All things should be the common possession of all, as it is written, so that no one presumes to call anything his own (Acts 4:32). But if anyone is caught indulging in this most evil practice, he should be warned a first and a second time. If he does not amend, let him be subjected to punishment.
— Rule of Saint Benedict 33:6-8 (RB 1980)
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.
— Acts 4:32 (NIV)
Ownership dis-owns us: it robs us of our very selves, never letting us claim who we truly are, never letting us be our own.
Only when we disown ownership in turn do we at last begin to come into our own. Thus, only if we disown ownership can we heed Nietzsche’s admonition: “Become who you are.”
What disowns us of what we own en-owns us, as it were, of ourselves. It grants us ownership over ourselves —not as though we held ourselves as some sort of marketable property, some sort of “capital,” but in the sense that it frees us from our delusions of ownership so that we can assume responsibility for who we are, as that itself is revealed to us step by step along the paths of our lives. Thus, disowning us of what we claim as our own property grants us the capacity to return again to who we are, only to know it now for the very first time — to adapt some famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.”
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From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
— Karl Marx
As challenging as it may be to those who style themselves “fundamentalist Christians,” how Marx in the nineteenth century in that line describes life in communist communities is just how life in a monastery is to be lived, according to Saint Benedict in the fifth century. Like Marx, Benedict in his Rule says that each brother or sister is to contribute to the community in accordance with their ability, as each’s ability is acknowledged by the leader of the house, the “Abbot” or “Abbess,” and that all of the goods of the monastery are to be held in common, and to be given to each as each has need of them.
In turn, that Benedictine admonition accords fully — as Benedict himself notes in the passage from his Rule with which I began this post — with the practice of the early Christian communities described in the foundational Book of Acts in the Christian bible. Most self-styled “Christians” would probably wish to deny the Christian roots of Marx’s own admonition, but those roots are there — and they run deep.
The word abbot derives from Old English abbod, from the Latin root abbatem, itself from the Greek abbas, which in turn comes from the Aramaic language, one of the Semitic family of languages. In Aramaic the word abba is a title of honor that literally means "the father, my father." That honorific title was originally given to every member of the monastic community, but in its most emphatic usage was later limited to the leader, or “head,” of the monastery. The Latin feminine form of the same word, used in the same honoring way, is abbatissa, the root of our English word abbess.
By Saint Benedict’s Rule, all those who dwell in the monastic community are to address their “elders” as abbas, “fathers”; and all such elders are to address their juniors as fratres, “brothers.” What is more, by Chapter 72 of the Rule, the next to last chapter, all the members of the community are to “vie in paying obedience to one another — no one following what one considers useful for oneself, but rather what benefits another” (Leonard J. Doyle translation, slightly modified).
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Sounds awfully Marxist!
Karl Marx, picture from the Marx House in Trier, Germany