On Embodied Souls in Business: Hinduism and Christianity

A man whose chosen Hindu name is Vridavanath spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 on the plight and ultimate aim of an embodied soul as described in the Bhagavad-Gita. A conditioned soul/self (atman) that has entered the material realm and is thus subject to karmic consequences can come back to the divine source of all: the One that is in all. As material, embodied beings while alive, that is, as both biological and spiritual, we are prone to getting locked into dualities of attachment and aversion, which in turn play right into suffering. We forget that we are wearing material masks, and that our real identity (atman) is greater than our material roles that we assume in our daily lives. Through our actions, we bind ourselves by the law of karma. Before being born into the material realm, a person’s unembodied soul (atman) knew Krishna, but as embodied, the soul/self relates to other corporeal bodies rather than to other people as spiritual beings and thus in compassion. Why does Brahman or Krishna—the respective impersonal or personal notions of Absolute Truth—create the world with separateness from the divine included?  Furthermore, how is a devotee of Krishna to navigate working in business, given the separateness woven into the very fabric of our daily existence as material and spiritual beings?

Body, soul, and matter are the three fundamental elements in the created realm. Fundamentally, we are free beings but we are subject to attachments in the created realm. Honoring the free will of the soul, Brahman or Krishna creates separateness in Creation; it is not that conscious being or the supreme deity wants us to be in a condition of separation from the divine. Rather, the embodied soul is guided in part out of its inclination to live separately from the divine, and Brahman or Krishna use creative energy to accommodate the inclination and thus human free-will. It follows that not only goodness, but also passion and ignorance are the fundamental elements of the soul’s material (embodied) existence in the material world.

As the Supreme Soul, according to Vridavanath, Krishna leads embodied souls to goodness even though Krishna (and Brahman) transcends goodness. Similarly, liberation (moksha) is achieved when there is no longer any residue from good and bad karma. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the same point: that the divine command that Abraham gets to sacrifice his son Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of murder (and even attempted murder, as Abraham is commanded by Yahweh to put down his knife at the last minute). From the standpoint of the (ethical) good, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder. Yet from a theological standpoint, the divine command is to sacrifice rather than murder Isaac. This can only be viewed as absurd to other characters in the story, for they do not have access to the divine command that is given exclusively to Abraham. The ultimate goal in a faith narrative is theological rather than ethical, for such a narrative lies squarely in the sui generis domain of religion, even if that of ethics is related.

In his talk, Vridavanath said that the ultimate goal of the embodied soul/self in the Bhagavad-Gita is to know Krishna, by using the faculty of buddhi, which is the enlightened use of the reasoning faculty of the mind to know the source of the created realm. However, does knowledge exhaust devotion? It seems that the former is better suited to Absolute Truth being impersonal than to it being assumed to be personal, as a Supreme Person. In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you sacrifice, whatever you give, whatever austerities-you-perform—do that . . . (as) an offering to Me. Thus you will be freed from the bonds of action (whose) fruits are auspicious (or) inauspicious. Released, (with) the self-yoked by the Yoga of renunciation, you will come to Me."[1] The goal thus surpasses good as well as bad karma, and thus ethics, as the world itself must be renounced in terms of being attached to it for a person to be liberated. This does not mean non-action, according to the Gita; rather, renunciation means non-attachment to consequences of actions. The embodied soul/self is to do one’s duty in actions without being concerned about the results. Krishna also advocates meditation, as well as bhakti-yoga, the path of offering love by infusing each activity with love of Krishna and all creatures.

The inclusion of "whatever you give" includes offering in devotion to Krishna the fruits of one's labor (i.e., monetary compensation) yet without being attached to the consequences of our actions, including whether there will be a monetary bonus. Rather than desiring wealth, being duty-bound to perform one’s job and giving of one’s compensation to charity in devotion to Krishna and compassion to other people is the way to avoid accumulating bad karma from being greedy and ultimately to return to Krishna, and thus be liberated from any future rebirth (samsara).

The approach corresponds to the Christian social-ethic paradigm whose dominance replaced that of the one wherein having wealth is tightly coupled to greed, regardless of how the wealth is used.[1] That other paradigm is epitomized by Jesus’s saying that a rich person getting into the kingdom of God is like a camel getting through the eye of a needle (I have trouble even putting a thread through a needle’s eye). 

In the Gita, a devotee of Krishna can and in fact should fight in battle, and by implication, be a highly paid CEO of a company, but without being attached to the resulting fame and wealth, respectively. As in the “pro-wealth” (i.e., uncoupled) paradigm of Christianity, a devotee of Krishna does not have to renounce accumulating wealth, as long as at least some of it is given away in charity, in order to avoid serving two masters—Krishna and mammon. That Christian paradigm is, however, less strict because the Jesus-devotee does not have to be detached from the consequences of one’s work, including the prospect of getting a bonus. 

I submit, therefore, that the Christian “pro-wealth” paradigm is more suspectable to the onslaught of greed. This may be why Jesus in the Gospels is firm in demanding that the rich man give away all of his wealth to follow Jesus. It can be concluded that the susceptibility to succumb to greed is treated as higher in the “pro-wealth” Christian paradigm that in the Bhagavad-Gita.

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1. Gita 9.27-28 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 199.
2. Skip Worden, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit and Wealth and God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth.

The Hebrew Bible on Wealth

The early Hebrews considered wealth to be an integral part of human perfection and, moreover, what ought to be.[1] The ideal man was wealthy and leisured, and yet occupied with honorable work.[2] In the Torah, as long as the Hebrews as a people obey God, including dutifully acting as stewards rather than as selfish exploiters of the land that God has provided, poverty should be nonexistent in Israel. “There need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God.”[3] Blessed wealth is a reward for fidelity to Yahweh, whereas poverty here is indicative of, or even punishment for, disobedience, which will evidently always be the case in Israel, for, “There will always be poor people in the land.”[4] The conditionality leaps off the page, as does the notion of collective justice, and yet wealthy individuals, including business practitioners, are held to account. The ethic of work is upheld even though labor in Genesis is due to original sin.  

The Torah does recognize, however, that the humble can be poor and the greedy and prideful can become rich. God does not punish the humble and reward the proud. To be proud is to trust in oneself, and thus one’s own ability to acquire still more. In Psalm 52, the righteous laugh at the man, “who did not make God his stronghold, but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!”[5] Such strength refers here to becoming richer or more powerful, rather than more righteous or pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

The Hebrew Bible depicts greed as a sin. For one thing, greed can motivate a rich or powerful person to unjustly exploit the poor to obtain still more wealth. Relatedly, moreover, putting the love of gain above loving and obeying God implicates greed in contributing to the more grave sin of idolatry—regarding or treating something in Creation as being above the Creator, and thus as a superior god. Pride is thus in the mix—the arrogance of a pot to presume itself superior to the potter who made it. Generally speaking, the Hebrew Bible tends to associate the rich with being greedy, prideful, and, worst of all, idolatrous. Prideful idolatry involves trusting in oneself rather than God. This sort of pride goes easily with making money into an idol to form the ground of existence. The prophets had nothing good to say about selfish wealth and leisure.[6] This does not necessarily implicate wealth itself, however, or even being rich, since it can be a reward for being obedient in placing Yahweh before oneself and other possible gods, such as wooden idols and even earthly treasure. In the Torah, greed and wealth are uncoupled, as if snipped apart with scissors. Wealth itself can go either way. Riches acquired righteously are a blessing from God and therefore do not carry the stain of greed, whereas wealth gained greedily, as in taking unjustly from the poor, is associated with sin.

Nobody is exempt from being tempted by greed. Referring to the people of Jerusalem, Jeremiah charges, “From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain.”[7] As an urge, greed can be understood as coming out of an instinct that is activated along with the subtle sense, or fear, that having enough for the future can never be guaranteed completely. It is as if we were squirrels continuously scurrying around after walnuts, storing as many as possible until none more can be found. No amount of wealth is sufficient to get a person to certainty on whether what one now has is sufficient for one’s future needs and comfort. Accordingly, having just clinched a good deal is never enough; any brief satisfaction at the achievement is quickly replaced by the urge to get an even better deal.

Just because greed is a sin does not mean that it treats all wealth as sinful too. According to the Hebrew Bible, a person need not be wealthy in order to be greedy, and a person can be rich without being greedy. Every prophet preached that if Israel were righteous, it would be sure to prosper—the gift of Jehovah on condition that Israel kept to the covenant (i.e., righteousness).[8] The prophets denounce the abuse of wealth rather than seeking or holding wealth itself, luxury, commerce or even monopoly as evil in itself. [9] Even if the overwhelming majority of rich Hebrews in Jerusalem were at a certain time very greedy in unjustly exploiting the poor to gain still more wealth, the Torah indicates that God could still bestow riches, which, coming as a blessing, would be unstained by the sin of greed. Each of the three Patriarchs in Genesis, for example, is rich.[10] Were greed mixed in with blessed wealth, God would be rewarding the righteous with a sin, which does not make sense. Abraham’s wealth is a gift from God rather than a sin.[11]

As a gift, blessed wealth can come with or without the need to labor for it. Proverb 10 promises, “The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, without painful toil for it.”[12] Blessed wealth gained without effort is reminiscent of the natural wealth of the Golden Age depicted by Greco-Roman poets such as Homer and Ovid.[13] The Greco-Roman poets characterize such wealth as being free of greed; where there is plenty and no fear of future shortage, a person need not labor; one can even let go of the instinct for still more without fear of falling short one day. In the Hebrew Bible, blessed wealth without painful toil is associated with not only a lack of greed, but also the Garden of Eden—hence prior to Adam’s original sin. It follows that blessed wealth without labor is more of a reward than is the variety of blessed wealth in which industriousness is required. 

The Hebrew Bible does not insist that industriousness itself is sinful. Proverb 10 states, “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. He who gathers crops in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son. The wealth of the rich is their fortified city, but poverty is the ruin of the poor.”[14] Therefore, working diligently does not necessarily mean that a person is greedy. “Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies will have their fill of poverty.”[15] Ceaseless activity does not necessarily point to the presence of greed. Proverb 18 goes so far as to say, “One who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys.”[16] Industriousness does not suffer from the vice of such sloth.

Industriousness is not unconditionally good, however. The virtue must pertain to the person who works rightly as a steward in the vineyard in which God created the soil, the vine, the fruit, and even the laborer. Proverb 22 declares, “Rich and poor have this in common: The LORD is the Maker of them all.”[17] Although the vineyard differs from the Garden of Eden (or the poets’ Golden Age) in that painful toil is necessary, profit-taking from industrious labor is a blessing, or reward, that God bestows on the stewards who have been dutifully industrious in managing God’s property.  The blessed wealth and the industriousness being presumed greed-free are therefore conditioned on how a person responds to God.

With God as “Possessor of heaven and earth,” the world is the Creator’s property in Genesis.[18] It follows that human possessions are gifts from God. Rather than becoming the absolute owner of the gifted property, the Hebrew is meant to act as God’s steward.[19] That is, God retains the basic or foundational ownership right in His property. Moreover, the property relations embody a relation between Israel and God in which the Israelites owe obedience and service as stewards in exchange for a right to Jehovah’s blessings, which include riches.[20]  Put another way, because Jehovah is a partner in every Hebrew’s property, no Israelite was able “do as he liked with his own.”[21] Indeed, one’s own is precisely what is being qualified or restrained here. At most, a Hebrew’s property was his own and God’s, if not altogether God’s.[22] The partnership laid out in Scripture is one of rights and responsibilities rather than “anything goes,” as is the case with greed.

The theological value of maintaining the partnership through dutiful work and blessed wealth should not be overstated, however. Even though the bounty from God’s vineyard is free of greed, the riches cannot be expected to accomplish what righteousness can do. According to Proverb 22, “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”[23] Proverb 11 is more direct. “Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.”[24] Through Zephaniah, God says of the sinners, “Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the LORD’s wrath.”[25] Clearly, having wealth is not as valuable as being righteous.

If riches bestowed by God are worthless in making up for unrighteousness, it goes without saying that greed-laden wealth surely cannot accomplish what righteousness can. “Ill-gotten treasures have no lasting value, but righteousness delivers from death.”[26] When greed is added to the equation, industriousness and its wages become ruinous. Proverbs warns, “Better the poor whose walk is blameless than the rich whose ways are perverse.”[27] In other words, even though we are all subject to the temptation to subject our diligent labor to greed, the sour odor need not stain the fabric of one’s work clothes or the fruit of one’s labor. “The wages of the righteous is life, but the earnings of the wicked are sin and death.”[28] The greedy, having acquired their wealth unjustly, will lose it. The Book of Enoch, of the ancient Jewish apocalyptic movement, reads, “Woe to you who acquire silver and gold in unrighteousness and say: ‘We have become rich with riches and have possessions; (a)nd have acquired everything we have desired.’ . . . your riches shall not abide . . . For ye have acquired it all in unrighteousness, (a)nd ye shall be given over to a great curse.”[29] Both in respect to wealth falling far short of righteousness and the very conditionality of blessed wealth, the positive theological significance of wealth is lessened, or at least moderated. Neither the conditionality of the positive theological significance nor the tendency of people to succumb to greed is a trivial point in the Hebrew Bible.

For more on Judaism on profit-seeking and wealth, see Skip Worden, God’s Gold, ch. 2.

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[1]. Charles R. Smith, The Bible Doctrine of Wealth and Work (London: Epworth Press, 1924), 21.

[2]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 22, 33-34.

[3]. Deut. 15:4-5.

[4]. Deut. 15:11.

[5]. Ps. 52:6-7. All Biblical passages quoted in this chapter are according to the New International Version of the Bible, obtained from BibleGateway.com.

[6]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 111.

[7]. Jer. 8:10.

[8]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 128.

[9]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 97-99.

[10]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 21.

[11]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 24; Gen. 24:35.

[12]. Prov. 10:22.

[13]. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, ch. 1.

[14]. Prov. 10:4,5,15.

[15]. Prov. 28:19.

[16]. Prov. 18:9.

[17]. Prov. 22:2

[18]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 23; Genesis 14:19,22.

[19]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 25.

[20]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 26,55.

[21]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 54-55.

[22]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 55.

[23]. Prov. 22:1.

[24]. Prov. 11:4.

[25]. Zeph. 1:18.

[26]. Prov. 10:2

[27]. Prov. 28:6. According to Flusser, the Book of Enoch, of the ancient Jewish apocalyptic movement, contrasts woes against the wicked rich with word of hope and promise to the righteous poor. David Flusser, “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit,” Israel Exploration Journal, 10 no. 1 (1960): 12.

[28]. Prov. 10:16.

[29]. Book of Enoch, bk 5, 97:8,10. Quote from Robert H. Charles, The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906.

Pope Francis on Subordinating Greed and Wealth

The documentary, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) chiefly lays out the pope’s critique of economic Man. The film begins with references to climate change too loosely linked to the global population figure of 8 million humans, 1 billion of whom are unnecessarily living in poverty. The viewer is left to fill in the gaps, such as that because as biological organisms we must consume and use energy, the hyperextended overpopulation of the species is the root cause of climate- and ecosystem-changing CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. Arguably, the salvific Son of God or the means into the Kingdom of God enjoy pride of place in the gospels, but compassion for the poor as well as outcasts and the sick is indeed a message that Jesus stresses in the faith narratives. Rather than being a sign of sin, poverty, especially if voluntary,  can permit the sort of humility that is much superior to the pride of the Pharisees. In the documentary, Jorge Bergoglio, who took the name Francis in becoming pope of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, is a practical man who points to the sickness or temptation of greed that keeps humanity from riding itself of poverty, unnecessarily. Moreover, the hegemony of the market, with its culture of consumerism and commoditization, comes at the cost of the common good, which to Francis has a spiritual basis. Abstractly speaking, harmony, which inherently respects its own limitations, should have priority over greed and markets. Both of these can go to excess without enough built-in constraints as occurred before and during the financial crisis of 2008, with poverty plaguing humanity more rather than less as a result.

The full essay is at "Pope Francis."

The Fire in Notre Dame Cathedral during Holy Week: Divine Retribution?

Just in terms of how the business and political elites reacted to the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the want of a distinctly religious explanation reflected the hegemony of the secular culture in the E.U. at the time. How the incident, which occurred on April 15, 2019, might fit into an established religious narrative was largely ignored, at least by the media reporting on the fire and its aftermath. Instead, the focus was on the impact on French politics and the donations being made to repair the damage. In particular, the matter of billionaires donating a hundred or two hundred euros fueled a debate on the morality of giving so much when giving to the poor could ease economic inequality, rather than on the religious legitimacy of being rich even with the good use in rebuilding a cathedral. The media at least was silent on the question of whether God had exacted divine retribution against the Roman Catholic Church for having pedophile priests and high-ranked clerics covering them up to safeguard the reputation of the universal Church. That the fire occurred during Holy Week makes the lack of any application of the faith narratives particularly striking; what if a fire in a major cathedral of the Roman Catholic Church during Holy Week were in fact, or at least in narrative, a matter of divine retribution?

(source: The New York Times)

Just three days after the fire, even as the state of France was paying tribute to the firefighters who had saved the building’s structure, “a growing debate about how the gothic landmark should be rebuilt” was brewing.[1] On the previous day, the state, which owned the cathedral at the time, laid out a five-year reconstruction goal” after donations of €845 million had already poured in.”[2] François Pinault gave €100 million and Bernard Arnault then gave €200 million.[3] The billionaires’ huge donations gave rise in turn to a debate on the extent of economic inequality in the state, one of the E.U.’s wealthiest. 

In terms of Christian ethics, the virtue of munificence, which had been especially esteemed during the Renaissance, involves large gifts, such as to build a church, and thus necessitated being rich. The virtue of liberality involves smaller donations and thus did not require riches. The rich man could get into heaven after all, as long as good uses are made of munificence. Serving God rather than greed could be inferred from the desire to spend at least a significant portion of a fortune on good uses, such as in funding a church or founding an organization to help the poor. The link between being rich and being greedy had been loosened if not broken by the Christian Renaissance theologians.[4] A person could be rich and yet not be presumed to be motivated by serving money rather than God. This assumption contradicts the assumption that seldom can a person become wealthy without having acted unethically in business. Forget morality; that a rich person could be motivated to serve God rather than money may seem astoundingly naïve to people in a secularized world.

Just in how quickly thoughts turned to the reconstruction in France, and, in President Macron’s words, the “resurrection,” of Notre Dame suggests that, outside of the investigation of whether the cause had been an electrical short-circuit, the question of the religious significance of the destruction was largely missed. Even as some onlookers prayed during the fire presumably for it to miraculously stop, the mere possibility that the fire was divine retribution directed to the Catholic Church because of its child-raping priests and the enabling bishops and cardinals who covered up the rapists within. Such a thought was simply too far from even twenty-first religious thought, not to mention secular thought, to be entertained.

In the Old Testament, Samuel tells King Saul that God is no longer with him; the prophet then anoints David, whom the prophet Nathan will castigate for adultery (and killing the husband). In a prophet role, Jesus points out the hypocrisy of the Temple priests even as he stays away from speaking truth to the Roman rulers. It could be expected, therefore, that followers of Jesus would speak up to ostensibly Christian clerics and even their religious organization. God is no longer with you. Your church (or you) can expect divine retribution for what it (you) has/have done, for no man or organization is above divine judgment. It would have been strange to hear Catholics in St. Peter's Square shouting Repent! to their Church. 

What if God damaged a gem of the Roman Catholic Church, even though the cathedral was owned at the time by the state of France? What if France itself was besides the point? The issue would not have been whether an electrical short-circuit caused the blaze; this type of causation reflects empirical science rather than religious causation, which can be something external or in terms of meaning in the human mind. Nor would the immediate focus have been on reconstruction and the need for “French Unity” as if the destruction were a political matter. The absence of religious debate attests to how far removed secular Europe was from its Christian past. Perhaps that past had never taken root. 

Had the debate been religious, questions would have included whether divine decrees could still happen, and could a religion continue to be viable whose deity does not punish a Church for having prioritized saving its own reputation over justice and the protection of innocents from acts as heinous as child-rape. 

Joe Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, had written a letter as the archbishop of Munich urging that a pedophile priest not be defrocked because of the damage the scandal would do to the reputation of the universal church. The priest in question was transferred to another parish, where his roles included youth ministry. In September, 2011, two American advocacy groups filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The complaint points to the pope and three other top clerics in the Vatican as having engaged in crimes against humanity for having abetted and covered up the rapes of children by priests. After the pope resigned and agreed to stay within the Vatican in 2013, the complaint was dropped. This is why the conservative pope resigned. Yet he got away with his crimes. "The high-level officials of the Catholic church who failed to prevent and punish these criminal actions," the complaint says, "have, to date, enjoyed absolute impunity."[5] Powerful enough to make a deal with the court's prosecutors, the Roman Catholic Church was able to protect itself (i.e., it's elite), but it may have lost God in the process. Given the lack of self-imposed justice in the Vatican itself, God may have sought to get the Church's attention, including its laity, by means of a fire at Notre Dame during Holy Week in 2019, or the thought of which may have religious significance, or meaning. 

Such meaning transcends satisfaction from moral justice. As Kierkegaard points out in Fear and Trembling, a divine decree may contradict our sense of morality, as it does when God decrees that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, which in a moral sense is murder. As immoral as raping a child is, divine judgment and retribution concerns breaking faith with God (i.e., sin). Too often, sin is reduced to "immoral," even though more is involved that transcends our notions of moral and immoral conduct. 

Religion can be very problematic precisely because religious people believe decrees that contradict morality are nonetheless valid. I write elsewhere that the element of transcendence transcends morality and makes religion distinctively religious.  A belief (not knowledge!) in divine decrees satisfies the transcendent core of religion, yet how many Christians in Paris at the time of the fire entertained the mere possibility that God may have been reacting to the unaccountable acts committed by clergy in the Roman Catholic Church? The ICC couldn't touch the former living pope and three others, but God could touch a gem of the Church, perhaps meant as a wake-up call as the fire during in Holy Week would surely get attention, even just in symbolic terms. Even just in enabling the men in the Church's clerical hierarchy by continuing to attend Mass and tithe, the laity may have been stepping away from God without realizing it. Perhaps God acted to get their attention because they had been so ensconced by the status quo or, frankly, too selfish to give up their local churches. 

To be sure, Isiah claims that God’s ways are not our ways and Jesus preaches that the Kingdom of God is not of this world, so would it be impious even questioning whether a fire at Notre Dame Cathedral is enough punishment for a hypocritical Christian Church that had strayed so, as if with impunity, from Jesus’ preaching on how to enter the Kingdom of God? Because God goes beyond the limits of human cognition and perception, according to St. Denis, we mere mortals can not know whether an event has the divine will behind it. Even the assumption that an event deemed supernatural is religious, or that the validity of religion depends on supernatural events, is problematic. So by asking whether the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral can be characterized as divine retribution, I am not necessarily suggesting the possibility of a supernatural act. I contend that the resonance of the religious meaning could have been felt or at least realized. 

Even if the belief in ongoing divine decrees had largely been vanquished by the time of the fire, whether due to encroachments by secular culture that privileges knowledge over belief, or by the related empirical science, the meaning of outside retribution against otherwise unaccountable crimes of power can still have resonance, even beyond moral agreement. The meaning could be informed by religious stories in the Bible known from childhood, and perhaps even fueled by a human instinctual urge for justice to be applied to power especially in cases in which it resists so. God has left you, Samuel said to Saul. 

It makes sense that the spirit of Christ has left the Vatican and priests if enough of the individuals acted in contradistinction to Jesus' preaching. Whether the intent of those clerics in the church hierarchy who covered up the sexual abuse was to protect the reputation of “the universal Church” or more personally to stay in office, power, like greed, can be at odds with the desire to serve God rather than oneself.

Christian leadership can be in the style of shepherd.[6] What good shepherd would rape a small sheep, or look away in protecting the rapists? Such a shepherd would hardly be a servant of the sheep. Such a shepherd would hardly evince Christian leadership, as such leadership must be consistent with Jesus's teachings on how to enter the Kingdom of God.  Rather, such a shepherd would fit Nietzsche's depiction of the ascetic priest, whose urge to dominate is incompatible with an underlying condition of weakness.[7] While neither Nietzsche's conception of strength or weakness fits with Jesus's kind of strength, Nietzsche's conception of strength is closer because it is more selflessly generous than is Nietzschean weakness. The sheer meaningfulness of outside accountability beyond human power being applied to weak clerics who refuse to give up their positions (i.e., power) in spite of the glaring hypocrisy is in line with many of the faith narratives in the Bible as well as a human instinct for justice. Hence the secular reactions in Paris during and after the fire can be said to have eclipsed a distinct sort of meaning, religious meaning, which transcends moral sentiment.

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[1] Aurelien Breeden, “France Debates How to Rebuild Notre-Dame, Weighing History and Modernity,” The New York Times, April 18, 2019.

[2] Aurelien Breeden, “Millions in Notre-Dame Donations Pour In as France Focuses on Rebuilding,” The New York Times, April 17, 2019.

[3] Liz Alderman and Steven Erlanger, “As Rich Lavish Cash on Notre-Dame, Many Ask: What About the Needy?” The New York Times, April 17, 2019.

[4] Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.
[5] Laurie Goodstein, "Abuse Victims Ask Court to Prosecute the Vatican," The New York Times, September 13, 2011.
[6] Skip Worden, Christianized Ethical Leadership: The Servant, Shepherd, and Steward, available at Amazon.
[7] For the figure of the ascetic priest applied to business ethicists and managers, see my book, On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Modern Management, available at Amazon.

God's Gold through the Centuries

In the wake of the financial crisis that came to a head in September of 2008, people might have been wondering if sufficient moral constraints on the greed on Wall Street are available, even possible. The ability of traders to create complex derivative securities that are difficult for regulators to regulate, much less understand, may have people looking for ethical or even religious constraints. It would be only natural to ask if such “soft” restraint mechanisms really do have the puissance to do the trick.

Here’s the rub: the tricksters are typically the last to avail themselves of ethical or religious systems, and they the wrongdoers are the ones in need of the restraint. Blankfein said of his bank, Goldman Sachs, that it had been doing God’s work. About a week after saying that, he had to walk his statement back and admit that the bankers had does some things that were morally wrong. Although divine omnipotence is by definition not limited by human ethical systems, it is hard to imagine a divine decree telling bankers to tell their clients one thing (buy subprime mortgage derivatives) while taking the opposite position on the bank’s proprietary position (shorting the derivatives, beyond being a counterparty to clients). Divine duplicity seems to represent an oxymoron on a megascale rather than a justification for greed.
As the crisis erupted and was subsequently managed by public officials in government and new managers brought in to salvage AIG, I was researching the history of Christian thought on profit-seeking and wealth. I have since published an academic text and a nonfiction book, which develops further on the treatise on the topic. As the book is too recondite for sane people (i.e., outside of academia), I am writing a non-fiction book on the topic for a broader readership.
To whet the appetites of those of you who are waiting for something more readable that a recondite thesis, I present a brief account of my original research on the topic here. Most significantly, I found evidence of a gradual shift in the thought between Aquinas and the fifteenth-century Christian Humanists (mainly in what is now Italy). Whereas early Christian thought had tended to stress the negative attitude toward riches—the camel being in extreme pain in getting through the eye of the needle—in the Renaissance Christian theologians tended to argue that being wealth is necessary for a Christian to exercise the godly practical virtues of liberality and magnificence (particularly the latter, which alone permits gifts reflective of God’s majesty).
Something had happened in the dominant Christian attitude on wealth that made the religion less of a buttress against greed because it had become possible for a Christian to be both rich and to go to heaven. Cosimo de Medici is a perfect example of a banker who was assured by the pope that a career based on usury would not necessarily bar a banker from entering heaven (assuming he gave financially to the Church).
The various Reformers can be read as efforts to pull Christianity back from being so close to incorporating love of gain, or greed. I looked at the (Standard Oil) monopolist and devout Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, to get a sense of how efficacious the Reformation was in attempting to arrest and reverse the momentum of the pro-wealth Christian paradigm.
Having sketched the shift and subsequent reactions of the Reformers, I turned my attention to trying to explain both the shift itself and the efficacy of the Reformation. I believe the increasingly commercialized environment since the Commercial Revolution does not provide enough of an explanation; I contend that one must look at the religion itself to find the roots of the shift and the results of the Reformation as concerns the religion's theological attitudes toward wealth. In other words, Christianity itself must be examined. As you read through the book, you could do worse than ask yourself: is there something deeper in Christianity at work in the historical shift in thought on wealth and profit-seeking?  You will find my theory in the conclusion. Undoubtedly, you will develop your own as you reflect as you read.
The main question I pose through the treatise is whether religion itself, as a phenomenon touching the human domain of existence, can hold us back from ourselves even when we least want it to do so. If so, then a religion operating in the human domain can operate as a wholly-other mechanism by which sins such as greed can be reduced in force or perhaps even finally extirpated. To expunge the sordid stuff from our banks and corporations, human nature itself would have to be radically changed. Perhaps the question is whether it is possible even if not probable for religion operating through human beings to accomplish this task, given that religion cannot but interact with the world.

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See related essay: "Religious Sources of Business Ethics"

The non-fiction book: God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. Available at Amazon.