Chrysostom Analysis

We track familiar terrain in Chrysostom this week. Like Clement, he (1) redefines wealth and poverty in terms of the disciplining of desire: rich is the person with few needs; poor is the person with insatiable needs (40). He also (2) argues for a stewardship model of caring for the poor, where excess possessions are rightly distributed to the poor. Indeed, material luxury describes nothing other than the state of having possessions-to-be-given to the poor such that withholding them amounts to theft (49-50). Like Basil, for Chrysostom the stomachs of the poor are storehouse spaces for the wealth of the rich (43). In keeping with all the authors we’ve read, Chrysostom (3) indicates that almsgiving is independent of judgments of character and from exchange economies. He summarizes this point by acutely distinguishing between an almsgiver and a judge (52), which entails that even if someone is the “most wicked” Christians are …show more content…
Concern for the poor Lazarus’s is driven, this is to say, by a concern for the eternal belonging of one’s soul, for the failure to care for the poor, in Chrysostom’s view, is nothing less that failure to care for reward and punishment. His description of the world as a theater and human inequalities as merely masks, for instance, clarifies the performative role of virtue and vice as the audition for eternity. Death, in this picture, marks the threshold which unmasks human life, laying bare who is truly rich and who is truly poor (47). Additionally, Chrysostom argues that the rich man’s mistake in the parable is thinking measuring the value of virtue in the gains in can attain for this world. By this criteria, which is demonstrated in the virtuous poor, virtue attracts no appeal. His mistake, of course, is his inability to attach virtue to a picture of eternal rewards