The Virtues of Wealth and Usury

If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
-G. K. Chesterton

Perhaps because on some level I am a masochist at heart, I find myself listening to Ancient Faith Radio from time to time. Every once in a while there is a gem, usually from Fr. Steven Freeman. More often I find myself listening in a sort of awful fascination, as in last months series by The Illumined Heart on "Managing Mammon".

One often has to wonder about that peculiar development within American Christianity that has led nearly all of its varied parts to subscribe to some form of the "health and wealth gospel". In reality, it should be no surprise that a show based out of an Evangelical convert parish in Orange County, California would do a two part series on how to get rich, or more fittingly, how it is a Christian's obligation to get as rich as he possibly can, even if the show is supposedly "Orthodox". It contained, of course, the usual twisting of the parable of the talents and other such oddities, such as the "tithing will make you rich" routine and the wonderful justification of "get rich so you can give more to the Church". One is left wondering why Christ did not tell the rich man to make more money, so that he could give more, or why so many Saints gave up the entirety of the wealth, instead of using it to make more so that they could give more.

Sadly, this is the state of American Christianity, by and large. Let me emphasize further that it is not merely an Evangelical or Charismatic problem, or even just a Protestant problem, even if they perhaps display it to a greater degree. American Christianity in general has merged with the bourgeois capitalist virtues of wealth as virtue. I, for one, have sat in Mega-churches and heard sermons on how Christ did not really mean what he said about the rich man and the camel, and I have sat in Orthodox parishes and heard homilies on how one should fulfill pledge card obligations before feeding the family and material blessings will come of it. What I have rarely heard are homilies on the virtue of suffering and poverty. It seems that we want all of the Old Testament "do as I command and you shall have", and none of the New Testament "do as I command and you will be persecuted."

Truly, what place does the pursuit for wealth have in the Christian life? I think it more fitting for us to seek the opposite, to give up our money hording. St. John Chrysostom once said in a homily, "if we are to tell the truth, the rich man is not the one who has collected many possessions but the one who needs few possessions; and the poor man is not the one who has no possessions but the one who desires many."

The worse thing still is that the virtue of wealth is no longer linked to such things as hard work, the production of goods or other such natural virtues, but rather through "making your money work for you." Which, to be certain, is nothing more that what the Church has always called "usury." It is a rather strange proposition, that money can somehow do work. What this really means is that we are to earn interest with our money by the labor of another. Theft really, or as St. Leo the Great ever more eloquently put it:
A man's possessions are indeed multiplied by these unrighteous and sorry means, but the mind's wealth decays because usury of money is the death of the soul. For what God thinks of such men the most holy Prophet David makes clear, for when he asks, "Lord, who shall dwell in thy tabernacle, or who shall rest upon thy holy hill?" he receives the Divine utterance in reply, from which he learns that that man attains to eternal rest who among other rules of holy living "hath not given his money upon usury" and thus he who gets deceitful gain from lending his money on usury is shown to be both an alien from God's tabernacle and an exile from his holy hill, and in seeking to enrich himself by other's losses, he deserves to be punished with eternal neediness.

Still, how pervasive this perversion is. It has touched and infected everything. I have but to look no further than my own parish putting its building fund into a money market account. Yet, at one time participating in usury could get a priest defrocked. I look at my own 401K and I am ashamed to have it, though the money put in it is not by my choice.