Chapter 5

The Layman and his Money

The poverty beatitude

After toying with the idea of starting this chapter, like the last one, with an analysis of economic ethics, I decided against it, for several reasons. First of all, the ethical dimension of the use of money is not subject at the moment to quite so horrendous a set of variations as that of sexuality: we know, basically, that to cheat is wrong and to use the power of money to force others into less-than-human conditions is wrong; the questions lie not in the basics, but in the nuances of applications of this general principle. And the second reason for leaving the ethics alone, except in passing, is that, once you get into the nuances, the whole issue becomes enormously complicated, involving critiques of capitalist and Marxist economics, which need books, not chapters or parts of chapters. The third reason is that I do have a book on the subject, The Moral Dimension of Human Economic Life, which can be consulted if anyone is interested in what I think on the matter.

[You can also see Modes of the Finite, Part 6, Section 2 for a detailed treatment of the basis of economics.]

For reasons that I hope will emerge as I continue, I think there might be said to be two counsels of Jesus with respect to money: "Go sell what you have and give to the poor," which defines the attitude of the Religious life, and "make friends with sinful property (the 'mammon of iniquity')," which I will take it is the source of what I think is the lay attitude.

Let me distinguish the three different attitudes toward money briefly first. the Religious, seeing everything in relation to God, and recognizing that money is in essence power over the services of others, repudiates that control over others' lives altogether and relies for material assistance on the bounty of God as expressed in the love of others. The priest or clergyman, interested in showing the supreme value of the Kingdom, has the kind of attitude St. Paul had in Second Corinthians: "I'm still not going to charge you for anything; I want you, not your money. Parents should provide for their children, not children for their parents; it gives me pleasure to spend for your souls until I have nothing left."

But the layman, taking over God's creative attitude, tries to look on money for what it is, and help it to be what it is. He is not going to use money for his own benefit, exactly--for what it does for him--he is going to use it in such a way that it can develop its full potential. And this will not necessarily mean giving it all away.

But the first beatitude is poverty, isn't it? I think this is the place to begin the discussion of the layman and the lay attitude toward money. There are a number, I think, of errors in interpretation of the Beatitudes in general and this one in particular that need to be cleared up before we can look at the issue squarely.

In the first place, as is clear from Luke's version of the beatitudes, that what Jesus is talking about is real, actual poverty, suffering, and misery--not things that are desirable in themselves. Why then does he call people who are experiencing these things "blessed"? "Blessed" here does not mean what we think of by the word--blissful. The way it should be translated is this: "It is good for or a blessing for people to be poor (Matthew adds "in spirit"), because then they are under heaven's rule."

As I understand this, what Jesus is saying is that it is a good thing to be poor because then we have a chance of not seeing this life as the be-all and end-all of things. This is why it is also good to suffer, and (to use the modern way of putting it) to be oppressed. It is precisely because these are bad that they are good for us; they take us away from this life, and make us realize that we don't matter--and so it makes it possible for us to let someone slap us on the other cheek, to give the thief our shirt after he takes our coat, and so on. It is not that we should court these things, but that we should have the attitude of not being of any importance to ourselves, that is the point here.

Why does Matthew add "in spirit" to "poor"? I think because simply being poor is not necessarily what Jesus was calling a good thing. Matthew, after all, was a tax-collector, and he would have seen that there are people who are poor who resent their condition bitterly and envy the rich, and who are prepared to engage in revolutions and killings to "get what they deserve to have." This, pace "Liberation Theology," is in my view anti-Christian.

I think what Matthew was referring to by being poor "in spirit" is not seeking something called "spiritual poverty" in the midst of wealth, but the kind of attitude so many poor people have who are poor and do not realize that they are poor. That is, they have what they need to live, they are not particularly interested in having more, and are not worried about losing what they do have. The fact that others are rich does not cause resentment. This is not a Stoic "being above" poverty, exactly, still less a seeking of the hardships of poverty in order to be "detached" from "the things of this world."

Now this detachment from things of this world is not wrong, and can be Christianized; and, in fact, it is part of the Religious attitude toward the world, which does not have the world as its goal, but sees the world in its relation to God. But the layman is involved in the world, cares about the world and has the things of this world as the object of his love; and so this kind of detachment may very well not be appropriate for him. Hence, poverty "of spirit" in the traditional sense of detachment is not necessarily a Christian virtue for the layman.

If you take poverty of spirit in the sense that being poor does not cause envy or fretting, then this sense would apply to most of the Beatitudes: suffering has to be suffering "in spirit," in the sense that the sufferer does not regard his suffering as an occasion to hate God who caused it; the meek person allows others to trample on his rights "in spirit," in that he does not try to stand up for them; and the oppressed must be oppressed "in spirit" for the Beatitude to apply, since if he hates the oppressor, he belongs to this world, not the Kingdom.

But note that all these things are, so to speak, curses, not blessings. True, they are only curses if we think such things "ought not" to happen to us, and that can only come about if we succumb to the serpent's temptation to look on things as good and bad--and it is in that sense, I think, that the poverty is to be poverty "in spirit." It is not to be considered as either good or bad--when it happens to oneself.