Many are familiar with Catholic and Protestant flavors of Christian social thought, but little is known about Orthodox iterations. Dylan Pahman joins the podcast to talk about his book The Kingdom of God and the Common Good, which aims to fill that gap. In it, he explores both the thought of Orthodox theologians and social thinkers less-known in the West and explains how the rise of Communism delayed the development of social thought in the Orthodox world.

The Kingdom of God and the Common Good by Dylan Pahman

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson. Today with me is Dylan Pahman at the Acton Institute. Dylan has written a tremendous compendium of Orthodox social teaching, especially on economics. It’s titled Kingdom of God and the Common Good. Is it “in the Common Good” or “in Common Good”?

Dylan Pahman (01:07):

The Kingdom of God and the Common Good.

James Patterson (01:09):

Okay. My PDF has a slightly abridged title up here. So …

Dylan Pahman (01:14):

Sequel will be Two Kingdom God, two, common Good, and so on. We’ll drop the the’s at some point and be a new title.

James Patterson (01:21):

Please tell me that this is the first time you’ve used that joke. Okay. As some listeners know, when I interview people who are my friends, things tend to be a little bit looser. Dylan and I have known each other for many years and I’m very excited about this project because it is something that I never thought of, but rather than having me explain it, how about we’ll have Dylan. So Dylan, tell us about what inspired you to write this project to maybe give us the elevator pitch for the listeners.

Dylan Pahman (01:54):

Yeah, definitely. So I’ve been working here at Acton for 14 years as a research fellow and as an editor of our academic journal. And I got all my degrees are in theology, so all the economics and political theory I’ve learned on the job. And part of that was reading a lot of great scholarship and hearing a lot of great lectures of people talking about Roman Catholic social thought and Calvinist social thought, and even some Lutherans and other people. And I am Greek Orthodox, and I kept thinking, well, “what’s our perspective on all those stuff?” And for those unfamiliar, the term “Christian social thought” refers to the problem of the working poor in the industrial era and then further issues, social and economic issues beyond that. So it begins in the Roman Catholic tradition with the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. And that was “On the New Things” is literally what it means or on revolutionary change.

(02:50):

So he is looking at the problems of social unrest and the rise of socialism, and he’s trying to come at it from the wealth of, at that point, 1,900 years of Christian tradition while also admitting that the world was very different and trying to engage that. And so that was the, inspiration is I really felt like my tradition needed something like that too. I think there’s a lot we can learn from other traditions and in fact, the first part–the book’s in five parts–the first part is just a survey of here’s what the other Christians are doing. Orthodox tend to like to be special sometimes, and we are special, but we also need to be part of the broader conversation. And I really don’t think we’ll know what our unique contribution is until we’ve actually surveyed, well, here’s what the other Christians are doing, here’s what the common ground is, and here’s maybe some areas of dissonance.

(03:38):

So the goal is to research and figure out what are orthodox principles for engaging our modern world and our modern economies and questions of wealth and poverty today, all the complexities of wages and lending and monetary policy and all that kind of stuff. And so what I wrote was basically the book I wished existed 14 years ago that didn’t exist. It’s a book that walks readers through contemporary Christian social thought, biblical teaching on wealth, poverty and society, orthodox church history, and then a survey of modern economics, which I actually look at historically. So my goal is that each chapter is very short, 2,000 to 3,000 words, like Law & Liberty essay length and people can maybe read one a day, that sort of thing and work their way through the book. And instead of bombarding people with terms, I take this more historical approach where I tell the story of Orthodox social thought and I tell the story of modern economics.

(04:35):

So we get a sense of who were the people; who was Adam Smith; who were the classical political economists; what were they dealing with; what motivated the rise of socialism and Marxism and what was the difference with Christian socialism and social activism and that kind of stuff. And then I finally take readers to contemporary Orthodox contributions, which there have been some, but part of the problem is that history that with the Russian revolution, you have atheistic, militaristic communism, just sweep across Eastern Europe and Russia and other traditionally Orthodox land had for a long time been under the Ottoman Empire and you just don’t really have a space for Orthodox to think freely about this stuff. The thinkers who did escape, and many of them were exiled from Russia, suddenly they find themselves with a very different set of questions that they concern themselves with. So they are wondering, well, how do we be faithful to our Eastern Orthodox tradition while living in the West?

(05:31):

And they start focusing on questions of ecumenism. And those are very good things, but it’s very distant from that question of, well, how do I be a good Orthodox Christian banker or whatever? How do I live in our modern economy as a faithful orthodox Christian? So that’s the goal of the book, is to walk people through that so that they know the story, they know our tradition and they know something of how modern economies work to prevent the kind of unfortunate and sometimes embarrassing statements that you can find on blogs and unfortunately sometimes even in unofficial church documents about the nature of wealth and poverty in our economies today.

James Patterson (06:10):

So I was actually about to ask you about the intervention of Soviet communism because I know a lot of listeners, their probably biggest association with Orthodoxy is going to be Russian Orthodoxy. So what happened with the encounter, not just of Russian Orthodoxy, but of Eastern Orthodox in general with communism? How did they respond to it in their social thought?

Dylan Pahman (06:42):

Yeah, so you can find writings actually as early as Vladimir Solovyov, who is a nineteenth century Russian Orthodox philosopher. He died in 1900. His first book is very metaphysical, but it begins with a critique of socialism. So he’s already seeing it in the kind of mid- to late-nineteenth century. His last book, The Justification of the Good, has a whole section on economics, and again, he sees this kind of danger. And then even more so in the early twentieth century, there’s an excellent volume that I recommend. I think you can find the PDF on archive.org. It’s called Vekhi, which is Russian for landmarks. And it was a collection of authors. It’s probably the most successful edited volume of scholars that I’ve ever heard about because usually they get published and never read, but it brought together, let’s see, S. L. Frank Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, somewhat recognizable names, but they were critiquing the Russian intelligentsia in 1909, so eight years before the revolution.

Dylan Pahman (07:43):

At that time there were storm clouds on the horizon. And there had been a failed revolution, actually. So they were almost taking a victory lab. These were all intellectuals who had had a religious turn in their thought and had realized that the kind of nihilistic and Marxist fervor was very, very much mistaken. And so they were critiquing their peers, their former peers at least. And as you might imagine, it was not well received. There was a huge blowup about this. Even people, Bulgakov was a cadet. He was basically the closest you could find to a liberal at that time. And he was part of the second Duma in Russia and the Russian Empire. But even people in his party didn’t like it, probably most notably Vladimir Lenin wrote a response to it. I mean, it really had that level of impact. And they talk about things that would be very recognizable to readers of Law & Liberty, the importance of rule of law and order and religious and moral culture, all that sort of stuff.

(08:43):

You see these thinkers really wrestling with these issues. And like you said, they kind of see the storm clouds on the horizon. And unfortunately you have this conflict. And that’s part of what I try to answer in the course of the book is to say, “well, what happened?” I mean, the Russian Empire is a mess in a lot of ways, but there’s nothing inevitable about history despite what Marxists will tell you, no un-combatable historical dialectic that we’re all just at the mercy of. People have free will. And why did a nation like that go in that direction? You see, in the early twentieth century, they were moving towards having a constitution with recognizable liberal human rights protections and things like that. But you had just this building and building and building of this class that had been about a hundred years before disenchanted with their role in society.

(09:40):

So the intelligentsia were basically aristocratic young men who ordinarily would’ve entered the civil service. And for the first half of the Russian Empire, there was a liberalizing trend, and it was not without problems from an Orthodox perspective, but it wasn’t all uncritical either. Their interaction with Western ideas and they were moving towards probably having a constitution. But then you get, I believe Czar Nicholas I and things changed upon his succession. You have the Decemberists uprising, the Decemberists murder the Czars negotiator, which was a very bad idea. I think they shot him in the back. They were the moderates as well, among people who wanted a constitution. The Decemberists, the moderates shoot the czars negotiator in the back. And so the czar commands his troops to turn his cannons on the crowd. And that’s kind of the end of that liberalizing trend in the Russian. That’s Russian,

James Patterson (10:34):

Russian politics in 30 seconds right there.

Dylan Pahman (10:36):

And so you have people, if you read Pushkin’s, Eugene Onegin, it’s all about this guy. You get this character in Russian literature called “the superfluous man,” and it’s this disenchanted young aristocrat, and it comes up again and again because it was a common phenomenon of people who thought their role was to reform Russian society and to lift up the former serfs and whatnot. And then they just kind of find themselves listless and directionless. And if they can, they get their hands on books. In fact, one of the reasons you find a lot of people coming out of seminaries being so radical in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, it’s the seminarian who’s the most nihilistic and terrible character in almost the most in the book. And that’s because seminaries were one place where they could still have books that were banned elsewhere. The church was actually trying to protect freedom of speech, but unfortunately that meant there was books like Karl Marx where in the libraries, Joseph Stalin was like a Georgian seminarian as a youth.

(11:40):

And you see that sort of a trend. And so you end up, and then in the midst of all that, the last czar completely bungled military policy in World War I and economic policy at home; people are just losing their jobs standing in long breadlines an absolute disaster, and it’s just ripe for revolution. So you get this conflict, and I mean, frankly, many people at the time, and from an orthodox point of view will also say, and the devil, I mean, read Russian literature. It’s unusual for someone not to have a conversation with the devil at some point. And Bulgakov called it a black miracle that you have this society that is a thoroughly Christian society, has its issues and problems, but it’s moving in this recognizable direction. And then just the most terrible thing happens. I mean, conservative estimates count something like a million people martyred, more liberal ones would be up to 10 million by the Bolsheviks.

(12:44):

So it’s a really, really terrible time. Most of the bishops of the church are replaced by atheist agents of the church or of the state. All but one monastery was completely shut down, turned into a museum or labor camps. So really, really awful thing. And it’s something that you can only understand in part by understanding the history of economics. You have to understand, well, what is it about Marxism that captures people’s imagination? And I talk about that. There’s two chapters in my book where I deal specifically with Marxism, and one, I look at it as a worldview. So Marxism is sort of like the ultimate conspiracy theory. It’s something wrong in your life. Well, here’s the answer: you’re oppressed and there’s an oppressor. And yeah, he’s the bourgeois, but in other ages he would’ve been, there’s again this historical dialectic that suddenly can help people make sense of their reality.

(13:38):

I don’t think it correctly does, but you can see the appeal, right? You’re struggling. You know what? It isn’t your fault. And sometimes it’s not people’s fault, but it’s just this story that suddenly they can, this meta narrative that they can hang in all of their problems, all the problems they see in society and make sense of it all. And we are storytelling people as human beings. We want a story to hang everything on, and Marxism provides that for one and it provides a very powerful one. Yeah, the Communist Manifesto says the history of all societies is the history of class struggle, which I think from a historical perspective is the most ridiculous historical statement I’ve ever read. They say everyone is conspiring this, including Pope and Czar, never mind that the Pope condemned the czar for forcibly converting Catholics to Orthodoxy at the same time. No, they’re conspiring together.

James Patterson (14:31):

That’s right.

Dylan Pahman (14:31):

For the sake of capital. But the reason that works from a Marxist perspective is well, they all have a false consciousness. They all are under the sway of these social forces because it’s ultimately material. There’s no place for human persons in Marxism, for that inherent dignity and freedom. We are the product of a historical equation, even to the point where Engels says the same about Marx, that he discovered this great material, historical, social dialectic. But you know what? The time was right. It was bound to be discovered. If not Marx, someone else. He says this, this is his friend. He gives his friend no credit for his own intellectual achievement. He ultimately kind of worships this as something in the place of God. And that’s a critique you find from Father Sergei Bolgakov, which I draw upon in that chapter. It says, ultimately this is a religious movement and it’s trying to stand in the place of religion for people.

(15:30):

And what does religion do? Among many other things, it gives people a narrative, a meta narrative to make sense of their world. And so that’s the power of Marxism. And then the other side that I look at is the economic analysis of Marxism and why that doesn’t work, why the marginal revolution ended up becoming the mainstream in economics and why it actually better explains reality. I feel like this is a long answer to your question, but I hope it’s still interesting. The example I give about why Marxist analysis doesn’t work, and I try to do this with every chapter, if I can, I have some kind of little attention grabbing hook to help it be relatable. So I talk about how two years ago, Hasbro Company, Wizards of the Coast published a genius crossover product: Magic the Gathering cards that were Lord of the Rings-themed just as J. R. R. Token intended, I’m sure.

(16:25):

And among those cards, they printed a one of a kind printing of the one ring card and card collectors were really stoked to get it. And they’re opening these $12 or $13 packs of little rectangles of cardboard trying to find this one ring card. And eventually a young woman did open the card, she found it, and she sold it at auction to Grammy award-winning musical artist Post Malone for $2 million. Now, according to Marxist analysis, the price of something and the market directly reflects the amount of labor put into producing it. There was no more labor that went into producing that rectangle of cardboard than any of the other ones.

James Patterson (17:11):

Wait, to be clear, it is a card of a ring. It’s not actually,

Dylan Pahman (17:16):

Oh, no, it’s not actually a ring. Nope, it’s not. It’s like a baseball card.

James Patterson (17:20):

With a demonic.

Dylan Pahman (17:23):

Nope.

James Patterson (17:24):

Or power. It’s just a card.

Dylan Pahman (17:25):

Nope, it’s just a card. It might be kind of glossy. There might be some foil on there or something, but nope, just a card, just cardboard. And the young woman who opened the pack didn’t take any more labor for her to open that pack compared to anyone opening any other path. It just doesn’t explain reality at the end of the day, the labor theory of value, the other element being the assumption of equality exchange, but I don’t need to get into that, but that’s kind of the idea.

James Patterson (17:49):

Did Post Malone throw the card into a volcano?

Dylan Pahman (17:53):

Maybe he should. Maybe that’s why our world is so chaotic these days because Post Malone just won’t do the right thing. He’s trying to use it for his own power. I don’t know. I’m sure he’s got it framed and behind a glass case or something like that.

James Patterson (18:07):

It’s either that or the orb, which is, remember when Donald Trump went to Saudi Arabia and put his hands on the orb? We entered a second dimension at that point.

Dylan Pahman (18:17):

That’s one of those news events where I’m just like, I think I’m a smart guy, but I don’t think I really understand the world. End of the day, I didn’t even know they had an orb. Not to mention what its function is. I still don’t know.

James Patterson (18:29):

They haven’t brought it back. Have you noticed the orb is a one and done like the one ring card.

Dylan Pahman (18:35):

Served its purpose, I guess? Yeah, right. Anyway, so that’s a very long route to answering your question of, but it is a big question. How did communism happen? So part of that is just there was the right opportunity. There was a disaffected class of at least pseudo intellectuals, and then there was a really terrible economic and military and national crisis, and people were fed up and they took power into their own hands.

James Patterson (19:02):

So when it comes to the development of modern economics, so the eighteenth century is normally sort of looked at, but when you take a look at where a lot of Orthodox Christians are sort of in the occupied territories of what used to be Byzantium, they’re bearing witness to the silk trade. They see all of this specialization that comes in. Its manufactured, the conveyance of goods and the marking up of prices for risk and discovery. So does that area of orthodoxy, the Greek Orthodox and the Balkan areas, did they develop a greater appreciation for modern economics that maybe doesn’t translate into the same ideas that we have in Western Europe?

Dylan Pahman (19:49):

Well, I mean, it’s hard to find translated treatises on economic issues. I’m actually not convinced they don’t exist. I just don’t think it’s what’s interested scholars for a long time. Usually if you’re looking into that stuff, you’re looking at philosophy or theology, and then you’re into metaphysics or the doctrine of the Trinity or something like that. And if you see a treatise on usury, that’s just not the normal scholar’s interest, and so they’re going to overlook it. But I will say, actually that’s a really good example of a East-West difference is the question of usury. So in the West, partly due to the rediscovery of Aristotle and adopting his definition of money and his definition of usury. For them, all interests on a loan was sinful usury. And this was based on Aristotle saying, well, it’s not the nature of money to reproduce itself.

(20:40):

It’s not like seed that you can plant in the ground and get many more seeds. It’s just money. It’s sterile. Now, he’s not really thinking it through as later scholars even in the West would point out that you use money to create stuff and then you make more money, and that’s how you get more money from your money. But there of course, is the problem of exploitation. There are predatory loans out there, and in the ancient world, that was a real concern. If someone is desperate and coming and asking for a loan, they probably can’t pay it back. And so it amounts to theft and an attempt to completely dispossess them to even give them the loan in the first place. But what you find, because the east was less agrarian and had to be more commercial, as you said, they’re kind of at these trading junctures.

(21:26):

Legally there’s never a ban on usury. I think it was once attempted by Leo the Isaurian, who is known in church history for being one of, I think it was the first emperor to try to impose iconoclasm. So he’s not exactly the most orthodox or popular emperor in the history of our church. And it’s like the law that I’ve read is funny because he is basically chastising everyone, like, well, we tried this, but since everyone’s so sinful, we’re going to go back to having some usury. And if you look at the Justinian code, it just caps the rate of interest at a certain point depending on the kind of loan. And that’s actually really common in the East, including in the Middle East. There’s records of church cannons. Church cannons ban priests from lending at interest, clergy from lending at interest. And that gets a very important theoretical distinction, which does come up in the book starting with the section on the Bible between the law and the gospel.

(22:20):

So the law aims at impartial justice, and you actually see this in Deuteronomy. Ancient Israel was allowed to lend an interest to foreigners. I don’t think that was the poor foreigner they’re always called to care for among them. I think that’s like a traveling merchant, right? Somebody who could be expected to pay back a loan with interest. But among their own people, if someone comes to you and they’re your friend or your family, I mean Jesus is the same thing. Someone comes to you and says, “I need help. Can you give me a loan?” He says, “lend expecting nothing in return.” Well, you have a personal relationship. It’s not at the level of law. It’s at the level of mercy. The gospel focuses on mercy. And so you see, canon law is an organized body of law, but it’s law aimed at a system of mercy that pastoral restoration of a person. Whereas the civil law, it has to be impartial, has to file the rule of law a bit more strictly in a positive sense, and then they just cap the rate of interest because they know that you can’t have commerce without that. They’re trading with Russians and with Persians and with people from all around the world. And the empire wouldn’t have survived a thousand years if they didn’t do that. So there’s a different sensibility just because of a different historical experience there as well.

James Patterson (23:36):

Does there emerge any kind of new understanding of sort of orthodox social thought from its contact and eventual conquest in some ways with Islam? Because Islam has its own kind of Sharia sort of conceptual work here, Sharia here, not meaning the scary stuff, but they have their own system of laws about trade, and it’s usually very favorable to commerce.

Dylan Pahman (24:04):

Right. It is. Although they specifically do have laws about lending, and they have a whole system of ways of getting around their absolute interest prohibitions.

James Patterson (24:13):

Selling someone a token for a very large sum of money and then you giving it back to them,

Dylan Pahman (24:22):

Right, right. You find similar stuff in the early modern West, actually with the triple contract. That was something I do talk about Scholastic economics, actually. That’s where I start the history of economics. I talk about the Jesuit to the School of Salamanca and some Protestant writers as well. But I had to cut the part about the triple contract. It was just too much detail for the sort of book that it is. But yes, I actually have a whole chapter on orthodox Christians and Christians in general in the Middle East after the fall of Jerusalem, basically from the fall of Jerusalem to the Ottoman Empire. And so what you find is not so much different economic thought, although Christians did have a different view of usury. For example, Christians, what you find is a social shift. So suddenly Christians could no longer serve in the military,

(25:10):

But they could serve as administrators, public administrators. For centuries, they were the most competent people and the majority there. So they continued kind of running a lot of society and they dominated the trades. So education, medicine, and there was a ton of Christian merchants. So what you have is this interesting situation where in many cases, Christians were persecuted and they become second class citizens. This is dhimmitude; they have to pay a head tax, but they were often tolerated. So it’s really kind of a mixed bag; it depends on usually the temperaments of the caliphs rather than necessarily anything fundamental to Islam. And what you find is now you’ve suddenly gotten Christianity for the first time since Constantine disentangled from the state, right? And from any kind of state favoritism. So what you see at that time is actually the birth of the Scholastic method. It comes from Christian scholars, and the purpose of it is they want to reasonably debate with one another about things like the nature of Christ.

(26:14):

There were three different churches actually that had slightly different views about the nature of Christ. And then of course they want to also dialogue with Muslims, with Manicheans, Zoroastrians. There’s this religious pluralism that they encountered. And there’s this kind of amazing wealth of people that, and on one sense it’s a very different context, but in another sense, there’s a lot we can learn that we live in pluralistic societies today, and at least in the United States, there’s no established church or religion. So there’s actually quite a bit that are these amazing treasures that I actually added the chapter to the outline after the book proposal was accepted because Ancient Faith, the publisher is a ministry of the Antiochian church in the United States. And I thought, “boy, I have this whole thing on orthodox history. I should have a chapter that tells their story.” These are Palestinians, Syrian, Lebanese, Orthodox Christians, largely, at least historically.

(27:11):

I was like, “I need a chapter.” And thankfully there has been enough Arab Orthodox sources translated into English as well as some good secondary sources. I was able to write that chapter, and I’m so glad I did because it gave this excellent bridge in terms of natural law and the scholastic method to talking about the early economics of those Jesuits. And it also showed, again, this common ground I get a little tired of. I am Orthodox. I chose to be Orthodox, I’m a convert. I do have some strong convictions about our church, but I do get frustrated with the polemics. There’s a lot out there that’s “Oh, the West is just scholastic and rational and bad, but we’re mystical and good.” And it’s like there’s no scholastic method without us. We invented it. It came through these Christian educators to then Muslim scholars to then the west. And in the Byzantine era, everybody was a scholastic, east or west. It’s a silly sort of thing that I think is an example, that kind of unhelpful, unhelpful rhetoric that actually obscures what’s unique about orthodoxy rather than bringing it to the fore. So I think there’s a lot to learn from Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians and from that experience under Muslim rule.

James Patterson (28:26):

I was actually about to go. You’re anticipating my questions. This is good, Dylan. I don’t know why I’m narrating my thought process into the microphone, but might have something to do with being at Dollywood all day yesterday. The experience in the West is so different from that of the Orthodox. They’re in control of their own regimes, but they’re all fighting each other and they’re not just fighting each other in temporal authority, but also over spiritual authority. You have different popes showing up depending on who was allied with different kings. And this is not as true in Spain for obvious reasons, but when we think about France, Italy, Germany, and to a lesser extent England. And so the result is after the Reformation, there is another sort of attempt for those states to adopt a singular understanding of Christian social thought, but one that is considerably more pro-usury than well just lending, right? It’s not actually considered lending. And so what you end up with is this kind of fractured space of Protestant and Catholic social thought. And as you’ve indicated before, the Orthodox approach has a kind of productive engagement in the book. So why don’t you tell me about the modern version of Orthodox social thought as it confronts the Catholic effort to reckon with the industrial revolution as well as the Protestant?

Dylan Pahman (29:59):

Yeah. Okay. So some of the back history that I think is really interesting, you’re right that in the West there is that difference in the medieval period, but you actually see something similar in the Orthodox East when it comes to the Russ. So Vladimir unites them and baptizes them all, but then they start fighting with each other again. The Mongols show up and they say, out of my cold dead hands, and the Mongols say, okay, and then they conquer just about everybody with the exception of Novgorod and Pskov, who very wisely just preemptively surrender and agree to pay a tax. And they actually are both republics for over 300 years. So similar to you get Northern Italy and German republics, you get Magna Carta in England. So you see a similar Christian progression in the East. There are some differences though. So there’s no guilds in the East, which is an interesting phenomenon.

(30:52):

And what you have in the absence of guilds is a domination of monastic commerce. A lot of the markets were on monastery grounds, monasteries owned factories and bars and all sorts of printing presses, that kind of thing. As far as in the modern era, that’s when you have, well, the fall of Constantinople. So you do lose a lot of the intellectual powerhouse there. But you get the rise of Kiev again this time as part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. So actually technically part of the West, a Catholic kingdom, but one that was uniquely in favor of religious liberty at a time when everyone else was killing each other. It’s like they have, there’s constitutional documents you can find where they actually explicitly mentioned freedom for Greek Christians, meaning Orthodox, but they were also favorable to Protestants.

James Patterson (31:39):

Just to interrupt, that is a policy that makes sense when you have the Germans to your west and the Russians to your east. Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s not find each other guys.

Dylan Pahman

(31:48):

Yes. And they had two kings and they elected, I mean, it’s really fascinating thing. This is a bit of a tangent there. But anyway, you have this rise of Kiev in the first Orthodox theological school in the modern era is Peter Mogila’s Academy. And Peter Mogila was very much just reading Jesuit theology and then trying to make it Orthodox. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He made a catechism that was modeled after the Tridentine catechism, but it was so Catholic that he submitted it to, he said, “Hey, I think the whole church should adopt this.” And they’re like, “Hey, that’s great, but maybe you should take out all this stuff about literal fire and purgatory because we don’t believe in that.” He was just like, “oh, okay, sure, I’ll take it out.” I mean, he didn’t really know any better. So to some degree, you kind of have the Orthodox lagging behind a little bit.

(32:36):

You also have a very different social experience. So in Spain, once it’s re Christianized, one of the first things they do is discover the New World. And the New World means gold, and the Spanish empire is very much gold means being rich, and so we want more gold. And the result, Marjorie Grice Hutchinson notes, is that prices doubled twice in the sixteenth century: inflation. And combine that also with really terrible monetary policy that people were convincing the king to debase the coins in addition to flooding the market with a ton of extra gold. They’re also debasing the purity of their coin, and it just runs havoc. So that’s how you get all these treatises in the West about proper monetary policy in the early modern era. Whereas in the East, they’re just trying to survive under the Ottomans, right? They have a very different experience. So you shouldn’t really expect exactly a parallel, but by the time you get to the modern era, to answer your question, you do have people like Solovyav, Bolgakov, S. L. Frank, and they all take somewhat different approaches, but there are some commonalities.

(33:45):

I mean, one thing I track all throughout Orthodox church history is this idea of catholicity, which you might think, well, your Orthodox not Catholic. Why is that a central principle? But we in our creed, confess the church to be one holy catholic and apostolic just like anyone in the west. And I traced that all the way back to Ignatius of Antioch who was martyred in one 10 AD. He knew the apostles. Basically, if he didn’t know what Christianity is, we’re all in big trouble. And in his letter to the Smyrnaeans, he warns them about Gnostics. He says they care nothing for love. They neglect the orphan, the fatherless, and the widow among them, they deny the incarnation, resurrection of Christ. They deny that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ, and they reject the authority of the bishop. You on the other hand, where the bishop is present, let the people gather just as where Jesus Christ is.

(34:32):

There’s the Catholic church. I don’t think he just means “universal church” when he says that the word Catholic in Greek means through the whole, right? He’s talking about the church that cares for the poor, the orphan, the widow that believes that Christ became a material person in contrast to gnostics, who believes in a literal resurrection, and who believes that the grace of God is present in the sacraments. It’s all of those things together. And you see that kind of again and again, whether it be in Byzantium, that symphony between canon law and civil law, trying to actually address the whole human person, not without flaws, but still that’s at the heart of it. Then in the modern era, especially in Russian thought, because again, that was where the Orthodox were most free and could write about and think about this stuff, you get this idea of sobornos, which it’s a Russian word that just derives from the old Slavonic word for Catholic in the creed.

(35:32):

It’s literally catholicity. That’s what they’re talking about, and they take it in all sorts of interesting philosophical directions. But one person that I focus on who I like a lot is S. L. Frank, and he talks about it in terms of the element of personal relation. So he’s a personalist for anybody familiar with Jacques Maritain or Martin Buber, other people. We have those in the east as well. And he talks about how human beings are not isolated individuals. We all are embedded within relationships. It’s not just he, she, they. It’s you and me. And that’s incredibly important for understanding our social life. And what makes those relationships happen is that we like each other. I mean, it’s a really simple point, but we like and trust each other, and he contrasts this with another even bigger, more obscure Russian word, which is kind of this external unity of society, which he thinks is fine.

(36:30):

That’s okay, but that very much corresponds to impartial justice, this impersonal nature of things. So the state needs to be impersonal, law needs to be impersonal, and a lot of commercial relations need to be impersonal. If I go to the grocery store, it doesn’t really matter who I am. They can’t deny me service unless I’m causing a ruckus and hurting people or breaking the law. I show up, I pay my money, I get my thing, and there’s an agreement there, or you sign a contract and there’s justice once again is a standard: rendering to each what is due. But that is, while essential is a pretty cold society, if that’s all you have, We need relationships of love. We need friends, we need family, and we need that dynamic even in these more impersonal relations. So a country that has no patriotism, no loyalty or love is in crisis, right?

(37:23):

Business where the employers don’t trust the employees. I mean, this is one of his rejoinders to Marxism is like nobody hires anybody unless they trust them not to steal from their shop or whatever, and nobody takes the job unless they actually have some affection for their boss. And in a free society, if they don’t, they go get a new job. And so you actually have to have this as a sort of glue that holds society together. And he relates this to catholicity or to sobornos and to that, the most perfect expression being the church. So you get in all these kind of biblical Christian dichotomies between, or juxtapositions between grace and law or the church and the world. It’s a way of harmonizing these things with attention to these new eras, new realms of life in the modern era. One of the things you find across Christian traditions, even into the early modern era is that the Christian map of society is very simple.

(38:22):

It’s not wrong, but it’s sort of like if you found an old world map, which I found one of these recently from the early 1200s; it’s a circle. They knew the earth was round. It’s got Europe, it’s got Africa, it’s got Asia. Some of the details are a little fuzzy, but there’s actually quite a lot. There’s a lot written in Latin. There’s even a ring of islands all around the outside. But beyond that, it’s like sea monsters. They do not know about the western hemisphere or Antarctica or Australia. That’s fine. It served them well for a time, and then it became obsolete. And that’s a similar sort of thing happened with our social map. So in our catechisms, when you get to the command, “honor your father and mother” basically across traditions, they will all say, this also applies to other legitimate authorities, among which they say there’s the church authorities and the state authorities. So that’s where you get church, state and family.

(39:16):

But in the nineteenth century, suddenly you have business as just another realm of life. It’s not a family business, it’s not a state business, it’s not a church business. All of those existed before; the East India company and that sort of more of a state enterprise, or at least a crony-istic one. But the idea that there’s just someone out there who, they have a project, they have a way in which they want to serve a social need, and they’re going to provide a product and they need to hire people to work for them, and they get the machines and they get the capital and they get it going. This is a new realm of life and we need to theologize about this as well. And so Frank and others like him, they use this concept of catholicity to help build some continuity between that ancient tradition all the way back to the Bible even, and these new emerging realms of life, whether it be, again, business commerce, we could talk about higher education in a similar way or the art world or whatever.

(40:15):

We need to have a more accurate map of social life. So part of it, I do have a little bit of a constructive contribution. Mostly I’m trying to say here’s what other people think throughout the book, but that’s one of my constructive contributions is to say, here’s a more accurate social map. And I have a way of charting that out for people, but it involves this sense of there’s a impersonal and personal realm of life or economy I call ’em, and there’s also materially productive and materially zero sum, and you put those together and you get four different kind of sectors of social life. You have the state which is extractive, not necessarily in a negative way, although we all know about the negative ways, I’m sure, but every law works that way. If you break the law, if you don’t do the good thing, the law says you’re going to receive a bad thing that’s coercive, right?

(41:06):

That’s just the nature of law. Good laws work that way just as well as bad ones. There’s the family and other integrative societies where a baby doesn’t earn its mother’s milk, right? It’s just a matter of mercy. It’s a matter of just this one way gift. And of course, vice versa. I hope my children will obey me out of just the love of their hearts, but sometimes we do need those other dynamics, need a system of rewards and punishments to teach our kids to obey, but it does happen. And I provide for them just because I love them and I care about them. And then you can move into that productive economy, and you have things like friendships, which are very personal, right? Local business. I talk about, actually, I did this last year at the Ciceronian Society Conference. I had a paper on friendship, and I talked about it as the wimpy dynamic of life. This is a reference for all the people our age and older who remember the old Popeye cartoon, but it was the mooch, the character “Wimpy” on Popeye. And his tagline for some reason was he would show up is if I remember right, usually a non-sequitur. But he would just show up and say, “I’ll pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Right? That’s an insane thing to say at a McDonald’s, right? It’s never going to work.

James Patterson (42:22):

Although they did try to make that a thing, right? Remember when Klarna, you could finance your burrito? They were literally doing the “Wimpy,” a model of burger purchasing.

Dylan Pahman (42:32):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would be worried about usury in that case, but somebody can’t, that’s actually a good point. Afford a burrito, but let’s say a local restaurant owner, and you come to the restaurant and you order your food and you say, “Oh, shoot, I forgot my wallet.” You say, “Hey, John, can I pay you Tuesday for this hamburger today?” And they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, you’re good for it. No problem.” That’s a different sector of society. There’s a different nature to that relationship. We see that dynamic throughout everything else. Anyway, all that is to say, I draw that from my own tradition. I think that’s something that every tradition can learn from, and I hope that it’s a book that won’t just appeal to Orthodox Christians, that really, anybody who’s struggling with how to integrate faith in modern society will find something that they can build upon within their own tradition from this book. But that would be the thing that I would center on is those different categories of social life, and then especially that principle of ster Catholicity.

James Patterson (43:34):

Dylan Pahman, thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast. The book is The Kingdom of God and the Common Good: Orthodox Christian Social Thought.

Dylan Pahman:

Thank you for having me.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.