A Plea for Foolishness as a More Durable Wisdom?

This was published 50 years ago – tell me if it is now obsolete, dated, passe? I have broken up what is otherwise a sustained and relentless paragraph in critique of a fundamental assumption of contemporary Western existence. You may have to read it more than once – that may be because it seeks to expose what we would rather not see.

The whole modern world is one great campaign against risk and uncertainty; as a money dominated world, it is a world of life insurance. 'The modern world as a whole is a world which thinks only about its own old age. It is a monstrous old people's home, an institution for pensioners.

In economics, politics, and constitutional law, as in ethics, psychology and metaphysics, we should, if only we had better eyes, be able to see one thing and one thing only: how much this terrible need for peace and quiet is invariably a principle of enslavement. It is always freedom that has to pay the bill. It is always money that is the master. The glorious insecurity of the present is always sacrificed to the security of the moment immediately following.

That is the real psychology of the contemporary idea of progress: man would like to live his life in the future, to live in advance of the event, so making his present into his past. Taking thought for the morrow, saving for the morrow, actually means throwing away its freedom, castrating its potency and fertility, which are the supreme blessings for human beings.

Every financial transaction is an expense of spirit; the only genuine miser, storing up his treasures, is the lover. This is the most profound teaching of the the Gospel. And we are so much under the domination of money, the Antichrist, that even when we do not openly name it, we constantly take its name for granted. In this commercial world, everything is commercial, even metaphysics, and theology; they too fall into line and cease to have any true presence in their own right. Christianity, like everything else, is detemporalised and thereby deprived of its 'salt'.

Avarice in the form of anxiety about tomorrow is the lord of all the world. The drying up of the heart makes itself felt both temporally and spiritually. The person who rejects the fluiditiy of the living heart, preferring the rigidity of money and conceptual thought, has already chosen the other kind of fluidity, the liquefaction of the corpse.

The question is simply what in any given world is a commercial commodity and what is not. It is by this standard that every world will be judged.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord III A Theological Aesthetics. Studies in theological Style: Lay Styles, (San Francisco: Crossroads) 1986, pages 478-9

Now I guess you could say those are the words of a grumpy old theologian, and that may be so. And it does seem a wholesale condemnation of economic activity for its own sake. But is he wrong? Does he exaggerate to the point where he can be ignored?

Jesus said you cannot serve God and money – so how do we follow faithfully after Jesus in a money dominated culture? What would be the signs that our allegiances are at times tested to the point of capitulation? In the work of the Kingdom of God, how important are financial questions of profit and loss, assurance and risk, generosity and prudence – and should the Church learn again the counter intuitive practices of giving away, free gift, reckless compassion, unlocked resources – and those as acts of freedom and declarations of independence from a cash dominant culture. 

Or is that the idealism of the fool, the naivete of the enthusdiast, the behaviour of one devoid of any practical, viable and responsible strategy? But maybe the strategy is precisely this, the sacramental use of money and possessions to subvert the secular sacraments of compulsive consumption within the free market by deliberate decisions and intentional actions that demonstrate a Christian use of money.

If there is such a thing?