Property and Possessions
So, I have been reading this evening from St. John Chrysostom, one of the late 4th century Fathers of the Eastern Church, about the use of property and possessions. He has some interesting views about material possessions:
Say not then: “I am but spending my own, and of my own I live a voluptuous life.” It is not your own, but of others. Others’, I say, because such is your own choice: for God’s will is that those things should be yours which have been entrusted to you on behalf of your brethren. Now the things which are not your own become yours, if you spend them on others. But if you spend them on yourself unsparingly, your own things become no longer yours. For since you use them cruelly and say that it is fair to spend your own things entirely for your exclusive enjoyment, I say that they are no longer yours.
The wealth is not a possession, it is not property, it is a loan for use. For how can you claim that it is a possession if when you die, willingly or unwillingly, all that you have goes to others, and they again give it up to others, and these again to others. We are all sojourners … Property, in fact, is but a word; we are all owners of other men’s possessions … Those things only are our own which we have sent before us to the other world … Only the virtues of the soul are properly our own, as almsgiving and charity.
Certainly makes you think differently about the things that we own here, and of what use they really are. He talks a lot about the idea that there really is enough to go around in the world, but too much of what exists is held by too few people. I’m reading these texts for an essay about this topic: ‘Spiritual poverty is seen as in continuity with material poverty, but spiritual wealth as in discontinuity with material wealth’. Should be interesting too see where it goes.
