CHAPTER II THE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS (a) THE OLD TESTAMENT

IF it is from Greece and Rome that Western Europe in large measure derives its ideas with regard to literature, art, philosophy, politics and much more, it is from the Jews and from Christianity that we derive our religion and our morality. Nor is it necessary to differentiate between these two sources: Christianity is the completion of Judaism. Christ professedly came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it¹; and in a passage which subsequently played a great part in the controversies with which we are concerned—the incident of the young man who had great possessions—he specifically pointed back to the Ten Commandments, as the foundation of all good behaviour and indeed as the key to eternal life.² On one side, and that doubtless the most important, the roots of our thoughts on that most difficult problem of how men should live together and behave towards each other are deeply intertwined with the Mosaic Law.

It is therefore not surprising that gallant attempts should have been made to represent Moses in the guise of a primitive socialist law-giver, and to find in the Gospels the seeds of later socialist thought. On all these matters a layman may but speak as a layman, timorously and tentatively; and assuredly no one who could avoid it would willingly allow himself to become entangled in the entangling entanglements of the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Yet even a layman may perhaps, with reasonable safety, note certain points. In the first place, the Mosaic Code, however it may be viewed, is clearly a monument apart in the history of the world's legislation. Waiving the details which may frequently appear to the modern eye to be concerned with trumpery details, the underlying spirit (which alone matters) is clear and obvious, and, having regard to what the Jews thought of themselves, is readily explicable. The Jews in a very strict sense regarded themselves as the children of one God. This relationship necessarily implied brotherhood; and to a large extent the purpose of the Mosaic Law was to maintain the Jewish people as one family. All should be linked together by a sense of common brotherhood.³ It was not, however, the brotherhood of children, living under the same roof and still eating out of the common pot; it was rather the brotherhood of grown men who have left the old home, each living his own life, yet remembering and acknowledging the claim each has on the other by reason of the past they have shared together. Even with this slight reservation, it may, however, be doubted whether such a prevailing sense of brotherhood could have existed, apart from the unifying conviction that they were a holy people unto the Lord, chosen to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth. Among other things, their profound consciousness of spiritual superiority tended to unite them, and make them as brothers.

Yet this ‘brotherhood,’ which it was the final purpose of the Mosaic Code to produce, in no way leads to anything suggestive of the desirability of communism, or of the reprehensibility of private possessions or of private enterprise. On the contrary, the sacredness of private property is an underlying assumption throughout. Probably the Ten Commandments have enjoyed in human history a somewhat unmerited pre-eminence; they represent in the main the negative side of well-doing which consists in avoiding evil-doing. Yet if we take such a commandment as the eighth (on the Anglo-Saxon enumeration), it is obvious (with all respect to Proudhon, who gave a pleasingly revised translation) that stealing necessarily implies the existence of property that may be stolen. ‘Respect the property of others’ is not merely the plain sense of the commandment: it is a precept which in a multitude of forms and in a multitude of applications is perpetually recurring in the books of the law. Still remaining within the confines of the Ten Commandments, it is significant that this respect for the property of others is carried so far, that the mere casting of covetous eyes on our neighbour's ass is ranked with the fundamental sins.

When we turn to the confused mass of detailed regulations, the outstanding feature is found in the manifold provision made for the prevention and relief of poverty, for the humane treatment of debtors, for the continuance to each of his property, and, where necessary, for the periodic restitution of property. In a very real sense each man was made his brother's keeper; on each rested the responsibility of seeing that his brother did not suffer want. It may be a trivial matter and of little immediate application to most of us, but it is worth while turning up the 22nd chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy and reading the first four verses, which impose on every one the obligation of taking in, caring for, housing and feeding his neighbour's errant ox, ass or sheep, should it happen in its wanderings to come his way. The spirit of this far transcends mere Scotland Yard regulations. The relief of the poor is put upon each as a duty: ‘Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.’¹ So also the law with regard to debtors and the taking of pledges was hedged round with restrictions and conditions designed to secure the humane treatment of those in distress: ‘No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man's life to pledge.’ ¹ That a worker's distress should not be made the occasion of separating him from his tools indicates the highest economic wisdom. Jesus, the son of Sirach, puts the same point, even more tersely: ‘He that taketh away his neighbour's living slayeth him.’² More odd is the stipulation that if a neighbour's raiment be pledged, it should be returned before sundown ³—lest the poor wretch should shiver in the night. Perhaps it is not wholly irrelevant to note that the Mosaic Law throughout also shows a most unusual concern for the humane treatment of animals.

In addition, there was what has come to be known comprehensively as ‘The Law of the Corner’—a provision which is surely unique in the world's legislation. It derives its title from the injunction: ‘When ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field... thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger’; but it had different interpretations as applied to corn, vineyards and olive trees, and it regulated the disposal of the gleanings, the fallen grapes and something which is delightfully called ‘that-which-is-left-through-forgetfulness.’ It is a curious device to make provision for the poor by inciting all and sundry to be somewhat carefully careless in the ordinary affairs of life, the wastage (if it may be so called) being used as a nucleus for poor relief. ⁴

It remains merely to point to two institutions whose obvious intention was to prevent the poor from sinking, and to restore every one to his own. The first was the ‘release,’ a cancellation of debts at the end of every seventh year,⁵ to which, of course, there are classical analogies, though doubtless not, as here, conceived as part of a longterm plan. In addition there is the consecration of the fiftieth year as a year of Jubile, the distinctive feature of which, for our purpose, was that ‘in the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession.’¹ What was the relationship, if any, between the year of release and the year of Jubile, whether they were ever effectively enforced, whether (in view of the apparent redundancy of one or other of these provisions) they represent the aspirations of different periods of Jewish history are questions which are easily asked.

Enough has been said to indicate the extent of the ‘socialism’ sometimes attributed to the Mosaic dispensation. The Jewish State was, rather oddly, one in which provision for the poor was more or less the fundamental act of association: it was a State founded on a Poor Law. And the poor were to be succoured by a universal prevalence of benevolence, of ‘charity,’ in the good sense which that word bore before it suffered devaluation. In other respects, however, it is rather a world of rampant individualism, where regard for the property and rights of others is inculcated in a thousand ways.

Needless to say, Israel did not live up to its high professions. It is the recurring theme of most of, if not all, the prophets, who also, by the ingenuous, have been roped into the socialist fold. The prophets were indeed valorous champions of the poor—of whom there ought to have been none, had the Mosaic Law been observed. They were stern in their condemnation of the tyrannous iniquity of the rich in grinding the faces of the poor, and in invoking the judgment pf God on those that join house to house, that lay field to field till there be no place. But again the prophets were indignant rather than constructive, or at least they were not constructive with regard to the management of the affairs of this world. With unequalled eloquence they denounced unrighteousness and wickedness, luxury and the abuse of wealth. They called men to repentance. The regeneration they sought was, however, a spiritual regeneration. Beyond this they did not go; nor would they have regarded it as within their province to do so. When, as in Isaiah, there is an idealised vision of the future, it has been suggested ² that it is more in line with the anarchist dream of a world where all men are good and do good without earthly or political constraint.

(b) THE ESSENES

The ancient Jewish world does, however, present one example of an apparently successful communistic way of life, extending over a considerable period of time. The Essenes have been described as the great enigma of Hebrew history and, doubtless because of the fascination of the enigmatic, a considerable literature has gathered round them. Seldom have scholars built so much on so little. The ordinary reader will find all he needs to know, and in a sense all there is to be known, in certain pages in Josephus and in Philo. Porphyry, who sometimes figures as a leading authority, is content to reproduce all that Josephus says, with that innocent and honest tendency to plagiarism which former and less sophisticated ages took as a matter of course.¹ Pliny likewise has a few words about the Essenes, as befits a man whose net nothing escapes.²

The Essenes, while unmistakably Jews and in the Jewish tradition, nevertheless represent a curious infusion of asceticism which, following a not uncommon sequence, tends towards communism. How the Essenes came to be, what influences went to their making—for that matter, how they ceased to be—are questions to which the experts can give the enquirer no assured answer. In fact, no one quite knows what the word ‘Essenes’ may mean: the interpretations offered are many and varied. Rather oddly, there is no mention of a founder. In the matter of their more peculiar characteristics, some speak of Pythagorean influences; some, groping further east, invoke Buddhist doctrine; one of their ritual observances embodies an obvious reminiscence of sun-worship. They regarded the soul as entangled in the prison-house of the body, and their aim was to obtain release from the bonds of the flesh. Holiness, if not dependent upon, was at least thought to be materially stimulated by under-nutrition.

The accounts given by Philo and Josephus, if combined, give a fairly complete picture of a communism which in certain respects has unique features. In numbers the Essenes were never anything but a feeble folk, some four thousand in all at any time, and they lived for the most part in the villages of the western shores of the Dead Sea. The most puzzling and unusual feature in their system of religious communism is, however, that they did not withdraw from the rest of the world. They continued to engage in ordinary secular occupations, working on the land or at their trade, like those around them. They had their houses scattered about among the other houses in the villages where they lived. Nor, although the Essenes were preponderatingly to be found in the area indicated, were they in any way restricted either in their place of habitation, or—generally speaking—in their occupation. Some Essenes lived in Jerusalem; some distinguished themselves as leaders in the war against Rome.

But, inside these rather vague frontiers, the Essenes professed to practise complete communism. On being admitted after a rigorous novitiate extending over three years, they surrendered all their possessions to the community. ‘In no other community,’ says Philo, ‘can we find the custom of sharing roof, life and board more firmly established in actual practice.’ Further, ‘all the wages which they earn in the day's work they do not keep as their private property, but throw them into the common stock and allow the benefit thus accruing to be shared by those who wish to use it.’ Consequently, and it is now Josephus who speaks, ‘their community of goods is truly admirable; you will not find one among them distinguished by greater opulence than another.’

Communism demands the elimination of the individual home, and this again demands the extinction of the individual wife. This may be achieved either by community of wives (as in many Utopias and in certain extreme and heretical sects), or it may be achieved by pretending that women do not exist. As was natural in an ascetic sect, the second course was that adopted by the Essenes, though with some hesitations. They ‘despised’ marriage; but they did not on principle condemn it or, apparently, forbid it. They merely desired to avoid what Mr. Thomas Taylor, in translating Porphyry, called the ‘lasciviousness of women.’ It is almost a Proudhonian intuition. Josephus somewhat unnecessarily adds that the Essenes were ‘persuaded that none of the sex keeps her plighted troth to one man.’ The community or sect (or whatever it may be called) had thus perforce to be perpetually recruited from outside. On the one hand they received the children of other people, and from a tender age moulded them after their own fashion; on the other hand (the phrase is Pliny's) they received those driven to them through vitae paenitentia, the weariness of life. Pliny's brief reference adds nothing to our knowledge; it is chiefly interesting because it is written (or so it may seem to some) in a strain slightly suggestive of satirical scepticism. He describes them as a gens sola et in toto orbe praeter ceteras mira—a unique tribe, remarkable beyond all others in the world; and he goes on to add that this ‘gens’ lives sine ulla femina... socia palmarum—with never a woman, and with palm trees for company. Thus through thousands of ages, a race, in which no one is born, lives on for ever. It is difficult to resist the impression that here at least Pliny did not believe all he was told.

The metaphysical and religious beliefs of the Essenes do not concern us here, important as they may be elsewhere. Assuming that the accounts given by Philo and Plutarch are fairly reliable in their main outlines—and the best authorities agree that they may be so accepted—the Essenes are of great significance in revealing something like a state of communism, enduring for a considerable period of time, with the added peculiarity that they intermingled curiously with the rest of the population. In themselves they were a special corps of the ultra-pious, more strict even than the strictest of the other Jews in their observance of the Sabbath. They were a moral élite, and they so regarded themselves; and it is fairly clear that in their make-up they had not a little of that spiritual pride and exclusiveness for which the Pharisees (probably unjustly) have become proverbial. In the stream of influences that go to make up the world's history, the Essenes may, without too much imagination, be assigned a somewhat focal place. It is probable that John the Baptist had affiliations, if not with the main body of the Essenes, then at any rate with some of the other less known and somewhat similar sects, which had Essenian characteristics.¹ Also, as we shall see presently, it is extremely probable that Luke's account of the communism in the primitive Church at Jerusalem, if not in fact true of Jerusalem, was a reasonably correct account of the communism of the Essenes; and it is abundantly clear that this passage, based on and infused with memories of the Essenes, was the inspiration of that line of thought in early Christianity which tended towards communism.

(c) THE NEW TESTAMENT

Thomas More represents his Utopians, who were naturally favourable to the community of goods, as eagerly embracing Christianity, ‘since they perceived that Christ and his followers lived by that rule.’ How far there is an element of socialism in the teaching of the Gospels and in the account of Christian beginnings in the Acts of the Apostles is a question that has given rise to prolonged controversy. At the one extreme are Sudre and Thonissen, devout men, writing at a time when socialism and communism were looked upon as the authentic mark of the Beast; and to them the spirit and the letter of the New Testament alike give no support to anything so tainted. At the other extreme (to take widely different examples) there are such writers as Cabet and Mr. Beer to whom primitive Christianity means nothing if it does not mean socialism. The question is probably very largely irrelevant in itself; in any case it is not quite so simple as either of these schools would maintain. It has been seen that the Mosaic Law, while prescribing alms and charity, contained nothing that was communistic or hostile to property. Nor is there in the Old Testament anything that is characteristically ascetic. Asceticism, as Adler suggests (probably rightly), filtered in from the East; and the results of the ascetic infusion may be seen in the Essenes. As the same writer acutely observes, asceticism may lead to one of two consequences. It may lead to the renunciation of wealth and comfort, and to the glorification of poverty as in itself a holy state, a sign of virtue. Along this line we have the begging friars and all those who hope to attain blessedness in another world by suffering hunger and self-castigation in this. But the impulse to asceticism may also be satisfied by stopping short at the renunciation of private property, each for himself. This line will lead to the formation of some sort of communistic body, composed of men who have severally renounced the world and who each individually possesses nothing; but the community to which they belong need be in no wise destitute.

In approaching the teaching of the New Testament in these matters, the first point to note is that, whatever may have happened later under various influences, there is no suggestion of asceticism in the earliest enunciation of Christianity. The Son of Man came eating and drinking: contrasting him with John the Baptist, who probably reflected Essene influences, his enemies even derided him as a man gluttonous and a winebibber. In the Gospels themselves it would be difficult to find any passages suggesting that life ought to be a vale of woe, and that we should go out of our way to make ourselves and others unhappy. It is probably equally true to say that so far as the words of Christ are concerned, comparing the different gospels where there is a suggestion of discrepancy, there is nothing anywhere to suggest any condemnation of private property or the structure of society which goes with private property. In large measure he represented the Mosaic Law—which professedly he came to fulfil—carried forward. He taught charity; he emphasised alms-giving as a way to divine favour; he condemned covetousness. Even the acknowledgment that riches may prove a stumbling-block on the way to the Kingdom of God is uttered as a warning rather than as a condemnation. The crucial passage on the subject is the account given of the young man who had great possessions—later the text of the discourse by Clement of Alexandria which probably decided the attitude of the Church on the matter. In view of the large place which this narrative occupies in later discussions of social problems, it may not be unprofitable to examine it with some minuteness.¹ Three points are of special significance. Firstly, in answer to the rich young man's question as to what he must do to inherit eternal life, Christ's original answer is a brief enumeration of the Ten Commandments. The enquirer is in fact referred back to the traditional Mosaic Law, which, as we have seen, involved respect for the property of others. ‘Do not steal: defraud not,’ as Mark puts it. Secondly, the further and stricter counsel is given only because the young man, protesting that he has kept the commandments from his youth up, insistently presses for something more. It is then that Christ counsels him to sell whatever he has and give to the poor; but if we follow St. Matthew, this instruction is prefaced by the significant words, ‘If thou wilt be perfect.’ In short there is here the familiar distinction between a precept binding on all, and a counsel of perfection imparted to some and valid in certain circumstances. The third point arises from the account given by St. Mark, in the comment of Christ after the young man had gone away ‘grieved,’ where there is what at first sight appears a curious repetition. ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God,’ are Christ's first words to his disciples; and when they were astonished, the difficulties of the rich are restated more guardedly with a slight verbal modification, which, however, profoundly affects the meaning of the phrase. The restatement takes this form: ‘how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God.’ This, it will be observed, no longer applies merely to the rich, but to all, rich or poor, who put their confidence in the things of this world.

The truth is, or so at least it would seem to some, that there is somehow an element of inappropriateness in microscopically examining the words of Christ in order to find therein an answer to a question in which he was not greatly interested. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness’: this, if one were compelled to choose one text for the purpose, probably best expresses the kernel of Christ's teaching. But it implies, above all in its context, that in the searching light of this exhortation, all other problems fade into insignificance. The true position has been admirably expressed by a writer quoted by Thonissen:

L'Évangile ne contient pas un mot qu'on puisse tourner contre la propriété; il ne s'élève pas une fois contre les prétendues injustices de l'ordre social; il ne représente pas les riches comme des oppresseurs ni les pauvres comme des opprimés; il se place au-dessus de ces distinctions sans les attaquer, en conseillant aux uns la résignation, aux autres le sacrifice, à tous l'abnégation d'eux-mêmes, la charité et l'amour.¹

Il se place au-dessus de ces distinctions sans les attaquer: it is probably as just an estimate as it is possible to arrive at in the matter. Even though the lecture containing this phrase dates from 1848, and derives from a forgotten Jew who precariously survives in a quotation in the pages of Thonissen, the words are worthy of perpetuation.

At the same time it is idle to deny, and it is only fair to recognise, that there were mingled with the origins of Christianity certain communistic aspirations, deriving probably from the Essenes, later colouring the day-dreams of the Christian Fathers in their unguarded moments, and erupting periodically as ‘heresies’ in the first centuries. Among the gospel-writers it is Luke who represents this ‘left wing.’ It is extraordinarily interesting, as well as extremely instructive as an example of the art of editing, to compare the version of the Sermon on the Mount given by Matthew with the much more summarised version in the gospel of St. Luke.²

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ says St. Matthew; ‘blessed be ye poor,’ says St. Luke in a conciser phrase.¹ ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,’ says St. Matthew; ‘blessed are ye that hunger now,’ says St. Luke. The abbreviating blue pencil converts a spiritual hunger into the pangs of bodily need. If one cared to be fanciful, one might note that Luke slips in (what is not in Matthew) a blessing ‘when men shall separate you from their company’—as though Marx and the class war were already pestering to be born. But without being fanciful, it is significant that in Luke the so-called beatitudes are followed by curses and objurgations—against the rich for being rich: ‘Woe unto you that are rich!... Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.’ This, one feels somehow, is Luke, rather than Christ. It is, on the economic plane and in terms of the physical belly, a denunciation of the full because they are full; a blessing on the empty because they are empty.²

It is also to Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, that we owe that idyllic account of the early days of the Church at Jerusalem, to which appeal has so frequently been made in the subsequent unending discussion regarding riches and poverty. The passage in the fourth chapter of the Acts is among the most familiar in Scripture:

Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.³

It is a fairly typical picture of the golden age; yet to draw from this highly idealised and conventional description of a communism in use the inference that a system of communism prevailed among the early Christians is shown to be erroneous by Luke's own narrative in the passage immediately following. For in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, which is a pendent to this account of primitive communism, it is clear beyond all question that Ananias, having a house, was free to sell or not to sell as he chose; having sold it, he was free to bring the money or retain it for his own use. He was not free to pretend that what he brought was the whole price obtained for the house, when in fact it was not. It is fairly clear that what prevailed at Jerusalem was not in any sense a system of communism: it was rather—as was perhaps natural among the members of a new and enthusiastic movement—a condition of unrestrained and voluntary sharing, in which all, in the spirit of the Mosaic dispensation, willingly and gladly helped their neighbours in need. That there was in fact no communism among the early Christian Churches is amply proved by the epistles of St. Paul. Mixed up with much theological doctrine and other things, St. Paul's letters also have, in innumerable passages, the character of begging letters, of appeals for charity. Doubtless they are written in a more impeccable English than most appeals for contributions, but appeals for contributions they nevertheless are—on behalf of distressed Churches. Moreover, it is assumed that what may be ultimately given will be given by individuals and will be, in modern jargon, a ‘free-will offering’: ‘Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.’¹

Probably the truth of the matter is that the account of the communistic way of life in the Church at Jerusalem was, for Luke, something of a Sorelian myth. His gospel reveals him as the leveller among the apostles; the passage in the fourth chapter of the Acts, after the manner of myths, served as a rallying cry to all the later egalitarian sects. The account he wrote was, of course, not contemporary with the events described. Looking back through a haze of years, Luke saw at Jerusalem, in the abounding liberality and generosity of the first Christians, something that seemed a reflection of the myth that had been his inspiration; and accordingly he described his ideal golden age, even though within a few lines he was compelled to deny it.

(d) THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS: GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

When we turn to the early Christian Fathers and to their attitude to the problems of wealth, private property and community of goods, it is necessary to trim our course somewhat gingerly round the fringe of an engulfing whirlpool. In a discussion in which the Fathers in their totality may be allotted only one section in a chapter, they cannot expect to be represented by more than a mere random sample. On the general question this much may, however, be said. For at least a hundred years, and perhaps much longer, it has been found an entertaining pastime to bring together explosive dicta from the Fathers, showing their kinship with left-wing revolutionaries. Nor is it a difficult, or even an unamusing task, apart from the fact that the Fathers were in many cases so unconscionably voluminous. Round about 1850, Thonissen obviously found much enjoyment in tearing to shreds a forgotten M. Pelletan, who had compiled such a revolutionary anthology from the Fathers. In our own day, a confiding and unquestioning reader of Mr. Beer would very easily, as indeed he is meant to do, carry away the impression that the term ‘Christian Father’ merely represents the extreme left of left-wing socialism. On the other hand, Dr. George O'Brien,¹ with much sobriety and conscientious scholarship, has shown that the early teachers in the Church were consistently opposed to what we should now call ‘communistic doctrine.’ If an alien and an intruder in these fields of scholarship may venture to utter a two-fold word of warning, it would be, firstly, that when any apparently communistic expression of opinion is cited from one of the Fathers, enquiry should be made as to the context, not merely with a view to verifying whether a few words may not have disappeared from the beginning or end of the quotation, but also to ascertain how the quotation is related to the general argument, assuming that there is one; and secondly, such an isolated quotation should be checked against what the Father in question may have said elsewhere on the same subject. This can usually be done without undue labour by looking up the Index under ‘Wealth,’ ‘Property,’ ‘Riches’ or ‘Possessions.’ If this course be adopted, the judgment of the dispassionate will almost certainly be with M. Thonissen and Dr. O'Brien, rather than with the forgotten Pelletan and Mr. Beer.

Dr. O'Brien very properly indicates certain considerations which ought to be borne in mind in any attempt to assess the true meaning of certain of the apparently more extreme utterances of the Fathers; for indubitably certain isolated expressions may appear to modern ears to bear a revolutionary significance, even if these may be belied by adjacent pronouncements. Three of the points which tend to a frequent misunderstanding of isolated passages may be indicated. There is firstly the altogether extraordinary importance attached to alms-giving in the Old and the New Testaments, and this is quite naturally carried forward to the Christian Fathers. In an age which is increasingly putting its hope of salvation in an indefinite extension of Social Insurance, it is perhaps difficult for us to realise just how fundamental a virtue alms-giving was assumed to be. That almsgiving was the pathway to salvation; that the rich man should open his hand liberally, and regard his wealth as a trust to be used for others; that the rich, in a picturesque phrase, were the dispensers of the treasure of the poor—these were all commonplace propositions in the early days of Christianity. But it is obvious that universal giving is not far removed from universal sharing; and it is accordingly not surprising that at times some of the Fathers, not having temperamentally the timorous caution of a civil servant skilled in balanced drafting, should say something that probably appears to mean more than was intended.

A second influence which at times led the Christian Fathers to express a non-communist thought in communist phraseology may be found in the peculiar horror with which the Scriptures regarded the discontented man. Covetousness, no less than murder or adultery, strikes at the framework of society. The greedy, avaricious man who seeks gain is a fool, with a wrong sense of values. He loves this present world, and thus, like Demas, he fails in the supreme test. That we should be contented with what we have is a pervading thought throughout the New Testament. It is one of the boasts of the somewhat boastful Paul: ‘I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.’ It is therefore only in the tradition of the prophets and the New Testament that the Fathers should denounce those who make the acquisition of gain the chief end of life; still more those who acquire gain by wrongful and tyrannical means. But again denunciation of the love of wealth may at times appear to imply denunciation of wealth itself; for the impassioned preacher it is a fine line of division that must be observed. It is significant and illustrative to note with what comparative unanimity the Pauline dictum that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ has passed into popular currency in the abridged and quite non-Pauline form that it is money itself that constitutes this root.

The third and most serious cause of misunderstanding of certain of the sayings of the Fathers is more subtle, and indirectly comes from classical sources in the conception of natural law, and the distinction between natural law and positive law. Let us cast aside refinements which vary from the Stoics to the Physiocrats (and beyond). Broadly, natural law reflects the mind and intention of the Creator when he set this globe spinning like a fretful midge and peopled it with men made in his own image. And in this happy state, this Eden, had it but endured, all men would have been equal; there would have been no ‘mine’ and ‘thine’; there would have been communism. Under natural law, God gave all things to all men, to be enjoyed in common; and such would be the position, could we but get back to things as they were ‘when they left the hands of the Creator’—in a phrase beloved of Mably in the eighteenth century.

Much, however, has happened since then. We are no longer concerned with man in his innocence, but with fallen man whose heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And for fallen man something more than natural law is required; he needs, for his restraint, positive law, civil law, civil administration and institutions, all of which would have been unnecessary had he remained in a state of innocence. Thus, under positive law, much may be added to natural law—in a sense modifying it to meet the frailty of man. Property may have to be recognised, a coercive State created and much more. Moreover, what is ordained under positive law is not in itself evil, or worthy of condemnation. These things may indirectly spring from man's sin, but they are devised as a remedy against further sin.¹ It will be seen, therefore, in what sense the Fathers, without condemning property, could yet hold that property is occasioned by, and is the result of, man's evil-doing. When they appear to condemn property, it is frequently the result of an unduly elliptical method of expression. At somewhat greater length they might have said that the recognition of property is a necessary provision in positive law, and that positive law has been rendered necessary because of the hardness of man's heart, which, unfortunately, must be accepted as a permanent hypothesis of the sinful world in which we now live. The Fathers had periodically a nostalgic longing for the world as it might have been under ‘natural law’; and in such a mood they describe how happy we would be if we could share all things, or live according to Luke's picture (true or imagined) of the early Church at Jerusalem. But in general, it is but a dream dependent on a hypothetical and unrealisable ‘if,’ rather than a concrete proposal calling for ‘active consideration.’

(e) CERTAIN CHRISTIAN FATHERS

Readers who have accepted the foregoing section without demur may perhaps, without great loss, skip the present section. For it is essentially in the nature of an expanded footnote, not perhaps free from a certain amount of repetition. Having stated in general terms the position of the Christian Fathers, it may be as well to give somewhat more concrete form to what has been said, by reference to some of the more frequently quoted passages, where the Fathers are assumed to reveal a communistic tinge. A mere handful of Fathers must suffice; but among these, for reasons which will be apparent presently, Clement of Alexandria must be included. The others must of necessity be a somewhat random selection, cited somewhat summarily to confirm and exemplify the general conclusions of the last section. As, however, they are in substantial agreement, no apology is needed for curtailing the procession of Fathers, or (apart from Clement of Alexandria) reducing to a minimum the time each is allowed to testify.

Clement of Alexandria is here the chief witness, and indeed he occupies a place of peculiar importance in this long controversy. In the main his attitude is the traditional attitude of the early Church; he holds that riches are a snare and a danger; that we must be on our guard against the love of riches; that they are to be used rightly, and that ultimately riches are a gift of God to be devoted, with a sense of responsibility, to promoting the good of others. In a rather quaint metaphor, he says that ‘wealth seems to me to be like a serpent, which will twist round the hand and bite; unless one knows how to lay hold of it without danger by the point of the tail’; and he goes on to say of riches that one must, ‘despising them, use them skilfully, so as to crush the creature by the charm of the word.’ ¹ Moreover, in a phrase which, though sometimes it is taken to mean more than it does, merely emphasises the misery of the miser and the blessedness of unrestrained liberality, he argues that ‘it is not he who has and keeps, but he who gives away that is rich; and it is giving away, not possession, which renders a man happy.’² Again, in a rather metaphysical argument, which is essentially the same as that underlying Wycliffe's Dominion of Grace, he reasons—as Ruskin might have done—that ‘good things are the property only of good men; and Christians are good.... Accordingly, good things are possessed by Christians alone.’ ³ Stated in this form, there is involved an obvious logical fallacy; in any case, the point is not developed. It is doubtful, however, whether St. Clement is here saying more than that good men alone know how to make a good use of good things, or even know which things are good.⁴

The importance of St. Clement, however, rests on the fact that he wrote a short treatise wholly devoted to the central issue in the question with which we are here concerned. This sometimes bears the title The Rich Man's Salvation, which is certainly more concise than the literal translation, Who is the Rich Man that is being Saved? The editor and translator of the Rich Man's Salvation in the Loeb series, writing from an English University, opines that it is too long to have been delivered as a sermon on any single occasion: but what do they know of sermons, who only England know? If it were indeed a sermon, then, if one may adapt the title of a frequently donated prize-volume to the young of two generations ago, it certainly deserves to be included among ‘The Fifteen Decisive Sermons of the World.’ For in some respects it is not too much to say that St. Clement's sermon represents one of the decisive landmarks of the world's history.

For the great miracle of Christianity, however the inexplicable be explained, lies in its ascent to power, authority and influence. It originated among the Jews, a race of outcasts, whose pride it nevertheless was to keep themselves to themselves, as becomes a chosen people; its first sponsors were for the most part men of mean origin, craftsmen and fishermen; the gospel, as it was formulated, was a gospel for the poor and downtrodden, counting as naught the powers and principalities of this world. How a movement with such unpromising beginnings came to conquer the Roman world and become the official religion of Europe, wielding a power above kings and emperors, remains something of a riddle, even after the ecclesiastical historians have said their last word. Christianity might very well have remained the faith of an obscure and languishing sect among the poorer Jews—at the most, something like the Essenes, or the Therapeuts, or the Hemerobaptists. The first great obstacle to be overcome lay in its Jewish limitations: the gospel must be extended to the Gentiles. The record of this great controversy runs through certain of the Pauline epistles.

The situation confronting St. Clement was somewhat different. He was stationed in one of the wealthiest cities of the ancient world. In the second century, Christianity, increasing in influence, was making an ever stronger appeal to those who were by no means poor and downtrodden, who could not with any show of reason be called weary and heavy-laden. Clement was in touch with the wealthy and the prosperous: in modern phraseology, he had a west-end congregation. But there was no use blinking the fact that the writers of the gospels (and Luke in particular) had not written at all encouragingly regarding the rich man's prospects of salvation. Above all, there was that incident of the rich young man and the comments attached to it. ‘Who then can be saved?’ the apostles had asked, and it was a question that might well continue to haunt the rich men of Alexandria. Nor had the poorer Christians taken kindly to their richer brethren. Clement implies that they had been behaving with ‘insolent rudeness’ to the rich. His mission, conscious or unconscious, was to make Christianity comprehensive: it should be not merely the religion of the poor, but the religion of all. It is unnecessary to emphasise the importance, for the future of Christianity and of Europe, of Clement's pronouncement which made it clear beyond all doubt that Christianity knew no frontiers determined by station or rank in life.

St. Clement's sermon is so illuminating as a considered statement of the attitude of the early Church towards worldly wealth, that a few points in the argument may be noted. The professed purpose of the discourse is to free the rich from their ‘unfounded despair,’ and to prove to them that they must not regard themselves as irrevocably damned in advance. The text is, inevitably, the story of the rich young man—in this case as given in the Gospel of St. Mark (x. 17–31)—and the problem is to rob of its sting the injunction to ‘sell whatever thou hast.’ The answer of St. Clement is that the words must not be taken literally. ‘It is no great or enviable thing,’ he says, ‘to be simply without riches.’ Nor has the injunction in this sense anything new in it: groping into Greek history, he cites various instances where men have renounced their wealth for one purpose or another. He will not admit that those who ‘lie along the roads in abject poverty’ are, for this reason alone, assured of God's blessedness. The real essence of the injunction is that we should

banish from the soul its opinions about riches, its attachment to them, its excessive desire, its morbid excitement over them, its anxious cares, the thorns of our earthly existence which choke the seed of the true life.¹

The fact that it is not the ‘visible act’ of parting with goods that matters is again shown by the fact that renunciation of wealth may in fact bring a man no nearer to God. A man who has unburdened himself of his property may be more anxiously minded than before, more occupied with the desire and longing for wealth than when he had it. The command laid upon us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked could not be obeyed, ‘if each of us were already in want of all these things.’ Consequently, advancing from this ‘alms argument’ which cuts little ice to-day (for no one would now admit that the continuance of poverty is necessary in order that alms-giving may flourish), he restates what is, despite deviation, probably the central doctrine of the early Church in these matters:

Wealth too is an instrument of the same kind. You can use it rightly; it ministers to righteousness. But if one use it wrongly, it is found to be a minister of wrong. For its nature is to minister, not to rule.²

What matters is not wealth, but the use of wealth. We must extirpate, not possessions which in themselves are neutral, but the passions of the soul which prevent the good use of wealth. Possessions are outward things, and salvation does not depend on outward things. So in the end we come back to liberality on an unbounded scale, with wealth as a trust to be administered with a sense of responsibility. The final statement does indeed speak of a ‘common stock’; but it is clear that individual responsibility remains. Christ, he says, ‘declares that all possessions are by nature unrighteous, when a man possesses them for personal advantage, as being entirely his own, and does not bring them into the common stock for those in need.’ ³

Let us now call St. Ambrose. One of the most frequently quoted passages in this controversy is that in the seventh chapter of the first book on The Duties of the Clergy, where St. Ambrose is concerned with justice and goodwill. The words usually cited are these:

... Nature has poured forth all things for all men for common use. God has ordered all things to be produced, so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be a common possession for all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few.¹

This occurs in a passage where St. Ambrose is stating and considering the views of certain ‘philosophers’; and it might be suggested that there is a faint pervading aroma of oratio obliqua about the whole argument: it is not clear where St. Ambrose's statement of the views of the philosophers ends, and where his own added comment begins. But, waiving this, the essential point to note in the foregoing extract is that it rests on the distinction between the state of nature and the conditions that supervened later. This is obvious from the fact that the conclusions which St. Ambrose draws from his argument are in no wise revolutionary. Far from suggesting that we should restore the situation as it was when ‘nature produced a common right to all,’ his recommendations are what we should now call tepidly and mildly reformist:

Thus, in accordance with the will of God and the union of nature, we ought to be of mutual help one to the other, and to vie with each other in doing duties, to lay all our advantages as it were before all, and (to use the words of Scripture) to bring help one to the other from a feeling of devotion or of duty, by giving money, or by doing something, at any rate in some way or other.²

This may be criticised on the ground that the guidance it gives to anxious souls (‘doing something, at any rate in some way or other’!) is somewhat nebulous: it certainly cannot be suggested that it is subversive of society.

It may be interesting to apply to St. Ambrose the other test indicated above. What does he say elsewhere, apart from the passages most frequently cited to demonstrate his communistic leanings? Riches, he says, are to be contemned: the love of riches is to be despised; they are unnecessary to salvation. But at the same time, ‘riches themselves are not blamable,’³ if one knows how to direct one's property. All of which is in danger of being trite and commonplace; but at least it reveals that the crucial test is not wealth and possessions, but the use made of wealth and possessions.⁴

Tertullian, in virtue of one passage, is frequently invoked in these questions. In the thirty-ninth chapter of his Apology, in describing for the instruction of unbelievers how the Christian community did in fact live, he remarks that ‘all things are common amongst us, except our wives.’ Waiving the reservation, it is, however, clear that Tertullian's words are not to be taken literally. He was a writer who greatly (and rightly) enjoyed his own rhetoric. Every sentence was fashioned and balanced with an eye to the maximum effect attainable. The whole Apology is an example of how a case should be presented to a jury. The significant point here, however, is that immediately preceding the phrase so frequently quoted, Tertullian gives a much more sober account of a way of life which is anything but communistic, but which again represents the prevalence of open-handed liberality among people who recognised private property:

Even the kind of treasury which we have is not filled up with sums paid under a sense of obligation, as if they were the price of religion; but each one places there a small contribution on a certain day of the month, or when he wishes, providing only he is both willing and able—for the offerings are not compulsory but voluntary.

Thus, he adds, ‘we never hesitate to communicate our substance to another.’¹

Lactantius is another of the early Christian writers frequently cited to prove the essentially communistic features of primitive Christianity—but surely, only by those who are content to accept the stray phrase offered to them, without looking behind and around. For Lactantius indeed condemns what he is summoned to bless. He admits that Plato ‘approached nearer to the truth’ (i.e. than some others who were more remote from the truth); but in the same sentence he adds that ‘no one fell into worse errors, especially because in his books respecting the State, he wished all things to be common to all.’ The utmost that Lactantius concedes is that ‘this is endurable concerning property, though it is unjust’; and the reason annexed is of the essence of the Manchester School: ‘For it ought not to be an injury to any one, if he possesses more than another through his own industry.’ But still he admits that ‘this is capable of being endured in some way’—an attitude of admirable tepidity, which, needless to say, changes to something else when he contemplates the Platonic community of wives.²

Perhaps more significant is a passage in the fifth chapter of the fifth book of the Divine Institutes, which is devoted to Justice. Here, Lactantius, with that odd confusion of sacred and profane history which is so charming and disarming a feature of some of the more scholarly of the early Christians, gives a glowing and approving account of the reign of Justice under Saturnus, before it was banished by Jupiter; and he quotes Vergil, how ‘it was not even allowed to mark out or divide the plain with a boundary: men sought all things in common’; and the reason was that

God had given the earth in common to all, that they might pass their life in common, not that mad and raging avarice might claim all things for itself, and that that which was produced for all might not be wanting to any.

But forthwith he explains that

this saying of the poet ought so to be taken, not as suggesting the idea, that individuals at that time had no private property, but it must be regarded as a poetical figure; that we may understand that men were so liberal, that they did not shut up the fruits of the earth produced for them, nor did they in solitude brood over the things stored up, but admitted the poor to share the fruits of their labour.¹

For Lactantius, this golden age is a dream gone for ever; and even the dream did not represent a world of communism, but a world of unbounded liberality, such as had been the ideal of the Mosaic Law, and of all the early Christian teachers without exception.

St. Basil is an interesting witness on these questions, if only because in certain of his homilies (especially 6 and 7) he is unrestrained in his denunciation of the foolish and self-indulgent rich. They keep horses with pedigrees, and ‘scarlet cloths make the horses as gay as bridegrooms.’ They maintain cooks, confectioners, butlers, huntsmen, sculptors, painters, devisers and creators of pleasures of every kind. They have herds of camels, troops of horses, droves of oxen, flocks of sheep, herds of swine. They paint their walls with flowers and let their fellow-creatures go bare; they have baths in town and baths in the country. And, needless to say, matters are worse when a man has a wealth-loving wife—a common misfortune: ‘With all their behests they do not leave their husbands breathing-time. No fortune is vast enough to satisfy a woman's wants—no, not if it were to flow like a river!’ In short, ‘when will the man have time to care for his soul, who has to serve a woman's fancies.’ Isaiah, towards the end of his third chapter, had obviously a glimpse of the truth.²

Such is the indictment: the rich man harnesses his horses with splendour, and despises his brother if he is ill-dressed; he lets his wheat rot, and will not feed the hungry. Yet the conclusion to be drawn is anything but communistic. ‘Come then,’ he says; ‘dispose of thy wealth in various directions. Be generous and liberal in thy expenditure on the poor.... Do not wait for a famine before thou openest thy barns.’ And when Basil is not delivering homilies with an effective popular appeal, but is merely writing soberly to a fellow-bishop, his position is made even more explicit:

The good man, however, neither turns his heart to wealth when he has it, nor seeks after it if he has it not. He treats what is given him not for his selfish enjoyment, but for wise administration.¹

It is the orthodox view of the early Church. It is not wealth, but the abuse of wealth that is sinful; the rich man should spend with a sense of his responsibilities.

Many passages might be cited from St. John Chrysostom, a particularly voluminous Father, but one must suffice in a chapter where there is barely room for samples of samples. The quotation selected is from the Second Homily to the People of Antioch, where the theme is that it is not riches that are forbidden, but pride; that sin lies not in external possessions, but in the covetous mind. Wealth is not forbidden if wisely used. St. John Chrysostom may himself explain the position in his own words:

For as I observed, wine is not a bad thing, but drunkenness is so. A covetous man is one thing, and a rich man is another thing. The covetous man is not rich; he is in want of many things, and while he needs many things, he can never be rich. The covetous man is a keeper, not a master of wealth; a slave, not a lord.²

The conclusion is that ‘the rich man is not one who is in possession of much, but one who gives much.’ Wealth is to be wisely used; it is to be a servant, not a master.

Many other Fathers might be summoned, but even if great names have been omitted, enough has been said to clarify the point at issue. And indeed further citation might prove but vain repetition—if indeed that stage has not already been reached. For there is, fundamentally, a singular uniformity in the official and orthodox views of the early Church, even if these views are not always expressed with punctilious prudence. ‘Communism’ receives no support; it is indeed at times explicitly condemned; but the spokesmen of the Church were very much alive to the dangers inherent in the possible abuse of wealth. Possessions in a sense were indifferent in themselves—neither good nor evil. The essential issue depended on how they were used and how they were regarded. The real evil lay not in wealth, but in being attached to wealth. It was not riches that damned a man; but pride and a covetous heart.

While this may be accepted as the ‘official’ attitude of the early Church, the view taken by responsible Fathers in their responsible utterances, there is perhaps something to be said on the other side. Unquestionably—and it merely shows unreasoning partisanship to deny it—there was a communistic tradition in early Christianity. How far this derived ultimately from the Essenes is largely a matter of speculation. What, however, is not a matter of speculation is the enormous influence and the abiding appeal of Luke's idealised account of the communism of the early Church at Jerusalem. Doubtless, the moment it is read carefully, the inner contradictions reveal that it is but an old man's confused dream of something he has persuaded himself ought to have happened. Yet for centuries one is almost tempted to say that these few verses in the Acts of the Apostles are quoted as frequently as any other passage in the New Testament. Obviously they served as a ‘myth,’ giving expression, if not to the aspirations of all men, at least to the aspirations of many men in a certain emotional condition. And beyond question the legend of the communism of the Church at Jerusalem served to give continuity to the communist tradition. The manifestations of this tradition are, however, to be found in what without disrespect may be called the underworld, in obscure communistic sects which appeared from time to time, earning the censure of the Church. Probably one such sect was that of the Nicolaitanes, which has the signal honour of a fleeting mention in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, with an expression of the undiluted hatred of the author. In the second century there was the sect founded by Carpocrates and his son Epiphanes, a precocious lad who died (it is said) at the age of 17 and who, rightly or wrongly, is credited with the authorship of a book which no adolescent should have written. The curious will find as much as they require regarding Carpocrates in the second chapter of the third book of the Miscellanies of Clement of Alexandria. Carpocrates (or it may have been the precocious Epiphanes) seems to have been moved by a singularly simple logic. The justice of God, it was argued, consists in all things being common, and in all being equal. And just as God makes the sun to shine on all alike, so he made all women for the equal use and enjoyment of all men. Clement was unconvinced and did not approve. It is odd, or perhaps not so odd, to note thus early the apparently inevitable connection between complete communism and promiscuity. The reason is not to be found in the simple faith in God's bounty that appears to have inspired the precocious Epiphanes. There is a much more compelling reason clearly realised by Plato, Campanella, Fourier and many others. It is that women are incorrigible individualists and make men selfish—or if not selfish for themselves, selfish for their wives and children. For the true communist, the home, postulating the supreme devotion of one individual to another, is the nursery of all selfish and anti-social instincts. And even St. Paul dimly sensed this truth.¹

(f) ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

In the concluding section of a chapter dealing with various aspects of the Christian tradition in regard to the questions with which we are here interested, it may be convenient to add a note on the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who, in unusual measure, is a link between far distant centuries. But indeed the significance of St. Thomas lies not so much in the fact that he restates and completes the essential elements of the Christian tradition; it is rather that he combines the Christian and the Greek traditions, aiming at a synthesis of the two great streams of influence in human history. Here, in the nature of things, we are concerned only with a small fragment of the teaching of St. Thomas; and in some ways, as he would himself have thought, the least important. The influence of Christianity had profoundly modified the accepted views on many aspects of human life, so that not a few of the assumptions of Plato and Cicero were no longer axiomatic. Even if slowly, labour was ceasing to be a thing of contempt; even if haltingly, it was being recognised, as in the Jewish tradition, that all men were the children of one God, though doubtless God expressed his will by assigning them to different stations in life. Yet on one point, if for very different reasons, St. Thomas was at one with the leading representatives of Greek thought. Neither Plato nor Aristotle were really interested in economic questions, for the excellent reason that these questions did not really interest them. In their eyes, a taint of lowness and vulgarity adhered to buying and selling, and to ‘mankind in the ordinary business of life.’ Ethics mattered; and politics mattered. The economic problem, when it appeared in mangled fragments, was a subsidiary by-product of more worthy studies. Nor, could it have been presented to him, would St. Thomas have been greatly interested in the ‘economic problem’ as such; for the still more excellent reason that it did not matter. Only one thing mattered; and that was Salvation, Beatitudo, living the Christian life, walking humbly with God now, in order to attain eternal life hereafter. This was the one end; and all other things were weighed as means to the attainment of this end. If, as we have been told in these latter days, economics is concerned with the application of scarce means to alternative ends, St. Thomas's comment would have been simple and emphatic: There never are and there never can be alternative ends. ‘Seek ye first—and indeed seek ye exclusively—the Kingdom of God.’

It is doubtless dangerous to give way to unprovoked generalisations, above all on insufficient knowledge; yet it may be suggested that perhaps no age has been so completely penetrated with the spirit and the assumptions of Christianity as that of which St. Thomas was the chief ornament. It was an age of moderation and restraint, which not merely accepted the view, but endeavoured to act on the view, that this transient world is but the porch to life everlasting; that we are indeed but pilgrims, and that in our pilgrimage we should do the right thing by our fellow-wayfarers. The assumptions on which the Middle Ages acted were largely that each should labour unquestioningly at the task assigned to him by Providence; that no one should take advantage of his neighbour in anything, that greed and avarice are incompatible with a balanced view of the relationship between this world and the next. God, it was held, may give riches; but riches cannot give God. This may appear, and perhaps is, a somewhat rose-coloured view of the Middle Ages. Possibly the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were as prolific of crime (and other things) as earlier and later ages; but it is sometimes wise to judge a people by its motives.

In this place we may confine ourselves to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on one point, and one point exclusively. His views on justice in exchange, on the just price and on usury are doubtless not irrelevant, but they are slightly off our path. The central point for our purpose may be subsumed under the heading of the problem of Property—or putting it in larger and more correct terms: ‘What should be the attitude of a man seeking the Kingdom of God towards the things of this world? also what, in respect of these things, should be his attitude to his fellow-men?’ It is generally said, and on the whole rightly said, that St. Thomas represents in his doctrine, a synthesis of Aristotle and of Christian doctrine, and some have even suggested that he is largely concerned (as in his references to slavery) to carry forward as much as possible of Aristotle. It may be so: but to anyone who reapproaches St. Thomas immediately after a surfeit of the early Christian Fathers, the really arresting point is the close kinship between the Fathers and the Angelic Doctor. St. Thomas indeed is largely the completion, the perfection and the clarification of the early Christian tradition.

The question of the lawfulness of property St. Thomas establishes in two stages. In the first place, he proves that the possession of external goods corresponds to the nature of man. True, all things are under the power of God: the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. But so far as ‘use’ is concerned, man has a natural power over external things, since, guided by reason and will, he can use them as though they were fashioned expressly for him. The less perfect exists for the more perfect. Thus the Philosopher proves that ‘possessio rerum exteriorum est homini naturalis.’¹

This, it may be said, does not take us very far. It establishes a right in man, made in the image of God, to have ‘dominion,’ in the phraseology of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. The really knotty problem remains: may the individual justifiably have individual property? The answer given by St. Thomas is very obviously in line with Aristotle; not so obviously, but nevertheless perhaps more essentially so, it is in line with the Christian Fathers. He is aware of, and indeed quotes in the ‘Objections’ the apparently communistic utterances of St. Paul and St. Ambrose, which have had such a long run up to, and including, the works of Mr. Beer. But St. Thomas is undeterred. Two rights, he answers, must be distinguished in this matter. There is the power to acquire and administer (‘potestas procurandi et dispensandi’); there is the power to use. Now, so far as concerns acquisition and administration, St. Thomas largely follows Aristotle, arguing that private ownership is not merely permissible, but necessary to human life. The grounds advanced are familiar, not to say hackneyed. There is, firstly, the greater care bestowed on individual possessions, compared to that devoted to what belongs to everybody, and therefore nobody; each of us, laborem fugiens—such is the nature of the beast—leaves the heavy end of the stick to others. Secondly, things proceed in a more orderly manner, if each has his allotted task and what belongs thereto, as contrasted with the chaos of every one doing, and looking after, everything. And thirdly, a point emphasised by Aristotle in regard to the disputes which spring from the common purse, relations will be more harmonious if each is content with his own possessions. These arguments for private property are, it will be observed, based purely on grounds of expediency and on the imperfection of men. It is not so easy for unregenerate man, laborem fugiens, to live in excessive intimacy with his fellows. We need, in all senses, a room of our own. Thus private property is ‘necessarium ad humanam vitam,’—not on general principles, but in order to avoid the greater evils which would otherwise result.

While private ownership is thus consecrated on the side of administration, it is otherwise so far as concerns ‘use.’ On this side it is not permissible to regard possessions as purely private property for personal enjoyment. The Latin somehow sounds more peremptory than most translations: ‘Quantum ad hoc non debet homo habere res exteriores ut proprias, sed ut communes.’ In form this is substantially Aristotle's counter-proposal to Plato's communism, viz. that the advantages of both systems could be combined by adding to private possessions the mollifying influence of community in use. Yet it is only necessary to read the relevant passage in Aristotle in conjunction with that in St. Thomas Aquinas to realise that in practice the two are poles asunder. In Aristotle the proposal gives effect to the proverb, ‘Friends’ goods, common goods’; we are, as becomes gentlemen, not to be too particular when our friends make use of what is ours. He cites with approval, as we have already seen, the custom in Lacedaemon where the citizens use each others' slaves, and where the employment of dogs and horses is not too strictly accounted for, when it comes to a hunting expedition. This, with respect to Aristotle, is but to scratch the surface of a deep problem; for this merely represents the camaraderie among members of a governing caste, corresponding to the etiquette of an officers' mess, where one does not wait to be pressed to take another cigarette, where the bottle is for use and not for ostentation, and where the return of Penguins is hardly expected. It is otherwise with St. Thomas Aquinas. There is here no question of free-and-easy sharing with ‘friends’ and equals. ‘Common use’ implies that wealth is to be shared easily with those in need; and after the manner of St. Thomas he falls back on the counsel of St. Paul to the rich, that they be ‘ready to distribute, willing to communicate.’¹

We are back, it will be observed, at the great question of almsgiving; and it should be noted that in an age innocent of employers' contributions, and of schemes of social improvement and betterment financed by a progressive income tax, the principle of community in use, of making wealth serviceable to the community at large, could only be effected on the initiative of the possessor of wealth, through the voluntary exercise of alms-giving. In St. Thomas Aquinas, as in the great body of the Christian Fathers, private property is defended, but for its justification it is necessary that almsgiving prevail. Moreover, seeing that the things of this world exist for the use of mankind, there can be no valid right to property, unless the owner by alms-giving makes his wealth available for the purpose for which it was created. It is fairly commonly reported that one of the Christian Fathers said roundly that the rich man is a thief. What in fact he did say was that the rich man, if he does not give alms, is a thief. The point illustrates admirably a cardinal element in the views of the Christian Fathers and St. Thomas Aquinas alike. The possessor of wealth is the administrator merely; it may be that in his administration he is responsible solely to his own judgment; but he holds it only on condition that he uses it for the good of mankind, which involves the giving of alms. It is not merely, as the semi-sacred writer said, that alms maketh an atonement for sin. It is necessary to the proper use of wealth; ultimately, the giving of alms alone can justify the existence of property.

The doctrine that wealth exists for the use of those who need it, finds its crucial test in St. Thomas's consideration of the question whether, in extremest need, ‘theft’ is permissible. He has already explained that the recognition of property is not contrary to natural law, but is something which human reason has added to natural law. But clearly, what flows from human enactment cannot derogate from natural or divine law. Now it is the nature of divine providence that all lower things are designed to meet the necessities of men. No provision regarding private property can therefore be allowed to prevent these lower goods from relieving the necessities of men. In short, what one has in superfluity is, in natural law, due to be applied to the sustenance of the poor. In the extreme case, therefore (where, e.g. death threatens, or help cannot otherwise be got), it is permissible, openly or secretly, to take what is necessary from the possessions of others. Nor has such an action anything in common with theft or robbery.¹

This, above all if detached from its framework, may sound like the voice of an instigator of anarchy. But, indeed, St. Thomas is cautious and moderate; so far is he from being revolutionary, that there are some who would have us believe that his was the great influence that turned the Church against the socialists and the communists! That alms should be given out of superfluities to those in need is the governing principle which admits of no denial. But as in the case of other general principles, it is easier to enunciate it at large than to apply it to particular cases. It is the need of another that is to be pitted against my superfluities; and (in these days at least) there is a marked disinclination to admit that we possess in superfluity.

The attempt to give the general principle somewhat more concrete form gives interest to St. Thomas's discussion of the question how far one should give alms out of one's necessities. The answer is that, as every text-book knows, the word ‘necessaries’ may have two meanings. He who merely has that which is necessary, in the sense that he has only enough to keep himself alive—one in the enjoyment of a sort of Ricardian wage—is clearly exempt from the obligation of giving alms, just as for similar reasons he was supposed, in the classical Political Economy, to be able to elude the incidence of taxation. But, on the other hand, ‘necessaries’ may refer to that provision without which it will be impossible to live appropriately as one's station demands (‘secundum conditionem et statum propriae personae et aliarum personarum quarum cura ei incumbit’). Admittedly it is impossible to determine where this line falls. To give alms impinging on this necessary provision is a good work: but it is counsel, not precept (‘non cadit sub praecepto, sed sub consilio’). But what is not permissible is that anyone should give so much that with what is left he is unable to lead his life in accordance with his station and the obligations resting on him. And St. Thomas adds, in what is a cardinal thought in the Middle Ages: ‘Nullus enim inconvenienter vivere debet.’ ¹

The matter is thus in the end left to the individual conscience, and indeed perhaps it cannot be otherwise. Alms-giving, it should be repeated, derived its extraordinary importance in the early Christian and mediaeval periods, from the fact that it was the only method of making provision for social needs; and as it was in its nature voluntary, it was necessary to stimulate the flow of alms by keeping men's consciences tender. But it is obvious that St. Thomas's theory leaves loop-holes. He belonged to an age which believed that men were assigned by Providence to different stations in life and, as has been seen, that it was their first duty to live in accordance with the requirements of that station. He was therefore no egalitarian. He outlined a theory of division of labour by divine decree, according to which one is more drawn to one task than another. But it is of the essence of the doctrine of the ‘calling,’ that if men are assigned different tasks, then their needs must also be different. Different things are expected of different people, and each must live convenienter. If in addition one ropes in dependents (as St. Thomas does), it is obvious that the question whether one has more than is ‘necessary,’ is a very difficult one, to which very varying answers, according to temperament, may be given. Imagine, in modern phraseology, a middle-class father, ‘with a position to keep up’ (which is a free translation of convenienter vivere); give him six utterly unattractive and completely feckless daughters, and ask him to determine the point at which he has more than is necessary. If we agree to give him £3000, doubtless the wolf will not be exactly at the door; his answer will be that neither are his six prospective sons-in-law. Nor is it much good telling us to take no thought of to-morrow. Perhaps because of our lack of mediaeval faith, the future nowadays is precisely the one thing we find it impossible to forget. This may seem a trivial example with which to confront Thomist philosophy: concrete examples perhaps always are trivial. The criticism which St. Thomas can hardly wholly escape on this question is that he advances propositions which are somewhat radical in principle; whereas his suggestions as to their application tend to the consecration of things as they are, and to the arbitrament of the flexible and elastic conscience of the individual.

So far as the main issue is concerned, however, the significance of St. Thomas Aquinas for our purpose is clear. He represents a continuation of the tradition of the Christian Fathers. Property is defended; but in theory, property is reduced to a right of administration. Wealth is a trust held for the public good, and therefore there can be no arbitrary jus utendi et abutendi. The owner is responsible, if only to his own conscience, for the use he makes of his substance. Alms-giving out of superfluity (as in Godwin who, oddly, has much in common with St. Thomas) is not a meritorious act, being merely the discharge of an obvious debt. St. Thomas, however, is much more cloudy than Godwin as to what constitutes superfluity. Lastly, the existence of property is justified only on the assumption of adequate alms-giving. The central dogma that the owner of property is merely the administrator has certain obvious links with some characteristic features of the Feudal System, which also refused to recognise absolute property, but merely usufruct on certain conditions.