Was/Is Jesus a Socialist?

Mikhail Gorbachev, who is to be enormously credited for his policy of Glasnost which also enabled the Russian Orthodox Church to celebrate the millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988, once famously said that

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

In this post, I am not going to critique socialism as an economic theory, nor will I give an apologia for capitalism (though I will make a brief critique of laissez-faire free enterprise towards the end, and an invitation to my readers to discover the Acton Institute headed by my friend, Fr Robert Sirico).  Instead, I am going to critique the claim that "Jesus was a socialist" on the basis of my field, that is, the infused virtues and the role of the indwelling Holy Spirit in the supernaturally moral life.  Let me repeat that last part again:  The supernaturally moral life, that is, not the 'merely' moral life.  This will be key.

Claims in favour of Jesus having been a socialist have been difficult to locate, as they tend to rely on vague ideas about His being on the side of the poor and how socialists are truly altruistic when it comes to the welfare of impoverished people.  At best, then, the argument runs something like this:

    1.  Socialism cares about the poor.
    2.  Jesus cared about the poor.
    ∴  Jesus was a socialist.

The implication made by "Christian Socialists" is that, like Jesus, we too ought to care about the poor.

Thanks to the "balkanization" of theology (to use the words of Fr Romanus Cessario OP) such that non-Thomistic  moral theologies have driven a further wedge between "moral theology" and "ascetical/mystical theology," we may paraphrase the famed words of St Jerome:

The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Pelagian.

"Pelgaianism," your catechist you probably never told you, is the heresy claiming that we can be morally good as Christians by our own gumption rather than by the grace of God.  It was first decried by St Augustine, condemned at the Second Synod of Orange in 529, and forcefully rejected yet again in Pope Francis' recent apostolic exhortation Gaudete et exultate.  Pelagianism has made a comeback for the reason pointed out by Fr Cessario:

According to the official teaching, these gifts [cf Is 11:2] are given to all Christians in baptism to facilitate the working of the other virtues by rendering the Christian docile to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that he or she shares in a divine, rather than merely human, mode of judging and acting.  This theory of the gifts is of utmost importance in the history of spiritual theology, and to neglect it would be to reinforce the disastrous separation of moral from ascetic and mystical theology which took place in the post-Tridentine period.  An example of this separation of the virtues and gifts from moral theology is to be found in the Directorium Asceticum or, Guide to the Spiritual Life, first published in 1752 by the Jesuit spiritual author Giovanni Battista Scaramelli.  ...The Directorium Asceticum disengaged both the moral virtues, which it describes as the "immediate dispositions for Christian perfection," from the theological virtues, especially charity, which it recognizes as "the essence of Christian perfection" from the canons of moral theology (R. Cessario, The Virtues Or the Examined Life [London:  Continuum, 2002], 12-13).

Pelagianism operates on the presumption in favour of human nature to be sufficiently morally good to perform specifically Christian acts.  Please read that again:  It assumes that humans are good enough to do specifically Christian things--like feeding the poor.  Yes--pace John Calvin--humans have the wherewithal to be morally good, but they do not have the wherewithal to be supernaturally good.

And the theological virtue of charity enables us to be supernaturally good.  St Paul wrote that "...God's love has been poured into our hearts though the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5).  We are not speaking here of the "passion" of love which is in the sensitive part of the soul as its subject; rather, we are speaking of the supernatural virtue of love or charity that is in the rational part of the soul, specifically in the will, as its subject, which is given in baptism.  Thus, when the Lord Jesus said "by this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (Jn 13:35; cf 15:12).

This is why, for example, Jesus asked Peter three times, "Do you love me?"  What's lost in translation is that the Johannine Jesus uses one Greek word for "love," but Peter escapes to another word:

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you agapas Me more than these?" [Peter] said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I philō You."  He said to him, "Feed my lambs."  A second time He said to him, "Simon, son of John, do you agapas Me?"  He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I philō You." He said to him, "Tend my sheep" (Jn 21:15-16). 

Notice how Jesus asks whether Peter loves Him with the love of agape; Peter, in reply, moves the goalpost:  "Yes, Lord, you that I...uh...really like You", which is what phileo means.  But when Jesus asks Peter the same question a third time he "gets busted," as they say, because Jesus catches Peter trying to lessen the demands of discipleship:

 "Simon, son of John, do you phileis Me?"  Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you phileis Me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I philō You."

Whereas Jesus asked Peter for the totality of self-effacing love of agape, Peter opted for a more worldly love of affection and human friendship in phileo; Peter "was grieved" because Jesus caught him in the act of mitigating the costliness of following Him.

Though it is used here as a literary device, we can cut Peter some slack for one very simple, crucial reason:  He had not yet been baptised in the Holy Spirit, which would take place on that first Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4; cf Lk 24:49).  It is only by the indwelling Holy Spirit that Christians are able to have that supernatural love called the theological virtue of charity, and--again--it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same thing as the emotion of love.  In the Kingdom of God, the supernatural, theological virtue of charity is the supreme precept.

But lest we imagine that it's something we can will, recall Jesus' words to Nicodemus:

Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God."  Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"  Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.  That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not marvel that I said to you, `You must be born anew.'  The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit" (Jn 3:5-8).

It is only by baptism and confirmation--by baptism in the Holy Spirit--that a person becomes a Christian and is thus graced with faith, hope, and charity, out of which the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit emerge, thus elevating the theological virtues and infusing the cardinal virtues.  Only with the indwelling Holy Spirit, in Christian initiation, can one be supernaturally good.

A Christian who loves the poor and serves the poor bears a Power infinitely more effective than social activism.

Ultimately, the "confederation of love" (to use Fr Michael Schmaus' words) entails the Lordship of Jesus, because it was from His throne at the Father's right hand that the Holy Spirit was outpoured, thus extending His dominion through the acts of the Beatitudes in Spirit-baptised Christians.

Now back to our question.  Assuming that a government aspires to be "like Jesus" in espousing socialism, we must ask:  Can a government be endowed with the supernatural, theological virtue of charity?  If a "Christian Socialist" operates on the principle of religious pluralism, then No, because it tries to mix the supernatural virtue of charity with the natural emotion of love and the uninfused virtue of justice, to say nothing of trying to build the City of God in partnership with the City of Man (see Jas 4:4; cf 2 Cor 6:14-18; 1 Jn 2:15).  The worst bit about Christians' partnership with worldlings is cooperating in a series of lacunae where the Lordship of Jesus is rejected.

Thus, the only way for any kind of "Christian Socialism" to work is if there existed a society--and therefore a government--that was an aggregate of Christians who are baptised in the Holy Spirit.

The only way for that to happen is if there existed an Integralist society.  This, I think, is why the recent book by Fr Thomas Crean OP and Alan Fimister, Integralism:  A Manual of Political Philosophy (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid:  Editiones Scholasticae, 2020) is critically important for us Christians who want to live discipleship under Jesus' Lordship to the fullest by building the City of God on earth.  "Christian Socialists," on the other hand, balk at such an idea, which undercuts their very claim of being Christian.

To the best of my knowledge, the closest I've seen of an integrally Christian society are my dear, dear friends who staff the Madonna House Apostolate in Comberemere, Ontario, founded by a woman, Catherine Dougherty, who escaped the brutality of the Bolshevik Revolution and spoke against the unjust regime of the Soviet Union, and who spent her entire life at the service of the disadvantaged.  In fact, the epitaph on the simple wooden cross that marks her grave simply reads, "She loved the poor."

As Catherine would tell you, one cannot "outsource" acts of supernatural, theological charity to the government, as if we can be counted among the sheep at the right of the Judgment Seat of Christ because we've paid our taxes.  Christ demanded personal contact with the poor in order to alleviate their physical crisis with food, housing, and employment and, more importantly, their existential crisis with the Gospel of salvation.

Ah, "salvation," too often replaced with "social activism," the hallmark counterfeit Christianity.

This is why Fr Robert Sirico, for example, founded The Acton Institute, because he and his confreres understand full well that Christian entrepreneurs and employers must inoculate their business practices with Gospel values.  Unjust economic structures can only be remedied by virtue-ethics; since secularism seeks the "lowest common denominator" for mutual cooperation, their race to the bottom undercuts any attempt towards an ethical society.

Ultimately, "Christian Socialism" is cheap grace, as it seeks to build the City of God by following the playbook of the City of Man, the very recipe of Pelagianism.

Ultimately still, "Christian Socialism" isn't nearly radically Christian enough, because, in preferring a Marxist-inspired revolution for change, it thus unmasks the faint of heart when it comes to living in the dynamism of Pentecost and under the social reign of Jesus Christ.