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Chapter 1: Patristic Sources and Catholic Social Teaching
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Themes in Patristic Social Thought 51 With this, it is becoming clear that poverty is good—rather, a good— but the poor are neither good nor a good for the construction of a better society. Plotinus, the Neoplatonist philosopher of the third century, connected this idea to metaphysics. “But if one considers that things external to the soul are evils, illness or poverty for instance, how will one trace them back to the nature of matter? . . . [P]overty is lack and deprivation of things which we need because of the matter with which we are coupled, whose very nature is to be need.”82 To Plotinus , poverty can be transcended even if it remains a constant, physical reality, but it certainly is a dreaded weight on our body and intensifies the need for contemplation. Although not a philosphical text, we find a practical outworking of what Plotinus has said in the second-century text The Dream, by Lucian of Samosata. In it, Lucian describes a choice he had as a young boy to pursue training in the craft of sculpting or in the craft of rhetoric . During a dream in which this choice is played out, “Culture” tells him of the hard life of labor and occasional poverty he will endure as a sculptor. “Living in obscurity you will have meagre and sordid returns and an abject spirit; you will count for nothing in public, neither sought after by your friends nor feared by your enemies nor envied by your fellow citizens—just a workman and one of the masses, cowering before your superiors and paying court to the eloquent.”83 This Nietzschean picture expresses well the lot of the poor in late antiquity. They were “the masses,” the nobodies of society. With the expansion of Christianity, awareness of the poor grew. According to the Codex Theodosianus (CT), two laws from 382 addressed the plight of poor people. In CT 14.18.1, able-bodied beggars were obliged to work in the public services in exchange for rations of food or a sleeping mat near the porticoes. CT 16.2.6 stipulated one of the obligations associated with tax-exempt status for churches. It required churches to use their financial resources, buildings, and landholdings to support the needs of the poor. The burden for poor relief shifted increasingly toward the churches during the late fourth and fifth centuries.84 Even in the mid-fourth century, the breadth of 52 Patristics and Catholic Social Thought the Christian church’s philanthropy programs had attracted the attention of the emperor, Julian, who obliged the priests of the state cults also to distribute rations of food, oil, and wine to widows and the poor.85 To sum up, there seems to have been a fairly remarkable shift from the classical to the late periods of antiquity. In the classical period , the poor were derided as lazy and idle, justly deserving of their hunger. By late antiquity, the poor were seen as objects of sympathy, deserving of the financial resources available to the church and to the state. It is likely this transition had something to do with rhetorical shifts in what it meant to be a “friend” of a poor person. Aristotle had argued in his Ethics that some relationships constituted true friendship (between equals) and others constituted patron–client friendships. The formal, almost contractual patron–client relationships between “friends” in the classical world gave way to an openness to true friendship with the poor in late antiquity.86 The Poor in Christian Teaching and Its Contexts It has already been suggested that the increased attention to the poor in Christian texts of late antiquity is due, in part, to the tax-exempt status Christian clergy increasingly enjoyed. By most measures, the Church Fathers took this responsibility seriously. One way in which they did so was to raise an awareness of the plight of the poor— especially the poorest of the poor—in their homilies. In one example of this, John Chrysostom quantified for his congregants the number of those who are beggars in contrast to the rest of the population. He suggested that 10 percent of the population was among the truly poor and 10 percent among the truly rich.87 This leaves a vast middle, 80 percent of the population, who from one year to the next might see themselves move in or out of what some are now referring to as “shallow poverty.”88 That is to say, any one medical...