Towards a Miraculous Economy: Christian Gifts and Material "Blessings" in Late Antiquity

Abstract

This study explores the origin, use, and idealization of gifts called "blessings" and their role in the church and monastic economies of late antiquity. Inspired by Paul's definition of a donation in 2 Cor 9.5-12, a "blessing" designated any gift considered to be a product of God's bounty, that made no demand on its receiver, that was used to support holy people, or conferred holiness when given. Conceptually distinct from alms, "blessings" gained further definition by contrast to secular gifts given for self-promotion and advancement. They therefore provided the basis for a religious economy that supported Christian professionals, while implying charitable responsibilities.

In hagiography of the sixth- and seventh-century Roman East, Vincent Déroche has found multiple illustrations of what he calls a "miraculous economy."¹ To summarize: God bestows material resources upon all who practice his commandments, especially charity. Such resources are bestowed in proportions greatly exceeding whatever was initially expended, so that by giving just a little, one might gain a hundred times or more in excess. Such resources are bestowed immediately, but conditionally—to continue receiving them, one must continue expending them on good works. The result was an economic ideal aimed at equilibrium and flow rather than possession and gain. Based on older Judeo-Christian notions of stewardship, such a system implied that humans involved in charitable transactions were mere points of passage in a circle of gifts that emanated from God. As Déroche observes, in this "miraculous economy" the moral burden lay not upon the receiver (who, no matter what his character, ultimately received for Christ), but rather on the Christian donor, for whom it was imperative to both imitate and enact God's compassion on earth by freely and indiscriminately circulating his goods.

What Déroche has revealed at the end of antiquity is nothing less than a Christian idealization of "holy" wealth: surplus material resources, that is, given by God as a sign of sanctity. Historians of the late Roman economy may be excused for not consulting Déroche's work. Yet it bears directly on one of the central questions of this essay: How did church and monastic writers of the period develop their own way of thinking, in positive terms, about the acquisition and management of excess material wealth?

Indeed, the "miraculous economy" Déroche describes did not arise in a vacuum. Its emergence in hagiography of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries corresponds to the rise of churches and monasteries to economic prominence in the same period in the Roman East.² This is actually the first time in history in which we can generally speak in terms of church or monastic wealth,³ a fact that invites us to consider how such wealth was conceptualized and managed in both theory and practice. Indeed, as Déroche observes, the wealth of churches and monasteries had to be represented differently from ordinary riches of "the world," not only because it was not acquired through ordinary modes of human commerce, but also because it was believed to participate in God's sanctity. And though we may doubt that it was ever administered with quite the same generosity as is celebrated in stories of the "miraculous economy," Déroche points out that the Coptic Questions & Answers, a seventh-century primer for clerics, admonishes them to spend church wealth on charity without calculating costs, because God knew exactly what he had, and because "no one who gives, shall suffer want."⁴

In fact, closer connections between hagiographical ideals and economic practices of late antique churches and monasteries can be made if we look more carefully at the terminology involved. In the stories that Déroche cites to exemplify the "miraculous economy," we might expect the common, key word to be eleēmosynē: "alms," or more literally, "mercy," signifying whatever aid one human might give another, thereby "feeding Christ," in hopes that God might someday remember and grant mercy to them too (cf. Matt 25.31-40). Almsgiving was of course a major theme of Christian discourse in this...