Saint Augustine of Hippo did not seek to reform the economic
forces that led people to lose their property and status. Instead of promoting
laws to protect smallholders and the poor, his Church urged the wealthy to act
generously and charitably – with the charity to be mediated by the clergy, not
by donors or the state acting independently of the Church.* Giving to the poor
was to take the form of giving to the monks and priests who organized the
Church in the name of the poor. The clergy in effect became the paradigmatic
“poor.” The misery suffered by the secular poor was depicted as punishment for
humanity’s original sin, not the sinfulness of wealth.
Neither Augustine nor any other contemporary orthodox
Christian leader spoke in the spirit of the Biblical prophets who called for
“repentance” by the Jews for having diverged from the Lord’s laws forbidding
selfish behavior and commanding the Jubilee Year [nationwide forgiveness of
private debt and returning of land to the people]. Their defeat by Assyria and
Babylonia was blamed on them having sinned against the Law of God for having
permitted the oligarchy to monopolize the land and reduce the population to
bondage. Jesus’s preaching followed this focus on social injustice and
criticized the selfishness of the Judaic wealthy that led to debt dependency.
He devoted his first sermon to announcing that he had come to proclaim the
Jubilee Year. But no members of the Romanized Church echoed Isaiah 5:12 by
denouncing the Empire’s latifundists for “add[ing] house to house and join[ing]
field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” Augustine
instead focused on personal sin, with an idiosyncratic focus on sexual
indulgence that has remained characteristic of his church.
In Egypt, largely under Cyril of Alexandria, worship of the
virgin Mary (an element often seen as transposing Egyptian Isis worship)
replaced the classical justice goddess Nemesis punishing hubris (mainly of the
rich and powerful). This Christian Mariolatry, emphasizing the compassionate
Mother of Jesus/God, helped exclude Jewish Christians as part of Cyril’s
anti-Semitism. It also excluded the idea of a justice goddess protecting the
weak and poor, a figure going back to Nanshe of Lagash in Bronze Age Sumer, who
was followed by counterpart justice goddesses for thousands of years down to
Greece and Rome. The dimension of social justice as a religious commandment to
protect the poor and their self-support land from the rich was replaced by
Christian compassion taking the form of charity by the rich – to the Church, at
their own personal discretion.
[* In The Ancient Economy (1973), M. I. Finley emphasizes that neither the Stoics nor Augustine and other Christian bishops called for abolition of slavery. “The stress is on the master’s moral obligation to behave, for his own sake, with self-restraint and moderation, at least as much as on the humanity of the slave.” Today’s billionaires who receive most growth in income and wealth defend themselves by endowing charitable foundations. This is not a sign that the economy is working well, but that it is not doing so, and therefore is obliged to rely on charity from the rich instead of internal prosperity, which is blocked precisely by the behavior of the wealthy in seeking to further enrich themselves.]