Socialism: The Christian View

I

In one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, there is a very delightful piece of conversation that might serve as a starting point for this enquiry:

“ ‘I like the old jollypantomime, where a man sitson his top-hat,’ said Blount.

‘Not mine, please,’ said SirLeopald Fischer, with dignity.

‘Well, well,’ observed Crook the Socialist, airily, ‘don’t let’s quarrel. There are lower jokes than sitting on a top-hat.’

Dislike of the red-tied youth and hispredatory opinions, led Fischer to say in his most sarcastic manner: ‘No doubt you have found something lower than sitting on a top-hat. What is it, pray?’

‘Letting the top-hat sit on you, for instance,’ said the Socialist.”

Now, is Socialism merely an irritation against that old symbol of inequality, the man in the top-hat, and having a joke at his expense? Obviously not; it is something very much bigger now, and also something far less negative.

In Andre Maurois’ Ariel, there is a suggestive scene where Shelley the poet, whose mind had been completely infected by Godwin’s socialistic ideas, is seen playing with soap bubbles. Those floating bits of rainbow–those stirrings and yearnings of the early days–have come down to earth so that Socialism today is something as practical as potatoes.

It is now identified with the Welfare State. It has come to mean State Capitalism or State Control of the means of production and distribution. In a more precise way, it is sometimes conceived of as a huge Employment Exchange which aims at providing 12 million jobs. It isa Five Year Plan, with all the nuts and screws predetermined.

It may therefore be defined, roughly, as planning and working for a new Society, with the legislative consent of the people, and aiming at the gradual elimination of all economic inequalities.

Now, isthere a Christian view of Socialism? Does Christianity support or sanction such a radical social change? A Christian may approve of a prophet like Vinobaji, who only kindles the fires of charity. But willhe endorse Professor Mohonalobis’ socialistic pattern of society? The answer cannot be given ina word. One must go to Christ and isteaching and, to some extent, to the history of the Christian Church, to find an answer.

A careful reading of the Gospels would show that Christnever came to preach an economic revolution. He was not a socialist agitator in any sense. He and his followers were not proletarians. He came to preach a spiritual redemption: “Repent, for the kingdom of God isat hand.” It is Luke (from whom Christian Socialists get all their favourite texts) who gives us a different impression of Christ in this matter. Luke, as we know, was a physician, and in the course of his practice, we may gather, he saw much of the disinherited classes, for whom he developed a sympathy. And Christ’s ‘gospel to the poor’, being in line with his own sympathies, naturally excited him.

In point of fact, however, Christ was not even true to his prophetic character in this respect. Amos, for instance, would, denounce the rich for “grinding the faces of the poor’– (what a master-piece of expression, by the way), and even one of Jesus’ own followers, James, would indulge in a piece of soap-box oratory: “Go to now, ye rich men, howl and weep for Your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you.” But there is nothing of the kind in the gospels. Mary would sing, even before Christ’s birth: ‘He filleth the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away,’ but Christ would not adopt it. I am inclined to think that in this matter, not only Luke and Mary, but also a historian like H. G. Wells, seem to have been carried away by their enthusiasm. H. G. Wells writes ‘His (Christ’s) teaching condemned all the gradations of the economic system, all private wealth. Is it any wonder that all who were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a swimming of their head at his teaching?’ I think it needs to be considerably qualified.

As far as one could see, Christ himself never made the rich as a class feel like that. It was the Pharisees, the religious leaders, who were like a bad smell to him, not the rich. He accepted invitations to dinner from the rich. He invited himself to the house of Zacheus, the chief of the Publicans, a well-to-do man. Among his followers were many women, one of whom, as Luke takes care to point out, was Joanna the wife or Herod’s steward, one who had to do with the palace.

His teaching on riches too was not an affront to the rich. ‘Thou fool not thou thief’ (the Marxian word), is what he says to the man who would build bigger barns to store up his goods. He was only pointing out the materialist’s flimsy foundations. His ‘Go, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor and, come, take up the cross,’ we may fairly assume, was prescribed for a particular case (found to be unpalatable medicine, alas)–an invitation to one individual to give up his gold that he may have a treasure of stars, to find his chiefest good in an uneconomic but profitable exchange.

It was one of his followers, not Christ, who called money ‘filthy lucre’. His disciples were to live by alms, and at the same time, paradoxically, they could carry a bag with money in it. Money was safe in the hands of people who were ready to throw away their very lives. The fact that the man who carried the bag, Judas, was a failure did not make money essentially bad. The sin of Judas was not so much that he betrayed the Son of man (and that, meanly, with a kiss) nor his love of money as that he estimated the eternal in terms of thirty pieces of silver. Calvary, apart from the redemptive purpose of God for the world, was the result of a complete collapse of values on man’s side. But as against Judas’s failure, Christ found his breath taken away by the beauty of a poor widow woman casting two mites–all her living–into the temple treasury. For the money-changers in the temple, he had only a whip; for this woman, the most un-qualified praise.

If he disapproved of riches, in particular circumstances, and the love of money (or covetousness) in all circumstances, it was only to warn people against the dangers inherent in them. The love of money was the root of all evil, and riches were a snare, because, inevitably they multiplied one’s wants (top-hats, among them). And multiplicity of wants condemned one to peripheral living. It was the worst enemy of that simplicity of life, that centering down, which he so much prized and so clearly commended.

The birds and the flowers, he said, had very few wants and they were happy, not only happy but creative, Give a bird a nest and a worm and it will sing at heaven’s gate. And all that a lily needs is a little patch of sunshine and soil, and it will purple the green hill-side. Song and beauty may be unmarketable, but they have the stamp of the divine. It was such ‘immaterial’ things that Christ commended to one’s consideration, not merely to one’s interest. ‘Consider...thelilies,’ ‘Consider the birds’. There was saving (not damnable) iteration in his ‘consider’.

He went further and told men that while enjoying the present good (mark the little life-affirming detail in the Gospel, his not denying himself a pillow white asleep on a fishing-boat in Galilee), they should at the same time live by a diviner law–take no thought for the morrow, seek first the kingdom of God, take up the Cross. This was no rose-water gospel then. If anything, it confronted ordinary men and women with perilous possibilities. No wonder, as the gospels record honestly, some people ‘walked no more with him.’ They shrank from revolutionary prospects.

If Christ was a revolutionary he was a revolutionary in this sense. He ‘transvalued all values’. That is why widely different people acclaim him as a revolutionary:

H. G. Wells: ‘To take him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming life’;

Bernard Shaw speaks of him as ‘a force like electricity, only needing the invention of suitable political machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with revolutionary effect’;

and G. K. Chesterton in his characteristic fashion: ‘Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all society to rags. Its merest minimum is a deadly ultimatum.’

These intelligent men must mean something, and what they mean, we may gather, is that Christ’s transvaluation of all values is a revolutionary factor and, if applied to individual or society, would produce revolutionary consequences.

Let us try it in two or three directions, as far as society is concerned, which is the scope of our present enquiry.

To begin with, Christ had an organic conception of society. ‘A new commandment give I unto you that ye love one another’. (St. John, 13, 34), and Paul expresses the same thing in different word’s when he says: ‘Ye are members one of another.’ No individual is independent. He is member of a society, and therefore member one of another like two fingers on a hand.

Society–even a socialist pattern of society–is held together by perhaps common aims, interest, history. The ideal of Christ goes infinitely far beyond this, and, lest somebody should think that it was never more than an ideal, let me say at once that it was worked out and existed in society during the first few centuries. If I may quote from W. R. Inge’s Christian Ethics and modern problems:

Apology of Aristides–‘They (the Christians) love one another and are charitable to all in need.’

Lucian–‘They were all brethren one of another.’

Caecilities–‘They love one another even before they are acquainted.’

Tertullian–‘Their Church or community resembled a huge Benefit Society. The authorities exerted themselves to provide work for those who were able to work and gave doles to the unemployed.’

It will be obvious that Socialism, whether in theory or in practice, would get out of breath trying to catch up with such an organic conception of society.

Again, Christ had a social ideal: ‘Whosoever will be great among you, let him be the servant of all.’ (Math. 20, 26) Sceptre and crown must tumble down, but only in lowly service, for helping some one in need. And before his disciples could take in these words, Christ astonished them beyond measure by washing their feet, transvaluing a menial job, as if from the dull clod there should suddenly break out the passionate rose.

And such a thing, it will be agreed, is much profounder than, say, Mohan Kumaramangalam the Communist (a Barrister of Inner Temple) carrying his own bag, which is rightly commended to us. Washing some one else’s feet is altogether a different job, and it goes beyond many of the things of which we are proud, and justly proud, in our Welfare State and in our social service age. Socialism, at best, has only many impersonal hands to reach and touch people.

Christ, further, had a great concern for the individual. “The very hairs of your head are all membered,” he said. (Math. 10, 30). If divine arithmetic can take note of such inconsequent things, it can only mean a great concern on the part of God for the individual. The trouble with society is that it has allowed the de-personalising process to go too far. Dean Matthews once complained that during the war he was just a number, for purposes of rationing. The man who told an acquaintance of his, “I nearly met your brother,”–and, when asked what he meant by nearly, replied: “Is not your brother constable No. 110? Well, I met No. 111,” puts the problem in a humorous light. And the woman who named her children one by one: ‘Well, there is Meena, and Seeni, and Kittu….” and when interrupted by the Census Officer to give the number, replied with some heat! “We haven’t run short of names yet,” only protested against this de-personalising process.

The value of the individual is the corner-stone of Christian ethics. St. Paul, the phrase-maker of Christianity as well as its most perceptive interpreter, describes any person on earth as ‘one for whom Christ died’ (a miracle of expression). At once, it is obvious, anyone, even the meanest apology for man (or, in Francis Thompson’s phrase, ‘the dingiest clot’) acquires cosmic value; a man for whom Christ died. Gandhiji’s Harijan (I say it with fear and trembling), beautiful as it is, seems to stop short, one feels, at the crucial point; it does not suggest Hari’s reckless love, his being broken on a cross for the dingiest clot in some cheri.

Socialism has to go much further than merely equal opportunities for all–which formula probably expresses its concern for the individual–if it should in any way approximate to the ideal of Christ.

In our enquiry so far, we have reached a point where the Christian teaching is seen to be a most revolutionary factor, and will have far-reaching consequences if, at any point, it is applied to society. It will be ‘alarming’. It will be ‘a force like electricity.’ It will be a ‘deadly ultimatum.’

II

The first Christian society was a revolutionary one after the manner of Christ. ‘Here come the men who turn the world upside down,’ said others excitedly of its members, and it was quite true.

Luke gives us too very arresting pictures of this society in his The Acts of the Apostles. In chapter II, 44: ‘All that believed were together and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men, as every man had need.’ And again in chapter IV, 32: ‘And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and mind; neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common. 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 at the Apostles’ feet, and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.’ There has been nothing like it in recorded history.

On analysis, it is found to contain three very striking features. There was a dispossession, which was very different from what is commonly achieved from the pressure of taxation or other such means, being entirely voluntary. There was distribution (one of the key-words of Socialism), but it was not a vague diffusion of benevolence, but according as every man had need, according to the measure and degree of each man’s need. And most important of all, there was a dynamic, something quite unknown even to our best human systems: ‘And all that believed were of one heart and mind.’ These were the three marks of Christian Socialism of the first days.

In the writings of St. Paul, we get further glimpses of this society, equally arresting. In his Roman letter, written to a heterogenous group of Christians, he speaks of all classes and races of people. He calls some of them his ‘kinsmen.’ He exhorts them to ‘greet one another with a holy kiss.’ In his letter to the Christians at Corinth, he speaks of the fellowship meal among the Christians on the Lord’s day. And in more than one place in his writings, he speaks of his collecting money for the ‘poor saints in Jerusalem’ during a time of severe famine. It was recognised on every hand that something very beautiful was going on, and some people even remarked: ‘Behold, how these Christians love one another.’

But this society did not last very long. It broke up, for several reasons. There was no means of replenishing the common stock. The prices of the things that were sold and laid at the Apostles’ feet could not be expected to last for ever. There was failure at a quite ordinary level too: ‘The Greeks complained that their widows were neglected at the daily ministrations,’ i. e. the common meal. The Apostles tried to set it right by appointing (what we would now call) a seven-man committee, but without much success, although the members of the committee were ‘all filled with the holy spirit.’ There was failure at a deeper level also. Ananias and Saphira sold their possessions and kept part of their money. Idealism is a fire that transforms those who give themselves to it, but consumes the triflers, the compromisers who would not put all their eggs in one basket from prudential considerations. That is exactly what happened to Ananias and Saphira, and two such flies were enough to spoil the whole ointment. At the deepest level too there was failure. From St. Paul’s strictures, we gather that the rich greased and slopped themselves at the fellowship meal on the Lord’s day (to which each one brought his own food) while the poor often returned home hungry. Remember, it was after this meal (which was meant to be shared) that the most solemn rite of the Church, the sacrament of the Lord’s passion and death, was celebrated.

III

The first Christian society therefore broke up, but its values were never lost. In time, they passed into the Christian Church which gradually grew up everywhere with the Apostles’ missionary journeys and preaching. But an institutional Church, however good it may be, cannot be expected to retain the revolutionary character of the first Christian society. As time passed, the Church more and more withdrew into itself, becoming a sort of nursery for its own faith and piety, so that the social implications of the gospel were almost lost sight of for quite a considerable time.

There were long periods of Church history, when its members were completely self-absorbed. Some of them travelled great distances to redeem their sins at a favourite shrine. Sir Galahad wasted his precious youth, seeking for the holy grail. Simeon Stylities lived a good part of 30 years on top of a pillar, cultivating saintliness. Bernard of Cluny kept the window of his room, overlooking the lake of Geneva, always shut, lest the beauty of dawn and sunset on the lake and the witchery of moonlight should distract him from his contemplation of Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest.

Even the best minds of the Church were either self-absorbed or concerned with secondary matters. Aquinas the Aristotelean was busy speculating, among other things, as to how many archangels could be accommodated without discomfort on a pin-head. Augustine, another great mind of the Church, was absorbed in tracking sin through all its metaphysical mazes, and in the excitement of this theological game seemed to have been indifferent to even ordinary hygiene, judging from his advice to the nuns of a certain convent not to bathe too often but once a month. Luther had a luxurious religious pastime, namely, giving battle to the Pope. A thunderbolt of a man, he could have shaken society to the core, but his interests were different.

None of these men, it may be further noted, had any very valuable social concept, even in theory. Augustine was all the time thinking in terms of a duality, his favourite City of God in conflict with society, and between them there was no possibility of accommodation. Aquinas distinguished between the law of God and the law of Nature. ‘Human laws,’ he taught, ‘are the application of the law of Nature to particular circumstances. Utility has modified the law of Nature and this utility or expediency has introduced the principle of private ownership.’ The true Aristotelean that he was, he would even quote the master: ‘Legislation against private property may have a specious appearance of benevolence.’ Luther’s views were not any different. ‘Political and economic ordinances are divine, because God himself ordained them,’ he taught. No Socialism, it will be obvious, can come from such conservatism. Calvin, Luther’s successor, was only a little less orthodox. He accepted the capitalism as it existed in his day, only denouncing its severe abuses.

Indifference to social morality was in part due to the worldliness of the Church, which has justly been strictured at different times. But by worldliness is meant not so much the love of money, position or comforts on the part of the clergy and the bishops, as the secular mind in the Church, with its faith in secular methods like elections, and, in particular, in that wash of democracy, the committee system, which has given us, in place of the ‘committed men’ of the first Christian society, the committee men, a new biological species. The failure of the Church has been the failure of Archdeacon Brandon in Hugh Walpole’s fine novel, The Cathedral, who would dominate even trivial decisions in committees. It may be said, in terms of today, that the worst enemy of the Church i not the Secular State, but the secular mind which saps and mines the idealism, that has always nourished the Christian Church.

But this is not the whole of Church history, only a partial glimpse of it from a particular angle. For, many times in its history, idealism has triumphed. The Franciscan movement was one such triumph. St. Francis was no ascetic, though he was found to wear a hair-shirt. Nor was he a pietist; he did not believe in any solitary religion. On the other hand, as G. K. Chesterton puts it beautifully, ‘he was the fire that ran along the roads of Italy, at which men, more material, could light both torches and tapers.’ We are once again in a beautiful world as in the days of the Apostles. Brother Juniper, one of Francis’ disciples, would run after the thief who had stolen his cloak and beg him to take away the hood also. In one place, we are told, the whole population of a town, men, women and children, turned out, leaving their wealth and work and homes, exactly as they stood, and begged to be taken into the army of God on the spot. ‘There is in it,’ to quote Chesterton again, ‘something of the gentle mockery of the very idea of possessions; something of a humourous sense of bewildering the worldly.’ But it is also obvious that there was in it only a mood for Socialism, not the mind–not the practical application of the mind to organising the enthusiasm. In fact, Francis and his followers were indifferent alike to private ownership and social ownership. And no Socialism of any kind was possible on such terms.

Even in such a matter-of-fact world as ours, Christian idealism has triumphed, and we see Albert Schweitzer pouring out his life in service to a primitive people in equatorial Africa, for the past two decades and more. But here again, curiously enough, Christian ethics for this man was just interimsethik, (interim ethics) a provisional code only valid during the short period before the kingdom of God should come.

The general contention, therefore, that the Church had allowed the social teaching of Christ, its revolutionary capital, to slip to the ground remains true. And what was said by the 12th century lawyer, Tertulliam: ‘Christ announced the coming of the kingdom of God (according to H. G. Wells one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought), it was the Church that arrived,’ can be endorsed, in even stronger terms, by a churchman of our own day, who speaks of ‘the betrayal of Christ by the churches.’ It is true that at about the same time as Middleton Murry spoke of the betrayal, another churchman, one of the greatest of our day, William Temple, wrote his Christianity and a social order, but it has taken centuries to bring again to the foreground what has so much receded to the ground of Christian thought and practice.

This revival was due in part to the revolt against social conditions, under Rousseau in the 18th century, and the height that theoretical Socialism reached at the end of that century, and, in a greater measure, to the profound secularising of the gospel that took place at the beginning of the 19th century when the idea of a secularised kingdom of God took a strong hold of religious minds. That was the time when the Christian Social Union came into existence in England, and soon after Morris and Ruskin in England and Tolstoi in Russia were relighting, in their different ways, the fires of Christian Socialism.

Since then, Christian social teaching has become part of modern liberalism. As Bertrand Russell, who cannot be accused of any Christian bias, puts it ‘In a new form, the ideal of Christ has passed into modern liberalism and remains the inspiration of much that is hopeful in our world.’ Bernard Shaw goes further: ‘We find that all our practical conclusions in politics and economics are virtually those of Jesus,’ which means, in other words, that Christian teaching is not opposed to our most sanguine schemes of social advancement.

Socialism therefore will have Christ’s vote, but only in the measure in which the instrumental or relative values of this artificial system adopted for particular purposes which have been determined by our wants,–approximate to or share in the eternal values for which Christianity stands.