Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Corporatism, Commonweal, and Just Society - Lazar Puhalo

INTENT AND CONCEPT

Since we are going to be discussing corporatism and commonweal in various contexts, we should say something about these two concepts. Corporatism is a basic principle of fascism. It seeks to curtail individualism, not in the context of commonweal – the common good – but in the sense of top-down control and order in society. It seeks to organise society into a hierarchy of corporate [not to be confused with capitalist corporations] structures that require conformity, severely limiting or even curtailing altogether individualistic liberties and actions.

This structured hierarchy corporatises behavioural norms according to a given ideology. Every aspect of society can be corporatised in order to produce a culture conforming to a given ideology. Education, religion, morality, and every external form of behaviour must be regulated in order to impose this ideological concept in a matrix interpretation of the "norm." This corporate structure is imposed and enforced by an arbitrary system of law.

Such a system falls under a general ideology known as “fascism.” It can be a secular civil construct or a heavily moralistic religious arbitrary “theocratic” construct.

There are other understandings and levels of corporatism, but we are using the ideological concept outlined above, which is the general form used to create a fascist society, usually with a deformed and corrupted variation of crony capitalism which curtails individualism and individual creativity of a new form which might interfere with the centrally controlled structure of social order and economic structures.

While Canada was originally shaped with the "Red Tory" idea of commonweal as opposed to a radical, self-centred individualism, commonweal is understood as "the common good expressed within a political system of democracy and individual liberties." In this system, capitalism is regulated only to the degree that is necessary for stability, justice, and fairness. Civil society is also regulated as little as possible while ensuring such things as equal healthcare for everyone and a regulated social safety net that provides for the commonweal, the common good, for the whole of society without impinging upon civil liberties but ensuring the greatest scope of civil liberties that are permitted in a peaceful and cohesive society. This presupposes freedom in such realms as religion and reasonable concepts of morality, a variety of political parties within a cohesive and democratic nationhood. The operational ideology in such a society is "democracy and the greatest scope of civil liberties as can be afforded in a united and orderly culture." In Canada, this is well expressed in The Canadian Charter. We will be mainly interested in discussing the idolatry of corporatising religion and morality, the idolatry and blasphemy of an ideological, arbitrary authoritarian “theocracy.”

Within these concepts, there are variations, of course, but these are the concept within which we are writing. Having established this framework, let us continue.

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Noetic Knowing, Mystical Union & Common Grace - Ron Dart

Abp Lazar Puhalo - Social & Economic Trinity, Essence & Energies

Supplement by Abp. Lazar

Perhaps at the root of the problem is a misunderstanding about ekonomia.

The concept is that when "akrivia" [the strict application of a canon or doctrine] might actually hinder someone's salvation–or even emotional and mental health– we apply economy, which is really the opposite of akrivia [strictness].

Allowing remarriage after a divorce is a clear example, and is especially necessary for young people who are not able to tightly control their sex drive.

Another example is when we receive people and to the Orthodox Church through chrismation if they have been baptized in a trinitarian church. Reception by chrismation does not become the "principle" but rather is an exercise in economy. The Chrismation would be seen as a form of ordination into the Royal priesthood. We do not thereby declare that the baptism was complete, but we exercise economy for the sake of someone's salvation.

I am not clear about what some people are trying to make of ekonomia.

The economy of our Saviour is really this: we could not on our own recover paradise, in the alienation between man and God, so strictness was set aside, and Christ, in himself, abolished the alienation. Men could not rise up to heaven, so Heaven descended to men.

I don't know what convoluted twist some people are trying to make of this. Our Christian social programme should be the Beatitudes and the moral imperatives given by Jesus Christ.

We are far off the track when we understand "justice" in a juridical sense and do not understand it as "balancing matters," restoring the balance in nature and the balance in the relationship between God and Man.

Ekonomia simply means "relinquishing strictness in order to facilitate salvation."

We also have to extend that to matters where strictness would mentally and emotionally damage a person. That has to be the only real definition of "social economy." Ekonomia can only be understood in the context of soteriology.

Francis Bacon's Five Holy Wars - Ron Dart

Ron Dart explores Francis Bacon's "An Advertisement Touching a Holy War" (edited with commentary by Laurence Lampert)

"Out the Embers" - OTC conversation (Jersak, Young, Fee, Murrell, MacMurray)

The Rich Man & Lazarus: Getting the Main Point - Fr Jonathan Tobias

Parables are stories

The Parables of our Lord are the most beautiful and meaningful talks in history. They are matchless in their depth. While the great third-century theologian Origen and the fourteenth-century poet Dante said that there were four levels of interpretation, G K Chesterton (the English Roman Catholic essayist from a century ago) said that he could count, in the Lord’s Parables, at least seven levels of meaning.

There’s no doubt about that.

Still, the Parables are simple and immediate. They “come at you” with personality, with familiar experiences, and concrete images. In style and approach, these are not like St Paul’s epistles, which are filled with doctrinal and propositional presentations. 

No, parables are meant to be experienced as stories, first and foremost. While one is meant to take St Paul’s epistles, and the Lord’s addresses (like the Sermon on the Mount), with every sentence as a proposition, the parables are different.

No matter how deep they are, the Parables of the Lord are always fresh, ever new. 

With parables, one has to look for the moral of the story, which usually comes at the very end. Then, one reads that moral back into the story, and the whole thing opens up in depth and clarity.

This is important. It should be easy to tell the difference between a parable and a doctrinal exposition, because the simple experience of the two is sharply different. An exposition proceeds by logical argument, point by point.

But a parable proceeds by the building up of drama in the narrative. The listener or reader is meant to be “hooked in,” his attention focused on the characters and the chain of events. And then the crisis of the story and the climax, and the conclusion where everything is made clear.

The main point

I propose to read with you the great Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. We will try to pay attention to the story, and to look for the “main point,” the moral of the parable. What was the Lord’s main intent in telling this story? What does the whole parable say, the whole narrative? What is the main concern of this Scripture?

These questions differ from the unfortunately common attempt to construct a dogma about the afterlife out of details from the story. I understand that a number of writers in Holy Tradition have made inferences from this parable, and they have taken from the story a number of eschatological propositions. 

Some writers in Holy Tradition have taken from this parable some difficult, if not unfeasible, eschatological interpretations: they teach that the angels take up the souls of the righteous to the “bosom of Abraham” … that the souls of the unrighteous are sent to torment in the fires of Hades … that there is an uncrossable chasm between the bosom of Abraham and Hades.

In general, such writers like to see this parable as referring to the “intermediate state of the soul” – that is, the bodiless existence of the soul in the interval between physical death and the general resurrection at the Last Day.

Such an interpretation is a difficult case to make. For one thing, it is attempting to force out a  literalistic reading of a parable, which is a perilous thing. But at the same time, these same writers interpret “the bosom of Abraham” in this parable as symbolically referring to the intermediate state of the soul in fellowship with Christ. So already, the strict “literalistic” interpretation is left behind.

But also, it is plain, for any reasonable eye to see, and any open heart, that parables must be taken in a literary sense, not literalistically. Stories are full of symbol and metaphor. They rely on rhetorical tropes like overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement (litotes). Everyone knows that in Aesop’s Fable, the fox moaning over sour grapes is not mainly about a fox denouncing grapes simply because he couldn’t get at them, but about an all-too-human and all-too-common defect. 

Everyone knows that Jesus really did not expect someone to literally pluck out his eye because it offended them.

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