Welfare and Poverty
by Archbishop John Shahovskoy
The poor may enrich the rich. The rich may impoverish the poor. What different sense is given to these words by the world! Unbelievers mean by them that the rich exploit the poor. Those who believe in Christ and live in Him see in them a far deeper and wider meaning: a materially poor man may uplift and spiritually enrich by the purity and loftiness of his spirit those who are materially richer than himself. And vice versa, a rich man morally gone astray certainly spiritually “impoverishes” the poor who come into contact with him. For not only is everyone ‘responsible for all,’ but everyone, whatever his social position, influences everyone else. People’s moral and spiritual energies continually, though invisibly to the superficial eye, go like waves over the world, meeting one another, so that individuals act as factories of good and evil, as conductors of Christ’s light, or of darkness — not only for themselves but for the world as a whole.
Material wealth is not in itself pernicious (it is morally neutral), and material poverty is not in itself useful for uplifting the soul (it too is morally neutral). But the lust of wealth and its deification is poison both for individuals and society: it means that human sacrifices are made to wealth (and the foolish rich sacrifice to it both themselves and those around them) and that the purpose of man’s life and his great and immortal dignity are forgotten. The lust of wealth is found not only among the rich and prosperous but quite frequently among the poor who envy other people in their material prosperity. The essence of Christian spirit is freedom from all attachment to perishable wealth, and every man, whatever his social position, may be liberated in Christ and become free in spirit from selfish avarice and envy.
Poverty that breathes of murder and lives by envy is not the blessed poverty of the Gospel. It is a horrible poverty. On the other hand, the humble rich who regard themselves merely as ‘stewards’ (Luke 16) of the wealth which belongs to the Creator and justly administer it, entering through it into a merciful relation to the world certainly cannot be numbered among the rich to whom the Saviour said ‘Woe!’ No, not woe but joy, joy everlasting, to such rich!
Nothing material and no absence of anything material is in itself either good or evil. Only Marxism, following in the steps of Buddhism (strange as this sounds), raises the material side of existence into a moral category of good and evil (thus manifesting the essentially religious, though negative, character of its teaching). For Christians nothing external is either good or evil, but everything in the world becomes good or evil through man’s inner motives and intentions. Both good and evil are purely inward, spiritual states which create either hell or paradise within man. The external world is merely the periphery of man’s manifestations, and of course if the man himself be full of light, the periphery of his life will give out light also.
It was not material riches as such that the Saviour called evil, but ‘trusting in riches,’ i.e. building one’s life upon the idea of material welfare. The instability and insecurity of such riches and such trust is emphasized in the Gospel in every way. It is “the house built upon sand” and “the rich man who fared sumptuously every day” and did not understand that sudden death lay in wait for him. The Revelation very definitely says of such riches: “thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” (Rev. 3, 17). In the reverse sense these words might be applied to a materially poor man rich in good and lofty feelings and self-sacrificing actions, but conscious only of his poverty and his earthly insignificance: “thou sayest thou art poor, and wretched and miserable, hast need of everything, but knowest not that thou art rich in Christ, rich in eternity, and no one can rob thee of this wealth which gives thee everlasting bliss. ...”
If all men were thoroughly imbued with this true vision of reality, how different their life would be! All the horrible theories breathing of hate that replace one another in the world would vanish, and the true, right attitude to earthly values would be established. Those earthly values, no longer regarded as supreme, would become real
Wealth may be God’s blessed gift — and so may poverty. Wealth may be a curse — and so may poverty. Poverty becomes accursed when it is proletarized. Wealth is accursed when it proletarizes the poor. To proletarize poverty is to deprive of blessing the souls of the poor — to deprive them of the spiritual means of acquiring and retaining that blessing; it is also to isolate and exclude the poor because they are poor. To cultivate such proletarization means spiritually to destroy the poor — which is the task of non-religious socialism culminating in Marxism; it means instilling the spirit of antichrist into the poor. Of course this process had not begun with Karl Marx or the leaders of early socialism. It is simply a manifestation of sin in the world — both in the world of the rich and of the poor. A poor man ‘proletaries’ poverty by his wrong attitude toward it, and a rich man does the same thing by his wrong attitude toward his own wealth and toward the poverty of others, and thus heaps coals of fire on his head. To a believing Christian it is perfectly obvious that the godless attitude to life widely prevalent in the modern capitalistic world is as much an evil as the atheistic proletarian revolution.
At the present time Christian consciousness — truly Orthodox Christian consciousness, in whomsoever it may be manifested — must enter the path of ideological and, what’s more, of spiritual activity against the proletarization of poverty both by the poor and by the rich. That activity must be a sacred struggle for the greatest value in the world — the soul of man — and be waged only through the living human personality, through the union of those who are living in Christ and can affirm by their own example the principles which they profess.
The world is not divided into two camps — capitalists and proletarians, as it appears to superficial observation. There are three camps in the world: 1) godless poor; 2) godless rich; and 3) materially poor and rich Christians. This is how the world is morally mapped out. Christians are not divided into ‘rich’ and ‘poor,’ for the poor are aware of the advantages of their poverty and the rich of the impediment of their wealth, or in any case of its insecurity and therefore — insignificance. And all follow their own path, perform their own service. It is only for this third group that there can be a ‘social problem’ in the proper sense. For the first two it does not and cannot exist, for they are actuated by the principle of struggle and irreconcilable discord, so that for them there is either war or purely diplomatic and unreal peace. The third group is of course the smallest in the world, for the heavenly and honorable privilege of belonging to it is derived not from verbal professions or even ideological beliefs (this should be emphasized) but from actual, spiritually real Christian faith. It is only this spiritual reality that can give rise to the true conception of Christian social life.
A Christian is one who labors whether he is rich or poor. Whatever his social and material position may be, a Christian is a laborer in the field of life. By the sweat of his brow he earns his physical and also his spiritual bread: eternal life in Christ. “If any would not work, neither should he eat,” says St, Paul (II Thess. 3, 10), and his words are a Divine commandment to all Christians. If a man has material bread without having to work for it or to struggle with earth’s thorns and thistles (for instance, if he has investments) he does not, if he is a Christian, remain idle, but procures bread for others and thus acquires spiritual bread both for himself and for others. A Christian who has property is never idle, but always ‘labors’. And if he does not labor, he is not a Christian.
This is why all Christians are in the same camp — rich and poor, distinguished and insignificant— according to earthly standards; and it is bound to be so. Christians are free both from envy and from contempt. The exalted and the lowly know themselves to be equal on the plane of eternity, and therefore there can be no envy for the exalted or contempt for the lowly. In proportion to his labor and in accordance with God’s will (apart from which nothing happens either in heaven or on earth) a Christian reaches this or that material position, which is the most useful and salutary for him.
The passions of men who have lost their Divine likeness may rage around him; others may try to entice him into this or that human camp welded together not by love but by solidarity in pursuing low and often criminal ends. A Christian will not sell his world-transcending, spiritual freedom for the mess of red pottage which the transitory world offers him— and he will not build his happiness upon the suffering of others.
For the Church of Christ “there are no rich and no poor...” or, rather, there are, but on a different plane. Wealth and poverty have a different quality in the Church. “The rich” are the poor in spirit; “the poor” are those who deem themselves rich because of their earthly poverty. It is the practice of the Church with regard to the rich that they should serve H er, and with regard to the poor that She should serve them. Thus the poor are regarded as worthy of help, and the rich are worthy of serving. The psychology of the Church is directly opposed to the one prevalent in the world, where the poor serve, and the rich accept this service as their due. It is noteworthy that the same law of the Church is observed even beyond the boundaries of the earth: the departed saints pray for sinful men in this world and thus further their salvation; believers still living on earth, being richer than the departed sinners who lost their opportunity of doing good on earth, can help them by their prayers and thus further their salvation.
In this spiritual sense service is preeminently the work of ‘the rich’; and in the earthly sense, too, wealth, power, position are always connected for the Christian mind with the idea of service and certainty, not with greater enjoyment of the earthly life (that is a pagan principle, and indeed even paganism in its higher forms rose above this Epicurian attitude).
The Church on earth and in heaven is essentially the servant of all the “least,” the helpless, the oppressed, the needy (whether in the earthly or in the spiritual sense). “The strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please themselves” (St. Paul’s commandment). This is why the Church stoops to heal, equally, the rich and the poor: the rich who ‘trust in riches’ and the poor grieving over their poverty and sick with envy toward the rich.
This is why true servitors of the Church never fawn on the rich, even if the rich give money to the Church and build temples for it. The servitors of the Church are impartial both to wealth and to poverty, and do not fall into the other extreme — that of denouncing wealth as such. The Church knows that men shall be judged not according to their external position, but according to the purity of their hearts and the degree of their love for God and man — love expressed by their deeds.
Modern godless communists demoralize the poor, segregating them into a class by themselves and making them wage a deadly struggle against another class, “the rich they unbridle the lower instincts and rouse murderous hatred and envy. The godless rich have no consideration and never have had for the poor as human beings. They only yield to the material pressure of the poor. By their hard-heartedness and by clinging to their ‘cankered’ riches (James 5,2) they unbridle — just as godless communists do — the lower instincts of the poor, for in their selfishness they show themselves to be apostles of atheism. And those representatives of the Church who were not true to its spirit frequently demoralized the rich by fawning upon them, countenancing their hypocriscy, passing over in silence their misdeeds.
And of course we too, representatives of the great Russian Church, have been guilty of it. We have not been able to win the spiritual confidence of the Russian masses and most of them have deserted us. We have not shown spiritual impartiality or cared sufficiently for the souls of the Russian people, both poor and rich. There can be no restoration, no renaissance of our Orthodox Russian culture until we have passed through the cleansing fire of penitence and recognized our mistakes and sins. The clergy must show an example not only of service, but also of penitence.
On the paths of our own history we must be convinced of the righteousness of God’s Judgment upon us, and woe to those of us who will find that judgment “undeserved!”
“Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are Thy judgments” (Rev. 16,7).
SOURCE: Archbishop John Shahovskoy, "Welfare and Poverty" in "The Orthodox Pastor: A Guide to Pastoral Theology" 2nd Edition (Crestwood: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2008) 96-103.
by Archbishop John Shahovskoy
The poor may enrich the rich. The rich may impoverish the poor. What different sense is given to these words by the world! Unbelievers mean by them that the rich exploit the poor. Those who believe in Christ and live in Him see in them a far deeper and wider meaning: a materially poor man may uplift and spiritually enrich by the purity and loftiness of his spirit those who are materially richer than himself. And vice versa, a rich man morally gone astray certainly spiritually “impoverishes” the poor who come into contact with him. For not only is everyone ‘responsible for all,’ but everyone, whatever his social position, influences everyone else. People’s moral and spiritual energies continually, though invisibly to the superficial eye, go like waves over the world, meeting one another, so that individuals act as factories of good and evil, as conductors of Christ’s light, or of darkness — not only for themselves but for the world as a whole.
Material wealth is not in itself pernicious (it is morally neutral), and material poverty is not in itself useful for uplifting the soul (it too is morally neutral). But the lust of wealth and its deification is poison both for individuals and society: it means that human sacrifices are made to wealth (and the foolish rich sacrifice to it both themselves and those around them) and that the purpose of man’s life and his great and immortal dignity are forgotten. The lust of wealth is found not only among the rich and prosperous but quite frequently among the poor who envy other people in their material prosperity. The essence of Christian spirit is freedom from all attachment to perishable wealth, and every man, whatever his social position, may be liberated in Christ and become free in spirit from selfish avarice and envy.
Poverty that breathes of murder and lives by envy is not the blessed poverty of the Gospel. It is a horrible poverty. On the other hand, the humble rich who regard themselves merely as ‘stewards’ (Luke 16) of the wealth which belongs to the Creator and justly administer it, entering through it into a merciful relation to the world certainly cannot be numbered among the rich to whom the Saviour said ‘Woe!’ No, not woe but joy, joy everlasting, to such rich!
Nothing material and no absence of anything material is in itself either good or evil. Only Marxism, following in the steps of Buddhism (strange as this sounds), raises the material side of existence into a moral category of good and evil (thus manifesting the essentially religious, though negative, character of its teaching). For Christians nothing external is either good or evil, but everything in the world becomes good or evil through man’s inner motives and intentions. Both good and evil are purely inward, spiritual states which create either hell or paradise within man. The external world is merely the periphery of man’s manifestations, and of course if the man himself be full of light, the periphery of his life will give out light also.
It was not material riches as such that the Saviour called evil, but ‘trusting in riches,’ i.e. building one’s life upon the idea of material welfare. The instability and insecurity of such riches and such trust is emphasized in the Gospel in every way. It is “the house built upon sand” and “the rich man who fared sumptuously every day” and did not understand that sudden death lay in wait for him. The Revelation very definitely says of such riches: “thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” (Rev. 3, 17). In the reverse sense these words might be applied to a materially poor man rich in good and lofty feelings and self-sacrificing actions, but conscious only of his poverty and his earthly insignificance: “thou sayest thou art poor, and wretched and miserable, hast need of everything, but knowest not that thou art rich in Christ, rich in eternity, and no one can rob thee of this wealth which gives thee everlasting bliss. ...”
If all men were thoroughly imbued with this true vision of reality, how different their life would be! All the horrible theories breathing of hate that replace one another in the world would vanish, and the true, right attitude to earthly values would be established. Those earthly values, no longer regarded as supreme, would become real
Wealth may be God’s blessed gift — and so may poverty. Wealth may be a curse — and so may poverty. Poverty becomes accursed when it is proletarized. Wealth is accursed when it proletarizes the poor. To proletarize poverty is to deprive of blessing the souls of the poor — to deprive them of the spiritual means of acquiring and retaining that blessing; it is also to isolate and exclude the poor because they are poor. To cultivate such proletarization means spiritually to destroy the poor — which is the task of non-religious socialism culminating in Marxism; it means instilling the spirit of antichrist into the poor. Of course this process had not begun with Karl Marx or the leaders of early socialism. It is simply a manifestation of sin in the world — both in the world of the rich and of the poor. A poor man ‘proletaries’ poverty by his wrong attitude toward it, and a rich man does the same thing by his wrong attitude toward his own wealth and toward the poverty of others, and thus heaps coals of fire on his head. To a believing Christian it is perfectly obvious that the godless attitude to life widely prevalent in the modern capitalistic world is as much an evil as the atheistic proletarian revolution.
At the present time Christian consciousness — truly Orthodox Christian consciousness, in whomsoever it may be manifested — must enter the path of ideological and, what’s more, of spiritual activity against the proletarization of poverty both by the poor and by the rich. That activity must be a sacred struggle for the greatest value in the world — the soul of man — and be waged only through the living human personality, through the union of those who are living in Christ and can affirm by their own example the principles which they profess.
The world is not divided into two camps — capitalists and proletarians, as it appears to superficial observation. There are three camps in the world: 1) godless poor; 2) godless rich; and 3) materially poor and rich Christians. This is how the world is morally mapped out. Christians are not divided into ‘rich’ and ‘poor,’ for the poor are aware of the advantages of their poverty and the rich of the impediment of their wealth, or in any case of its insecurity and therefore — insignificance. And all follow their own path, perform their own service. It is only for this third group that there can be a ‘social problem’ in the proper sense. For the first two it does not and cannot exist, for they are actuated by the principle of struggle and irreconcilable discord, so that for them there is either war or purely diplomatic and unreal peace. The third group is of course the smallest in the world, for the heavenly and honorable privilege of belonging to it is derived not from verbal professions or even ideological beliefs (this should be emphasized) but from actual, spiritually real Christian faith. It is only this spiritual reality that can give rise to the true conception of Christian social life.
A Christian is one who labors whether he is rich or poor. Whatever his social and material position may be, a Christian is a laborer in the field of life. By the sweat of his brow he earns his physical and also his spiritual bread: eternal life in Christ. “If any would not work, neither should he eat,” says St, Paul (II Thess. 3, 10), and his words are a Divine commandment to all Christians. If a man has material bread without having to work for it or to struggle with earth’s thorns and thistles (for instance, if he has investments) he does not, if he is a Christian, remain idle, but procures bread for others and thus acquires spiritual bread both for himself and for others. A Christian who has property is never idle, but always ‘labors’. And if he does not labor, he is not a Christian.
This is why all Christians are in the same camp — rich and poor, distinguished and insignificant— according to earthly standards; and it is bound to be so. Christians are free both from envy and from contempt. The exalted and the lowly know themselves to be equal on the plane of eternity, and therefore there can be no envy for the exalted or contempt for the lowly. In proportion to his labor and in accordance with God’s will (apart from which nothing happens either in heaven or on earth) a Christian reaches this or that material position, which is the most useful and salutary for him.
The passions of men who have lost their Divine likeness may rage around him; others may try to entice him into this or that human camp welded together not by love but by solidarity in pursuing low and often criminal ends. A Christian will not sell his world-transcending, spiritual freedom for the mess of red pottage which the transitory world offers him— and he will not build his happiness upon the suffering of others.
For the Church of Christ “there are no rich and no poor...” or, rather, there are, but on a different plane. Wealth and poverty have a different quality in the Church. “The rich” are the poor in spirit; “the poor” are those who deem themselves rich because of their earthly poverty. It is the practice of the Church with regard to the rich that they should serve H er, and with regard to the poor that She should serve them. Thus the poor are regarded as worthy of help, and the rich are worthy of serving. The psychology of the Church is directly opposed to the one prevalent in the world, where the poor serve, and the rich accept this service as their due. It is noteworthy that the same law of the Church is observed even beyond the boundaries of the earth: the departed saints pray for sinful men in this world and thus further their salvation; believers still living on earth, being richer than the departed sinners who lost their opportunity of doing good on earth, can help them by their prayers and thus further their salvation.
In this spiritual sense service is preeminently the work of ‘the rich’; and in the earthly sense, too, wealth, power, position are always connected for the Christian mind with the idea of service and certainty, not with greater enjoyment of the earthly life (that is a pagan principle, and indeed even paganism in its higher forms rose above this Epicurian attitude).
The Church on earth and in heaven is essentially the servant of all the “least,” the helpless, the oppressed, the needy (whether in the earthly or in the spiritual sense). “The strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please themselves” (St. Paul’s commandment). This is why the Church stoops to heal, equally, the rich and the poor: the rich who ‘trust in riches’ and the poor grieving over their poverty and sick with envy toward the rich.
This is why true servitors of the Church never fawn on the rich, even if the rich give money to the Church and build temples for it. The servitors of the Church are impartial both to wealth and to poverty, and do not fall into the other extreme — that of denouncing wealth as such. The Church knows that men shall be judged not according to their external position, but according to the purity of their hearts and the degree of their love for God and man — love expressed by their deeds.
Modern godless communists demoralize the poor, segregating them into a class by themselves and making them wage a deadly struggle against another class, “the rich they unbridle the lower instincts and rouse murderous hatred and envy. The godless rich have no consideration and never have had for the poor as human beings. They only yield to the material pressure of the poor. By their hard-heartedness and by clinging to their ‘cankered’ riches (James 5,2) they unbridle — just as godless communists do — the lower instincts of the poor, for in their selfishness they show themselves to be apostles of atheism. And those representatives of the Church who were not true to its spirit frequently demoralized the rich by fawning upon them, countenancing their hypocriscy, passing over in silence their misdeeds.
And of course we too, representatives of the great Russian Church, have been guilty of it. We have not been able to win the spiritual confidence of the Russian masses and most of them have deserted us. We have not shown spiritual impartiality or cared sufficiently for the souls of the Russian people, both poor and rich. There can be no restoration, no renaissance of our Orthodox Russian culture until we have passed through the cleansing fire of penitence and recognized our mistakes and sins. The clergy must show an example not only of service, but also of penitence.
On the paths of our own history we must be convinced of the righteousness of God’s Judgment upon us, and woe to those of us who will find that judgment “undeserved!”
“Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are Thy judgments” (Rev. 16,7).
SOURCE: Archbishop John Shahovskoy, "Welfare and Poverty" in "The Orthodox Pastor: A Guide to Pastoral Theology" 2nd Edition (Crestwood: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2008) 96-103.
