The Transformation of Early Christianity from an Eschatological to a Socialized Movement

Similarly annual agapes were established by bequests as a charity to the poor brethren.⁵⁹ These agapes were no innovation. As an institution they were perfectly familiar and in universal observance among the pagans. The agapes were simply ordinary Roman silicernia with the name changed. To the Romans, founding a silicernium was like wearing a toga or going to a bath. It possessed the sanction of law and the benediction of religion; but its real compulsion lay in social custom. No person could escape this pressure of the mores and retain self respect, to say nothing of the respect of others. The pagan silicernium was morally respectable; it perpetuated friendship and promoted good feeling. There was no reason for avoiding it, if avoidance had been possible – as it was not. The Christians not only preserved this pious institution; they improved it. Their annual agapes fed the poor, which the silicernia, excellent as they were, seldom did.

The explanation we have endeavored to give of the endowment of family burial lots and annual agapes is applicable, mutis mutandis, to other cases of interest. It therefore is not surprising to learn that Callixtus (pope 218-223 A.D.) was a banker previous to his elevation to the papacy; that large numbers of Christians, particularly widows and orphans – entrusted their money to his bank, and that he had large loans out at good interest to Jewish bankers.⁶⁰

The truth is that the early Christian horror of interest, while absolutely honest and even desperately sincere, was a strictly legalistic, ceremonial, and ritualistic horror. It was purely formal and was not at all concerned with any economic principle. The thing that was wicked, was not income from capital invested, but income in the form of interest on money. To own a ship and sail it and make profits from ownership by freight charges was perfectly honest, but to invest money in a shipping corporation and receive dividends was wicked. So it was honest to own a building and get money as rent. It was immoral to invest money in the construction company that erected that building and receive income in the form of interest. Rent, profit, and interest are merely three forms of the same thing, income from invested capital. Any endeavor to distinguish between them in this respect is entirely devoid of moral or economic justification. The ancient Church fathers were as well aware of this as we are. The real point and importance of their concept of interest was their defense of that concept. That defense was a curious one and illustrates the difference between ancient and modern reasoning on economic matters – and on other matters also. The difference in a word is that of mistaking means for ends on the theory of course that we moderns are right and the prophets, philosophers, Christian fathers, et al. wrong. According to modern social science, interest is merely a means adopted for the attainment of certain ends – economic, educational, religious or whatever. The goodness or badness of interest is to be judged strictly and solely by the convenience and economy with which it serves these ends. If any other property institution can, in a given situation, serve a given end more easily and more cheaply than the institution of interest, then, in that situation, the institution of interest – other things being equal – is immoral and should be abolished. If, in the given situation, no other property institution can serve the given end more easily and more cheaply than the institution of interest, then that institution is moral and should be retained. That is, from the modern sociological point of view, the institution of interest is inconceivable except as a means to some end outside itself. As a means it is to be judged in a purely objective and pragmatic manner by the ordinary standards of cost price, economic, social, and other.

The method of the ancients is entirely otherwise. Assuming still the correctness of the modern viewpoint, which viewpoint be it said is not unassailable and indeed is assailed by divers radicals, socialists and others, but for the most part persons lacking in pecuniary reputability; the mistake then, that the Early Church fathers make is that of taking the means for an end. They have many arguments against interest but all these arguments can be criticised for this one error. The fathers elevate interest to the dignity of an end in itself. Interest, qua interest, is condemned. It is taking advantage of a brother's necessity. It is grinding the face of the poor. It is producing pride, luxury, and vice. As soon as moral value is attached to anything, it of course, is viewed as an end in itself. If it be true that interest is an end in itself, then the fiercest diatribes of the fathers are none too severe. Assuming their premises, their conclusions follow inevitably. The modern man – he is not unknown – who talks about the "sacred rights" of private property is guilty of the same error as the ancient Christians, the error of mistaking means for ends. The early Christians could not see that the property institution of interest is neither good nor bad except as it is good or bad for something. The something determines the judgment. As a matter of historical fact the condemnation of interest developed in certain early stages of human civilization and at those stages interest was socially detrimental. At those stages, however, it was exceedingly rare and correspondingly infamous. In any country where there is abundance of good, free land the phenomenon of interest on money will disappear, provided labor is free. So it disappeared in the northern states of this Union in the later part of the 18th century. These phenomena caused the southerners to adopt slavery though all their English traditions had declared it immoral for more than three centuries. The relation of interest to slavery under a condition of free land is the relation of cause and effect, i.e., the requirement of interest will produce slavery and the abolition of interest will abolish slavery.⁶¹ These social phenomena are of importance in our consideration of the early Christian doctrine of interest. That doctrine was largely evaded and disobeyed but it still had great effect and that effect was toward the abolition of slavery. We do not mean that this economic doctrine alone resulted in the abolition of slavery, or even that it was a chief cause in the abolition of slavery, it was not obeyed well enough to be such a chief cause; but so far as it was obeyed, it tended in that direction.

The net result of all Christian teaching together was to prolong the existence of the institution of slavery for two centuries, perhaps for three. The doctrine of the sinfulness of interest however, worked toward emancipation and forced slavery in its later end to become almost wholly agricultural, i.e., to yield income as rent. Slaves cannot be employed in commerce or industry in sufficient numbers to be profitable where the institution of interest is banned as it was in the 'dark ages.' The Christian concept of interest undermined ancient civilization by abrogating, slowly but surely, the institution of property by which such gangs of 'manufacturing slaves' as made the fortune of Crassus, could alone be made profitable. It is an historical curiosity that it accomplished this result without any attack on the institution of slavery itself.

As soon as Christian doctrines became widespread enough to produce important social results we find Christian slave owners manumitting their slaves in considerable numbers. It is no derogation to the influence of the doctrine of human brotherhood or to the humanity of the Christian slave owners to mention the fact that the doctrine of the sinfulness of interest, by tending to make slavery unprofitable, aided in the process of bringing to light the real content of the doctrine of human brotherhood, and of making the humane practice of manumission easier by the removal of certain economic impediments.

In order to understand properly the working of the prohibition of interest and its relation to manumission, it is necessary to carry the analysis one step farther to its ultimate physical basis, which was the conditioning factor of actual practice and eventually of theory also. The exhaustion of the soil of western Europe which was the result of ancient methods of agriculture, together with the rising standard of living and the competition of other more fertile agricultural regions like Egypt and North Africa resulted in the substitution of the latifundi for small landholdings.⁶² As the pressure continued the latifundi in turn became economically unprofitable under forced labor (slavery) and large tracts of land were abandoned. In order to put this land under agriculture again the charge upon it had to be reduced by the substitution of (relatively) free associated labor, villeinage or serfdom. But this change cut off the economic margin upon which the structure of ancient civilization was built and is the ultimate economic reason assignable for the fall of Rome. Of course the collapse of the empire could, theoretically, have been avoided had the Romans of the first three centuries A.D. been content to live the toilsome and frugal life of the Romans of the early republic. But this was an utter impossibility in practice. This slowly working and hardly understood decline in the relative and actual ability of ancient agriculture to sustain the weight imposed upon it, enables us to see why the sinfulness of interest could be steadily indoctrined even though steadily evaded, by Christians from the beginning, while manumission was not taught at all in the beginning and only worked up to the dignity of a pious action relatively late.⁶³ It also explains why manumission of household and personal slaves preceded that of agricultural slaves. Of course there is nothing peculiarly Christian about this later phenomenon and the operation of other causes is discernable, but it is important for our purpose to observe that Christian practice, and Christian theory in property matters in the long run, followed the broad lines of the underlying economic evolution.⁶⁴ The application of this to the origin of Christian monasticism and to the revival of communistic theories by the later Church fathers lies at the very outside limit of our study but will be briefly touched on after we have considered the final overthrow of the communistic property concept as they appear in the earlier fathers up to and including Tertullian.

Clement of Alexandria 153-217 A.D. has the distinction of being the first Christian theological writer who clearly expounds the concept of private property which has held sway without substantial change in the Church until the present time. This statement does not apply to the doctrine of receiving interest on money. In respect to this doctrine Clement is in perfect accord with all other early Christians both before and after himself. Indeed he specifically states that the Mosaic prohibition against taking interest from one's brother extends in the case of a Christian to all mankind. But in regard to all other property institutions Clement's attitude is essentially that of any modern Christian of generous disposition.

In all that Clement has to say about property, and the 'bulk' of his 'property passages' is as great as that of all previous Christian writers together, he speaks like a man on the defensive. Indeed there has come down to us no other Christian writing earlier than his time which presents his view, with the dubious exception of some passages in Hermas. The fact seems to be that while Clement is undoubtedly presenting an apologetic for the existing practice in the Church of his day, that practice was felt to be more or less open to attack in the light of certain scripture passages. Communism as an existential reality was gone by the time of Clement – whatever may have been the extent – probably a limited one – to which it had existed in the earlier ages. But while communism as a fact was dead, communism as an idea or ideal of Christian economy was not dead. Indeed Clement's views about the morality of wealth were so different from those of previous writers that a great modern economist⁶⁵ in treating of this subject ventures the opinion, though doubtfully, that the reason why Clement, alone among the great early theologians, was never canonized by the Church was that he ran counter to popular belief on this subject. This opinion is probably erroneous. Clement's theological opinions have a semi-Gnostic tinge quite sufficient to explain the absence of his name from the calendar of saints.

Clement justifies the institution of private property. He justifies, on the highest ethical and philosophical principles, the possession by Christians of even the most enormous wealth. His apologetic is not an original one. He borrows it bodily from Plato. Indeed he quotes Plato verbatim, invocation to Pan and the other heathen gods included.⁶⁶ The originality lies in applying this Platonic doctrine to the exposition of Christian scripture. Clement's method is strictly that of Biblical exegesis. In the well known sermon or essay on: "Who is the Rich Man that shall be saved" he takes up practically all of the scriptural passages which seem opposed to the institutions of private property and explains them in so modern a spirit that the whole sermon might be delivered today in any ordinary Church and would be readily accepted as sound and reliable doctrine. His thesis is that wealth or poverty are matters in themselves indifferent. That riches are not to be bodily gotten rid of, but are to be wisely conserved and treated as a stewardship intrusted to the owner by God. That charity to the poor should be in proportion to one's wealth and that a right use of wealth will secure salvation to the upright Christian even though he possesses great riches all his life and leaves them to his heirs. The wealth that is dangerous to the soul is not physical possessions, but spiritual qualities of greed and avarice.

His views can be best expressed by himself. We give two characteristic passages from the sermon above referred to.⁶⁷ "Rich men that shall with difficulty enter into the kingdom, is to be apprehended in a scholarly way, not awkwardly, or rustically, or carnally. For if the expression is used thus, salvation does not depend upon external things, whether they be many or few, small or great, or illustrious or obscure or esteemed or disesteemed; but on the virtue of the soul, on faith and hope and love and brotherliness, and knowledge, and meekness and humility and truth the reward of which is salvation." "Sell thy possessions. What is this? He does not, as some off hand conceive, bid him throw away the substance he possesses and abandon his property; but he bids him banish from his soul his notions about wealth, his excitement and morbid feeling about it, the anxieties, which are the thorns of existence which choke the seed of life. And what peculiar thing is it that the new creature, the Son of God intimates and teaches? It is not the outward act which others have done, but something else indicated by it, greater, more godlike, more perfect, the stripping off of the passions from the soul itself and from the disposition, and the cutting up by the roots and casting out of what is alien to the mind." "One, after ridding himself of the burden of wealth, may none the less have still the lust and desire for money innate and living; and may have abandoned the use of it, but being at once destitute of and desiring what he spent may doubly grieve both on account of the absence of attendance and the presence of regret."⁶⁸

We have now come to the beginning of what is in many respects the most interesting period in the history of property concepts. It is a period in which everything is upside down and wrong end to. In that strange age we find a famous archbishop, one of the world's noblest orators, a man of the most spotless integrity and the most saintly life, publicly preaching in the foremost pulpit of Christendom doctrines of property, the implications of which, the most hardened criminal would scarcely venture to breathe to a gang of thieves.⁶⁹ We find the most learned scholar of the century, in the weightiest expositions of Christian Scripture, penning the most powerful apologetic of anarchy that is to be found in the literature of the world.⁷⁰ We find one of the greatest of the popes, a man whose genius as a statesman will go down to the latest ages of history, setting forth in a manual for the instruction of Christian bishops, property concepts more radical than those of the fiercest Jacobins in the bloodiest period of the Terror.⁷¹

Stranger still, these incredible performances are the strongest proofs of the wisdom and piety of the men responsible for them. These men are today honored as the saviors of civilized religion and their images in bronze and marble and painted glass adorn the proudest temples of the most conservative denominations of Christians. The strange history of these famous men: Athanasius, the two Gregories, Basil and Chrysostom in the East; Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory in the West, lies outside the limits of our study. But the explanation of their desperate and uncompromising communism can be given in a word. It was the communism of crisis: the communism of shipwrecked sailors forced to trust their lives to a frail lifeboat with an insufficient supply of provisions. These great Christian scholars, enriched by all the accumulated culture of their civilization, saw that culture falling into ruin all around them; they felt the foundations of that civilization trembling beneath their feet. To vary the figure, they beheld the rising tide of ignorance and barbarism rapidly engulfing the world and with desperate haste they set to work rebuilding and strengthening the ark of the Church that in it, religion, and so much of civilization as possible, might be saved till the flood subsided. Their task, perhaps the most important and most urgent, that men have ever had to perform, was of such a nature that they cared not what they wrecked in order to accomplish it. They ripped up the floor of the bridal chamber for timber and took the doors of the bank-safe for iron.

These rhetorical figures are violent; but they are less violent than the reality they are intended to express. Monasticism was the last desperate hope of civilized Christianity and these men knew it. To establish monasticism they degraded the sanctity of marriage and denounced the sacredness of property. They conferred the most sacred honors upon the lowliest drudgery;⁷² they turned princes into plowmen and nobles into breakers of the soil. Some historians, judging them by the different standards of a later age, have pronounced them fanatics led astray by vulgar superstition. But judged by the needs of their own age, judged by the inestimable services rendered to the world by the monastic system they instituted, they are entitled to a place far up in the list of the wisest and the ablest of the human kind.

Sketchy and imperfect as the above study necessarily is, it nevertheless gives the primary facts which are essential to an understanding of the important part played by property concepts and property institutions in the transformation of early Christianity from a predominantly eschatological to a practically socialized movement.

We have seen,⁷³ that the earliest generations of Christians took over from contemporary Judaism a strongly Chiliastic eschatology. The logical consequence of such an eschatology is an indifference to, or undervaluation of, the existing social arrangements including the property concepts and institutions. One form easily taken by this indifference and undervaluation is that of practical communism. We accordingly find in the Acts and in such early writings as the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas a distinctly communistic theory and the traces of more or less effort to put this theory into some degree of practical effect. Chiliasm and communism in these writers go together naturally.

Pari passu with this logical, communistic Chiliasm we can trace the development of an illogical, individualistic Chiliasm in St. Paul, Clement of Rome and Hermas. It is already manifest even at this early stage, that the weight of influence and power of control in the Christian societies is on the side of the individualists. This is due to two causes. In the first place the communists among the Christians worked under a great handicap. The underlying economic institutions of society can indeed be changed. But they can be changed – on any considerable scale – only very slowly and by enormous effort. At any attempt to change them a thousand interested and determined antagonists at once arise. It is not too much to say that had all Christians insisted upon communism as an essential element of the Christian faith and practice, Christianity in the Roman world could never have developed into anything more than an unimportant sect. The very fact that Christianity spread as rapidly as it did in the first century of its existence is proof that the communists in the Church made very little headway. It was hard enough to combat pagan religion and philosophy. Had the property institutions been attacked also, the primary religious objects would have been lost sight of in the conflict.

In the second place the more practical minded Christian leaders would be antagonistic to a doctrine and practice which alienated many persons who might otherwise be won to the Church, and practically minded persons outside the Church regarded the individualists with more favor and were more easily influenced by them to become Christians themselves. The early importance attained by the Church of Rome is to be largely ascribed to the predominance in its councils of such practical persons.⁷⁴ Communism had no hold there at all and Chiliasm was never allowed to interfere with the practical workings of society.

By the time of Justin the three concepts; Chiliasm, Communism, and Individualism had arrived at a modus vivendi. According to this arrangement Chiliasm and Communism held sway as theories while individualism ruled in the world of fact. This agreement proved very satisfactory and for more than half a century was the the accepted thing. It is seen in full force in Tertullian.

There is a general tendency, due to the natural effects of use and disuse, for theories which do not correspond to realities to become discredited, even as theories. Conversely realities which at first lack theoretical justification tend to accumulate such justification with the lapse of time. It is therefore not surprising to find by the beginning of the Third Century, a movement to discard theoretical Chiliasm and communism and to validate by theoretical apologetic the actually existing individualism. These two processes in the nature of the case are closely connected with one another and it is not by mere chance that they find a common exponent in Clement of Alexandria. That famous opponent of Chiliasm is equally well known as the justifier of an extreme individualism. He greatly facilitated the spread of Christian theology by liberating it from the burden of an eschatological theory increasingly hard to reconcile with reality and also by bringing the economic teachings of Christianity into conformity with current practice. As noted above, there was one economic doctrine which neither he nor any other early Christian teacher ever attempted to reconcile with the facts, and it is undoubtedly true that the doctrine of the sinfulness of interest was alike detrimental to the spread of Christianity and to the general well being of society as it then existed. The reasons why this particular reality i.e., interest on money, was so slow in receiving its theoretical justification are numerous. The only ones that need concern us here are that the opposition to be overcome in this case was much more formidable than in the cases of Chiliasm and communism and the fact that this inconsistency on the part of the Christians did not in reality offer any very serious obstacle to the growth of the Church. Communism had no great body of Biblical authority at its back. There are indeed some texts in its favor but there are plenty of an opposite nature. The doctrine had no great popular prejudice in its favor. In addition it was insuperably difficult of realization in fact. It was otherwise with interest. The theoretical prejudice against interest was almost as great among the Jews and Pagans as among the Christians themselves. The Scriptures were unequivocal in their denunciation of it. Furthermore the correlative institutions of rent and profit offered so many opportunities to disguise the fact of interest that it was exceedingly easy to retain the theoretical opposition without ceasing the actual practice. Although Clement's condemnation of interest was probably merely an inherited prejudice it is by no means impossible that he considered that an attempt to justify it would endanger his defense of the more fundamental institution of private property. At any rate his course can be defended as a practical one under the circumstances. Whatever may be said of its consistency, the Christian custom of condemning the theory and winking at the practice of interest worked well. The inconsistency which seems so glaring to us, was probably very largely unperceived by the ancient pagans – they had exactly the same inconsistency themselves.

In regard to Chiliasm and property, practically the same attitude prevailed. It worked indeed even more easily. In the West there seems to have been a considerable Chiliastic tradition. So long as this tradition did not result in any practices which interfered with the actual progress of the Church, the Fathers were content to let it alone. It did not, till at least the Third Century, hinder the acceptance of Christian doctrine by the pagans and may even have aided the process among some of the lower classes. Its long survival can be taken as sure proof that it did not effect either the development of the hierarchy or the institution of property.

As regards property of man in man, the superior power of the Christian religion to keep slaves in subjection accounts in no small measure for its relatively rapid rise to power in the ancient world. The pagan religion was inferior in usefulness to the Christian religion because it could not keep the slave contented with his position. The next world in the pagan theology was only a worse copy of this world. Christianity, in glaring contrast to paganism, proclaimed that the despised and afflicted were to sit on golden thrones in the next life. The more they were exploited in this life, the brighter their crown in the next one. The pagan slave was dangerous. The whole pre-Christian literature of Classical antiquity shows the ever present fear of a servile outbreak. There were good grounds for that fear. Outbreaks were frequent and of a most ferocious character. On more than one occasion they threatened the very existence of the ancient civilization. Christianity was able to make the slave contented to be a slave. It was economically an enormous advance over paganism. A master whose slaves were Christians was not afraid of being murdered by them. Not only was the master's life secure, his property was secure also. The pagan slaves were notorious thieves. The Christian slave did not rob his master. These facts gave Christianity an enormous leverage in its efforts to force its way into social recognition. It went far toward securing a favorable disposition toward the new religion on the part of the influential, wealthy, and conservative elements in the population.

Into the general economic changes which began to operate toward the end of our period it is not our purpose to enter, but it is worth notice that the efforts made by the Church to save itself in the general ruin which overtook the ancient world, chiefly the institution of monasticism, were such as to secure more firmly than ever the hold of the Church upon society. The Church rapidly became an economic factor of the first importance. The only secure basis of lasting social influence is economic. Christianity by teaching the virtues of honesty, frugality, simplicity, and charity laid the foundations of her subsequent triumph, and when she had great societies of men and women working hard and living plainly and adding all their accumulations to institutions belonging to the Church and directly under the supervision and control of the ecclesiastical authority, the Church paved the way for her subsequent domination of the civil government. Monastic communism, being economically superior to Chiliastic Communism, inevitably superseded it.