by David Holden

above: The multiplication of loaves and fishes.

All of Orthodoxy honors St. Nikodemos of Athos for providing us with the Philokalia. Less well known is his Exomologetarion: A Manual of Confession. First published in 1794, it contains the following story:

A king once happened to confess to a farmer, who was discreetly a Spiritual Father, and after having confessed his sins, said to the Spiritual Father, “I don’t have anything else to say to you.” “How so, O king?” said the Spiritual Father. “How? Have we finished the confession? No. You have said the sins of Alexis (stating the king’s first name), say now the sins of the king.” That wise Spiritual Father wanted to show by these words that every ruler and head, foreign or domestic, must not only confess as an individual or be examined by a Spiritual Father as a common person, but in addition to the sins he committed as a person, he must also confess those things he could have done as a ruler unto the good of his people but did not do, and as many bad things as happened to his subjects on his account which he did not correct, for which he will have to give an exact account to God.

This story illustrates the Orthodox Christian attitude regarding the relationship between faith and life in the world. When Orthodox people are in positions of authority and power, they are expected to follow Christ in those positions just as they follow Him in their private lives.

But what does that mean? The task of people in positions of authority is not to create a “Christian state” or “Christian corporation” or “Christian theater.” Only people can be Christian. Christ came to make people partakers of the divine nature, not institutions, agencies or businesses. The task is to do all that is possible to create an environment that will help people to see Christ, seek Christ, and find Christ.

To be more particular: How then do we bring the domains of commerce and finance under the lordship of Christ? We know the fundamental principles of Orthodox ethics that pertain to economics: that the material world was created good and beautiful and that it is appropriate to have and to pray for “the abundance of the fruits of the earth;” that poverty is an evil, not a virtue – a plight to be eased, not to be worsened; that indebtedness is not good; that living simply is; that the love of money has been and can easily be a root for all kinds of evil; that God commands us to seek justice and right relationships at all times and with all people; that charging interest is morally questionable, and certainly wrong when it is charged to people merely seeking the necessities of life; that it is about as easy for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. We Orthodox know all these principles, or at least we have heard them and know that we ought to practice them. The particular question here is, How do we create an environment that embodies those principles? Knowing that we Orthodox, like all the rest of the human race, are fallen creatures, prone to all kinds of sins both voluntary and involuntary, and knowing that all organizations and institutions magnify and entrench our sins, what kind of economic structures might restrain our sinfulness and encourage justice?

In this essay I invite my readers to consider an economic system known as distributism. The system is ancient and widespread, but this term for it appeared only in the last century. The term and original definition came from Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in the early 20th century. Both were devout Roman Catholics, highly influenced by the social teachings of Pope Leo XIII, but also disenchanted with the socialists. The term fell into obscurity after Chesterton’s death in 1936 and Belloc’s in 1953, but the ideas did not. They deeply influenced E. F. Schumacher, whose book Small Is Beautiful has had a profound impact on environmentalists around the world. In recent years distributism has been directly and consciously revived within Catholic circles. The Distributist Review is a website covering many aspects of old and new distributist thinking. IHS Press has republished many of the older texts. Some impressive new material is also now available, especially by John Médaille of the University of Dallas. He displays a grasp of recent developments in economics and its mathematical foundations, neither of which is found in the distributist writers of earlier generations.

What then is distributism? To answer that question we have to ask, How is distributism both like and unlike the three other major economic systems that have arisen in the course of human history? In point of fact, no society has any economic system in its pure form; every society, both past and present, has some mixture of the four. Any society with a system predominantly of one type will have some features of the other three. The four systems are, therefore, descriptions of tendencies and philosophy, but even so, these distinctions are instructive.

Four Economic Systems: The dominant economic system in the world today is capitalism. It has evolved into its present form over the past five hundred years. The discovery of America, the advance of shipping and trade during the colonial era, the progress of technology and the Industrial Revolution, and the increasing sophistication of marketing, accounting, computing, and mathematical models of economics all contributed to its rise. On the positive side, capitalism supports the private ownership of land and business, rewards the combination of intelligence and hard work, and supports democracy and limited government. Capitalism harnesses the (natural) inclination of people to compete with one another and the (fallen and therefore actually unnatural) inclination of people toward greed and acquisitiveness. In his Economics for Helen, Belloc said that in a capitalist system, “Every man, however poor, feels himself to be free and to that extent saves his honor.” Consequently, capitalism immediately appeals to Americans, who value freedom above just about everything.

On the negative side, capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of a minority. The claim that such a system had to develop because of colonial shipping or the need for vast sums of money to build factories during the Industrial Revolution is historically false. Capitalism developed because of the way that people – generally people already wealthy and powerful – have shaped laws and customs to their own advantage. In The Servile State, Belloc shows how England was already moving toward capitalism prior to the great age of colonization and long before the Industrial Revolution. It began with the closing of the monasteries in 1535. The same process – changing laws and structures to benefit the wealthy – still occurs. The present trend of CEO’s to earn as much as 600 times as much as the laborers in their companies is not an aberration. It is the natural and inevitable result of a capitalist system. If this process is left unchecked, capitalism eventually destroys freedom. While workers are legally free agents, they are economically powerless. Franklin Delano Roosevelt pointed to this in his State of the Union address of January 11, 1944. He said, “Necessitous men are not free men.” Furthermore, if left unchecked, capitalism destroys the legitimate power of government. When businesses and corporations become so large that the government cannot restrain them, they become the government. That is to say, democracy ends and plutocracy prevails.

In the past two centuries, the system proposed to replace capitalism was socialism. Its most famous proponent was Karl Marx. The essence of socialism is that the government of a state owns and controls all or almost all of the means of production and distribution. Rather than leave the economy to the greed and manipulation of private owners, or to be guided by an “invisible hand” (in the words of Adam Smith), the state would intervene. The great power of socialism, when it was merely a theory, was that its supporters were keenly aware of the injustices of capitalism. When countries put socialism into practice, however, its disadvantages were revealed in blood. Many lost their property, health, and even their lives to socialism. For all the promises made, socialism became one of the most tyrannical and oppressive systems in all of history, merely  moving the concentration of wealth and power from the hands of owners to the bureaucratic managers and leaders of the state. It proved to be much worse than capitalism.

At certain times in history a third kind of economic system was employed. Belloc called it “the servile state.” It was fairly common in ancient times. Ancient Egypt was an example of this kind of economy. In ancient Egypt the Pharaoh owned everything and all the people were in fact his slaves. Ancient Sparta and the Roman Empire also depended on slave labor, as did the Confederate States of America many centuries later. Despite the obvious moral disadvantages, the servile state has a couple of very strong advantages: it is remarkably stable and people feel and really are secure, knowing that they will be fed and provided for. These advantages can be so strong that people have sometimes been known to support a servile state even if it means a loss of freedom and dignity.

Left Photo: Hilaire Belloc

Distributist writers speak of the servile state in two ways. On the one hand, some seem to believe that its essential element is that people actually and legally own other people. From this perspective, a servile economy differs from a capitalist and socialist economy in precisely a matter of law. Few if any capitalist economies have actually deteriorated into servile states, though Belloc argued that they eventually would. Chesterton even wondered whether brute force would return as a way of compelling people to work. It may well be argued, however, that the socialist economies did indeed devolve into servile states. On the other hand, others speak of the servile state more loosely, pointing out that people living under capitalist systems are treated like slaves. The term “wage-slave” is a figure of speech, but the intensity of feeling that it conveys makes it almost a literal term. The near-slavery of workers was egregiously obvious in capitalist England in the 19th century and was abundantly illustrated in the novels of Charles Dickens. In America today, we have a very high standard of living and even our poorest people live better than the poor of developing nations. But we also have now a global economy. The slaves of contemporary American capitalism do not live in America, but in countries where people work for less than a dollar an hour and where $60 dollars a week is not enough to live on.

The fourth system is distributism, but this is a strikingly misleading name. Belloc sometimes suggested calling it “the proprietary state,” which would be much less misleading. When people hear the term “distributist,” they often tend to think of a system in which money is taken away from the rich and distributed to the poor (who generally are thought not to deserve it). In other words, people mistake distributism for socialism. That is not the intention of the name.

Right photo: G.K. Chesterton

The idea in distributism is that the legal ownership of the means of production in the economy is distributed as widely as possible in the population. This implies a double comparison and contrast. On the one hand, as in capitalism, distributism honors private property and rewards intelligence, hard work, and entrepreneurialism. But simultaneously, and differing from the usual structure of capitalist governments, a distributist state takes measures to discourage the endless accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority. While capitalism believes in private ownership, it also believes that only a few people should own what really matters, that is, the ways of producing money and goods. Distributism is not content, therefore, with great numbers of people owning their own homes or having shares in the stock market; they need to have real control over the land, farms, factories, and institutions that produce money and goods.  On the other hand, as in socialism, the state remains the most powerful entity in the country; the state does not permit plutocrats and corporations to usurp its authority, as they ceaselessly attempt to do in capitalist countries.  But simultaneously, and differing from the common ideal of a socialist economy, distributism is realistic enough to acknowledge that some are still going to be rich and some are still going to be poor. The rich are not automatically dispossessed, nor are the poor put on the welfare rolls.

Although is sounds utopian, a distributist economy was a common reality in the past. It is the natural form an economy takes when its societal structures are relatively simple and local. Imagine a primitive society. In such a society people accumulate wealth by the work of their own hands either on farms or in small industries. Some people do get wealthy, through the combination of hard work, intelligence, inheritance, and divine providence (usually but wrongly called “good luck”). But when trade is limited to an area the size of a county (a few hundred square miles), even the wealthiest people will generally not become vastly wealthier than their neighbors. Vast accumulations require theft, slavery, war, or some other form of exploitation. Numerous examples from history illustrate this kind of simple, local economy. The Roman Republic had a distributist economy before the rise of the Roman Empire. A distributist system gradually developed out of the ruins of the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages in Western Europe. When England began to colonize North America, people thought that England’s economy was still distributist, though they never used such a word for it and the dispossession of the monasteries had already steered their economy on the course toward capitalism. In early America, the economic system of the English colonies in the North was largely distributist; in the English colonies in the South, it was mixed with a servile state. Today, with the coincidence of modern technologies and the tradition of law and polity for the past century and more, capitalism has eclipsed distributism in the United States. But distributism is not forgotten. Remnants of the old distributist order remain in practice, in law, and in the collective memory of the nation. The importance given to personal home ownership, the “family farm,” and small business; the current movement toward eating locally grown food; the continuing appeal of arts and crafts as full-time occupations – all are living remnants of distributism.

Distributism’s goal is not to overthrow and destroy the capitalist system. It is too obviously successful and productive. Besides, the socialists tried that and failed. But the limitations and injustices of capitalism are real. The goal in contemporary distributism is to promote, enact, and entrench distributist ideals. The distributist hope is that at some point the scale will tip, and what is now a capitalist system will become a predominantly distributist system with capitalist elements still remaining within it. The goal is not to establish socialism, to give undue power to the state, or to play Robin Hood, but to change laws, especially regarding taxation, so that it becomes very difficult for money and power to become concentrated in the hands of the few and easier for ordinary people to own their own farms, workshops, businesses and industries. Distributism is economic democracy.

Sergius Bulgakov was one of the greatest, and one of the most controversial, of modern Orthodox theologians. He was reared in the faith, but lost it in his youth. He then studied political economy in law school, was a Marxist for a while, and published his first books on the subject of economics before regaining his faith and writing the many and profound books for which he is now remembered. Perhaps his best known book is The Orthodox Church, first published in English in 1935. In this brief introduction to Orthodoxy, Bulgakov included a chapter entitled “Orthodoxy and Economic Life.” He seems to be bound to the dichotomy of capitalism and socialism that has paralyzed discussion of economics for the past couple of centuries. Furthermore, the essay betrays no knowledge of any of the distributist writers or even of the Roman Catholic encyclicals that criticized both capitalism and socialism. It is therefore quite significant that Bulgakov should say: “Concerning distribution, the Church is called to be a social conscience which should raise its voice, speaking to the hearts of men and mingling in their public life.” And further: “The best economic form – whatever its name, and however it combines capitalism and socialism – is that which, in any given circumstances, best assures personal liberty, protecting it from natural poverty and social slavery.”

That is precisely what Belloc, Chesterton, Schumacher, and Médaille have called for. No doubt a distinctively Orthodox articulation of economic ethics would differ from the ways that Catholics and Protestants have responded to economic issues. Bulgakov suggested a few such Orthodox differences, noting that economic life falls within the scope of the Holy Mysteries, that agriculture, industry and commerce are aspects of the transfiguration of nature, and that democracy parallels the principle of conciliarity in Orthodox ecclesiology. It would be a great gift to the Church and to the world if Orthodox ethicists and economists would elaborate these suggestions. Nonetheless, the differences between distributism as it has developed in the West and distributism as it might be articulated in the East would be merely matters of detail. Both of them are seeking to beat swords into plowshares – and to find a way for all of us to live in peace and safety under our own fruit trees.

Suggested Readings:

Can distributism be grounded in Orthodox tradition? Read C. Paul Schroeder’s translation of St. Basil the Great: On Social Justice.

Hilaire Belloc is perhaps the primary writer to consult, though all his work dates to before World War II. For starters see: The Servile State and An Essay on the Restoration of Property. Belloc also wrote Economics for Helen, an introduction to economics for his niece, still strikingly helpful even though dated.

His friend G. K. Chesterton was prolific and hilarious. On this subject see The Outline of Sanity.

The British economist E. F. Schumacher taught the distributist message without using the term. See his classic, Small Is Beautiful.

John Médaille has written books for serious students of economics, superb for use in college and university settings. If you perceive the morality but question the real-world practicality of distributism, his works are the ones to read first. See The Vocation of Business and Toward a Truly Free Market.

Larry Burkett, a respected evangelical Protestant, was not distributist and his work may be faulted for being focused on individuals and not on systems and structures, but his Business by the Book is an excellent summary of ethical guidelines for commerce and finance.

Susan Pace Hamill has done some serious thinking about the moral implications of the existing American tax codes. See her The Least of These: Fair Taxes and the Moral Duty of Christians.

Tobias J. Lanz has edited a collection of essays, Beyond Capitalism and Socialism, that would be a great starter text for a discussion group.  Though distinctively Catholic, Orthodox and other Christians will find the book worthwhile.

David Holden studied Biblical languages at Duke University and received a Master of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His spiritual journey brought him to Orthodoxy in August 1999. He is a professional counselor and clinical addictions specialist. He and his family live in the country outside Boone, North Carolina.

❖ IN COMMUNION / FEAST OF ST. ANASTASIA OF ROME / FALL 2010/  issue 58

by Kamiel Duchatelez

Basil’s social doctrine is grounded in the conviction that all people are equal and share the same human nature. The poor, the rich and the emperor are all companions in slavery, that is, they are all dependent on God. Moreover, human beings are social creatures and communal life and interaction with one another require a generosity that can alleviate the needs of the destitute. The scriptural command to “Give to anyone who asks” calls us to a sharing and a mutual love that are characteristic of human nature. The Acts of the Apostles teaches us how this is to be put into practice. In the first ecclesial community of Jerusalem, the Christians sold their goods and gave the money to apostles to distribute to those who needed it.

Basil encouraged the faithful Christians of his time to respond to the Gospel injunction to “sell your possessions and give to those in need.” He had long ago responded to this call and committed himself with all his heart to a life of voluntary poverty. In the Acts of the Apostles, the giving away of one’s possessions is presented as a free choice, and in the Gospel it is seen as a condition of perfection. However, Basil became even more radical and saw it as a rule of life for all Christians. Moved by the extreme social needs of the population, and enlightened by the Scriptures, Basil insisted that the produce of the earth was intended for all. While God the Creator had indeed distributed it unevenly, he had done this with the intention that the rich should share with the poor.

Basil simply swept aside such objections as “To whom am I unjust when I keep what is mine, asks the rich man.” His response: “Tell me, which things are yours? Where did you get them from at the beginning of your life? It is like someone who has a seat in the theater, and who objects when others also take their places. He claims that he owns what is for the common use of all. So too with the rich. They claim in advance that which is common property and make themselves the owners of it. Moreover, if everyone acquires what they need and leave the excess over for the destitute, then there will be no rich and no poor. Did you not come naked out of your mother’s womb? Are you not going to return naked to the earth? Where did you get your present possessions from? If you say ‘from fate,’ then that makes you an atheist who neither acknowledges your Creator nor gives thanks to your Benefactor. If you acknowledge that they came from God, then tell me the reason why He gave them to you. Is God unjust that He gives the things of life to people unequally? Why are you rich while another is poor? In any case, is it not so that you can receive the reward for good and faithful stewardship, and the other can receive the reward for his patient effort? But you, who grasps at everything in your insatiable greed, do you really think that you are doing nobody injustice by plundering so much? Who is the greedy one? The one who is not satisfied with that which is enough. Who is the plunderer? The one who takes that which belongs to all. Are you greedy? Are you a plunderer? The one who steals clothes off someone’s back is called a thief. Why should we refer to the one who does not clothe the naked, while having the means to do so, as anything else? The bread that you have belongs to the hungry, the clothes that are in your cupboard belong to the naked, the shoes that are rotting in your possession belong to the barefooted, the money that you have buried belongs to the destitute. And so you commit injustice to so many when you could have helped them.”

“Nice words, but money is nicer,” thought the rich in reaction to Basil’s harsh charge. Basil viewed the goods of the earth as a gift of the Creator. God had entrusted their stewardship to a number of people who were intended to share them with others. With his theory of stewardship, Basil went beyond a prevailing understanding of almsgiving in his day to lay a new foundation for the Church’s social work.

We can see in this a plea for the recognition of what we might call human rights, although Basil also goes further than this. In situating the inequality between rich and poor in God’s ordering of salvation history, so that the former are called to love of their neighbor and the latter to patience, Basil clearly saw that there is no such thing as private ownership in the strict sense. And, there should really be no such categories as rich and poor.

This radical approach sounds revolutionary in the face of corruption and excess. But it is an evangelical radicalism that we are meant to strive for nonviolently. This is not so surprising considering that Basil upheld the one same ideal for all Christians. He was realistic enough to realize that not everyone would follow that ideal, but it was lived out among ascetics and in monastic communities. Jesus and the scriptures held up certain ideals to which all were invited, but to which not all would respond.

The author is a Catholic priest living in Belgium. This is an extract from Basilius de Grote: Een Evangelische Revolutionair (Averbode, 1999, pages  110-112). The translation is by Macrina Walker. For more on the topic, see C. Paul Schroeder’s translation of St. Basil the Great: On Social Justice.

❖ IN COMMUNION / FEAST OF ST. ANASTASIA OF ROME / FALL 2010/  issue 58

by James Campbell

Readers of In Communion may recall that a brief prayer for peace and repentance in time of war was published in the Fall 2009 issue. Having been designed for insertion into the Litany of Fervent Supplication, it was actively sponsored by OPF North America and approved for use in the Liturgy by the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America in the spring of 2010. For parish usage, it has been modified to read:

Also, we pray Thee for a speedy end to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and that all who are entangled in their violence may embrace the riches of Thy kindness, forbearance and patience, and enter into that godly grief which leads to repentance; vouchsafe that our hearts and theirs may turn to works of reconciliation, to mercy and compassion for all, and to a thirst for that peace from above which heralds the drawing near of Thy Kingdom, we pray Thee, O Lord, hearken and have mercy.

The idea of explicitly praying for repentance in this present time of war arose after hearing Metropolitan Jonah’s words “pro-war is not pro-life” being read from his pastoral letter for Sanctity of Life Sunday early in 2009. Consequently, the very first version of this prayer was modeled on the long prayer for Sanctity of Life Sunday read in OCA parishes. Circulating that version by email had only one verifiably positive result. Jim Forest of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship read it and suggested that a short prayer for the Litany of Fervent Supplication might find more support, since topical prayers are often inserted in that litany.

This indeed has been the case, thanks to a number of people. The prayer was first sponsored by Alexander Patico (secretary of OPF-North America) and then introduced into the deliberations of the Synod of Bishops by Fr. Alexander Garklavs (chancellor of the OCA). The openness of the Holy Synod to its message led to its being recommended for use at the discretion of each diocese. Lacking a diocesan bishop in the Diocese of the Midwest, the Chicago Deanery (led by Fr. Thomas Mueller) decided to let parish priests use it at their own discretion. (Fr. Alexander Kuchta now regularly inserts it into the litany at Holy Resurrection parish in Palatine, Illinois.)

Not only is the prayer now shorter and more focused, but it is also more scripturally based. Three passages in particular helped shape the text.

1) “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.” (2 Corinthians 7:10)

2) “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

3) “Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience?” (Romans 2:4; sentence order reversed)

The predominance of scriptural and liturgical language in the prayer has freed it from the personal rhetoric that was evident in the original long version. And the subsequent modifications of the brief prayer for the litany – made in collaboration with Fr. Alex as he began using it in the Liturgy – have acted in the same way. For example, the phrase “as participants or supporters,” found in the earlier draft, fell away because it was already implied in the preceding phrase “all those entangled in violence,” and because it could too easily become a bone of contention that would distract attention from our real need for repentance. A second modification – substituting “conflicts” for “wars” – was made for similar reasons, keeping well in view the fact that the prayer is most relevant in countries whose people will have the most difficulty truly hearing it.

To pray for peace in a time of war is only natural, for that is the end we desire. But prayer is about being willing, not just about wishing. So what must we be willing to do or suffer for the sake of finding peace? The prayer asks this of us: to repent of our entanglement in violence. Immediately we are faced with two difficulties. First, if the violence in question is part of what is commonly considered an honorable war, how can it be repented of? And second, if we are not ourselves combatants, how can the violence of distant battlefields entangle us? But these difficulties are more apparent than real.

To begin with, “violence” can be roughly defined as the unjust use of force; and more pointedly, as the intentional devastation and killing of innocent people. Whether or not the use of deadly force in Afghanistan and Iraq is believed to be justifiable, that use of force becomes “violence” the moment it devastates and kills the innocent. Here the facts on the ground speak for themselves, and the moral distinction between an accidental killing and planning for some “acceptable level of collateral damage” is clear. The violence of warfare inevitably entangles all those who participate in these conflicts to some degree, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Still, it is within the power of repentance to free the soul from its entanglement in violence – and of prayer to help to make repentance a reality.

The second difficulty can also be resolved by a little reflection on the realities of the situation. Moral responsibility for acts of violence perpetrated or precipitated by the Coalition Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq is a shared responsibility. But it is shared not just by combatants on both sides of the conflict. Civilians who send others “into harm’s way,” and who condone the inevitable killing of innocent people to achieve their purposes – however noble those purposes may appear to be – are also morally culpable. Whenever we become complicit with violence in this way, we too become entangled in an unjust use of force and find ourselves in need of repentance.

The inherent sinfulness of using violence to accomplish our desires – even when they are godly desires – is captured by Fr. John Mefrige in his distinction between desire and demand in the last issue of In Communion. A demand asserts an unconditional right to what our will desires, and therefore imposes an unconditional duty on others to conform to our will. Performance of such duties can only be exacted through force of one kind or another, and any reluctance of others to acquiesce to our demand leads to their being summarily judged and condemned as malicious obstacles. Because we heartily resent such imposed duties when placed on us by others, we violate the law of love whenever our desires morph into demands. One could say the very violence of such demands entangles us in a web of unjust attitudes and actions.

Since demands imply the readiness to use force and ineluctably draw us into entanglement with unjust uses of force, when we imagine our demands will lead to righteous results we have been seduced by what Walter Wink calls, in Engaging the Powers, “the myth of redemptive violence.” This is a popular myth, but in reality violence does not redeem us. Never in history has it happened that violence as such (namely, the use of violence beyond the pale of just criteria) has truly protected from erosion or abrogation the cherished values it purportedly defended – although it has often provided the victors with a fleeting illusion of safety. It is for this very reason that when Christ frees us from the tyranny of death he does so by his suffering of violence, not by acting in violence.

Since repentance is how we lay hold of Christ’s gift of freedom, repentance for our entanglement in violence is one of its most valuable forms – particularly for Christians surrounded by the passions of an endless “war on terror.” Once we have freely turned away from violence, we can engage wholeheartedly in those works of “reconciliation, mercy and compassion” that make peace a living reality, the very embodiment of that “peace from above” for which we continually pray.

James Campbell is an adjunct instructor in World Religions and Ethics at McHenry County College in Illinois and holds a Master of General Studies degree from Roosevelt University and a Master of Arts in Divinity from the University of Chicago. He is a Vietnam Veteran, a retired zookeeper and a landscape designer who was received into the Orthodox Church in 1981. His essay, “Taking Responsibility for Evil: Addiction and Usury in the Light of Repentance,” was published in Ethical Dilemmas: Crises in Faith and Modern Medicine.

❖ IN COMMUNION / FEAST OF ST. ANASTASIA OF ROME / FALL 2010/  issue 58

By Scott Cairns

How can one believe in a loving God who allows the innocent to suffer? I’ve been asked this many times, and I’ve never been quick to answer. Subconsciously, I’ve probably asked much the same thing in the past.

While I may not frame the matter this way now, it remains a useful question, if only because it reveals a premise I am no longer willing to buy – the illusion of individual autonomy.

The question reveals a keen ignorance regarding how intimately we are connected to one another – both now and forever – and more or less ignores the extreme freedom that God appears to insist upon in creation. These phenomena, together, provide a clue as to why all this suffering isn’t exactly God’s doing.

Above Right Image: Elder Zosimas: an illustration for The Brothers Karamazov

Sooner than later, we’ll want to puzzle over God’s curious insistence on the radical freedom of creation – its inhabitants and the volatile earth itself; but for now, let’s attend to the business of our intimate connection with one another and to the suffering caused by human failure.

I dare say that if the innocent suffer they do so because one of us – you or me or some other thug – now or in the past has set their pain in motion. If the innocent continue to suffer they do so because we have yet to take responsibility for their pain; we have yet to take sufficient responsibility for their relief.

Our failure to appreciate the degree of our own responsibility enables our famous indifference to those who suffer, allows us a continuing, dim-witted, and blithe condemnation of those in pain or in poverty. We suspect that something has caused their situation, but our failure to see our own hands in the mess leaves us thinking those suffering are somehow to blame. We shake our heads as we stand by or as we turn away, feeling both helpless and – assuming that we’re not completely dead yet – a little culpable.

That faintest whiff of our own culpability is subtle evidence that there may be hope for us yet.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosimas manifests a keen sense of this culpability. “There is only one salvation for you,” he says to his gathered brotherhood. “Take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friends, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.”

And there is an even greater consequence that Zosimas would alert us to: “Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan’s pride and murmuring against God.”

You might even join the grim chorus of those who cannot believe in a God who would allow such things.

In the midst of his own suffering unto death, the elder Zosimas makes clear his sense of this great mystery of our mutual complicity:

Remember especially, that you cannot be the judge of anyone. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty of all for the crime of the one standing before him. When he understands this, then he will be able to judge. However mad that may seem, it is true. For if I myself were righteous, perhaps there would be no criminal standing before me now.

In his book about the life and witness of his own spiritual father, St. Silouan the Athonite, Archimandrite Sophrony, a modern-day ascetic, further recovers for us this ancient understanding when he writes:

Sin is committed first of all in the secret depths of the human spirit but its consequences involve the individual as a whole. …Sin will, inevitably, pass beyond the boundaries of the sinner’s individual life, to burden all humanity and thus affect the fate of the whole world. The sin of our forefather Adam was not the only sin of cosmic significance. Every sin, manifest or secret, committed by each one of us affects the rest of the universe.

My time with the fathers and mothers of the Church has made clear to me the truth that my own sin is not only about me. The general consensus would have it that your sin is not only about you either. Every choice that separates us from communion with God, and every decision that clouds our awareness of His presence, or erodes our relationships with one another, has a profound and expanding effect – as the proverbial ripples in a pool.

That profound effect is to give us precisely what, by so choosing, we prefer over communion with God, what we prefer over our cultivating an awareness of His presence, and over our having healthy relationships with one another – namely, ourselves alone.

Ourselves alone, it turns out, is a circumstance that must finally be appreciated as the antithesis of our becoming human persons. The very notion of the Holy Trinity (in Whose image we are made) should lead us to suspect that personhood requires relationship, that genuine personhood depends upon it.

My hope for healing, therefore, lies in my becoming more of a person, and more intimately connected to others. To succeed as we are called to succeed, we must all come to share this hope.

Satan himself (should we say, rather, itself?) proves an exemplary case in point. In Satan, we have a figure of one who has doggedly opted for isolation, for nonbeing, and for acute (albeit a comically moot) independence. Except for the Book of Job – another perplexing study in affliction – we do not find much about Satan in the scriptures. A good bit of our “Satan” has come to us by way of Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, rather than from Scripture. That isn’t to say the Miltonic construction isn’t useful to our thinking; Milton took his theology seriously. One revealing passage occurs in Book IV, where Satan speaks thus:

So farewell, hope; and with hope farewell, fear;
Farewell, remorse! all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my good;
By thee at least Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new world, shall know.

With a bit of dramatic irony, Milton offers up a Satan who – even in the midst of his strenuous denial of God’s authority – fails to notice how his own moral economy (in which God’s evil becomes Satan’s good) nonetheless depends upon God’s having established the prior economy in the first place.

With a keen sleight of the poetic hand, evil is revealed as merely a denial of the good, an absence of the good, and nothing of itself – nothing, really, beyond spiteful, infernal response.

Early in the 7th century, the beloved St. Isaac had already come to a comparable conclusion concerning the figure of Satan, and also came to understand the ontological status of sin, of Gehenna, and of death as similarly vexed:

Sin, Gehenna, and death do not exist at all with God, for they are effects, not substances. Sin is the fruit of free will. There was a time when sin did not exist, and there will be a time when it will not exist. Gehenna is the fruit of sin. At some point in time it had a beginning, but its end is not known. Death, however, is a dispensation of the wisdom of the Creator. It will rule only a short time over nature; then it will be totally abolished. Satan’s name derives from voluntary turning aside from the truth; it is not an indication that he exists as such naturally.

In his translation of the above, Sebastian Brock puts it even more plainly: “‘Satan’ is a name denoting the deviation of the human will from truth; it is not the designation of a natural being.”

One might say further that “Satan” is not the name of natural being, period.

It is the name for that which rejects being, that which is satisfied to become aberration. It is necessarily the name for that which, turning away from the natural, the good, and the beautiful – and away from the God whose communion gives life to all things – has turned, instead, toward its own isolation, severance, and death.

So much for Satan.

Writing in the 14th century, St. Gregory Palamas made a similar observation regarding the nature of evil: “It should be remembered that no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned aside from the activity appropriate of it, and thus from the end assigned to this activity.”

As both St. Isaac and St. Gregory Palamas are eager to establish, while sin is to be understood as nothing of itself, it can be quite something in terms of its effects. Admittedly, our particular English noun, sin, can be misleading, given that, generally speaking, when we bother to put a name to a thing, we expect that thing to exist. The Greek precursor, amartía (literally, missing the mark), is a good deal more instructive for our apprehending the status of things; the Greek word’s construction, beginning with that familiar a – which is to say, beginning with not – attends to sin’s ontology, its originating energy. It is the great not, the infernal no to God’s eternal yes. It is ever and always mistaken. Dissing the marker, it misses the mark. It is the failure – the refusal – of being, plain and simple.

Those of us who struggle with habitual sins – and we know who we are – are very likely to break our hearts over the business of turning away from those chronic mark-missings. Our problems with recurring sin, and the more general human problem of being enslaved by sin, is never solved simply by our rejecting that sin, no matter how many times we try, no matter how strenuously we struggle to reject it.

This is because merely rejecting sin – that is, focusing on not sinning – is finally just another species of infernal no. “Just say no” is an insufficient principle.

The strongest man or woman in the world is not nearly strong enough to triumph over his or her sin simply by saying no to it. What we need is the strength-giving grace occasioned by our saying yes to something else, by our saying yes, and yes, and yes – ceaselessly – to Someone else.

It is not finally our turning away from sin that frees us from sin’s recurrence; rather it is the movement of our turning toward Christ – and the mystery of our continuing turn into Him – that puts sin behind us.

One other illustration comes to mind. Orthodox Christians generally observe three fasting seasons during the year besides Great Lent; many also observe most Wednesdays and Fridays as discrete days of fasting throughout the year. These are days when, for the most part, neither meat nor dairy foods are eaten. In any case, the tradition is keen to insist that fasting be accompanied by almsgiving. One forgoes expensive foods in favor of inexpensive food, and one is encouraged to share with the poor whatever money is saved by eating on the cheap. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the tradition teaches us that a fast – or any manner of self-deprivation – that is not accompanied by good things done for others is understood to be “a Satanic fast.”

Forgive my inserting more poetry to bring home the point. This particular piece is one of a sort of playful, mostly serious series of poems having to do with word studies in New Testament Greek; in this case the word is metanoia.

Repentance, to be sure,
but of a species far
less likely to oblige
sheepish repetition.

Repentance, you’ll observe
glibly bears the bent
of thought revisited,
and mind’s familiar stamp

– a quaint, half-hearted
doubleness that couples
all compunction with a pledge
of recurrent screw-up.

The heart’s metanoia,
on the other hand, turns
without regret, turns not
so much away, as toward,

as if the slow pilgrim
has been surprised to find
that sin is not so bad
as it is a waste of time.

The good, on the other hand, is what actually exists; our long and continuing tradition tells us that all that is worthwhile is good, and all that is good is worthwhile. Moreover, all that partakes of the good is by good’s efficacious agency brought into existence, and is by that selfsame agency kept there.

Regardless of our situations, we are inevitably partaking of something or other at every moment. The catch is that we will either partake of what is, or we will partake of the absence of what is. We partake either of life (all that has true being by way of its connection to God) or of death (all that has opted to sever that connection).

As we all must have guessed by now, we actually are what we eat.

Scott Cairns is an Orthodox poet, memoirist, libretist, and essayist. He serves as a reader at St. Luke Orthodox Church in Columbia, Missouri. He is also a professor of English, Director of the Center for the Literary Arts and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri.

❖ IN COMMUNION / FEAST OF ST. ANASTASIA OF ROME / FALL 2010/  issue 58