is not that food is bad. Quite the opposite. Food is good enough that voluntarily giving it up can become a spiritual discipline. If cheese were morally equivalent to poison, abstaining from it would have little significance. The sacrifice presupposes the goodness of the thing sacrificed. I am saying that delight in food belongs to gratitude for creation. The danger is not delight itself but what the Christian tradition calls gluttony, that is, allowing the love of food to displace the love of higher goods. The deepest tension is that industrial dairying/meat involves suffering that corrupt precisely those goods of gratitude and delight. One might therefore say that the problem is not cheese but the conditions under which much modern cheese is produced. The answer is not necessarily never to eat cheese again, but to recover forms of agriculture in which our delight in food is no longer purchased at the cost of hidden cruelty. Whether that recovery is practically possible on a large scale is another question, but philosophically it is a coherent aspiration.

   Finally, I think of the Christian concept of repentance, which does not necessarily require immediate perfection but for starters refusing to lie to oneself about the good.

Rereading the Gospel of Mark

 

I reread the book of Mark. I confess much of the Bible has always been a problem for me. With my recent rereading it was no different. Thus I turned to the historical-critical method scholars Dale Martin and Bart Ehrman for help. And then to Josef Ratzinger and Timothy Ware, a great Catholic and a great Orthodox theologian. Ratzinger discusses Mark explicitly; Ware gives the general framework that fits Mark like a glove. Only with their help was I able to come to some understanding of the story, and found it actually much deeper than I was able to understand it on my own (very humbling). Now you can read a book like Mark from different perspectives: historical-critical, literary, theological, faith. I just wanted to understand it as a story and as theology, and so kind of bracketed out the historical question. 

 . . .

    Mark wants to tell his readers who Jesus was, why his life was so significant. "Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?" (4:41). It is curious that the demons recognize him immediately, the crowds are full of wonder (an appropriate response) but the disciples are constantly confused. The answer unfolds over the course of the book.

     Jesus repeatedly tries to keep his identity hidden, silencing demons, ordering healed people not to tell anyone, and commanding the disciples not to reveal him. And his disciples seem clueless throughout the book.  This puzzled me. So I went to scholars and theologians. I learned that the connection between the "Messianic Secret" and the cross goes back at least to a certain William Wrede, who made the Messianic Secret famous in 1901. Wrede argued that Mark created the secrecy motif to explain an embarrassing historical fact: if Jesus was really the Messiah, why was he not recognized during his lifetime? The interpretation that makes the most sense to me is that of Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. What Ratzinger did is give the secret a theological rather than merely literary explanation, as did Wrede. 

   His argument was that the titles "Messiah," "Son of God," "King," and even "Christ" were ambiguous in first-century Judaism. People naturally interpreted them in political, military, nationalistic, or triumphalist ways. That is exactly what happens in Mark. Peter correctly says: "You are the Christ." But then rejects the prediction of suffering, proving he knows the title but not its meaning. Therefore Jesus forbids public proclamation because the title itself is not enough. It will inevitably be misunderstood. Only the cross reveals what kind of Messiah he is. In Ratzinger's reading, the secrecy is not over whether to tell people that Jesus was Christ but was because they would not, could not understand what that meant. Before the cross, everyone fills the title "Messiah" with their own expectations of power, glory, victory, or national restoration. After the cross, the title can finally be understood for what it is. Thus the Roman centurion's confession at the crucifixion is so important: "Truly this man was the Son of God." The irony is deep. The disciples confess Jesus as Messiah before the cross but misunderstand him. The centurion confesses him at the moment of apparent defeat. For Mark, according to Ratzinger, that is the first confession that fully grasps the meaning of the title. The cross functions like the key to a code. Before the cross people misunderstood “Messiah,” “son of God,” “kingdom of God,” and even “power.” After the cross, as a culmination of the story, we learn that Messiah means self-giving love, kingship means service, divine power is sacrificial love. Victory appears through apparent defeat. Jesus remains a secret until the cross because the cross reveals the meaning of every title applied to him. Without the cross, "Messiah" is merely a word onto which people project their hopes. Through the cross, the word receives its true content. A reversal of values if there ever was one.

    The cross overturns the framework through which human beings interpret reality. The disciples think they know what greatness, power, victory, and kingship mean. The cross reveals that they do not, which is why they cannot understand Jesus beforehand. They know all the facts but lack vision as their hearts are not open. (An epistemological message of the book is that only the heart can see, those with “hardened hearts” are blind, even if they do know all the facts.) Mark seems obsessed with misunderstanding. The problem is not that people do not know the answer. The problem is that they are asking the wrong question. They want to know whether Jesus is the Messiah. Mark wants them to discover what kind of Messiah he is. Jesus cannot be understood correctly apart from the cross. The disciples' blindness is understood not simply as intellectual misunderstanding but as a spiritual condition. Humans do not apprehend divine reality clearly because they are trapped by pride, fear, and distorted desire. Only through repentance and participation in Christ's life can true vision emerge.

    A favorite Orthodox image, I learned, is the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22–26). The man first sees people "like trees walking." Only afterward does he see clearly. Many Orthodox commentators see this as a symbol of the disciples themselves. Understanding Christ comes gradually through purification and transformation.

   The problem Mark lays out is a kind of blindness of attention. People are socially programmed to seek power, prestige, security, wealth, and victory. Therefore they cannot recognize goodness when it appears as humility, suffering, and self-giving love. In that sense, Mark's Gospel echos themes earlier found in Plato, and later found in Augustine, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Raimond Gaita: namely, we do not merely need more facts; we need to learn how to see. At bottom, the main theme of the book is not who Jesus is – that is made clear – but what must happen to us before we can recognize who Jesus is. Before we can see the world right. The answer Mark gives is that only when our ordinary understanding of power, success, and greatness is broken by the cross do we begin to see reality clearly. 

. . . 

    It is interesting that a similar reading is offered by the critical-historical Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, from a different perspective. Both Ehrman and Ratzinger agree that Jesus repeatedly silences people because people would misunderstand his identity if they proclaimed him Messiah before understanding the significance of his suffering and death. The divergence comes one level deeper. For Ehrman, this is a literary and historical observation about Mark's theology. Mark believes that Jesus is the Messiah, but a suffering Messiah. Since most people expected a triumphant Messiah, Mark constructs a narrative in which Jesus' true identity remains hidden until the Passion. For Ratzinger, the same observation points to a theological truth about reality itself. The cross is not merely Mark's literary solution to a narrative problem; the cross is the actual revelation of who God is. Both agree that Mark wants readers to reinterpret messiahship through the lens of suffering. For Ratzinger, a man of faith, through the story God has revealed the true meaning of power, kingship, and love through the cross. The literary reading is similar; the metaphysical conclusion is different. Why is reality structured in such a way that suffering love reveals truth more deeply than power does? That question lies outside the historian's discipline, though I think Ehrman smuggles in his purely secular positions at times, at least in his interviews. The issue is whether Mark is expressing a truth about God (reality) or a just a belief of the early Christian community. 

. . . 

  I think that is the main thrust of the book. There are other related themes or problems that become clear when interpreted in this light. I couldn’t help but notice that Jesus is often less than kind and patient with the disciples. He often seems exasperated by their ignorance. He is hardest on those closest to him. The crowds often receive compassion. The sick are healed. The possessed are liberated. The hungry are fed. The sharpest rebukes are directed at the disciples because they have been invited into deeper intimacy and therefore bear greater responsibility for understanding. In light of the above reading, however, rebuke is a form of love. Not sentimental affirmation, of course, but the refusal to leave someone imprisoned in illusion (cf. Socrates leading the imprisoned souls out of the Cave of shadows). The cross reveals what divine love actually is. If that is true, then Jesus' severity toward the disciples is not contrary to love. It is part of the painful process by which their distorted vision must be healed so that they can finally see what love, power, and God really are. By the end of Mark, the disciples never fully "graduate." They remain confused and frightened almost to the last page. Mark is not interested in presenting heroic disciples but in showing how difficult genuine conversion of vision really is. (The implication is that it take the resurrection to do it.) The reader is surely meant to recognize himself among them. The problem is not so much why the disciples are so dense but how they must either let go of their worldly concept of reject Jesus on the cross as a failure and a fraud. That is where Mark's severity becomes uncomfortable. 

. . . 

   I know there are many echoes of Mark’s theme in literature and even movies. My favorite in a 1951 film adaption of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. The verse from Mark (8:18) is: literal translation - "Having eyes, do you not see? Having ears, do you not hear?" One of the most moving scenes in the movie occurs when the transformed Scrooge visits Fred and Fred's wife and asks forgiveness. He says: "Can you forgive a pig-headed old fool with no eyes to see with and no ears to hear with all these years?" That line was added by the screenwriters, not original to the book, but it beautifully captures the theme from Mark, a perfect summary of both Mark's Gospel and Dickens's understanding of conversion. Scrooge's problem was never intellectual. He knew the poor existed. He knew his nephew loved him. He knew Christmas made people happy. The facts were all there. But he did not see. Likewise in Mark, the disciples see miracles, hear teachings, and witness wonders, yet Jesus repeatedly asks: "Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear?" (Mark 8:18) In both stories, redemption is conceived as recovering the capacity to see reality rightly. 

. . .

 

Works

 

Ehrman, Bart D. "The Gospel of Mark." The New Testament. The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2001.

 

Martin, Dale B. "The Gospel of Mark." Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (RLST 152), Open Yale Courses, Yale University, Spring 2009, Lecture 6: The Gospel of Mark.

 

Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI). Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. New York: Doubleday, 2007. [chapters 9 and 10]

 

Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction to Christianity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. Einführung in das Christentum. Vorlesungen über das Apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis. München: Kösel-Verlag, 1968.

 

Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995 rev. ed. (original edition 1979).