Living the Beatitudes

by Fr. John Chryssavgis

The root of the English word “beatitude” is “beau­ty.” The Greek term kalos implies attractiveness — literally, an attraction toward divine beauty.

In the first book of the Bible, beauty is central. We learn how God made the world as a “very good” creation (Gen. 1: 31) — a beautiful cosmos. And in the first Gospel, the protoevange­lion of the Christian scriptural canon, Matthew opens his very first verse by describing the message that he wishes to convey as “a book of genesis.” By so doing, Matthew is being faithful to Genesis as an archetype of God’s message or purpose for the world.

In his gospel account, Matthew is not offering a biography of Jesus, but a way of living for a new Israel, the Christian community, the church; he is presenting an ecclesiol­ogy, not a history. He is addressing a people in community, con­firm­ing a way of life. He is telling us that the beauty for which God created and intended the world must become part of our own life style and worldview.

Matthew is addressing a people in crisis. After the resurrection, an apocalyptic attitude sustained the Christian community. The early Christians believed Jesus would soon return. Yet Matthew believed and proclaimed other­wise: that the kingdom of heaven is already at hand, even now in our hands. God is already present in those who live a life of restoration and resurrection in Christ.

To help you appreciate how it is that Matthew could have an alternative vision, let me take an example from daily life. When we look at buildings, the untamed eye will observe bricks and mortar, wood and glass. An architect, however, will perceive beyond the surface appearance; an architect discerns harmony or pressure points. Yet another person will discern the beauty of the spiritual world, the presence or absence of God.

Matthew too is able to reveal a new understanding of our world, new — and at the same time ever deepening — perceptions of the presence of God in our lives. In the beginning, in the book and the event of Genesis, God saw chaos and darkness, and God cared enough about the world to place things in order, to render things beautiful. He created the cosmos. In Matthew’s Genesis, God once again cared for and loved the world. The phrase “in the beginning” — whether in the first book of the Old Testament or the first book of the New Testament — is a symbol for whenever, signifying always. The term “whenever” implies the phrase “in the beginning.” It also includes “every beginning.” This reality teaches us to respond accordingly. Whenever we see any form of deviation, any deformation in nature, in life, or in the world, we too must care enough to respond; we too must love sufficiently to restore, to heal.

How does Matthew propose that we achieve this? Instead of searching for God in empty places, Matthew asked his community to return to and re-examine its roots. He begins his Gospel with three periods, three series of fourteen generations, in order to show how God’s presence in this world, in history, has both roots and continuity. As Orthodox, we would adopt the term “tradition.”

In the genealogy that is offered, Matthew is in fact very radical, hardly traditional — he includes women, non-Jews and a foreigner. He could quite easily have included each of us.

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit: theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

God’s kingdom is never reduced simply to a matter of rules and regulations. It is certainly not a reinforcement of worldly positions and secular institutions. God’s kingdom is a reversal of attitudes, a metanoia, a conversion and reordering of values and behavior. It means becoming more and more a person who shares in the holiness, the beauty, and the perfection of God. It implies coming under the authority of God, rather than under the authority of this world. Living the Beatitudes signifies our acceptance of this new authority.

Matthew often uses the word “perfect.” The Greek word for perfect (teleios) signifies reaching for a goal (telos). For Christians, this “end” is the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, Matthew is telling us that perfection is a process, a series of stages of progress. It is less a condition of perfection, than it is a potential or possibility. Think of the emphasis in St. Gregory of Nyssa on “never-ending perfection” (epektasis).

And in order to become perfect, Matthew tells us we must become poor. To become complete, he tells us we must surrender, we must be incomplete. If you want, “go sell all your possessions and give to the poor.”

There is a cost involved here. The question is: How much have we sold? How much have you sold? How much have I sold? And are we in fact willing to give up and to give up everything? Are we prepared to sacrifices our preconceptions, our prestige, our positions, our possessions, our power?

Matthew is not romanticizing poverty. Sharing in the kingdom in fact depends on our effort to alleviate the various forms of poverty in the world. Poverty is not good; it is not blessed; it is not a virtue. Poverty is miserable; poverty is a clear indication that the kingdom of God has not yet come.

However, poverty can be voluntary, as with monastics. Voluntary poverty becomes a way of sharing with the poor, a means of giving up whatever gives us security. Indeed, such poverty is more than merely giving up. It is a way of giving! But so long as we justify our ways and our behavior, we shall not appreciate the need to change. We will not understand that everyone has a right to enough of the earth’s resources: to sufficient water, energy, food, clothing, health, a safe environment, and peace.

If God’s purpose is for us to be more and more, then we must admit that to have more than enough is to be less than human. It is to bear a lighter “footprint” on the world that we inhabit. In the Beatitudes, we learn that we must choose our gods; we cannot serve two masters. Remember, where your treasure is, there your heart is also. And our world offers us numerous temptations to find security in consumer goods.

“Blessed, then, are the poor in spirit.” Blessed are those who submit to God, who put their trust in God, who have confidence in God, who are not controlled by their needs or by the demands of this world.

Blessed are those who
- know that they are poor in spirit:
- recognize the need for healing
- admit the wasting of goods
- work to remove conditions that contribute to world poverty
- are ready to change their lifestyles
- reflect on their ways and their attitudes
- work with others to overcome the fears and controls of society
- recognize they will not change (either themselves or the world) by themselves or indeed overnight
- trust that “our heavenly Father knows all that we need. Therefore, seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be given to [us] besides.”

Blessed are those who mourn: they shall be comforted

When we think of Jesus Christ, we imagine the healer, the one who overcomes brokenness and death, the Lord that assumed the scarred flesh and touched the shattered world. There is a softness of touch, almost a sense of joy, to this Beatitude. When Isaiah speaks of comfort, he says: “Give them oil of gladness in place of mourning” (61: 3). There is an entire literature and theology of tears in early ascetic writers.

Mourning and tears continually touch every level of our life. And Jesus brings healing to all levels of life. Yet comfort is not tantamount to relaxation; it is again a form of restoration. It is in fact a challenge.

How is healing brought to those who suffer, or comfort to those who mourn? First, Jesus notices the brokenness, cares for the broken, and responds to the broken. Second, all the healing miracles of Christ have to do with overcoming individualism, with breaking open the closedness within us and around us: the deaf person is shut off; the dumb person cannot communicate; the paralytic cannot step beyond himself; the leper is isolated, ostracized from the community; the demonized man is possessed, imprisoned.

And how does Jesus heal these people? To the deaf, he says: “effatha” (be opened). To the dumb person, he says: “speak.” To the paralytic, he says: “take up your bed, and walk.” To the leper, he says: “be cleaned.” To the demonized man, he says: “be healed, go to the rest of the community, and show yourself.”

These miracles offer us an insight into the healing and wholeness of the kingdom. Henceforth, if we wish to live by the Beatitudes, we can no longer remain deaf to the cry of those who suffer, or to an environment that groans.

And so we mourn. We mourn because we have betrayed our call to be faithful to God’s plan and authority. We grieve and admit our sins — sins of envy, greed, gluttony, jealousy and aggression — against our neighbor and against the earth. We recognize of course that such external “sins” are only symptoms of our inner disease. However, by recognizing our own brokenness, we are forgiven and comforted. Then, and only then, are we given the power to heal.

It is significant that Matthew’s Gospel shows that Christ’s disciples were given the power to heal as early as in chapter 10. It is not until much later, in the final chapter 28 — and in the very last verse of that chapter — that they were also given the power to teach! The message is simple: when we are in pain, we do not easily receive or give teaching. When our community or our environment is broken, mere words about the beauty of nature will not go a long way in restoring the suffering that we have inflicted upon it.

There is a further dimension to our mourning. Mourning is a condition, not just a singular event. Standing before society’s unwillingness to change, even Jesus is brought to tears. Sometimes even our wrongful ideologies, our mis­guided values are reinforced by established religion and the institutional church. One of the shortest and most powerful verses in the Bible is: “Jesus wept.” Yet this verse is also a symbol of comfort and sweetness to a broken people.

Finally, in relation to the natural environment, the Book of Hosea tells us that even “the land itself mourns, and everything that dwells in it languishes [i.e., sheds tears]” (Hos. 4: 1).

Matthew wrote of birds in the sky; today, oil slicks wash them ashore. Grass in the fields brought joy in the times of Christ’s disciples; today, toxic chemicals and warfare leave the land barren. Jesus assumed that foxes had homes; today, we cannot assume that foxes will survive. Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes; today, 800 million are severely undernourished.

Extending our care and concern to people and to inanimate creation brings good news to the whole world. One teardrop of mourning for our way of life can water the whole world.

Blessed are the meek; they shall inherit the land

As the King of heaven and earth, Christ comes not with violence but in meekness. He will inherit the earth and all its power, all its positions, all its prestige. Matthew reassures us that God is found at the very center of the world, with us in all generations. And this King comes to assume authority over all of creation, to reorder all creation from chaos into cosmos — an allusion to the events recorded in the first Genesis.

The average Jew during the life of Christ, and the average Christian disciple of Christ, had one of two ways of responding to Jesus: either with meekness or violence; either through peace or indignation. The way in which we receive Christ is reflected in the way in which we regard the earth or the land.

God and land, divine Word and created world must be integrated. The spiritual life brings God, the land, and the people together in a balance and integrated order.

This means that the land or the earth must never become an end in itself. God is always the source of all worldly resources. Israel laid aside a weekly day of rest in order to remember this, to reflect on where our treasure is. Worshiping the created land, venerating any false god, is a form of idolatry. Yet on the other hand, Worshiping God without assuming responsibility for the land is a dangerous and misleading form of spiritualism.

We may, for instance, pray for the environment, imploring God to do something about the crisis that we confront, yet never changing our lifestyle, which may well be reinforcing the problem. Matthew’s Christ warns us: “None of those who cry out: ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom but only the one who does the will of my Father” (7: 21).

Or else we may be activists who leave little or no room for prayer. Our lamps should not go out because of our failure to wait for God (25:1-3) in silence. Prayer is not a pretext for the evasion of responsibility. Prayer and action are equal dimensions of spirituality. We must understand how Jesus was as authentic when He healed the sick, as when He withdrew to be alone with God.

Our society, however, promotes a mentality that exalts the acquisition of material possessions. Once we are in “the land,” it is difficult to “seek first the kingdom of God.” It is easy to forget that this earth is inherited — it is received; it is not taken, or snatched. It is never ours to own, but only God’s to give.

Therefore, the land and its wealth must be oriented to others in order to promote God’s kingdom, reordering the priorities of this world. Meekness is the blessed way of dealing justly with the land. The meek person reflects a reversal of attitudes toward power, possessions and positions. Other­wise, the land becomes a territory of violence, a domain of division, a realm of mistrust.

Meekness is a way of caring. It should touch every aspect of our lives. It should teach us that God is God, that we are God’s, and that the land is God’s. Thus, the land is ours only to use and share responsibly. Meekness is a blessed correction, a heavenly contrast to the violence which we have wrought upon the earth, a stark opposition to the desecration of God’s plan for creation.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness [or justice]; they shall be filled

This Beatitude introduces the fundamental theme of justice in relation to the environment and the spiritual life. “The Lord is our justice,” says the Prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 23: 5-6). And when we thirst for justice, we know that we shall be filled. “As the earth brings forth its plants … so will the Lord God make justice” (Is. 61: 3-4, 10-11).

Hunger and thirst lead to dependence on God. And God promises that there will always be enough for all. That is justice; that is fairness; that is righteousness. However, like Israel in the Old Testament, we want more than enough, more than our share, more than what is just and fair. We lose our conviction and confidence that God will “give us our daily bread.” God responds to our need, and asks in return that we do not store up treasure on earth, that we do not live in excess, so that others too may have enough. We are to seek to have only just enough, in order to be more and more.

When Matthew speaks of the kingdom, he speaks of justice (dikaiosyne). Matthew uses this word seven times in his Gospel. The opposite of justice, for Matthew, is not injustice; it is hypocrisy. Justice creates community; hypocrisy destroys commonality. Justice creates cosmos (beauty); hypocrisy creates chaos. Justice means sharing; hypocrisy signifies concealing and keeping. The ultimate test of our justice is to ask ourselves whether we continue our acts of piety when no one is watching.

For the Jew and the early Christians, there were three practical ways of materializing justice:

1. Almsgiving: Almsgiving is not simply a matter of feeling. Almsgiving means responsibility. And almsgiving is not an optional virtue. Giving all that is in excess is naturally expected of everyone.
2. Prayer: In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches us that when we pray we must (a) not talk too much; and (b) learn to forgive. Yet when we look honestly at our life of prayer, we have to admit that we do tend to talk too much. Prayer must heal divisions, not harbor anger or resentment. “Forgive us … as we forgive others,” we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. If we are not striving to create heaven on earth, then perhaps we should stop praying the Lord’s Prayer. Our actions and our lifestyle will show whether we mean what we pray (”your kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven”), or whether we are merely talking too much.
3. Fasting: We fast in order to remember the kingdom. We fast in order to commit ourselves to the priorities and the ways of the kingdom. We fast in order to practice offering our resources to the poor and sharing our possessions with our neighbor. Fasting helps shape a vision whereby we can view the world with God’s eyes. It clarifies the purpose and sharpens the focus, so that our view and our worldview is larger than ourselves.

“This is the fasting that I desire: releasing those bound unjustly … setting free the oppressed …. sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless, clothing the naked … satisfying the afflicted …. Then the Lord will guide you always and give you plenty …. You will be like a watered garden, like a spring whose water never fails …. ‘Repairer of the breach,’ they shall call you” (Isaiah 58: 6-12).

Fasting reminds us of the hunger in the world. The degree to which we resist fasting may reflect the degree to which we contribute to hunger.

Blessed are the merciful; they shall receive mercy

An essential aspect of justice and righteousness is mercy. Mercy is the personal experience and practical expression of God’s love. To be blessed by God is to show compassion, to have concern, to care for every living person and every living thing. We remember in this regard Abba Isaac the Syrian describing the merciful heart:

[The merciful heart] is a heart that burns out of compassion for birds, beasts, human beings, even demons. … Such a heart cannot bear to hear of the slightest pain suffered anywhere in creation.

Blessedness, then, means showing mercy. Indeed, the perfection of God and the kingdom of God are almost synonymous with the quality of mercy. Mercy is a sign of God’s kingdom. This is why we repeat “Lord, have mercy” in our liturgy. We are asking God to be who He is in spite of who we are. We may think here of the parable of the king who forgave the large debt. When the official refused to show a similar compassion to the servant, the forgiving king was angered. Sadly, while the mercy of the master changes the situation of the official, it does not convert his heart.

A Christian cannot win God’s mercy. But a Christian can lose God’s mercy by not extending it to others and to the environment.

At the same time, God’s mercy is also passionate, full of “pathos” (or pas­sion). If we do not show mercy, if we are a-pathetic, if we do not care, if we are indifferent to the cry of the earth, if we remain neutral in the face of injustice: then we do not reflect God’s image, we are not revealing God’s kingdom.

There are no excuses for our un-involvement. We have the information. Anyway, we are deeply — innately and inevitably — involved in one way or another. We must choose to care. Otherwise, we are not being fair; we are not acting in a just manner. Otherwise, we are being hypocritical, self-righteous, and certainly not righteous.

Let us consider one example of such mercy from the life of Christ. In the miracle of the feeding of the multitudes, the Lord encourages the disciples to act for their environment: “There is no need for them to disperse. Give them something to eat yourselves.” (Mt 14: 16) “Use your own resources” is what He is telling them. The disciples response reflects ours: “We have nothing here.”

What they are saying is that we have only limited resources. Yet it is the willingness to share that transforms what looks like very little in the eyes of the world into what is more than sufficient. We shall never give people enough to eat. But we must give them from our table.

How many people sit at our table? What kind of people do we invite to sit with us at our table? How many issues do we ignore at the table of our life? How significant — or just how subtle — is our attitude of prejudice?

Blessed are the pure in heart; they shall see God

Seeing God’s face depends on purity of heart, a purity requiring total commitment to God’s kingdom, an inner attitude of wholeheartedness. Our external actions indicate our internal priorities. “Where our treasure is, there our heart is also.”

Purity of heart is achieved through purification, through asceticism. By asceticism, I mean learning what really matters, not being controlled by the cares of this world, not remaining on the surface level of life, not seeking instant results, not avoiding painful struggle. Asceticism is learning what to care for, and when not to care; when to be involved, and when not to interfere; it is taking the time and making the space to be still in order to “hear” God. Then our heart becomes pure; then we become better disposed to “see” God.

So purity of heart implies a process of stripping the surface. It is an invitation to greater depth. It is making choices about things, about people, about God. Then we value and desire not what we want, but what we need; and gradually we come to value and desire only what God wants. We begin to understand what blocks our vision of God, what separates us from God. We learn to see the world with new eyes. We hear God’s silent words in creation. The very same things appear renewed, “a new heaven and a new earth.”

At this point, it is very much like being in a guest-room by ourselves only to sense that we are in another person’s presence. There, in our heart, we discover ourselves in relation to God; but there too we discover ourselves in communion with the entire world. Then we see Christ everywhere. And therefore — as Fr. Alexander Schmemann liked to say — we can only rejoice. For we have direct and intimate access to the face of God, to the ear of God, to the word of God.

And because we live — or at least strive, desire to live — in purity of heart, we can actually see God. And our prayer for purity becomes simply: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me and on your world.

Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called children of God

To understand how it is that we can work for peace in a way that God will call us His children, it may be helpful to remember what it means for Christ to be called God’s Son. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ is called “Son” twice, and the call comes from a voice from heaven. The first time was at His baptism; the second was on the mount of transfiguration. On both occasions it is said: “This is my beloved Son; in Him I am well pleas­ed.” (3: 17, and 17: 5)

Christ is the Son of God because He is in full communion with the nature of God; because He is fully committed to the will of God.

Full communion means sharing in all His resources. Full commitment to the Beatitudes signifies a reflection of God’s unity, of divine peace, life, and justice. Even though Christ’s communion and commitment lead Him to the cross and to death, nevertheless He remained surrendered to God’s purpose, irrespective of whether this meant standing in direct contrast, indeed in contradiction to the way society understood peace and justice.

So perhaps it is important to stop measuring progress or success in the way society regards these. The criterion for success cannot be defined in quantitative terms. For Christ, the end was the cross; for John the Baptist, the end was his beheading.

Now, the emphasis on becoming children underlines another point. Peace­making means building community; and community begins by realizing and respecting the dignity of each person. Each member of the community is precious in the eyes of God. Therefore, when Christ was asked about greatness, He called a young child over, stood it in the midst of those who were gathered, and said: “I assure you, unless you change [literally, repent] and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God” (18: 2-3).

This was a radical, not a sentimental gesture. At the time of Jesus, children were denied human rights. They had no access to necessary resources for basic survival. By their age, as well as by law, they were segregated from the rest of society. In order then to be a “peacemaker,” in order to be called a “child of God,” we are to give way — to defer — to others, out of reverence for the rights of others. We must recognize that all people require the resources of this world.

It is in this light that we are invited to become peacemakers. This also means that making peace is work. It is in fact very difficult work. Yet it is our only hope for the restoration of a broken world. By working for peace, by working to heal the environment, by removing obstacles for peace, by avoiding what harms the environment, we may — at least, this is what we are assured — hear a voice in our heart that says: “This is my beloved. In my beloved — and him, in her, in you — I am well pleased.” What greater joy, what richer blessing, what more abundant grace can there be than this?

Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice [or righteousness]; theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you … for great is your reward in heaven

Matthew wished to reassure his community about two things: first, if they lived by the Beatitudes, according to His name, then they should expect rejection; ­and second, if they were persecuted, this would be a sign that they were truly faithful.

This last Beatitude, like the first, is a reassurance that the kingdom of God can be immediately expected.

Christ did not come to spread peace, but the sword, that is division (10:34). Persecution must be expected. Some people will not under­stand the language about justice and healing the environment. Society will not understand; much less will society be “converted.” Even the Church may not understand. What Christ calls a “blessing” is for others a “scandal.” Living the Beatitudes means resisting, sometimes even reversing, the ways of the world. Society will reject both message and messenger, our theology and actions alike. People have too much at stake. As the Prophet Isaiah says: “They look, but they choose not to see; they listen, but they choose not to hear.” (Mt 13:13; Is 6: 9-10)

In response, the Christians become a “remnant” community, a small flock, the leaven. They can begin a new process of hope in a world unwilling to receive the kingdom. Yet they are not afraid; they are not alone. They may rejoice, for He has overcome the world. Fear gives way to faith in God’s promise: “the kingdom of God is theirs.” Indeed, it is ours.

Yet Matthew placed this Beatitude last in order to indicate something more powerful than this. This Beatitude is more than a mere conclusion. It is a clear commission, an explicit command for the disciples to enter the world of their day, to assume the problems of their time, to bring God’s care into the world — no matter what the cost, irrespective of the risk or the pain. That’s why the Lord continues the Beatitude by changing to the second person: “Blessed are those who are persecuted…. Bless­ed are you when … they persecute you …. Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is great in heaven.”

The Beatitude now becomes a direct invitation, a personal blessing, a definite assurance and promise. And Christ later continues: “You are the salt of the earth …. You are the light of the world” (5: 13-15).

We must persist in responding to the poor, in striving to share the resources of the world, in trying to heal our broken community and environment. This is the way in which we shall inherit the heavenly kingdom and this earth. In fact, this is the way that we shall understand how the kingdom relates to this earth. For by living the Beatitudes, we shall hear Christ’s voice: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you from the creation of the world.” (Mt 25: 34)

Matthew’s new Genesis returns to an echo of the creation story, closing with a reminder about the first Genesis when God created the world; “and behold it was good,” indeed “very good.”

Fr. John Chryssavgis studied theology in Athens and Oxford. He has been professor of theology at St. Andrew’s Theological College in Sydney and at Holy Cross School of Theology in Boston. He serves as theological advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch on environmental issues. His recent books include Soul Mending: The Art of Spiritual Direction, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and Cosmic Grace, Humble prayer: eco­logical initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholo­mew. His text on the Beatitudes was the keynote address at the Orthodox Peace Fellowship conference at St. Tikhon’s Monastery in June.

Reprinted from In Communion, Quarterly journal of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, Spring-Summer 2003 / issue 30. Copyright by the author.

source: http://incommunion.org/articles/issue-30/living-the-beatitudes

Where the Recovery Jobs Are

Some folks ask, where are the jobs? when talking about the Recovery Act. Jared Bernstein of the White House introduces five stories from around the country—stories of Americans whose jobs have been saved or created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Nonviolence and Peace Traditions in Early & Eastern Christianity

By Fr. John McGuckin

Fr. John McGuckin is professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary and professor of Byzantine History at Columbia University, both in New York City. His essay is due to appear in 2005 as a chapter in The Church’s Witness to Peace, edited by Fr. K Kyriakose[1]. The text is placed here by permission of the author. Footnotes are indicated by brackets.

Ideals of Peace in a Violent World.

Christianity has had a very checkered history in terms of its peace tradition. It is often to images of Inquisition and Crusade that the popular imagination turns when considering the darker side of the church’s imposition of control over the personal and political worlds it has inhabited over long centuries. The figure of a pacific Jesus (the poet of the lilies of the fields, and the advocator of peaceful resistance to evil, who so inspired Tolstoy and Gandhi among others) is often contrasted with a church of more brutish disciples who, when occasion presented itself, turned willingly, and quickly enough, to tactics of oppression and coercion, policies which they themselves had lamented, as being against both divine and natural justice, when applied to them in the earlier centuries of the Roman persecutions.

The common version among Church Historians of this generic tale of a progressive sinking into the “brutal ways of the world,” also points to regular cycles of renewal and repentance, when Christians are said to reappropriate the “real” meaning of their past, and renounce violent resistance in the cause of a “truly Christian” non-resistance. This, of course, is usually a matter of occasional academic protest from the sidelines, or the wisdom of the aftermath, since in times of war the ranks of those who rush to defend the Christian defensibility of hostilities are rarely short of representatives, it would seem.

The key academic studies of the Early Church’s peace tradition, for example, had to wait until the 20th century. They appeared in two clusters, both of them the immediate aftermath of the great conflicts of 1914-18, and 1939-45, followed by a longer “tail” which was overshadowed by the Cold War’s generic fears of nuclear holocaust, and which produced a more thorough-going tenor of the “suspicion of war” in academic circles. Both the main-clusters of post-war re-assessments of Christian peace tradition in antiquity, witnessed a conflicted product in the tone of the literature. All lamented the fact and experience of war, from a Christian perspective, but some justified the concept of limited war engagement (usually Catholic scholars defending the then dominant Augustine-Aquinas theory of the Just War) while others were evidently more pacifist in tone (generally Protestant scholars calling for a “reform” of defective medievalist views). The more recent work, inspired by the public sight of several disastrously “failed” military interventions (such as Vietnam and Afghanistan) and the horrific record of genocidally-tinged conflict at the end of the 20th century (one of the bloodiest and nastiest on human record, though we still like to regard the ancients as less civilized than ourselves) have, again understandably, caused the Christian witness on war and violence to come under renewed scrutiny. Today the literature on war in early Christian tradition is extensive [2], and a synopsis of the primary sources has recently been collated in a useful ready-reference volume, with a good contextualizing discussion .[3]

While the common image of a militaristic Church is still, perhaps, prevalent in popular estimation, there are nevertheless, a multitude of pacific figures who feature in the Church’s exemplary stories of the lives of the saints.

One such hagiography was the narrative on Abba Moses the Ethiopian in the Tales of the Desert Fathers who, when warned in advance of the impending attack of marauding Blemmyes tribesmen in 5th century Lower Egypt, refused to leave his cell, and (though famed as a strong man of previously violent temper) stayed quietly in prayer waiting for the fatal assault of the invading brigands. This story of his election of pacific martyrdom was celebrated as most unusual; a heroic and highly individualist spiritual act of a master (and thus not normative). All the other monks of Scete in his time were either slaughtered because they were surprised, or else had much earlier fled before the face of the storm of invasion.

In terms of pacific saints, the Russian church celebrates the 11th century princes Boris and Gleb, the sons of Vladimir, the first Christian ruler of ancient Rus (Kiev) who, in order to avoid a civil war on the death of their father (when the third son, Svyatopolk, took up arms to assert his right to monarchical supremacy), are said to have adopted the role of “Passion-Bearers.” Refusing to bear arms for their own defense, and desiring to avoid bloodshed among their people, they followed the example of their new Lord, who suffered his own unjust Passion. The image and category of “passion-bearing martyr” is one that is dear to, almost distinctive of, the Russian church, so troubled has its history been.

Nevertheless, even this celebrated example contrasts, in many respects, with the witness of other Russian saint-heroes, such as the great warrior prince Alexander Nevsky and contrasts with the witness of many other ancient churches too (such as the Byzantine, Romanian, Serbian, Nubian, or Ethiopian) who had an equally fraught pilgrimage through history, but who proudly elevated and honored the icons and examples of warrior-saints who resisted the onslaught militarily, and died in the process.

In the Romanian Church one of the great heroic founders was the warrior prince Petru Rares who slaughtered the invading Turkish armies under the guidance of his spiritual father and confessor Saint Daniel the Hesychast. The saint commanded the prince to erect monasteries on the site of the great battles, to ensure mourning and prayer for the lost souls whose blood had been shed. This was an act that was seen as a necessary expiation of Petru’s “equally necessary” violence. Both he and his spiritual mentor were heavily burdened by their perceived duty of defending the borders of Christendom. To this day Romania’s most ancient and beautiful churches stand as mute witnesses to a bloody history where Islam and Christianity’s tectonic plates collided (as often they did in the history of the Christian East). The national perception in Romania of prince Vlad Dracul (the western bogeyman of Dracula) is diametrically opposed to the common perception of more or less everyone outside. Within the country Vlad himself is regarded as a national hero and a great Christian warrior who assumed the duty of defending the Faith against the military attempts of Islam forcibly to convert Europe.

Similarly, almost all the saints of Ethiopia are either monastic recluses or warriors. The saints of the (now lost) Church of Nubia [4] were also predominantly warriors. Likewise, the frescoes of saints on the walls of the ancient Stavronikita monastery on Mount Athos, on the Halkidiki peninsula, demonstrate serried ranks of martyr protectors dressed in full Roman battle gear, in attendance on the Christ in Majesty [5]. The monks were not particularly warlike themselves, but knew at first hand the terrors of living in the pirate-infested Mediterranean. Like the Nubians, a life entirely and permanently surrounded by hostile foes, gave the Athonite monks a very practical attitude to violence, pacific resistance, and the need for defense in varieties of forms.

The western church too has its share of noble saint-warriors. In medieval English literature the warrior saint was a highly romantic figure [6]. We can also think of the famed Crusading juggernaut Louis the Pious. These, however, are noticeably not, any longer, “popular saints” (as their counterparts remain in Eastern Christianity) though this may be laid to the door of a generic loss of interest in hagiography and the cultus of the saints in contemporary Western Christianity, as much to a sense of embarrassment that the ranks of saints included so many generals of armies.

Along with its warriors, the Western Church often appealed, for an example of pacific lifestyle, to the Christ-like image of Francis of Assisi, in preference perhaps to the more robust figure of Dominic and his inquisitional Order of Preachers, although one ought not to forget that the Franciscan order itself had from its early origins a foundational charge to evangelize Muslims in the Middle and Near East; its own form of potential “Inquisition” that never had the opportunity to flourish because of Ottoman power, but which was often felt as real enough and resented greatly by the Eastern rite Christians of those places.

This macro-picture of Church History as a sclerotic decline, where simple origins are progressively corrupted into oppressive structures as the church seizes an ever-larger foothold on the face of the earth, is so familiar, almost cliched, that it hardly needs further amplification.

It is perfectly exemplified in the general presumption that the Christian movement before the age of the Emperor Constantine the Great (4th century) was mainly pacific in philosophy, but afterwards began theologically to justify the use of coercive force, and so began the long slide into all manner of corruption of power, and abandonment of the primitive spirit of the gentle Jesus [7].

The theory is problematized to some degree by the issue of “conflicted contextualization” for the notable resistance of the earliest Christian movement (2nd through to early 4th centuries) to military service: whether this was predominantly pacifist in temperament; or was related to the military requirements to worship the pagan pantheon of gods; or was simply an aspect of the fear of an oppressed and persecuted group in the face of the state’s arm of power. In early canon law the military profession had the same status as a harlot when it came to the seeking of baptism: before admission to the church was countenanced an alternative career had to be sought.

After the Pax Constantina, that prohibition was relaxed as even the Christian emperors expected their fellow-Christians to take up their station in the army. Recent historical study has progressively argued that the advancement of Christians to political and military power should not be seen as a surprisingly miraculous event (as the legend of Constantine would have it be), but the result of more than a century of prior political and military infiltration of the higher offices of state by Christians bearing arms. The earliest materials (martyrial stories of how the poor resisted the Roman imperium) tend to come from the account of the churches of the local victims [8].

The full story (why, for example, Diocletian targeted Christians within his own court and army to initiate the Great persecution of the early 4th century) [9] is less to the front: but clearly the great revolution of the 4th century which saw an internationally ascendant Church, was not simply an altruistic “gift” of power to a pacific Christian movement, but more in the terms of an acknowledgment by Constantine that his own path to monarchy lay with the powerful international lobby of Christians. The question as to “who patronized who”: Constantine the Church, or the Church Constantine, remains one that is surely more evenly balanced than is commonly thought. The military and political involvement of Christians, therefore, (as distinct from the “Church” shall we say) is something that is not so simply “switched” at the 4th century watershed of Constantine’s “conversion.”

Nevertheless, the story that from primitive and “pure” beginnings the Christian movement degenerated into a more warlike compromise with state power, is a good story precisely because it is so cartoon-like in its crudity. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that it “is” a story, not a simple record of uncontested facts. It is a story, moreover, that took its origin as part of a whole dossier of similar stories meant to describe the movement of Christianity through history in terms of early promise, followed by rapid failure, succeeded by the age of reform and repristination of the primitive righteousness.

In short, the common view of Christianity’s peace tradition, as sketched out above, is clearly a product of Late-Medieval Reformation apologetics. That so much of this early-modern propaganda has survived to form a substrate of presupposition in post-modern thought about Christian history is a testimony to the power of the apologetic stories themselves, and (doubtless) to the widespread distrust of the motives of the late medieval church authorities in western Europe at the time of the Reformation.

The common view about Christianity’s peace tradition, however, is so hopelessly rooted in western, apologetic, and “retrospectivist” presuppositions (a thorough-going Protestant revision of the Catholic tradition on the morality of war and violence that had preceded it) that it is high time the issue should be considered afresh.

The common histories of Christianity, even to this day, seem to pretend that its eastern forms (the Syrians, Byzantines, Armenians, Copts, Nubians, Indians, Ethiopians, or Cappadocians) never existed, or at least were never important enough to merit mention; or that western Europe is a normal and normative vantage point for considering the story. But this narrow perspective skews the evidence at the outset.

Accordingly, the figures of Augustine of Hippo (the towering 5th century African theologian) and Thomas Aquinas (the greatest of the Latin medieval scholastic theologians) loom very large in the normative western-form of the telling of the tale. Both theologians were highly agentive in developing the western Church’s theory and principles of a “Just War.”

In the perspectives of the eastern Christian tradition, not only do these two monumental figures not feature but, needless to say, neither does their theory on the moral consideration of war and violence which has so dominated the western imagination. Eastern Christianity simply does not approach the issue from the perspective of “Just War,” and endorses no formal doctrine advocating the possibility of a “Just War.”

Its approach is ambivalent, more complex and nuanced. For that reason it has been largely overlooked in the annals of the history of Christianity, or even dismissed as self-contradictory. It is not self-contradictory, of course, having been proven by experience through centuries of political suffering and oppression. If it knows anything, the Eastern church knows how to endure, and hardly needs lessons on such a theme; but it is certainly not a linear theory of war and violence that it holds (as if war and violence could be imagined as susceptible of rational solution and packaging). Its presuppositions grow from a different soil than do modern and post-modern notions of political and moral principles.

Christianity was, and remains at heart, an apocalyptic religion, and it is no accident that its numerous biblical references to war and violent destruction are generally apocalyptic ciphers, symbols that stand for something else, references to the “Eschaton” (the image of how the world will be rolled up and assessed once universal justice is imposed by God on his recalcitrant and rebellious creation). Biblical descriptions of violence and war, in most of Christianity”s classical exposition of its biblical heritage, rather than being straightforward depictions of the life and values of “This-World-Order” are thus eschatological allegories. To confound the two orders [10] (taking war images of the apocalyptic dimension) for instances of how the world (here) ought to be managed [11] is a gross distortion of the ancient literature. This has become increasingly a problem since the medieval period when allegorist readings of scripture have been progressively substituted (especially in Protestantism) for wholesale historicist and literalist readings of the ancient texts. [12].

This is not to say that eastern Christianity itself has not been guilty of its own mis-readings of evidences, in various times of its history, or that it has no blood on its hands, for that would be to deny the brutal facts of a Church that has progressively been driven westwards, despite its own will, by a series of military disasters, for the last thousand years. But, Christian reflection in the eastern Church has, I would suggest, been more careful than the West, to remind itself of the apocalyptic and mysterious nature of the Church’s place within history and on the world-stage, and has stubbornly clung to a less congratulatory theory of the morality of War (despite its advocacy of “Christian imperium”), because it sensed that such a view was more in tune with the principles of the Gospels. What follows in this paper is largely a consideration of that peace tradition in the perspective of the eastern provinces of Christianity, the “patristic” foundation that went on to provide the underpinning of Byzantine canon law, and (after the fall of Byzantium), the system of law that still operates throughout the churches of the East.

In the decades following the First World War, Adolf Von Harnack was one of the first among modern patristic theologians to assemble a whole dossier of materials on the subject of the Church’s early traditions on war and violence. [13]. In his macro-thesis he favored the theory of the “fall from grace,” and argued that the Church progressively relaxed its earliest blanket hostility to bloodshed and the military profession in general. The relaxation of anti-war discipline, he saw as part and parcel of a wider “corruption” of early Christian ideals by “Hellenism.”

And yet, no Eastern Christian attitudes to war, either before or after the Pax Constantina, have ever borne much relation to classic Hellenistic and Roman war theory [14], being constantly informed and conditioned by biblical paradigms (reined in by Jesus’ strictures on the futility of violence) rather than by Hellenistic Kingship theory or tribal theories of national pride.

In the second part to his study (subtitled “The Christian Religion and the Military Profession”), Harnack went further to discuss the wide extent of biblical images of war and vengeance in the Christian foundational documents, suggesting that the imagery of “spiritual warfare” however removed it might be from the “real world” when it was originally coined, must take some responsibility for advocating the sanctification of war theories within the church in later ages [15].

For Harnack, and many others following in his wake, Constantine was the villain of the piece, and not less so his apologist the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. The latter finds no problem at all in comparing the deaths of the wicked as recounted in Old Testament narratives of holy war, with Constantine’s conquest and execution of his enemies in the Civil War of the early 4th century [16]. For Eusebius, writing in 336, the cessation of the war in 324 was a fulfilment of the Psalmic and Isaian prophecies of a golden age of peace [17].

Eusebius’ fulsome rhetoric has had a great deal of weight placed upon it by those who favor the “theory of fall,” even though on any sober consideration, to extrapolate a court-theologian such as Eusebius into a marker of general opinion in the Church of the early 4th century should have been more universally acknowledged to be a serious mistake. Eusebius’ more sober thoughts on the expansion of the Church (as exemplified by Constantine’s victory over persecuting emperors, and his clear favoritism for the Christians) was really an intellectual heritage from that great theological teacher whose disciple he prided himself on being — Origen of Alexandria.

It was certainly Origen who had put into his mind the juxtaposition of the ideas of the Pax Romana being the providentially favorable environment for the rapid internationalization of the Gospel. Origen himself, however, was pacifist in his attitudes to war and world powers, and was sternly against the notion of the Church advocating its transmission and spread by force of arms [18]. In his wider exegesis Eusebius shows himself consistently to be a follower of his teacher’s lead and the Old Testament paradigms of the “downfall of the wicked” are what are generally at play in both Origen and Eusebius when they highlight biblical examples of vindication, or military collapse.

Several scholars misinterpret Eusebius radically, therefore, when they read his laudation of Constantine as some kind of proleptic justification of the Church as an asserter of rightful violence. His Panegyric on Constantine should not be given such theoretical weight, just as a collection of wedding congratulatory speeches today would hardly be perused for a cutting edge analysis of the times. In applying biblical tropes and looking for fulfillments, Eusebius (certainly in the wider panoply if all his work is taken together not simply his court laudations) is looking to the past, not to the future; and is intent only on celebrating what for most in his generation must have truly seemed miraculous — that their oppressors had fallen, and that they themselves were now free from the fear of torture and death.

Origen and Eusebius may have set a tone of later interpretation that could readily grow into a vision of the Church as the inheritor of the biblical promises about the Davidic kingdom (that the boundaries of Byzantine Christian power were concomitant with the Kingdom of God on earth, and thus that all those who lay outside those boundaries were the enemies of God), but there were still innumerable dissidents even in the long-lasting Byzantine Christian politeia (especially the monks) who consistently refused to relax the apocalyptic dimension of their theology, and who resisted the notion that the Church and the Byzantine borders were one and the same thing [19].

The Canonical Epistles of Basil of Caesarea.

Basil of Caesarea was a younger contemporary of Eusebius, and in the following generation of the Church of the late 4th century, he emerged as one of the leading theorists of the Christian movement. His letters and instructions on the ascetic life, and his “Canons” [20] (ethical judgements as from a ruling bishop to his flock) on morality and practical issues became highly influential in the wider church because of his role as one of the major monastic theorists of Early Christianity. His canonical epistles were transmitted wherever monasticism went: and in the Eastern Church of antiquity (because monasticism was the substructure of the spread of the Christian movement), that more or less meant his canonical views became the standard paradigm of Eastern Christianity’s theoretical approach to the morality of war and violence, even though the writings were local [21] and occasional in origin. Basil’s 92 Canonical Epistles were adapted by various Ecumenical Councils of the Church that followed his time. His writing is appealed to in Canon 1 of the 4th Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451), in Canon 1 of the 7th Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (787), and is literally cited in Canon 2 of the 6th Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (681) which paraphrases much else from his canonical epistles. By such affirmations eventually the entire corpus of the Basilian Epistles entered the Pandects of Canon Law of the Byzantine Eastern Church, and they remain authoritative to this day.

Basil has several things to say about violence and war in his diocese. It was a border territory of the empire, and his administration had known several incursions by “barbarian” forces. Canon 13 of the 92 considers war:

“Our fathers did not consider killings committed in the course of wars to be classifiable as murders at all, on the score, it seems to me, of allowing a pardon to men fighting in defense of sobriety and piety. Perhaps, though, it might be advisable to refuse them communion for three years, on the ground that their hands are not clean.” [22]

The balance and sense of discretion is remarkable in this little comment, one that bears much weight in terms of Eastern Orthodox understandings of the morality of war. The “fathers” in question refers to Athanasius of Alexandria, the great Nicene Orthodox authority of the 4th century church. Athanasius’ defense of the Nicene creed, and the divine status of Christ, had won him immense prestige by the end of the 4th century, and as his works were being collated and disseminated (in his own lifetime his reputation had been highly conflicted, his person exiled numerous times, and his writings proscribed by imperial censors), Basil seems to wish to add a cautionary note: that not everything a “father” has to say is equally momentous, or universally authoritative. In his Letter to Amun Athanasius had apparently come out quite straightforwardly about the legitimacy of killing in time of war, saying:

“Although one is not supposed to kill, the killing of the enemy in time of war is both a lawful and praiseworthy thing. This is why we consider individuals who have distinguished themselves in war as being worthy of great honors, and indeed public monuments are set up to celebrate their achievements. It is evident, therefore, that at one particular time, and under one set of circumstances, an act is not permissible, but when time and circumstances are right, it is both allowed and condoned.” [23]

This saying was being circulated, and given authority as a “patristic witness” simply because it had come from Athanasius. In fact the original letter had nothing whatsoever to do with war. The very example of the “war-hero” is a sardonic reference ad hominem since the letter was addressed to an aged leader of the Egyptian monks who described themselves as Asketes, that is those who labored and “fought” for the virtuous life. The military image is entirely incidental, and Athanasius in context merely uses it to illustrate his chief point in the letter — which is to discuss the query Amun had sent on to him as Archbishop: “did nocturnal emissions count as sins for desert celibates ?” Athanasius replies to the effect that with human sexuality, as with all sorts of other things, the context of the activity determines what is moral, not some absolute standard which is superimposed on moral discussion from the outset. Many ancients, Christian and pagan, regarded sexual activity as inherently defiling and here Athanasius decidedly takes leave of them. His argument, therefore, is falsely attributed when (as is often the case) read out of context as an apparent justification of killing in time of war. He is not actually condoning the practice at all, merely using the rhetorical example of current opinion to show Amun that contextual variability is very important in making moral judgements.

In his turn Basil, wishes to make it abundantly clear for his Christian audience that such a reading, if applied to the Church’s tradition on war, is simplistic, and that is it is just plain wrong-headedness to conclude that the issue ceases to be problematic if one is able to dig up a justificatory “proof text” from scripture or patristic tradition (as some seem to have been doing with these words of Athanasius). And so, Basil sets out a nuanced corrective exegesis of what the Church’s canon law should really be in terms of fighting in time of hostilities. One of the ways he does this is to attribute this aphorism of Athanasius to indeterminate “fathers,” who can then be legitimately corrected by taking a stricter view than they appeared to allow. He also carefully sets his own context: what he speaks about is the canonical regulation of war in which a Christian can engage and be “amerced” [24]; all other armed conflicts are implicitly excluded as not being appropriate to Christian morality). Basil’s text on war needs, therefore, to be understood in terms of an “economic” reflection on the ancient canons that forbade the shedding of blood in blanket terms. This tension between the ideal standard (no bloodshed) and the complexities of the context in which a local church finds itself thrown in times of conflict and war, is witnessed in several other ancient laws, such as Canon 14 of Hippolytus (also from the 4th century) [25]. The reasons Basil gives for suggesting that killing in time of hostilities could be distinguished from voluntary murder pure and simple (for which the canonical penalty was a lifelong ban from admission to the churches and from the sacraments) is set out as the “defense of sobriety and piety.” This is code language for the defense of Christian borders from the ravages of pagan marauders. The difficulty Basil had to deal with was not war on the large-scale, but local tribal insurgents who were mounting attacks on Roman border towns, with extensive rapinage. In such circumstances Basil has little patience for those who do not feel they can fight because of religious scruples. His sentiment is more that a passive non-involvement betrays the Christian family (especially its weaker members who can not defend themselves but need others to help them) to the ravages of men without heart or conscience to restrain them. The implication of his argument, then, is that the provocation to fighting, that Christians ought at some stage to accept (to defend the honor and safety of the weak), will be inherently a limited and adequate response, mainly because the honor and tradition of the Christian faith (piety and sobriety) in the hearts and minds of the warriors, will restrict the bloodshed to a necessary minimum. His “economic” solution nevertheless makes it abundantly clear that the absolute standard of Christian morality turns away from war as an unmitigated evil. This is why we can note that the primary reason Basil gives that previous “fathers” had distinguished killing in time of war, from the case of simple murder, was “on the score of allowing a pardon.” There was no distinction made here in terms of the qualitative horror of the deed itself, rather in terms of the way in which the deed could be “cleansed” by the Church’s system of penance.

Is it logical to expect a Christian of his diocese to engage in the defense of the homeland, while simultaneously penalizing him if he spills blood in the process ? Well, one needs to contextualize the debarment from the sacrament in the generic 4th century practice of the reception of the Eucharist, which did not expect regular communication to begin with (ritual preparation was extensive and involved fasting and almsgiving and prayer), and where a sizeable majority of adult Christians in a given church would not have yet been initiated by means of baptism, and were thus not bound to keep all the canons of the Church. By his regulation and by the ritual exclusion of the illumined warrior from the sacrament (the returning “victor” presumably would have received many other public honors and the gratitude of the local folk ) Basil is making sure at least one public sign is given to the entire community that the Gospel standard has no place for war, violence and organized death. He is trying to sustain an eschatological balance: that war is not part of the Kingdom of God (signified in the Eucharistic ritual as arriving in the present) but is part of the bloody and greed-driven reality of world affairs which is the “Kingdom-Not-Arrived.” By moving in and out of Eucharistic reception Basil’s faithful Christian (returning from his duty with blood on his hands) is now in the modality of expressing his dedication to the values of peace and innocence, by means of the lamentation and repentance for life that has been taken, albeit the blood of the violent. Basil’s arrangement that the returning noble warrior’ should stand in the Church (not in the narthex where the other public sinners were allocated spaces) but refrain from communion, makes the statement that a truly honorable termination of war, for a Christian, has to be an honorable repentance.

Several commentators (not least many of the later western Church fathers) have regarded this as “fudge,” but it seems to me to express, in a finely tuned “economic” way, the tension in the basic Christian message that there is an unresolvable shortfall between the ideal and the real in an apocalyptically charged religion. What this Basilian canon does most effectively is to set a “No Entry” sign to any potential theory of Just War within Christian theology [26], and should set up a decided refusal of post-war church-sponsored self-congratulations for victory [27]. All violence, local, individual, or nationally-sanctioned is here stated to be an expression of hubris that is inconsistent with the values of the Kingdom of God, and while in many circumstances that violence may be “necessary” or “unavoidable” (Basil states the only legitimate reasons as the defense of the weak and innocent) it is never “justifiable.” Even for the best motives in the world, the shedding of blood remains a defilement, such that the true Christian, afterwards, would wish to undergo the kathartic experience of temporary return to the lifestyle of penance, that is “be penitent.” Basil’s restriction of the time of penance to three years (seemingly harsh to us moderns) was actually a commonly recognized sign of merciful leniency in the ancient rule book of the early Church [28].

Concluding Reflections

We might today regard such early attempts by Christians as quaintly naive. They are wired through the early penitential system, clearly, and have a fundamental “economic” character about them. By Economy the early church meant the art of doing what was possible when a higher ideal standard was not sustained. In the case of war Basil and the canonical tradition are tacitly saying that when the Kingdom ideals of peace and reconciliation collapse, especially in times of war when decisive and unusual action is required, and the ideals of reconciliation and forgiveness fall into chaos in the very heart of the Church itself [29], as members go off to fight, then the ideal must be reasserted as soon as possible — with limitations to the hostilities a primary concern, and a profound desire to mark the occasion retrospectively with a public “cleansing.” While the honor of the combatants is celebrated by Basil (even demanded as an act of protection for the weak), one essential aspect of that honor is also listed as being the public acceptance of the status of penitent shedder of blood. The clergy (as with other economic concessions of morality operative in the church’s canons) are the only ones not allowed benefit of necessity. In no case is violent action permitted to one who stands at the altar of God. Even if a cleric spills blood accidentally (such as in an involuntary manslaughter) such a person would be deposed from active presbyteral office. The sight of “warrior- bishops” in full military regalia, passing through the streets of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, left its mark on contemporary Greek sources as one of the greatest “shocks” to the system, and one of the incidentals that were taken by the Greeks as proof positive that Latin Christianity in the 13th century had a serious illness at its center.

More than naive, perhaps, might we regard such a morality of war as seriously “under-developed”? Can such an important issue really be dealt with by so few canons of the ancient eastern church, and even then, by regulations that are so evidently local and occasional in character ? Well, the charges of inconsistency (praising a noble warrior then subjecting him to penance) and muddle-headedness, were raised in early times, especially by Latin theologians who wanted to press the envelope and arrive at a more coherent and all-embracing theory of war: one that balanced the apparent biblical justifications of hostility on the part of the chosen people, with the need to limit the obvious blood-lust of our species. The Latin theory of Just War was one result. Considered primarily (as it was meant to be) as a theory of the limitation of hostilities in the ancient context (hand to hand fighting of massed armies whose very size limited the time of possible engagement to a matter of months at most), it too was an “economic” theory that had much merit. It’s usefulness became moot in the medieval period when armament manufacture took ancient warfare into a new age, and it has become utterly useless in the modern age of mechanized warfare, where it could not stop the fatal transition (on which modernized mechanical warfare depends — both that sponsored by states, and that sponsored by smaller groups which we call “terrorism”) to the centrally important role of the murder of non-combatants. Be that as it may, it is not the purpose of the present essay to offer a sustained critique on Just War theory — merely to raise up a mainline Christian tradition of the ancient East which has never believed in Just War — and to offer instead of an elegant theory, a poor threadbare suggestion of old saints: that War is never justified or justifiable, but is de facto a sign and witness of evil and sin.

When it falls across the threshold of the Church in an unavoidable way, it sometimes becomes our duty (so the old canons say) to take up arms; though when that is the case is to be determined in trepidation by the elect who understand the value of peace and reconciliation, not in self-glorifying battle cries from the voices of the bloodthirsty and foolish. But in no case is the shedding of blood, even against a manifestly wicked foe, ever a “Just Violence.” The eastern canons, for all their tentativeness, retain that primitive force of Christian experience on that front. It may be the “Violence of the Just” but in that case the hostility will necessarily be ended with the minimal expenditure of force, and be marked in retrospect by the last act of the “violent Just” which will be repentance that finally resolves the untenable paradox. Ambivalent and “occasional” such a theory of War might be: but if it had been followed with fidelity the Church’s hands might have been cleaner than they have been across many centuries; and it might yet do a service on the wider front in helping Western Christianity to dismantle its own “economic” structures of war theory which are so patently in need of radical re-thinking. Perhaps the place to begin, as is usually the case, is here and now: with “Christian America” at the dawn of a new millennium, in which we seem to have learned nothing at all from generations of bitter experience of hostility: except the hubris that international conflicts can be undertaken “safely” now that other super-powers are currently out of commission. Such is the wisdom of the most powerful nation on earth, currently in an illegal state of war [30] which it wishes to disguise even from itself, even as the American military deaths this month exceeded 1000, with a pervasive silence all that it has to offer in relation to all figures of the deaths of those who were not American troops. Such is the wisdom under a leadership that is itself apparently eager to line up for a “righteous struggle” with the “forces of evil,” which so many others in the world outside, have seen as more in the line of a determined dominance of Islamic sensibilities by Super-Power secularism of the crassest order. In such a strange new millennium, perhaps the wisdom of the need to be tentative, finds a new power and authority.

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1 In: KK Kuriakose (ed). Non-Violence: Concepts and Practices Across Religions and Cultures. NY. 2005.

2 The chief sources in English are: RH Bainton. Christian Attitudes to War and Peace. A Historical Survey and Critical Re-Evaluation. Nashville. 1960; CJ Cadoux. The Early Christian Attitude to War. Oxford. 1919 (repr. NY. 1982); A von Harnack. Militia Christi: The Christian Religion and the Military in the First Three Centuries. (tr. DM Gracie. Philadelphia. 1980: original German edn. 1905; HA Deane. The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine. New York. 1963 (chs.5-6); J. Helgeland. Christians and Military Service: AD 173-337. PhD Diss. University of Chicago. 1973. (summarized in Idem. “Christians and the Roman Army. AD. 173- 337.” Church History. 43. June 1974. 149-161; JM Hornus. It is Not Lawful for me to Fight: Early Christian Attitudes to War, Violence and the State . (trs. A Kreider & O Coburn). Scottsdale, Pa. 1980; HT McElwain. Augustine’s Doctrine of War in Relation to Earlier Ecclesiastical Writers. Rome. 1972; TS Miller & J Nesbitt (eds). Peace and War in Byzantium. Essays in Honor of GT Dennis. CUA Press. Washington. 1995; EA Ryan. “The Rejection of Military Service by the Early Christians.” Theological Studies. 13. 1952. 1-32; WR. Stevenson. Christian Love and Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in St. Augustine and his Modern Interpreters. Macon. Ga. 1987.

3 LJ Swift. The Early Fathers on War and Military Service. (Message of the Fathers of the Church. Vol. 19). 1983. Wilmington. De.

4 Byzantine in foundation and structure, until its annihilation in the late 15th century.

5 See: M Chatzidakis. The Cretan Painter Theophanes: The Wall-Paintings of the Holy Monastery of Stavronikita. Thessaloniki. (published on Mount Athos). 1986.

6 Cf. JE Damon. Soldier Saints and Holy Warriors: Warfare and Sanctity in the Literature of Early England. (Ashgate press). Aldershot. 2003.

7 Helgeland (1973. p. 17.) illustrates how both Harnack and Cadoux’s works progress from this shared presupposition despite their different perspectives on the issue of pacifism as a general Christian ideal. (Cadoux regarded Harnack as having soft-pedalled the Church’s early peace witness).

8 The early martyrial acts are charged with the dramatic characterization of the martyr as the apocalyptic witness, and the condemning magistrate as eschatological servant of the Beast. The narratives often deliberately follow the literary paradigm of the Passion Story of the Gospels. The Martyrdom of Polycarp is one such example.

9 Or how it might well be the case that Christian soldiers had already taken the imperial throne by force of arms in the mid 3rd century (in the case of Philip the Arab).

10 What the ancient sources described as the “Two Ages” (This Age of turmoil that stands within the historical record and permits brutal oppression as the ultimate symbol of “the Beast,” that is evil personified, and the Other Age, which is the Transcendent “Kingdom of God” when peace will be established by the definitive ending of violent powers hostile to the good., and the comforting of the poor.

11 It is a major category mistake, therefore, for fundamentalist Christians to apply apocalyptically matrixed scriptural references to “war in the heavens spilling out on earth,” as authoritative “justifications” from the Bible for Christians to engage in violent conflict for political ends. The essence of biblical, apocalyptic, doctrine is that the Two Ages must never be conflated or confused. The “Next Age” cannot be ushered in by political victories gained in “This Age.” By this means Christianity, in its foundational vision, undercut the principles that continue to inspire Judaism and Islam with their (essentially) non-apocalyptic understandings of the spreading of the Kingdom of God on Earth in recognizable borders, and militarily if necessary.

12 As if, for example, the biblical narratives of the Pentateuch where God commands Moses and Joshua to slaughter the Canaanite inhabitants in the process of seizing the “Promised Land” were to be read literalistically — as both vindicating war for “righteous reasons,” and validating the forced appropriation of territories after conflict. Protestant fundamentalism would, of course, read the texts with that political slant (symbolically going further to adapt the text to justify Christianity’s use of violence in a just cause); whereas the ancient Church consistently reads the narrative as allegorically symbolic of the perennial quest to overcome evil tendencies by virtuous action. The Canaanites assume the symbolic status of personal vice, the Israelite armies, the status of the ethical struggle. While this allegorical symbolism still depends in large degree on a symbolic reading of violent images, it successfully defuses a wholesale biblical “sanction” for violence and war.

13 A. Harnack. Militia Christi. The Christian Religion and The Military in the First Three Centuries (Tr. D. McI. Gracie). Philadelphia. 1981.

14 Though Ambrose and Augustine take much of their views on the subject from Cicero.

15 He probably underestimated the extent to which the early Church was propelled, not by subservience to emperors, but more by the way in which the war theology of ancient Israel was passed on as an authoritative paradigm, simply by the force of ingesting so much of the Old Testament narratives in the structure of its prayers, liturgies, and doctrines. It is, nonetheless, worthy of note that formally, from early times, the war passages of the Old Testament were consistently preached as allegorical symbols of the battle to establish peaceful virtues in human hearts (not the advocating of conquest of specific territories). Harnack himself admitted (when considering the example of the Salvation Army, that this aspect of this thesis could limp badly.

16 Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History. 9.9. 5-8; Life of Constantine. 1.39.

17 Is.2.4; Ps.72.7-8.

18 See N McLynn. “Roman Empire,” pp. 185-187 in: J.A. McGuckin (ed). The Westminster Handbook to Origen of Alexandria. Louisville. Ky. 2004.

19 For a further elaboration of the argument see: J.A.McGuckin. The Legacy of the Thirteenth Apostle: Origins of the East- Christian Conceptions of Church-State Relation. St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly. 47. Nos. 3-4. 2003. 251-288.

20 The “Canonical Epistles of St. Basil,” otherwise known as the “92 canons.” They can be found in English translation in: The Pedalion or Rudder of the Orthodox Catholic Church: The Compilation of the Holy Canons by Saints Nicodemus and Agapius. Tr. D Cummings. (Orthodox Christian Educational Society). Chicago. 1957 (repr. NY. 1983). pp. 772-864.

21 Basil was the Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, now a city (Kaisariye) of Eastern Turkey.

22 Basil. Ep. 188. 13; Pedalion. p. 801.

23 Athanasius Epistle 48. To Amun. full text in A Robertson (tr). St. Athanasius Select Works and Letters. Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Church. Vol. 4. (1891). repr. Eerdmans. Grand Rapids. 1980. pp. 556-557.

24 That is find canonical forgiveness for the act of shedding blood: which is canonically prohibited. The background context of the canons which forbid the shedding of blood are important to Basil’s thought, and are presumed throughout. He takes it for granted that clergy are absolutely forbidden to shed blood: and even if they do so accidentally, will be prohibited from celebrating the Eucharistic mysteries afterwards. In this case, just as with the church’s canonical rules relating to the prohibition of second marriages, what began as a general rule, was relaxed in its application to wider society, although the clergy were required to sustain the original strict interpretation (see Apostolical Canons 66. Pedalion. pp. 113-116.) Today in Orthodoxy, marriage is described as a one-time occurrence: but if the marriage is broken a second (and even third) marriage can be contracted “as an economy” to human conditions and relational failures. The clergy, however, are not allowed to contract second marriages (even if the first wife has died). The economy is not permitted to them. Clergy in the Eastern tradition are still canonically forbidden from engaging in any violence, beyond the minimum necessary to defend their life (Apostolic Canon 66.)though they are censured if they do not vigorously defend a third party being attacked in their presence. For both things (use of excessive violence in self-defence, and refusal to use violence in defense of another, they are given the penalty of deposition from orders).

25 “A Christian should not volunteer to become a soldier, unless he is compelled to do this by someone in authority. He can have a sword, but he should not be commanded to shed blood. If it can be shown that he has shed blood he should stay away from the mysteries (sacraments) at least until he has been purified through tears and lamentation.” Canons of Hippolytus 14.74. Text in Swift (1983) p. 93. See also Apostolic Tradition 16.

26 As developed especially (out of Cicero) by Ambrose of Milan On Duties. 1. 176; and Augustine (Epistle 183.15; Against Faustus 22. 69-76; and see Swift:1983. pp. 110-149). But Ambrose (ibid. 1. 35.175) specifically commands his priests to have no involvement (inciting or approving) whatsoever in the practice of War or judicial punishments: “Interest in matters of war,” he says, “seems to me to be alien to our role as priests.”

27 Many churches have uneasily juggled this responsibility in times past. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously denounced the Archbishop of Canterbury’s post-Falklands-war service in 80’s London (St. Paul’s cathedral), as ” far too wet,” while other critics in the country were hard on him for not stating at the outset that the Falklands invasion did not fulfill the requirements of a “Just War” in terms of classical western theory, and so should have been more severely denounced by the Church.

28 Ordinary murder was given a 20 year debarment from the church’s sacraments as well as all accruing civic penalties. Basil’s Canon 56. Pedalion. p. 827; manslaughter received a ten year debarment. Basil’s Canon 57. Pedalion. p. 828.

29 Note that they are not querying the collapse of peace ideals outside the church as they regard the spread of hubris and violence on the earth as a clear mark of all those dark forces hostile to the heavenly Kingdom. The advocacy of war that is not a direct response to a clear and present threat of aggression is thus permanently ruled out of the court of morality in this system.

30 The conflict in Iraq, an invasion not given sanction of international law through the medium United Nations, but initiated to overthrow the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein on the pretext that he was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.

Fr. John McGuckin
Union Theological Seminary
3041 Broadway
Knox Hall #6W
New York, NY 10027

source: http://incommunion.org/articles/essays/nonviolence-and-peace-traditions

President Obama Explains Why Health Insurance Reform is Crucial for Small Business

The President speaks to small business owners about how health insurance reform is important not only to businesses and their employees, but also to the overall health of the economy. October 29, 2009.

Confronting Poverty and Stigmatization: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective

John D. Jones [1]
Department of Philosophy, Marquette University

Would you see His altar also?…This altar is composed of the very members of Christ, and the body of the Lord becomes an altar. This altar is more venerable even than the one which we now use. For it is …but a stone by nature; but become holy because it receives Christ’s Body: but that altar is holy because it is itself Christ’s Body….[which] you may see lying everywhere, in the alleys and in the market places, and you may sacrifice upon it anytime…When then you see a poor believer, believe that you are beholding an altar. When you see this one as a beggar, do not only refrain from insulting him, but actually give him honor, and if you witness someone else insulting him, stop him; prevent it.[2]

[Vagrants are the] “vast heap of social refuse — the mere human street sweepings — the great living mixen that is destined, as soon as spring returns, to be strewn far and near over the land, and serve as manure for the future crime crop of the country.”[3]

The ‘problem of poverty’ has been, and is today, defined primarily in terms of the moral values of work. Those who fail to support themselves or their families through work…without a socially approved excuse at a socially approved job…are defined as deviant….Moral degradation of the poor is used as a negative symbol to reinforce the work ethic. [4]

In developing a Christian, and in particular an Orthodox Christian, engagement with or response to poverty, one might expect to begin with poverty in its ordinary sense as an economic category.[5] Naturally, one would try to clarify what is meant by poverty: no small task given conflicting conceptual models of poverty such as inequality, absolute deprivation, relative deprivation, lack of money, etc. Moreover, to complicate matters, some notions of economic poverty can be analogically extended to other forms of deprivation so that we can talk about social or political poverty.[6] One would, of course, consider the teachings of Christ, Holy Scripture, and the Fathers concerning poverty and, hence, one would be lead to the broader issue of our relations to wealth among ourselves and with reference to God. In so doing, we would expand the notion of poverty to characterize both our general ontological dependence upon God and our nature as corrupted by sin. One would also develop a variety of spiritual or religious conceptions of poverty — poverty of spirit, renunciation of possessions, etc. — that bear more or less analogous notions to everyday conceptions of poverty. Moreover, one would at some point have to deal with a fundamental Christian ambivalence toward everyday life: an engagement with everyday life in which poverty is an evil and an ascetic renunciation of this life in which poverty is a good.[7]

In the Orthodox Christian faith, all such concerns are ordered toward our participation in the life of the Trinity, that is, the transfiguration and deification of human life both now and in the next life. To be sure, this transfiguration and deification is utterly dependent on God’s grace; but it also requires our cooperation (synergy) grounded in a recognition of all humans as icons of Christ.[8] Accordingly, we are led to consider the special manner in which Christ is present in the poor. So St. Maria Skobtsova “told her collaborators that all their charitable activities should be guided by the conviction that the human person ‘is God’s image and likeness, the temple of the Holy Spirit, the incorruptible icon of God.’”[9] This insistence on what is often called the ‘dignity’ of the poor is important given the widespread human tendency to denigrate and stigmatize the poor. Joel Handler has shown quite decisively how American public policy toward the poor is driven by the invidious distinction between the ‘reputable’ and ‘disreputable’ poor.[10] A cross-cultural study of poverty by Deepa Narayan showed widespread complaints by the poor concerning the humiliation, shame and denigration to which they are subjected, even by those who ostensibly acted to help them.[11]

It is this matter — the stigmatization of poverty and stigmatization in general — that I want to make a starting point for considering an Orthodox Christian engagement with poverty. The stigmatization of poverty is closely connected with the psycho-social dynamics of stigmatization in general.[12] While stigmatization itself is not necessarily associated with poverty in its social/economic sense, it constitutes its own form of poverty since, as we shall see, those who are stigmatized are imputed to be impoverished, that is, fundamentally defective, as persons. The stigmatization of economically poor people as such exacerbates and intensifies the suffering to which they are subjected. The stigmatization of economically poor people on account of conditions conceptually unrelated to poverty — such as mental illness, AIDS, addiction, or physical disability — likewise intensify and exacerbate their suffering as poor. Conversely, protest against the unjust evil that stigmatization imposes on people who might not be not poor also, and for the same reasons, entails protest against the stigmatization of the poor.

Stigmatization raises a host of existential and spiritual issues not just about the poor but about those who stigmatize them. Although not labeled as such, the discussion of this stigma is central to St. Gregory (Nazianzus) the Theologian’s Oration 14, “On the Love of the Poor.”[13] It also plays a central role in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon, “On the Saying, ‘Whoever Has Done It to One of These Has Done It to Me.’”[14]

The oration “On the Love of the Poor” begins with a review of various Christian virtues and concludes that of all the virtues,

following Paul and Christ himself, we must regard charity (agapê) as the first and greatest of the Commandments, since it is the sum of the Law and the prophets; and its most vital (kratiston) part I find is love of the poor (philoptôchia), along with compassion and sympathy for our fellow man. (sec. 5)[15]

St. Gregory then delineates various forms of poverty (ptôcheia) with leprosy specified as its most extreme form. In delineating the suffering that accompanies these various forms of poverty, he notes the worst is experienced by the lepers, a condition such “that most people cannot stand to be near them, or even to look at them, but avoid them, are nauseated by them, and regard them as abominations so to speak. This is heavier for them to bear than their ailment when they perceive that they are hated because of their misfortune (sec. 9).” The ‘poverty’ to which the lepers are subjected is not simply ‘economic.’ It is constituted by a radical disaffiliation and marginalization from their social world that is grounded in their denigration and stigmatization.[16]

A particularly vivid passage from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath illustrates the underlying logic of stigmatization. What follows is the conversation between two gas station attendants who have just sold fuel to the Joads after their entry into California:

“Jesus, what a hard looking outfit!” “Them Okies? They’re all hard-lookin.” “Jesus, I’d hate to start out in a jalopy like that.” “Well, you and me got sense. Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable. They ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas.”[17]

In brief, the ‘Okies’ for these two attendants, like lepers for those who stigmatize them, ‘are more like animals than humans.’ This formulation constitutes the core of stigmatization: to see this, one need only consider the language and visceral reactions of racists, xenophobes, and misogynists among others.

Stigmatization, it should be noted, is not simply a matter of stereotyping. The latter essentially consists of hasty generalizations about the members of a group. Stereotypes need not be negative and typically they are not accompanied by the hostile, visceral rejection that is connected with stigmatization. Nor is stigmatization a matter of ‘marking.’[18] In this latter case, we take note of a condition such as blindness, tuberculoses, or poverty, which we judge may be an obstacle in some determinate situation. We do this when we make special accommodations for a blind person to participate in some activity, to provide appropriate quarantine for someone with tuberculosis, etc. We legitimately engage in ‘marking’ as a part of our daily activities. We may not always be correct in marking individuals — we may mistakenly make unneeded accommodations for a blind person — but we certainly do not denigrate people simply in ‘marking’ them.

Stigmatization is qualitatively different from both stereotyping and ‘marking’:

It is the dramatic essence of the stigmatizing process that a label marking the deviant status is applied and this marking process typically has devastating consequences for emotions, thought, and behavior. Many words have been applied to the resulting status of the deviant person. He or she is flawed, blemished, discredited, spoiled or stigmatized. In the classic case, the mark or sign of deviance imitates a drastic inference process that engulfs impressions of the deviant target person and sets up barriers to interaction and intimacy.[19]

Stigmatization arises when people are so ‘overwhelmed’ by encountering certain conditions, that they are repelled by those who are subjected to those conditions.[20] An acquaintance of mine who could not bear to be near people in wheelchairs betrayed his underlying anxiety by remarking, “I’d rather be dead than confined to a wheelchair.” We stigmatize various conditions because they fundamentally imperil us. We take them to be death-dealing.[21] We believe that to be subjected to these conditions would irrevocably ruin our lives and strip them of significance. To be subjected to them would involve being subjected to a ‘living death’: for those who stigmatize lepers or the poor, it would be better to be dead than to be a leper or poor. When stigmatized, then, people are defined or reified in terms of imputed death-dealing conditions. As ‘dirty’ — physically, morally, existentially and symbolically — the stigmatized provoke reactions of fear, disgust and loathing from those who stigmatize them.[22] The stigmatized then become experienced as fundamentally dangerous and deviant, and thus to be rejected and marginalized. From the standpoint of those engaged in stigmatization, the stigmatized cease to be fully human but, in the extreme, rather ‘more like animals than people’ and, thus, to be banished, or ‘quarantined’ and controlled. Whether or not stigmatized people are economically poor,[23] they are imputed to be ‘poor’ — that is, fundamentally defective — as persons. When socially legitimated, stigmatization often results in banishment or ‘ghettoization’ of those who are stigmatized. Stigmatization, then, does not consist simply in disliking people, not wanting to be around them, or even in morally censuring them for their actions. Stigmatization amounts to a kind of hatred of others[24] that effectively seeks to dehumanize and marginalize them.

The issue for those who stigmatize others is not other people, it is themselves or more precisely their embodied condition as free human beings. Jean Paul Sartre gives a remarkable analysis of this in his essay on anti-Semitism:

We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities…of everything except the Jews.…In espousing anti-Semitism, he does not simply adopt an opinion, he chooses himself as a person.…The Jew only serves him as a pretext, elsewhere his counterpart will make use of the Negro, or the man of yellow skin. The existence of the Jew merely permits the anti-Semite to stifle his anxieties at their inception…Anti-Semitism, in short is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torment, a devastating thunderbolt — anything except a man.[25]

Let me return to St. Gregory’s oration since he, indirectly at least, provides a clue to what is at issue in confronting leprosy. First (sec. 10), there is his graphic description of the plight of lepers and the manner in which people flee from them:

There lies before our eyes a dreadful and pathetic sight; one that no one would believe who has not seen it: human beings alive yet dead, disfigured in almost every part of their bodies, barely recognizable for who they once were or where they came from…mutilated, stripped of their possessions, their families, their friends, their very bodies…even the most kind and considerate person shows no feeling for them. And on this account alone we have lost sight of the fact that we are flesh and compassed in a lowly body, and we are so derelict in our obligation to look after our fellow man that we actually believe that avoiding these people assures the safety of our own bodies.[26]

Prior to this, however, St. Gregory had detoured into an apparent digression about his own ambivalence toward his own body. The entire text in context is quite long, but I want to present the salient parts. In sec. 4, St. Gregory completes his enumeration of various virtues in this way:

beautiful is contemplation (theoria), as likewise beautiful is activity (praxis); the one… conducts our mind upward to what is akin to it, the other because it welcomes Christ and serves (therapeuousa) him, and confirms the power of love through good works.

After noting the primacy of charity and of love for the poor among the virtues and also that “Of all things, nothing so serves (therapeuetai) God as mercy because no other thing is more proper to God” (sec. 5), he then continues (sec. 6):

We must, then, open our hearts to all the poor and to all those who are in distress from whatever cause, for the commandment enjoins us “to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep” (Rom 12:15)…particularly to those wasted with the sacred disease[27] that devours their flesh and bones and marrow clear through — as threatened to some[28] — and betrayed by this wretched, vile, and faithless body.

He immediately follows this with a digression, which continues through sec. 7, about his relation to his body:

How I came to be joined to it, I do not know; nor how I am the image of God and concocted of clay at the same time, this body…that I both cherish as a fellow-servant and evade as my enemy…If I struggle to suppress it, I lose the helper I need to achieve my noble aims, knowing as I do why I was created and that it is through my actions (praxeôn) that I am to ascend to God…(sec. 7) I show it consideration as a co-worker but I do not know how to suppress its insurgency nor how I can help falling away from God when [it] drags me down.

He then concludes (sec. 8):

But now, though confronted with the suffering of others, I have been dwelling on the infirmity of my own flesh. We must, my brothers, as I started to say, care for (therapeuteon) it as being our kinsman and fellow-servant. For, even if I have denounced it as my enemy for the distress it causes, still, I also embrace it as a friend because of him who joined us together.

Why does St. Gregory exhort himself and others to care for (therapeuteon) the body? If it is ‘suppressed’ or ‘wasted away,’ we each lose the co-worker we need to perform acts of mercy by which we “serve (therapeuousa) God,” “confirm the power of love through good works,” and “ascend to God.” But more generally, if the body ‘wastes away,’ we are cutoff from activity (praxis) in the world. The assaults on the body in leprosy, poverty and other like ‘afflictions’ thereby threatens our very freedom to engage in the world in meaningful ways. So, “we actually believe that avoiding these people assures the safety of our own bodies” — but not just our bodies, rather, our very existence in the world.

Confronted by the suffering, disfigurement, impotence, and rejection suffered by lepers and the poorest of the poor (ptôchoi) generally — real threats and assaults on human beings to be sure — and overwhelmed by these conditions, those who stigmatize these people are overwhelmed in anxiety by their own vulnerability to this condition as something death-dealing that will radically strip life of its meaning — a ‘living death.’[29] To deflect their anxiety and to assure their own safety, they interpret those actually subjected to these conditions as deserving their fate through some fundamental defect as humans, that is, they are taken to be accursed and abandoned by God. What drives this sort of stigmatization, theologically expressed, is at bottom an anxiety about one’s own possible abandonment by God.

What lurks unthematized in the hearts of those who are ‘engulfed’ by the conditions, and thus the people, they stigmatize is a truncated version of Ps. 21 (LXX):

subjected to these conditions, one will be abandoned by God — “My God, my God” (v.1) you shall indeed forsake me;

in the face of exhausting suffering — since “I [will be] poured out like water, and scattered [will be] all my bones; my heart [will] become like wax, melting in the midst of my bowels” (v. 16);

denigration and rejection — “As for me, I [will become] a worm, and not a man: a reproach of men, and the outcast of the people” (v. 6);

yet bereft of the possibility of transfiguration and resurrection. For it is promised that “the Lord will not set as naught nor abhor the supplication of the poor …but the poor shall eat and be satisfied” (vv. 24, 26).

Certainly, those who stigmatize the poor fail to see them in the image and likeness, and more concretely, as an icon of Christ. As icons of Christ, we cannot find Christ in others or ourselves apart from or in spite of our embodiment, but only as embodied and, thus, in the midst of suffering, pain and denigration. But since, to follow Sartre, those who stigmatize the poor or anyone else are not fundamentally afraid of them, but anxiety ridden about themselves, such people do not just fail to see others as icons of Christ, they fail to see themselves as icons of Christ. After all, Christ became poor for our sakes: that is, took on all of our weaknesses, infirmities and suffering — actual and possible — in order to sanctify, heal and restore us to life. Yet insofar as stigmatization is grounded in an anxiety over abandonment by God, then in stigmatizing others we effectively repudiate Christ’s promise that he will be with us always (Matt. 28:30) both in respect to ourselves as vulnerable to the conditions we stigmatize and, thus, in respect to those who are actually subjected to those conditions. In stigmatizing others, then, we effectively circumscribe God’s healing power both for ourselves — since we would rather be dead than subjected to these conditions — and for those who are stigmatized, since they are imputed to be more like animals than humans and to be accursed of God.

Note also that individuals can stigmatize themselves particularly in response to stigmatization imposed by others. Howard Bahr offered this poignant description of the effects of denigration on those who lived in and were acculturated to Skid Row:

The defectiveness of the skid row man stems from his occupying several stigmatized statuses at once….To begin with there is a physical, visible basis for antipathy toward the skid row man. He is defective physically: the scarred face, the toothless mouth, the missing limbs, the strange actions of the psychotic or mental incompetent….Then there are the stigmatizing aspects of his character: the past of drunkenness, arrests and prison and the long periods of institutional living. Over everything else is the imputed alcoholism, the addiction which makes him a man out of control, perhaps not a man at all.

His defectiveness and powerlessness combine with his other negative characteristics real or imagined and predefine him to involvement in a vicious cycle of negative encounters which serve to bind him to skid row, lower his self-esteem and make a social fact out of what was at first social definition…that he is hopeless and unsalvageable.[30]

Self-stigmatization is essentially masochistic in character: viewing themselves as worthless and hopeless, people who stigmatize themselves affirm their worthlessness by seeking out punishment — abuse, humiliation and situations of self-defeat — that confirms their worthlessness. The patient suffering of evil for Christ’s sake as well as the recognition of our own wretchedness before God in prayer and confession are, of course, a central part of Orthodox spirituality. But both, grounded in the springtime of Great Lent, must take place in light of our faith and hope in the Resurrection: that is, our capacity to be deified and to participate in a whole and complete manner in the life of the Trinity. Neither patient suffering for Christ nor the recognition of our own wretchedness in repentance serve to legitimate self-stigmatization or its patient endurance but, as grounded in faith and hope, essentially protest against it. Surely, the protests that SS. Gregory and Gregory of Nyssa repeatedly lodge against the denigration of the poor[31] extends to those, who in stigmatizing themselves, view themselves as unsalvageable by God.[32] As Fr. Boris Bobrinskoy wrote about Job:

The merciless friends of Job consoled him with this logic: “You suffer; you are punished because you have sinned against God; repent before God.” With all his being, Job refused to surrender to such exhortations and did not admit his guilt. He appealed to God, in the certainty of seeing the Redeemer with the eyes of his flesh. God sided with him…Job’s refusal of unjust suffering still resonates in all human sufferings.[33]

It must be noted that charitable actions towards the poor do not necessarily counter, and may even mask, stigmatization. For, apart from the lived recognition of the other as an icon of Christ, what is given in aid to the poor is negated if we continue to exclude the poor from our world. As St. Gregory of Nyssa writes:

Let no one say that some place far away from our life is perfectly sufficient and send them off to some frontier, supplying them with food. For a plan of this sort displays neither mercy nor sympathy but is designed, in the guise of goodwill, to banish these people utterly from our life. Are we not willing to shelter pigs and dogs under our roof?… Will we disparage our own kind and race as baser than the animals? Let these things not be — no, my brothers! Resolve that this inhumanity will not triumph.[34]

This inhumanity is not simply a matter of some individuals stigmatizing others. Patterns of stigmatization are often socially sanctioned; stigmas form the ‘ideological’ basis for the oppressive and marginalizing social structures that are instituted to exclude stigmatized groups from full social life. St. Gregory gives a powerful description of this marginalization in sec. 12 of “On the Love of the Poor.”

They are driven away from cities, they are driven away from homes, from the market place, from public gatherings, from the streets, from festivities, from drinking parties, even…from water itself. They wander about night and day, helpless, naked, homeless, exposing their sores for all to see…To them a kind benefactor is not someone who has supplied their need but anyone who has not cruelly sent them away.[35]

The marginalization, here, is obviously not due just to the ‘inhuman’ actions that some individuals perpetrate on others; it indicates the failure of a community to establish structures and policies that provide even minimal recognition, mercy and justice to people. So too, as noted earlier, various scholars have argued that the American welfare system arises out of and often seeks to maintain the invidious distinction between the reputable (or deserving) poor and the disreputable (or undeserving poor). That is not too surprising since the denigration of the poor has been a feature of our economy since the origins of capitalism: when society became construed as “a collection of independent, atomized individuals all pursuing their private interests and ordering their relations with each other by means of formal, explicit contracts,” paupers became viewed as “useless, shameless drones in the context of the new values of individualism and self-reliance.”[36]

An Christian, an Orthodox Christian, response to denigration and stigmatization remains fundamentally incomplete if it fails to identify, to protest against, and to seek to root out the forms of denigration and stigmatization that lurk inside and drive social policies. As Fr. Boris Bobrinksoy wrote,

There is, in the ultimate reality of things, no nonspiritual life that is closed off to the Holy Spirit…The world that is called profane is in reality a profaned world and man is responsible for that. We have expelled God from this world: we do it every day. We chase him from public life by a Machiavellian form of separation between our private lives — pious and good — and the domains of politics, commerce, science, technology, love, culture and work, where everything is allowed. All these domains of human work depend upon the creative work of man, seized, modeled, and inspired by the Spirit of God.”[37]

Susan Holman notes that litourgiai in the ancient pre-Christian world referred to “public service performed by private citizens at their own expense.”[38] The poor, whether intentionally or not, were excluded from these liturgies. St. John Chrysostom, and the Cappadocian fathers, brought the poor and marginalized into these liturgies and ‘extended’ the sacred liturgy into the alleys and market places. In this way, they engaged the Divine Liturgy with the civic liturgies of public life.[39] It is in this context that St. John Chrysostom identifies the poor as an Altar — the Body and Blood of Christ. It is particularly important to note that while he makes this identification for the sake of encouraging charitable action toward the poor, the identification also has a powerful ‘legitimating function.’ “The poor become the liturgical image for these most holy elements in all of Christian worship: the altar and body of Christ.”[40] As Christ’s Altar, the poor are not to be despised but honored; conversely, if implicitly, those who despise the poor, thereby despise Christ.

Because the source of the anxiety that underlies stigmatization often remains unthematized and, thus, likely denied by those who engage in it, it is a particularly difficult ‘hardness of heart’ to expose and challenge. Indeed, some of the responses designed to motivate charity toward the poor are likely to misfire in their practical efficacy. First, one might appeal to the dignity of the poor: that we all share a common humanity.[41] But so far as this appeal is made simply to reason, it misfires since, even though true, what drives stigmatization is not mistaken reasoning but profound anxiety. One need simply consider the many racists in our society who were unmoved by appeals to the “self-evident truth” “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” because they cheerfully subscribed to this truth and yet held tenaciously to their racism.[42]

Second, one can appeal to Christ’s command that we are to give to the “least of our brethren.” Yet as St. Gregory of Nyssa observed, providing assistance to people in a way that banishes them from our presence still allows the inhumanity of the denigration to persist. Third, one can strengthen the appeal to charity through the analysis and condemnation of greed and miserliness. But it is not clear, e.g., that the gas station attendants in the Grapes of Wrath are either greedy or miserly. Certainly, the denigration of the poor and lepers has not been confined to those who are either greedy or misers.

In the end, the most powerful negation of stigmatization is our direct engagement with those who are stigmatized[43] in which we discover and respond to life — Christ in the person of the poor — rather than death. Indeed, St. John Chrysostom’s identification of the poor as the Altar of Christ urges and, for him, requires us to enter into that engagement. For we do not partake of the mysteries of the Eucharist at a distance; we must come forward and make physical contact with them.[44] So, too often in the profaned world in which we live, it is there in the “alleys” — marginalized social worlds — that we find the Altar of Christ in the poor and are bid to render hospitality.

Thus ought we ever to exercise hospitality by our own personal exertions, that we may be sanctified, and our hands be blessed. And if you give to the poor, disdain not yourself to give it, for it is not to the poor that it is given, but to Christ; and who is so wretched, as to disdain to stretch out his own hand to Christ? This is hospitality, this is truly to do it for God’s sake.[45]

Dr. John D. Jones
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Marquette University
P.O Box 1881
Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881
(414) 288-5938
(414) 288-3010 (FAX)
Web page: http://academic.mu.edu/phil/jonesj/

Footnotes

1 A version of this paper was read at the Society for Orthodox Philosophy in America, Holy Archangels Monastery, Kendalia, Texas, February 24-26, 2006. This is the first part of a more comprehensive treatment of an Orthodox response to Poverty. The notes, designed for the conference presentation, are still a bit more sparse than if they were composed for publication.

2 St. John Chrysostom, “Homily 20,3 on 2 Corinthians 10:15.”

3 From Henry Mayhew, London Labor and the London Poor, about vagrants in 19th c. England. Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty:, England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Vintage Books, 1983): 340.

4 Joel F.Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, The Moral Construction of Poverty: Welfare Reform in America (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991): 17-18.

5 One could suggest that in fact the starting point for Orthodox Christians would be the teachings of the Church. But even if we begin here, we have to have some idea of what is meant by poverty and, in the case, of everyday poverty, that takes us outside the realm of religious discourse per se into other types of discourse.

6 See, St. Gregory the Theologian, “On the Love of the Poor,” sec. 6 (Oratio 14 (=De pauperum amore) PG 35:857-909) for multiples sense of ptôchoi. See, Susan Holman, The Hungry are Dying (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 5 for the distinction between pôtchos and penês. The former connotes more extreme poverty and social disaffiliation; the latter, less extreme poverty with greater social affiliation.

7 While this ambivalence is ultimately central to understanding this matter, dealing with it is well beyond the scope of the present paper. However, Verna Harrison, “Poverty, Social Involvement, and the Life in Christ according to Saint Gregory the Theologian,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 39.2(1994): 162 makes the following observation that should be borne in mind in connection with our reading below of the Oration “On the Love the Poor”: “For the Theologian, there is an inner spiritual connection between asceticism and charity. Philoptôchia [love of the poor] can mean compassion for the needy, but it can also mean a love for poverty which leads one to renounce one’s own possessions. In both cases, one is drawn toward the condition of poverty because Christ is present and manifest in it.” (See sec. 19 of this Oration.).

8 And of the Trinity? One finds Orthodox thinkers such as Archbishop Kallistos (Ware), Sr. Nonna (Harrison) and Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) who seek to understanding human community in light of the communion (koinonia) of the Trinity. On the other hand, there are others, who resist this sort of interpretation., e.g., Fr. John Behr and Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos). This matter is exceptionally complex in part because it is very difficult to relate modern concepts of the person to the patristic use of ‘person’ with reference to the hypostases of the Trinity. An inquiry into this matter is well beyond the scope of the paper. For some literature see, John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985); “The Church as Communion,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 38.1(1994):3-16; John Behr, “The Trinitarian Being of the Church,” SVTQ 48.1(2003):67-88; Nonna Harrison, “Human Community as an Image of the Holy Trinity,” SVTQ 46.4(2002):347-64 (qv. ftns. 17-18 for relevant articles by Archbishop Kallistos), and Hierotheos Vlachos, The Person in the Orthodox Tradition, selections on-line at http://www.pelagia.org/htm/b23.en.the_person_in_the_orthodox_tradition.00.htm (see, Chapter IV.7).

9 Verna Harrison, “Poverty in the Orthodox Tradition,” SVTQ 34.1(1990):15.

10 See ftn. 3 above. For two excellent histories of social welfare policy in America see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor :From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989) and In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

11 Deepa Naraya, Raj Patel, et. al., Can Anyone Hear Us? Voices from 47 Countries (Poverty Group, PREM, World Bank, 1999): 54-56, 76-78. This volume is part of a three part series, Voices of the Poor. All of the material from these volumes can be viewed on-line at: http://www1.worldbank.org/prem/poverty/voices/reports.htm.

12 There is an immense literature on stigmatization. Perhaps the best and most comprehensive treatment, in my view, is Edward. Jones, Amerigo Farinia, et. al., Social Stigma: The Psychology of Marked Relationships (San Francisco: WW Freeman and Co., 1984). This book has an extensive bibliography.

13 I am using the translation, slightly modified, by Martha Vinson in St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Select Orations (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003): 39-71. I shall refer simply to the sections of the Oration in referencing it. All references to St. Gregory in this paper are to this oration. For the purposes of this paper, I will simply refer to St. Gregory the Theologian as St. Gregory in contrast to St. Gregory of Nyssa.

14 In illud: Quatenus uni ex his fecistis mihi fecistis (or, De pauperibus amandis 2) in Gregorii Nysseni Opera (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1967-): 9,1:111-27 (PG 46.471-90). I will follow the translation by Holman in The Hungry are Dying (pp. 199-206). I will cite this sermon by column number in PG 46 and page number in Holman, e.g., PG 472(HD p. 199). All references to St. Gregory of Nyssa in this paper are to this sermon.

15 Verna Harrison, “Poverty, Social Involvement, and the Life in Christ according to Saint Gregory the Theologian,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 39.2(1994): 151-164 , esp, 155ff., gives a fine discussion of this Oration in light of the theme of philoptôchia as well as its connection with Oration 19.

16 As to the universality of the stigmatization of leprosy see Liora Navon, “Beggars, Metaphors, and Stigma: A Missing Link in the Social History of Leprosy,” Social History of Medicine 11(1998): 89-105. Based upon a study of leprosy in Thailand, she noted that there was an ambivalent reaction toward leprosy among the Thai people. The most hostile reaction was directed towards beggars who had the disease (pp. 96-7), but evidently there were lepers that were cared for by family members, largely out of public view, as well as individuals with milder forms of the disease that were not denigrated or excluded from society (p. 84). She argues that the extremely negative portraits of lepers and the concomitant accounts of hostility towards them were focused on beggars with the disease and, thus, led to exaggerated accounts of leprosy as universally stigmatized in Thailand. She also notes (p. 89) that only about 30% of the untreated cases of leprosy develop the sorts of severe effects like those portrayed, e.g., by SS. Gregory or Gregory of Nyssa. The article raises some interesting questions about the empirical legitimacy of using leprosy per se as a universal metaphor for denigration. Whether her investigations in Thailand have cross-cultural validity is an open question but it does, as she notes, highlight “the need to better understand the sources, severity, and persistency of leprosy stigma” (p. 92). Cf. Holman, p. 158. Of course, the condemnations of the treatment of lepers by both Gregories does not depend whether all lepers in their society were universally denigrated although, it should be noted, they never cite examples of lepers with relatively mild forms of the disease who were viewed less harshly.

17 Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 1977): 301.

18 For the distinction between stigmatization and marking and an excellent general discussion of stigmatization as a response to ‘impression engulfment’ see E. Jones, Social Stigma, pp. :4-8.

19 E. Jones, Social Stigma, p.4-6.

20 It should be clear, I hope, that ‘those who stigmatize others’ represents an social-existential ‘type’ and that I am providing a phenomenological description of that type. No inference is made, or should be drawn, about whether this type applies to specific individuals or groups. Such application is obviously an empirical matter.

21 See especially, E. Jones, pp, 82-89 for this and for the ‘symbolic’ nature of the peril.

22 See, e.g., Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967):109-117 as well as Stig Hornshøj-Møller, “On Der Ewige Jude” at http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/. Der Ewige Jude was an infamous Nazi propaganda file that “depicts the Jews of Poland as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse: they are an alien people which have taken over the world through their control of banking and commerce, yet which still live like animals.” The film generated “shouts of disgust and loathing” by Hitler and the Nazis who first viewed it.

23 So, the stigmatized historically have included those who are blind, physically disabled, severe stammerers, members of ethic out-groups (Jones, Social Stigma, p. 5). Of course, the bases for stigmatizations vary from culture to culture; so too, people may not be stigmatized by everyone in a particular social group.

24 See St. Gregory’s remark, quoted above, that ‘being hated for their misfortune’ is what is hardest to bear for lepers.

25 Anti-Semite and Jew, Trans. George Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948):53-54.

26 See, St. Gregory of Nyssa, PG 477-476(HD pp. 201-202) for even a more horrific portrait of lepers which, it must be acknowledged, comes very close to the kind of language that might be used by those who stigmatize them: e.g., they ‘have none of the appearances of a man, nor those of a beast” and “rather than men, theirs is a lamentable wreckage.” It is only St. Gregory of Nyssa’s constant stress on the full humanity of lepers as images of God that prevents these portraits from legitimating denigration of them. In addition to a ‘natural loathing’ for such conditions, which St. Gregory of Nyssa acknowledges (PG 488(HD p. 205), one might expect the avoidance of lepers to be justified because of fear of contagion. There is scholarly debate about whether leprosy is contagious and, if so, to what degree. But both St. Gregory (sec. 27) and St. Gregory of Nyssa (PG 484-488(HD p. 205) thought the fear of contagion misplaced; neither thought it justified the denigration and avoidance of lepers. See also, Holman, pp. 156-60.

27 “Sacred disease” was usually reserved for epilepsy. Holman, p. 161, notes that St. Gregory applied it to leprosy in order to “evoke the biblical image of the sacred beggar, Lazarus.”

28 See Ps. 38.3 (LXX 37.4) and 102.3-5 (LXX 104.4-6) as well as Numb. 12.10 where God afflicts Miriam with leprosy. St. Gregory, it should be noted, explicitly distances himself from the idea that every affliction is from God as a form of punishment (secs. 30-31).

29 It should be noted, though, that the threat can also take the form of an imputed daemonic presence which an embodied condition is imputed to convey. White racists are not likely threatened by blacks because they fear becoming black. They are threatened by an imputed daemonic, irrational presence that the bodies of blacks is taken to represent and which racists can avoid only by a marginalization of blacks that is justified by dehumanizing them. A similar analysis would apply to misogynists.

30 Howard M. Bahr, Skid Row: An Introduction to Disaffiliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973): 120-21 and 15 respectively.

31 See St. Gregory, secs. 10, 14, and 15 and St. Gregory of Nyssa, PG 473-476 (HD p. 201), 476(HD p. 203), 480(HD p. 203).

32 Rollo May relates an account of his therapeutic work with a young woman who had been prostituted by her parents, but who was unable to feel any anger toward them. The woman’s response was essentially masochistic in character. Seeing herself as nothing but a servant in which she had no rights against others, she became “indentured a priori.” May was unable to lodge her from this self-degradation until he expressed, in a spontaneous and uncalculated manner, his own anger about what had been done to her (Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New York: Norton Publishing Co., 1972): 85-6.

33 Compassion of the Father, Trans. Anthony Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003): 53.

34 St. Gregory of Nyssa, PG 480(HD p. 203).

35 To be sure, St. Gregory of Nyssa points to a minimal level of community among the lepers (PG 477(HD 202)) but this hardly constitutes what would be regarded as a ‘social world’ or an ensemble of institutional and other structures that allows for meaningful engagement in the world. Indeed, the “existential death” imputed by stigmatization carries with it a “social death” — a loss of social world — imposed by marginalizing social actions and structures. See the reference to Bahr above.

36 F. Allan Hanson, “How Poverty Lost Its Meaning,” The Cato Journal 17(1997)2 on-line at http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj17n2-5.html. This sort of view persists in the welfare-state in more modern notions of the ‘culture of poverty’ and the ‘underclass.’

37 Bobrinskoy, p. 28.

38 Holman, The Hungry are Dying, p. 21

39 Ibid., pp. 60-62.

40 Ibid., p. 62.

41 See, e.g., “On the Love of the Poor” sec. 14. See also Harrison, “Poverty, Social Involvement…” p, 158 for a discussion of the various senses of the “unity of human nature” in this section. See also, St. Gregory of Nyssa, PG 480(HD p. 203).

42 See, Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, p. 119-20 for a variation on this theme.

43 As to how efficacious direct contact may be for reducing stigma see, e.g., Gregory M. Herek and John P. Capitanio, “AIDS Stigma and Contact With Persons With AIDS: Effects of Direct and Vicarious Contact,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27.1(1997): 1-36 for a nuanced discussion of this matter in relation to AIDS patients. The authors also note that “A large body of empirical research has shown that contact can indeed reduce prejudice when it is sustained and intimate between individuals of equal status who share important goals and are supported by the institution within which it occurs” (p. 2).

44 So, Holman, pp. 161-62, notes that for SS. John Chrysostom, Gregory, and Gregory of Nyssa “lepers once set apart for their pollution, become a symbol of all that is ‘set apart’ for God… the ill beggars lying on the ground are holy coins that ‘bear the countenance of our Saviour’…They ought to be touched physically without repulsion.”

45 St. John Chrysostom, “Homily 14 on 1 Timothy 5:9.” The context makes clear that alms are given to Christ as found in the poor, not Christ instead of the poor. (PG 62, 573).

Copyright 2006 by the author; all rights reserved

Placed on the web site of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship March 2006.

source: http://incommunion.org/articles/resources/confronting-poverty-and-stigmatization