Christianity 004: We are not free (that is, most of us)

Has not man a hard service upon earth,

and are not his days like the days of a hireling?

Like a slave who longs for the shadow,

and like a hireling who looks for his wages,

so I am allotted months of emptiness,

and nights of misery are apportioned to me. - Job 7:1-3

In the Orthodox Church, as in most other Christian traditions, there seems to be a list of commandments or rules that is often seen, at least implicitly, as obligatory for many. Thou shalt pray, thou shalt fast, and thou shalt attend church services are some of these imperatives. They are taken so much for granted that it is rarely if ever elaborated who specifically is expected to obey these precepts or to what extent, or where exactly did these rules originate. It may appear that these are general rules that all must observe - see, for example Apostolic Canon 69 - and as far as I can tell, most faithful understand them to be such, and feel guilty - to one degree or another - for not observing, and regularly confess something like "not praying enough," "not fasting enough," or "not going to church enough." I have little doubt that people genuinely feel sorry for these failures.

On the other hand, there exists a multitude of exceptions from these rules and dispensations for a large number of circumstances. For example, a child who depends on his parents for transportation is quite obviously blameless in failing to attend all church services or to arrive on time. Similarly, the same may not have complete independence in matters of cooking and consuming food. An older child may be gently encouraged to non-demonstratively abstain from desserts or to limit amounts of certain foods if his family chooses not to fast, but it is generally understood that the child is not independent, and that any conflict between the child and his parents in such matters is to be discouraged.

Canonically, dispensations from fasting are given to women after childbirth and to the ill - see the canons of Saint Timothy of Alexandria 8 and 10 respectively. Thus, at least by the end of the fourth century, there existed a general principle that if the body has been "humbled" in some way - whether through childbirth or sickness - that fasting was not necessary, and the afflicted person "ought to partake of as much as he or she may wish" and "ought to be released and to be allowed to partake of food and drink" (canons 8 and 10 respectively). Naturally, a derivation of a general principle prompts its application in other situations not specifically addressed but conforming to the condition of the body being humbled. For example, physical labor, strenuous exercise, and old age are all conditions that humble the body. The same logic can be applied even further. Famously, students and faculty at the Moscow Theological Academy and Seminary are allowed to eat fish during Lent, the clarity of the Typikon in this matter notwithstanding - presumably, because studies in theology humble the brain, and fish contains omega-3 fatty acids, which are beneficial to the brain. Students at another seminary which shall not be named here are said to partake in a tradition of going out for pizza on Fridays. The reasoning is that the students, who are not monastics, eat at the monastery’s dining hall all week and are thus “forced” to fast. Friday night, then, is their “make up” meal for the feasting they missed during the week. Suum cuique.

Precepts of Orthodox praxis are highly dependent on one's life's circumstances; and perhaps the most constraining circumstance is on one's time - when one's time belongs not to him but to someone else. The most obvious example is that of slavery. It is not that slaves in times past could not attend Christian services, for example - they could and did, both in ancient Rome and in the not-so-ancient United States - but that their masters could prevent them from attending, should they choose to. Ordinarily, slaves had to perform work for their masters before they would be free to join their fellow Christians in celebrating the Eucharist. In fact, obedience to the earthly masters was not seen as lamentable or to be suffered begrudgingly, but elevated to the spiritual level of obedience to the Lord - see Eph 6:5, Col 3:22-25, et passim. Thus, for slaves, service to Christ may be rendered not only through feeding the hungry or visiting the sick (Matt 25-35-36), but likewise through "entire and true fidelity" to their masters "with all respect" (1 Pet 2:18).

For their part, masters allowed, if not actively encouraged, their slaves to practice the vast variety of religious traditions in the Roman Empire, including Christianity - at least in its earliest decades - at all levels, to include serving as elders and priests (Shaner 2012). However, the Apostolic Constitutions 8:82 stipulates that slaves should not be "ordained into the clergy without their masters' consent," which was to be expressed by the masters' granting freedom to the slaves worthy of ordination (ibid.). This was not due to racism or prejudice against slaves as persons - a very interesting topic to explore in a future post - but due to the nature of a slave’s occupation in a very literal sense of this word. The slaves' obligations to their masters, evidently, were incompatible with taking on clerical obligations to the Early Church. Even freedmen (those who were freed unrelated and prior to being considered for clerical ordination) continued to be under obligations to their masters, and thus ineligible for holy orders, according to the Synod of Elvira, canon 80. Compare this to the Apostolic canon 6, which forbids clergy from undertaking "worldly business" in general, presumably because worldly considerations and obligations will inevitably come into conflict with service at the altar - even if in no other way but by taking up one's time, the most limited of all resources.

While at the present time in the West we do not consider ourselves to be slaves, and slavery as an institution no longer exists, very few people are independently wealthy, belong to the idle class, or are gentlemen farmers. Most of us are forced to work by the circumstances of our birth and life. We hire ourselves out to employers and receive compensation for a portion of our life. At least a quarter of our life - forty hours every week or five out of every twenty years - does not belong to us. Theoretically, we can quit a job, but very few of us are in the position to not immediately seek another. Most of us, hopefully, do not feel dehumanized by our employers, but it would be an equal mistake to think that the employers consider us as persons or individuals. In a technical sense, we are a resource - a human resource. When a company needs workers, it does not need you specifically or any other individual, but rather “bodies” in general - albeit, with certain skills or aptitudes. If a human can be replaced by automation, then employers readily do that - thus, highlighting the fact that for them, a human is merely a thing that performs certain tasks which can be just as well performed by another thing. In order to acquire human resources, companies enter the so-called "labor market” - a marketplace where humans sell themselves or are sold by staffing agencies. This is in no way a comment on human rights, opportunities, or individual situations of specific people, but only to point out that the forces that in the past set prices for commodities at slave markets may be quite similar to the ones that today set wages at markets of human resources. “Slaving away” at their job is still something many people feel that they do. Notably, the Russian word for job, just as the Greek one, has the root slave. (And the English word slave comes from Slav - so many Slavic people were enslaved in the Middle Ages that the very word for their ethnicity became the word for slave.)

It must be noted that any moral parallels between slavery - especially, some of the worst kinds of slavery and the atrocities committed by the worst slavers - and modern-day employment cannot truly be made. This may not have been the case a hundred years ago, but employees today have many rights, protections, benefits, and can bring lawsuits against employers who violate these rights. Clearly, this is a very different situation from a slave who is treated as a farm implement, rather than a human. Thus, this conversation is not about any moral equivalency between these phenomena, but about the practical implications of not being fully in possession of one’s time - whether as a slave in the Roman Empire or an employee of a corporation in the United States.

The considerations that were relevant in the first few centuries of Christianity may be just as relevant today, quite apart from any discussion on the moral aspects of slavery in late antiquity or the particulars of the present-day capitalist treatment of humans as resources to be exploited.