“The renewal of Creation has been wrought by the Self-Same Word who made it in the beginning.” – St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation
The consistency of the Christian narrative as being renewed by the one who created Creation comes with a great division of responses. Either we find excessive relief in the observation Athanasius makes, leading to an excuse for a nominal passivity, or we allow it to frame our role in its renewal. As much rest as we can find in the initiative & ownership that the Holy Trinity has over history as it unfolds before us, the invitation to participate in Christ’s restorative act is an immediate affront to modern absolute ideas of ownership on a notably foundational level. We—much like Joseph—are invited to participate, to restore, to make use of something that fundamentally isn’t ours.
Modern capitalism in establishing a monopoly on the idea of private ownership as absolute and highly individualized, has not only served as an obstacle for this restorative work in Creation to which we have been called, but also has cultivated a mindset around ownership that offers little ground for humanity to stand on in its relation to this call to act. The idea of freely utilizing resources to direct growth, to participate in something that is fundamentally not ours, that we definitely did not and cannot truly buy, runs entirely counter to the absolute sacredness of private property.
There is a widespread tendency to run with this capitalist concept of ownership in one of two ways: there is, on the one hand, laissez-faire liberalism, and on the other hand the taking of full ownership as gods over creation.
The fatalist outlook that supports the laissez-faire hands off response makes inaction appear to be reverent. The posture taken is that of an intruder who knows he or she is guilty of intrusion and destruction of another’s property so they passively wait for the owner to come back trying to not make a mess but “freely” (passively) allowing others to break in and make a mess as well. The hope that one has in this position is that the owner offers a passive grace by choosing not to prosecute. The deeply pessimistic Calvinist outlook reinforces inaction as the only viable, truly reverent action given the unshakeable and total depravity of humanity.
The bourgeois route comes with the assumption that with the invitation to participate in Christ’s restoration of the cosmos comes a status change from steward to executive director or owner. Some (or all) of that ownership and absolute right to Creation may seem arrogant at first, but an initial medieval sense of duty reveals a deep fear of God for misuse of what’s been given. It becomes flagrantly arrogant again in its liberal form—“Christian in appearance, it has been atheistic in fact” as Jacques Maritain describes (The Person and the Common Good)—and ultimately sets up what seems to be the perfect stage for every anti-Christ one could think of in this neoliberal age.
The third and final approach, less prevalent in recent years, that could fall under the category of the second route is the typical Marxist-Leninist approach. The thrust of this movement is the least damning because its aim is to abolish private property (in the capitalist sense) altogether out of a desperate protest against the dehumanization of the human person. While many criticisms have been leveled at the historical attempts to build such a society, the one that I’d like to highlight here is that the Marxist-Leninist model fails to escape the same human-deification-over-nature paradigm that it shares with the bourgeois outlook.
Participation and ownership as inextricably linked, as they have been under these absolute ideas concerning property and rights, create a modern conflict for Christians. Working within this paradigm of ownership and rights, the options we’re given are a passive faith without works (because only Christ can do this) or an arrogant deification over nature in which humans take full license.
Joseph the Worker had no ownership over the miracle in which he was invited to participate, but he was nonetheless expected to participate, to protect, to guide, to facilitate, and to be in the custody of a miracle that he had no immediate unlimited legal right of ownership. The responsibilities given in Genesis and the recurring theme of the responsible servant in many of Jesus’ parables affirm that this relationship can be understood, especially in the modern context, to be custodial in nature. Neither above and over nature in the materialistic conception (be it bourgeois or communist) nor under and tossed about by nature as in the laissez-faire paradigm, but intrinsically interwoven into and essentially responsible for the natural world. It’s this Josephine posture that offers a meaningful alternative to private property as we know it, and the extreme responses to Christ’s call to act without total ownership or legal right to do so.
The socio-environmental implications of this wide spread conception of absolute private property have created and intensified environmental degradation, eroded away at human dignity (especially that of the working class), and ultimately has cracked the popular Christian social ethic by replacing the primacy of Imago Dei with a logic of exploitable objects. Recovering and re-establishing a custodial ethic as a foundation for Christian communities to subvert predatory capitalism, identitarian nationalism, and to avoid environmental collapse should start with the custody we’ve been given, rather than common ideas about ownership that continue to exacerbate the flourishing of life in all its forms.
Viewing the economy as a force that somehow supersedes the environment into which we are integrally woven has in turn eroded the basic premise of the markets, as well as our basic station as custodial image-bearers. The principle of absolute private property has synthetically distanced us from our custodial responsibility for Creation while at the same time enabling and multiplying the individual rational agents willing to swallow up the very ground on which they stand –ultimately for little more than ownership for ownership’s sake. Is this not clearly the least natural conception of humanity? As St. Basil the Great puts it:
The sea knows its boundaries, the night does not exceed the limits set from old, but the avaricious person does not regard the passage of time, does not respect any limit, does not defer to the proper order of things, but rather imitates the violent nature of fire: spreading to all and devouring all. (On Social Justice)
The claim that we can’t overcome this “inevitable” greed is supposedly due to our nature. Along with St. Basil and probably every other zoologist (looking especially at you, P. Kropotkin) I don’t see anywhere else in nature this self-destructive drive being so widely accepted—even forest fires have their constructive function and purpose within the natural world by limiting excessive growth and contributing to the richness of the soil. As members of nature, this large scale, highly planned, and culturally engrained way of existing doesn’t fall into the category of “natural.” Quite the opposite actually, —which is exactly St. Basil’s point. None of this depraved & static view of human nature is true, so why have we cultivated worldviews and created systems that are supposedly set up to accommodate so heavily to this essentially Calvinist view of humanity?
We have come to see ourselves as [the earth’s] lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life… We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth. (Laudato Si, Pope Francis)
The very fact that we have a function to play in Christ’s restoration of Creation challenges the arrogant hedonism to which Pope Francis is referring. RH Tawney elaborates:
The idea of function is incompatible with the doctrine that every person and organization have an unlimited right to exploit their economic opportunities as fully as they please, which is the working faith of modern industry…it asserts that the rights of individuals and nations are absolute… instead of asserting that they are absolute in their own sphere, but that their sphere itself is contingent upon the part which they play in the community of nations and individuals… Thus it constrains them to a career of indefinite expansion, in which they devour continents and oceans, law, morality and religion, and last of all their own souls, in an attempt to attain infinity by the addition to themselves of all that is finite.
(The Acquisitive Society, R.H. Tawney)
Jesus being fully God and fully man, is of course central to the Christian narrative. His ability to fulfill what we cannot gives him the most “ownership” in the restorative act. Mary, the mother of Jesus, physically takes on an incredibly active role in raising him as his mother by birth. Fully Jesus’ mother, the Father entrusts the Son to her. This doesn’t mean she holds absolute right over him, but that no one else is entrusted with him or with that role in restoring Creation the way she has been. Joseph facilitates all of this, his role is active but lacks the full legal right to Jesus. Joseph’s ability to interact with and participate in raising Jesus, along with his active role in facilitating the restoration of Creation (despite lacking any formal ownership in the miracle of “God with us”) offers us a station to re-posture ourselves. Reflecting on Joseph’s custodial role in Christ’s restorative work offers a potential foundation for Christian social ethics as we relate to property and economic-environmental justice in the world today.
Correcting the dualism (laissez-faire or man-deified-over-creation) that has lead us to these social sins will mean challenging the very premise of ownership to which many of us in the West subscribe. We may be frightened by the reality of this responsibility (as I’m sure Joseph was frightened of the responsibility & station he was charged with as well) but we have the capacity to move on from the myth that private property and all its abuses are central to human nature. I can only pray, and ask Joseph to intercede for us, that we will have the imagination to go beyond “Lords and Masters” over Creation, or helplessly depraved intruders on God’s property, and that by God’s grace we’d be able to attain our truer divine human calling — as fellow custodians integrally dependent on and responsible for what we truly cannot call our own.
