If a person should suggest the Jews, their patriarchs tended flocks; if the Greeks whom we call pagans, they considered cobblers as quite respectable philosophers; if the Church of God, that just man . . . to whom the Virgin Mary who bore Christ was espoused was a carpenter. Whatever work men perform without guilt and trickery is good.
This is an interesting treatise, written by St. Augustine, not for wide distribution to the larger Catholic Church, but to address a particular local issue brought to his attention by the leader of a large monastery. A dispute had arisen among the monks, and other community members of the area, around the issue of manual labor. Jesus had told his disciples, when He sent them out to minister, to take no money and to take food and lodging from the people they ministered to and elsewhere had cautioned all his followers to “take no thought for the morrow” when it came to issues of food, clothing and lodging; the Apostle Paul, however, had stated quite bluntly, “If any man would not work, neither should he eat,” and the Book of Acts specifically mentions a period of time when Paul earned a living through tentmaking. Should the local community be responsible for supporting the monks in their spiritual disciplines or should the monks learn a trade and support themselves? Out of this small local dispute, Augustine spins out around fifty pages of witty, well-reasoned, thoughtful, practical advice about the ways all people, though most especially those called by God into a role of authority, must strive to balance their spiritual well-being with the practicalities of life.
I’m kind of surprised at how much I’m enjoying these doctrinal writing by Augustine, even more, to be perfectly honest, than I enjoyed his Confessions. Obviously, one has to give the translator some credit for the tone of these things. This translation was done in the 1950s by Sister Mary Sarah Muldowney, just to give her that credit; obviously, Sister Mary Sarah found a way to balance her spiritual disciplines and a little meaningful labor in the linguistic field, given her doctorate. But what’s undeniable here is that the personality of Augustine just shines through in his writing and that’s what makes him a pleasure to read, even on small issues. He strikes a nice balance of a lot of things. He has a not entirely unpleasant tendency to pedantry; he’ll go into the “rulebook,” the Bible to find out what the “rules” are about whatever issue he has before him and he’ll lay them out explicitly and bluntly. But then he moves into his more pragmatic phase where he takes the various statements of Scripture on an issue and seeks to resolve their seeming contradictions (as in this case, which seemingly puts Jesus and Paul at odds with each other) and also just explore how we could apply these principles in a common-sense way. It’s his pragmatism and common-sense that has helped him endure, I think; in this particular instance, he does what he often does, which is end up taking the old classic, the “Middle Way.” At times, it might be most beneficial to a community for their preacher or minister to spend all of his time in spiritual pursuits; at others, the minister may need to supplement his income by a trade or use his trade to build savings in order that he not feel beholden to the community. By halving the baby, so to speak, he gets back to the ground he’s most comfortable on: the Heart. Do the monks who wants to subsist solely on community support really want to do so solely for spiritual reasons or is it possible that they’re, well, a little lazy? As for those who want to require the monks to work, is it because they’re so principled about the virtue of work or is it just that they’re a bit stingy? Everyone, he says, should search their hearts and ask God to help them examine their true motivations. Nicely done. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; modern Christian writers could stand to learn a lot from this old saint. 4 stars.
tl;dr – warm, witty, thoughtful exploration of balancing practical necessities with spiritual life; Augustine is incredibly readable and engaging, all these centuries later. 4 stars.