The Christianization of money

In order to acquire the Christian attitude toward money, a person first has to give up certain myths connected with life and economic life in particular.

The first thing that has to be given up--perhaps the most pernicious thing for economic theory--is something that sounds extremely Christian, and in fact was articulated most clearly by St. Augustine at the beginning of the Confessions: "You have made us for Yourself, Master, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You."

That, I think, is simply false. God made us because of himself, but not for himself, as if possession of him was our goal in life. I have argued before that neither the natural nor the supernatural possession of God can be a real goal for our lives: the natural, because in fact the mere possession of God does not totally satisfy us (as we can see since we now possess him by knowledge and love, but are not totally satisfied with this meagre possession); and the supernatural, because what is beyond nature must be a pure gift which is precisely not desired by our nature ("nor has it entered into man's mind to conceive the glory that awaits us").

St. Augustine assumed--gratuitously--that, since we long for "the good" as understood, and that means "goodness" in the abstract or ignoring any definiteness (limit) to it, then any definite good which was not Absolute Goodness would leave us unsatisfied, because we would know that this was not what we desired.

But if you assume, as I think is true, that our freedom means that we create "the good" simply by imagining a state of affairs and using that conception as the standard for judging what the facts are, then it does not follow that we automatically desire something called "the good." When we desire (see things as not being the way we conceive they "ought" to be), then simply by definition what we desire is called "the good"; but it is good simply because it is the goal we have set for ourselves, not because it is something objective that attracts us.

This means that "the good" for a given person is something definite and finite, and he is not "restless" once he possesses it, always desiring more and more until he reaches the Infinite. True, young people do tend to desire more and more, because they have not yet defined themselves, and they are still experimenting with the various possibilities open to them; so they set goals for themselves. But once one reaches middle age, this restless striving tends naturally to get into a desire for "security," and a discomfort with change, even change for what might be called "the better"; and the older one becomes, the more rigid he grows, if anything desiring the return of the past more than flights into unknown tomorrows.

The importance of this for economics is that in fact we are not infinitely greedy. There is nothing built into our nature that produces a discontent with what we have, making us want more and more. The economic myth is that "desires are infinite, resources finite," and therefore we must always be coping with resources inadequate to do what we want.

But desires depend on what people's goals actually are. True, people who blunder through life and don't know what their goals are are rather easily persuaded to adopt new goals when these are attractively presented; thus, advertising is by no means a waste of time. But the advertising PR men are misleading us when they say that all advertising does it bring to notice new things--"provide information"--which people take into account when deciding what to give up in order to get what. Advertising tries to create interest in these new things and the goals they represent; the goals are not necessarily desired just because the person will be "better off" if he has them. Think of how the symphony orchestras have to work to persuade people that the (objectively complex and more meaningful) music they offer is worth sitting through. Beethoven loses to the Beatles almost every time.

Recognizing this, the first thing, it seems to me, that the Christian should be clear about is what his goals in life are, which is another way of saying what sort of human being he considers himself to be. Of course, he is the sort of human being who loves God above everything and loves as God loves; but who is it that is doing this love? What properties do you have as the lover? That is, what other acts besides love are your acts--or better, what are the acts in which you love as God loves?

What I am getting at is that Jesus was a Jew of the first century A. D., of a certain height, speaking a certain language, with a certain style of dress and hair, and so on and so on. He was the embodiment of God's love in the world; but he was a definite embodiment, a picture of which can (I think) be seen in the Shroud of Turin.

Similarly, the Christian is someone who is of a definite size, skin color, style of dress and style of life: one who cares or does not care about classical music, one who likes or does not like to work with his hands and tinker with machinery, one who reads or does not, and so on. What are you? Your definition of yourself will be in terms of the actions you perform that are "yours." What do you want to do in your life--which is another way of saying what do you want to do with your life, or even what do you want your life to be?

To do is to be; you define yourself as "the person who does such-and-such"; and your goals in life are the actions that you consider to be "the real you," whether you are doing them at the moment (and in that respect are successful, and if you are aware of the success, happy), or not (and at the moment are unfulfilled if the goals seem possible but not yet attained, and frustrated if they seem impossible).

To love as Jesus loves, then, does not mean that you "give up" being a definite person, who does very definite things; it means that this definite person you are is not important to you; you love this person who is yourself with your goals; you respect him as God respects him. It is not that your fulfillment matters to you as something that must be attained at all costs; it is that you are a human being, created as a goal-setter by God, and you respect this creation of God so that you set goals for yourself that do in fact lead to fulfillment and even enjoyment. We saw in the chapter on vocation that there are certain innate dispositions that "want" as it were to express themselves, and these are our vocation in life. In that chapter, I was stressing the tendencies that take us out of self-interest; but here I want to point out the fact that one who respects his genetic makeup will listen to this internal vocation and find out what actions his talents lead to, and use them as goals to define just what this lover of God in the world is.

Now it is not necessary, of course, to spend a week or a month in retreat to define once for all what the complete set of those actions is to be, still less to think that, once you have set a goal for yourself, you will never listen to experience when it tells you that you were mistaken and should reformulate your self-definition. This is one of the reasons we are changing creatures. Our self-definition comes gradually, and can continue up until the moment we die, never totally leaving the past choices--they always remain with us unless they are sinful and erased by the miracle of confession and the change of attitude--but building on them and refining them, making the person we are eternally to be more and more complex and interesting.

The Christian, in this goal-setting and refining, has an advantage over the non-Christian, in two senses. First of all, since the achieving of the goals is not the ultimate in importance--his self is not the be-all and end-all of his interest in life--then he is less likely to get locked into goals that he has set and refuses to give up even when they are seen to be not what he thought them to be. He is the opposite of some alcoholics, who are so wrapped up in themselves as drinkers that they cannot give up the drinking with all its attendant miseries because this is to give up the one thing that really defines themselves, and they cannot give up themselves. The Christian has given up himself in this sense of something that must be held onto, come what may.

Secondly, the Christian, in setting goals for himself in the presence of God, knows that he is doing it because he loves himself as God loves him, not because he is the be-all and end-all of his existence. But he also knows that God loves him infinitely, and knows where his true fulfillment and enjoyment lie; and that God will help the person who seeks the "best" definition of himself find it--always consistently with his freedom, and always consistently with taking himself away from self-interest and giving up his self as a sort of god to worship (as we saw in the section on sanctity).

But since God knows the creature's fallibility and yet his sincerity and respect for himself in setting goals, the Christian is aware that God will not allow him to make mistakes--in the long run, that is. Mistakes will turn out to be serendipitous; "everything works together for good for those who love God." Just as God will help the sinner frustrate himself, the Christian knows that God will help the one trying to love him fulfill himself; and so he can with confidence choose the thing that seems most reasonable and pursue it, knowing that even if it is a mistake, he will be better off somehow for having made it. This is the faith of the Christian layman, and any Christian, for that matter.