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Join the Libertarian Christian Institute as each week they explore, debate, and analyze the issues that are directly relevant to the intersection of Christianity and liberty. Always thoughtful, frequently controversial, and never boring (trust us), it is our hope and prayer that The Libertarian Christian Podcast serve as a valuable resource to the Church for years to come.
If you'd like to reach out to us and ask a question or submit some feedback, you can reach us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, our website, libertarianchristians.com.
Matt Bellis:
[0:03] Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo, expand your imagination, and tackle controversy head-on. Let's stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It's time for the Libertarian Christian Podcast.
Cody:
[0:22] Welcome to the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and a member of the Christians for Liberty Network. My guest today is Dr. Dylan Pomon. Dr. Pomon is the founder and president of the St. Nicholas Cabosalus Institute and a research fellow at the Acton Institute. He's also the author of The Kingdom of God and the Common Good, and co-editor of a new book, The Christian Roots of American Liberty, which is a source book charting the prehistory of America's founding principles through the ancient medieval and early modern worlds. I guess actually both are pretty new books. He's committed to making the case for free and flourishing societies to Christians from an Eastern Orthodox tradition. Dr. Pomon, thanks for joining us.
Dylan:
[1:04] It's great to be here.
Cody:
[1:05] Well, first off, I'm excited about your brand new book, The Christian Roots of American Liberty. But since I haven't had a chance to read that one yet, I want to focus on the kingdom of God and the Common Goods. And the subtitle of that is Orthodox Christian Social Thought. So I want to start by maybe kind of clarifying what this book is and what it isn't. So if a reader picks this book up and they're thinking, okay, I'm going to get a strong argument for classical liberalism or libertarianism directly from Orthodox tradition, they're probably going to be a little puzzled by what they actually end up reading. So in fact, you do highlight some areas where Eastern Orthodox thought can contribute to the project of building a freer society. And, But you also bring in Catholic and Protestant tradition into that conversation. And so is that because, you know, just because of your ecumenical spirit or is it because Eastern Orthodoxy's resources are more limited for this kind of project of arguing for a free society?
Dylan:
[1:58] So I don't think our resources are actually limited, but they're not as well known. So I've been working at ACT Institute for 15 years now. And for 14 of those years, I edited our academic journal, Journal of Markets and Morality. And I was reading all this great stuff from Roma Catholics and especially Calvinists, but other Protestants too. And in my own research, I was trying to answer the question, well, what's my tradition's perspective modern economics, on questions of liberty and free markets and all that kind of stuff. And I found resources, but it wasn't like there was no book. There's nobody's writing books on this in Orthodox tradition, but there were people talking about it and researching it at least, I'd say, into the mid-20th century. And then what happened is 70 years of communism and civil war in Greece and a civil war in Lebanon and basically... People from traditionally orthodox societies had bigger problems that they were addressing. They weren't asking the question, you know, what do we do about the working poor in this industrial era? They were asking the question, how do we preserve our orthodox tradition now that we're living in the West or, you know, things like that.
Dylan:
[3:07] Totally important questions, but just different questions. So it's something that while other traditions just kept building on what they had, our voice became a bit quieter. And so that's that's the goal of the book is not only to bring our voice back into that broader Christian ecumenical conversation, but also to provide the tools, the resources to really show my work so that anybody hopefully could come alongside me and contribute to this. It's it's the book that I wish existed 15 years ago, but didn't.
Cody:
[3:39] Yeah, I always say when I'm writing a new book, I think of Gandhi's comment, be the change you want to see in the world. My philosophy is write the book that you want to see in the world, because if it doesn't exist yet, somebody's got to write it.
Dylan:
[3:49] Yeah.
Cody:
[3:50] So do you think, though, that Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity kind of famously leads the way for classical liberalism, and that develops there. Do you think that Eastern Christianity could have arrived at classical liberalism on the basis of scripture and its own tradition alone? Or is it necessary, do you think, to bring it into conversation with the Western tradition? In other words, did the West stumble on these ideas accidentally, or was there something in the Western cultural or religious imaginary that was unique that made the development of liberal ideas somewhat inevitable?
Dylan:
[4:22] So I chose to become Orthodox 18 years ago. I didn't grow up in the church, and I did that for experiential reasons, but also doctrinal reasons. So there are some things that are real differences between East and West, and I side with East on those things. However, there's a lot that's just over-polemicized. And actually think having a sharp division between Eastern and Western Christianity is really harmful. It ends up, from an Orthodox perspective, it ends up where people start throwing things out for being Western that are actually perfectly Orthodox. I think a great example would be things like religious liberty, rule of law, all this kind of stuff first actually happens in the Christian East. You have the Edict de Milan. I mean, I guess Constantine was emperor of the whole Roman Empire, but he changed the capital to Constantinople. You have the Justinian code. When it was discovered in the Middle Ages in the West, it led to a renaissance in law. Well, where was Justinian emperor again? He was emperor in Constantinople, right?
Dylan:
[5:27] And I could just kind of go throughout our history. And again, like there are these sources I can point to and I can say, well, there it is and there it is and there it is. But it's just not. The direction that very recent history took. And so it's not what is typically associated with orthodoxy. But, you know, there's things like St. Nicholas Kabasilis, who I named my institute after, in the 14th century is talking about private property and freedom and freedom of speech. And he's linking all these things together on the basis of his Christian convictions. And there's things like the republics of Novgorod and Pskov in the Middle Ages for 350 years, Orthodox Christians were voting on their rulers. They were voting on their laws. They were even voting on the archbishop. And we have like a copy of their charter, or at least one of their charters. And the very first article is rule of law, that, you know, everyone is supposed to be judged equally, no matter what class of society they belong to.
Dylan:
[6:22] And so I think all the fundamentals are there. And in like the early Russian empire, I'd say the first century, there was a lot of kind of constructive borrowing from the West. Sometimes I do think that was, they went a little overboard. But I think a lot of the Orthodox memory is, oh, that was just this Westernizing period and therefore it was all bad. And again, like we have saints from that period that are great. And they saw there was some valuable things in the West and not just valuable things, but they saw things that resonated with their Orthodox point of view. I think that's a healthier way to approach it.
Dylan:
[6:56] And then more recently, I've been doing a lot of work on the 20th century Orthodox philosopher S.L. Frank. He died in 1950, but I actually just had an essay published today. So I would recommend it at the Center for Enterprise Markets and Ethics. So CEME. And it's on S.L. Frank's liberalism in the classical sense.
Dylan:
[7:17] There's amazing parallels to Hayek and his understanding of spontaneous and planned orders in society. His understanding of the limits of empirical observation. You know, there's kind of two forms of knowledge that he gets into. So there's a lot there, I think. We have those same resources and it's not, there's no big conspiracy behind it. It's just a different story of history. But the common foundation is Christianity. It's not Western-ness or Eastern-ness, right? And I think that that's something that sometimes gets lost in all the polemics.
Cody:
[7:49] Yeah, that's a fair point. Well, maybe just kind of another sort of question along those lines. Would you say that free market or limited government views are at least a minority view in Eastern Orthodoxy? Maybe they're there, but are they a minority view? And if so, what place do minority views have in traditions like Eastern Orthodoxy where broad consent is a major criteria for evaluating doctrine?
Dylan:
[8:14] Well, I mean, I think it's kind of a minority view in most Christian traditions, you know, maybe with the exception of like the Southern Baptist Convention, although these days they're kind of big on, you know, tariffs and Trump and that kind of thing. So that's just true everywhere.
Cody:
[8:30] Yeah, I guess I'm asking the question more from kind of a Protestant perspective where Protestants don't weigh tradition or consent as heavily as Catholics or, Eastern Orthodox would. So does that create a challenge? Because Protestants, we can just believe anything we want. But, you know, being Orthodox, is it complicated if you have a view that's kind of a minority view?
Dylan:
[8:51] I don't think so, actually. It depends on what you mean by minority views. So when it comes to dogma, especially in the Orthodox Church, I like to use a kind of distinguish between an Orthodox approach to tradition and, say, Roman Catholic view. It's sort of like the difference between civil law and common law, like the British common law tradition. The British common law tradition respects kind of unwritten rules, customs, that sort of thing. Whereas the civil law tradition really needs everything written out or it's not legal. Right. And that's kind of the approach to dogma in the West. There's a lot in the Roman Catholic Church that is dogma. There's actually not a lot other than the seven ecumenical councils, which are basically all about the question, who is Jesus? That's dogma.
Dylan:
[9:36] Now, there's definitely some things that are heresy. There's some things that are out of bounds, right? But there's a lot in between, which we would call theologumina, right? Kind of an acceptable opinion, but don't go out teaching it as dogma. And within that, there are minority views that are tolerated. So even doctrinally, we have differing views of heaven and hell within our tradition, depending on the saint. And we kind of are like, well, you know, God will sort that out. We don't we don't need to dogmatize that. We don't have that kind of inside knowledge. You know, some people are kind of more universalist. Some people are, you know, more traditional from a Western point of view. And that's kind of just OK. It doesn't bother us. and so I don't, I don't think, uh, on, on top of all that, when you talk about questions of, how we relate to the world, well, the world is always changing. I mean, that's just fundamental to its ontology. Anything that is not God is mutable and changing. in which case,
Dylan:
[10:30] It's actually inappropriate to have an unchanging view how we relate to the world because the world is changing. So there should be principles that are unchanging. There's, of course, eternal moral foundations, ontological foundations. But we need to actually be aware of the context we live in today. A metaphor I like to use is in the Middle Ages, you can find these maps that are actually quite good, like in manuscripts, where the world is shown as like a circle, is good. They knew the world was round, contrary to stereotypes. You got like Jesus and some angels at the top, so that's better than our maps today, right? But then you get to the actual like land on the map and you have Europe and Asia and Africa and then like a ring of islands around the outside and then like sea monsters on the bottom, right? Because all they knew is you go too far and you don't come back. So you probably were swallowed by sea monsters. the maps are actually really, really detailed. They got rivers and mountains and cities and everything labeled. And that's all the map that anybody needed until 1492. Right.
Dylan:
[11:31] And then human knowledge changed. The knowledge of our world changed and we needed a new map to be able to navigate that world. That I feel the same way about our social life. We need a new social map since the Industrial Revolution really incorporate all these new dimensions of our social life. And that's definitely kind of the part five of my book. I really try to tie everything together with that theme, that it's not about reinventing our faith, but it is about applying our faith to new circumstances. So again, in that case, need to have respect for that tradition. We always want to be rooted in the faith passed down to us. we also need to acknowledge that we live in our time now and we need to figure out what that looks like for us in our context.
Cody:
[12:14] Yeah, I love the map illustration, by the way. That's really great. Map is good if it's useful.
Dylan:
[12:21] Right.
Cody:
[12:22] So let's focus in then a little bit on some of these positive contributions that Eastern Christianity brings to the conversation. So some people might be thinking, especially coming from a classical liberal or libertarian perspective, okay, well, Roman Catholicism, they've got subsidiarity. Reform theology has sphere sovereignty. Anabaptism has the two kingdoms. So there are three orthodox ideas that you emphasize in particular and this is one i didn't check with you on pronunciation but i think it's sober nos to believe it's a russian word, or togetherness there's also sophia greek word meaning wisdom then there's liturgy so sober nos sophia liturgy and these sound like great interesting principles but but what do they have to do with building a society which is not only virtuous but free when you say you know subsidiary i kind of get it but but how does togetherness and wisdom and liturgy help us to build a freer society?
Dylan:
[13:13] Yeah, so I guess I'll go through each of them in that order. So, Sabornost comes from the old Salonic translation of the Nicene Creed. And there's, you know, at the end of the Creed, after it talks about Father, Son, Holy Spirit, it talks about the church. And it describes the church as one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church. So, Sabornost comes from the word for Catholic. Catholic in Greek is katholiki, and it literally means through the whole. It's not just through the whole world. It means through the whole of life. And I talk about this in relation to St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred in 110 AD. He coined the term, as far as we know, the Catholic Church. And it's very clear that he means something more like that in context. And so it's this idea that is then applied even to society, that you don't have community, you don't have a society, you don't have a community. Just as an aggregate of individuals, that there's some togetherness, you know, to use your translation.
Dylan:
[14:09] There's something that turns he, she, and they into I, you, and we. It's this difference between, you know, maybe Hayek would say true and false individualism, or, you know, other philosophers would contrast kind of atomistic individualism with a personalism. I mean, in this, I think there's some common ground with other traditions too, you know, Jacques Maritain, for example, in the Roman Catholic tradition as a personalist. it's very much a dynamic that comes out of that. And it's emphasizing this, uniquely and essentially personal nature of social life.
Dylan:
[14:40] Writers such as S.L. Frank and St. Maria Skobsova, they then ground this ontologically in our created in the image of God, our essential connectedness to God, that we don't exist apart from him. He's sustaining our existence. And it's when we are aware of that and we're living in that reality that we experience this conciliarity or this subornos. And that's contrasted with a more, you know, externally ordered system. And it's usually understood that we actually need both of these in life. Like you do need some law. You do need some police even.
Dylan:
[15:17] Some of us are more skeptical than others of how much you need. But what's great about Stobornos is it makes room for that spontaneity and makes room for the local, the personal. And it's something that is rooted very strongly in our Orthodox tradition. Sophia, on the other hand, does, is it, you know, basically just the Greek word for wisdom. A lot of Russian theologians, especially Russian, I would say, and maybe not exclusively in the 20th century, use this to talk about.
Dylan:
[15:48] Kind of related reality, but it was more along the lines of, you know, just like in Proverbs, talks about God creating the world through his wisdom. They said, well, you know, God has given us wisdom. And so when we use our wisdom to create We're actually co-creating with God. It was a way of framing the productivity of human nature, the creativity of it. So on the one hand, Sobornos is contrasted with the impersonal realm of life, both of which are important. Sophia is more about productive versus unproductive is maybe not the nicest term for it. And I think Jean-Baptiste C is correct in saying, you know, Adam Smith maybe went too far in talking about unproductive and productive labor. But certainly in economic terms, there's a difference between a charity and a business, right? A charity is redistributing resources for a very good cause, perhaps. But a business is actually creating new wealth. And so there's space within our tradition for talking about the creation of wealth, not only an impersonal level in terms of businesses, corporations, industries, but also on a personal level. There's something about friendship that is, in fact, productive.
Dylan:
[16:56] I love there's this line from Cicero where he says, you know, brothers remain brothers, whether or not they have goodwill between them. But friends will not long remain friends. Right. It doesn't matter what he does to you. Your brother's your brother. But you have to actually like your friends to stay friends. And that means that you're both getting something out of the relationship. So there's there's, again, something in there that helps us, I think. Navigate some of the complexities of the variety of our economic life and social life.
Dylan:
[17:25] The example I use is the old Popeye cartoon. This is a very dated reference, but I watched a lot of old cartoons when I was a kid. It had this character, Wimpy, who is a mooch, and he would show up in his line, which was a non sequitur usually. He'd just show up and say, I'll surely pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today? And the idea was like, he's never going to pay you. And this is a ridiculous thing to ask. And, you know, if you go to McDonald's and you order a bunch of food and they say, oh, shoot, I forgot my wallet. Can I pay you Tuesday? They're going to be like, get out of here. Like, we don't know you. You can't do that. But if you go to a local restaurant where you know the owner, you have a relationship, a friendship, and you order for your family and you say, oh, shoot, I forgot my wallet. Can I pay you on Tuesday? They'll be like, oh, yeah, you're good for it. There's this degree of difference, right? But there's still this give and take, this positive sum relationship between you. So I think that's super helpful, just even from a social scientific point of view. And then, of course, we have this theological angle on it. And then lastly, our liturgical theology really shapes our whole Orthodox worldview. Everything centers around the Eucharist and on coming together in worship. And it's always done in a way that engages all of the senses. So if you enter an Orthodox church, you'll see icons, you'll smell incense.
Dylan:
[18:44] Even if you're not Orthodox, you can at least have some of the blessed bread, not communion. But if you're Orthodox, then of course you can have communion. But basically every sense, you hear the chanting as well. Every sense is engaged in worship. And the presumption being that everything in the material world was given to us to be cultivated and offered back to God. So all of it has at least a potentially sacramental quality to it.
Dylan:
[19:10] And I think paired with that, there is this way of relating to the world that also comes to our ascetic tradition. So when we prepare for Holy Communion, we actually observe a total fast from the morning we wake up till we receive Holy Communion. There's all sorts of periods like Lent and we just got through the Dormition fast. It comes out about half the days of the year. Every Wednesday and Friday, we're fasting. And the point is not that food is bad. We're not Gnostics. The idea is I want to transfigure my hunger. I want to put it in its place. There's more important things than my impulses and my desires. They are important. You know, it's important to eat. I need to eat to survive, of course. But there's something more important than that, right? Like the scripture says, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. And so fasting helps us remember that. And all the other ascetic disciplines, you know, whether it's meditative prayer or almsgiving, all these sorts of things, take our material resources and put them in the proper place. And then through our liturgical worldview, we actually see them as means of grace, means of communion with God.
Cody:
[20:19] So just maybe to clarify a little bit, trying to just draw these lines a little more clearly. So when you talk about sabornost, so as I was listening to you talk about that, I was sort of thinking in my head of kind of like a sort of a decentralized order, something that's not really emerging from coercion or force, but that emerges sort of organically from the relations of voluntary human. Is that kind of, is that part of, is that one of the lines that I could sort of draw to kind of building a free society?
Dylan:
[20:52] Oh, definitely. Yeah. So at least, at least in terms of S.L. Frank, I think it corresponds exactly to Hayek's distinction between cosmos and taxes. So, soborno be cosmos, the spontaneous order. And then an even more cumbersome word, obchesvenost, is the Russian word for taxis. But, you know, I mean, you think of Hayek lamented that English didn't have words for this. So he had to pull from the Greek, whereas Russian does. And so you see that, at least in the case of Frank, shaping his thought that he had these concepts already just available to him in his native language. And part of that being shaped by his Orthodox Christian tradition. Again, sobornos comes from the creed.
Cody:
[21:32] Gotcha. And you say taxis as an order, not taxes, which are the thing that you have to pay. Gotcha.
Dylan:
[21:38] Right, right. Yes.
Cody:
[21:40] Although I guess we wouldn't approve of either. So what do the Eastern Fathers, just to kind of get down to some specific examples here, do they have anything to say about international trade and the division of labor that we can sort of say, okay, that's something where I definitely am seeing, a parallel to the way that a classical liberal would think about some of these things?
Dylan:
[21:58] Yeah, there's so there's a really good book. I think it's Erwin is the author. I know I cite it in my book, but I can't remember off the top of my head. But he gets to the kind of the history of, I think, free trade in general. And he goes, he starts in the ancient era. And he talks about how, like, Aristotle and Plato were very aristocratic. And so they kind of were very protectionist. They just want to protect their position. Whereas the Stoics were much more, they were literally cosmopolitan. They coined the term. They were citizens of the world. Right. And so they saw trade as a positive thing. They believed in providence. They also probably coined that term. And they saw it as this way in which different peoples come together, participating in one global community. And one thing Erwin remarks that I think is mistaken is he says, well, the church fathers, they just followed Plato and Aristotle. So they have this negative view of trade. And that's true of some church fathers, I think, especially St. Ambrose of Milan, who he does draw from. But you can especially in Eastern fathers like St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzus, and we call him St. Gregory the Theologian. they all praise the sea because through the sea, God connects people in far off lands so that they can take their surplus goods and go and sell them.
Dylan:
[23:14] Bring them to some other lands where they don't have enough. Right. So it's a way in which we're actually providing for each other's needs. It's a way in which God is providing for our needs. And then we can actually hear about news from far off lands. I mean, today we have the Internet, of course, you know, it's a different world with the information revolution. But back then, if you wanted to hear about the world, you had to send somebody on a boat to go somewhere. Otherwise, you had to have a messenger on foot. But that was a lot of times how they heard what was going on in the world is through merchants who had been somewhere. Because they were trying to make a living, right? And so you see this kind of stoic argument being baptized and Christianized. And it's something that, again, like we have these resources in our tradition, but sometimes people just don't notice them or they don't know to look for them.
Dylan:
[24:03] But yeah, so I think there's something in that. It reminds me a lot of Adam Smith and the Christian classical political economists, who all have the same sort of attitude to the division of labor, right? That it is the result of human action, but not of human design. In fact, Adam Smith says we often mistakenly attribute it to human design just because it's the result of human action, when in reality, this is the wisdom of God. And so, I mean, now, you know, we kind of come full circle to Sophia, right? I think that's where it has continuity in modern Orthodox thought. But there's a significant tradition, even in the Orthodox East, of understanding the division of labor, at least in the context of international trade, as working with the wisdom of God and providence to provide for people's needs.
Cody:
[24:53] Now, and you also mentioned that monasteries have an interesting contribution to the way Christian might approach questions like private property and even commerce. You know, we think of monks as these people who sort of give up property and live this sort of ascetic life and are, you know, constantly whipping themselves. But what do they add to the way we think about private property and commerce?
Dylan:
[25:15] Yeah, so this is like a big misconception in general. But then I also found there were some scholars, this was a few years ago when I really first looked into this, there were some scholars who would acknowledge that, you know, actually in the West, monasticism is really important economically and civilizationally. But then they would have these comments about, oh, but not in the East. They're a bunch of like mystic naval gazers and, you know, they don't care about work at all. And I said, that doesn't sound right to me. And it turns out it's not right at all. These people just didn't bother to open a book. People like Max Weber and Adolf von Harnack and others. And it turns out from the very beginning, like we're talking Egyptian desert, you have, you know, monks inheriting goods, leaving goods to other people. Not only did they own property, they purposefully made some so that they could sell. The ideal of monastic poverty was really more economic self-sufficiency. So there are stories in the desert fathers of the trader. this merchant who would go out to the desert to meet with the monks to see what they had for sale. And the pretty constant wisdom is that it is good to make stuff, usually like weaving baskets and things like that, in order to sell. And it's good to sell beyond what you need and make a profit so that you have something to give.
Dylan:
[26:32] This goes all the way back to the beginning. And then as monasticism grows, um, you, you get these huge monastic industries, all throughout time, really everywhere, east and west you go. Some of this is bad. There is a secularizing tendency. If times get bad all around you, you might say, you know, I don't want to take a vow of celibacy, but if it means not starving, I'll join the monastery, right? So people start joining for the wrong reasons, different periods.
Dylan:
[26:57] But I think in general, this is actually very consistent with monastic teaching. Again, they actually get something from the Stoics that is kind of baptized and Christianized, It's something that I actually think you've been seeing the New Testament to some degree. But it's a distinction between good, evil, and indifferent things. So the only good is righteousness and virtue. The only evil is sin and vice. And everything else is indifferent. And only good or evil to the extent that it's used for one or the other. And this is something that I, you know, and I do in the book, but I can supply abundant quotations from the fathers about this. So they even among those indifferent things will explicitly list money and wealth. They don't think it's inherently evil. They're not communists. They have a lot of harsh things to say to the greedy and to people who aren't going to be generous. Greed is a vice.
Dylan:
[27:49] That hasn't changed. That's still good advice. And sometimes they don't quite get, you know, certain economic insights because nobody did back then. But they actually have a lot more nuance to what they say. And you see that in the monastic tradition. And so what ends up happening is these monasteries, especially in Byzantium, they end up being built on private estates. So in the ancient world, in ancient Rome, you for a while just had the states and private estates. then when Constantine becomes emperor, now you have church and state and private estates. And now with monasteries being built on these private estates, suddenly you get kind of another space of civil society that you have in these monastic constitutions. They're actually...
Dylan:
[28:35] Defending their freedom to the point of saying, you know, cursed be anyone who allows this monastery to fall in the hands of bishop or archbishop or emperor or magistrate, you know, anyone like we just want to be free forever. Freedom very clearly linked to private property rights. Right. We want to be independent of the church and of the state. That's that's part of our tradition as well. And that comes in part from monasteries being so economically important that both the church and the state would say, you know, we should actually take control of that, right? You know, we want to reap the benefits. We want to have control of how these resources are used. And then you get people defending their right and their independence to operate on their own and to be self-governed.
Cody:
[29:17] That's interesting. Well, so let's talk just a little about St. Nicholas Kaposilus, since obviously he's an important figure for you. So who is he and why did you think his name could serve as a standard-bearer for orthodox liberty.
Dylan:
[29:29] Yeah, so he was a monk in the 14th century in Byzantium, like Thessaloniki. And he, before he became a monk, worked in law and politics. So he's best known for his spiritual classic, The Life in Christ, which I highly recommend. It's a beautiful book. also wrote a commentary on the divine liturgy. That's kind of our mass in the East.
Dylan:
[29:51] But before that, he worked in law, as I said, and he wrote a defense of monastic property. Somebody was advising the emperor, who was actually a friend of his, somebody else was advising the emperor, hey, you know, we could really use these resources better than the monks. And, you know, as time went on, these estates just kept growing because people, if they didn't have any heirs, a lot of times they leave their land to the local monastery or they leave their wealth to the local monastery. And so the emperor and the Byzantine state is thinking, well, we could we could use this better. You know, I don't know quite the circumstances. Maybe they're at war with Persia again or, you know, someone else. Right. they're saying, you know, we could really use this. And so he writes this really strong defense and he links it to freedom of contract. So if someone left their property to the monastery, you are actually violating, that contract. You're violating their word by taking it from the monastery. Right. That was their wish with their own private property. He says, you know, emperors and magistrates have a right to manage public, but not private property. He makes that distinction very clear. At what point he's at one point, he says, how could there ever be a stable form of government that made it impossible to live in freedom? Again, freedom being linked to private property and not only private property, he talks about the right to the fruit of your labor. Right. So he even talks about profit in that context.
Dylan:
[31:11] And so he's someone that he just, you know, when I first read him I said, my goodness, like this is a guy who gets it, like really gets it, everything I've been working on and this is 600 years ago, 700 years ago and, Nobody talks about this aspect of his work. Like I said, he's known for his spiritual classics and rightly so. That's what really what makes him a saint. But this is a story that needs to be told. Right. So to me, he's he's a perfect patron for the sort of work that that I want to do with this institute, really getting Orthodox scholars together who understand the importance of liberty today, who have their own expertise, whether it is things like law or economics or bioethics in some cases and theology and philosophy. Get them together, produce a book every year, and then offer hopefully some clergy retreats to give some professional development for our priests and deacons so they can feel a bit more confident when it comes to these big questions.
Cody:
[32:07] Well, that's awesome. Well, so, this is something, I guess, a critique that's not just of Eastern Christianity, for sure, because I think medieval Christianity more broadly had this tendency, to be suspicious of work that was disconnected from physical production. So things like money lending, merchant professions, and we tend to think of those things as sort of integral to a free market society. Although I've heard some people say that maybe, we can make some changes there in terms of, anyway, money lending being so central. And banking. So what were these arguments that these medieval Christians were making against these non-physical kinds of professions? And were they flat out wrong or is there something we could learn from them?
Dylan:
[32:54] So, you know, there's there's actually a variety of arguments and influences. You know, some of it, I think, is just kind of an aristocratic attitude. There's nothing really saintly about it. It's just that if people came from the upper classes, they didn't tend to look positively on the middle class, which was the tradespeople, kind of new money folks, you know. And that's that's something you can you know, that kind of attitude persists even to this day. And ironically, you know, they they would almost be more critical of the people who had to work for a living rather than themselves, who had inherited, you know, whatever, whatever wealth that they enjoyed. So that that's one influence. Another, though, is Aristotle. And actually, this is this is an interesting East West difference. So in the West, knowledge of Aristotle was kind of lost to some degree or at least obscured for a long time. And then the Middle Ages, they started to get some good translations and get really excited about Aristotle, through actually, I believe, studying Muslim scholastics, who in turn their translations of Aristotle from Middle Eastern Christians who are in many cases Orthodox. And in the West, in the East, they never lost Aristotle. So they picked and choose kind of different parts of Aristotle. And so the critique of money lending in particular,
Dylan:
[34:11] Focuses on natural law, and it's a particular Aristotelian kind of natural law. So it's not just about human nature, it's about the nature of everything. So the nature of money, said Aristotle, is not to reproduce itself. It's not like you plant a grain in the ground and you get many more money put in the ground, you don't get anything more. It's just the same. Now, this is kind of silly because, of course, if you bought grain with the money, you could get a lot more grain. And this is just kind of the fundamental flaw, to put it very simply, with that reasoning. it was very influential because usury is a sin in the scriptures and in Christian tradition. And usury is sinful lending an interest. The question was, does that mean all lending an interest or is it a subcategory? And for a while in the West, it was understood just to be all lending an interest based on this Aristotelian argument. Whereas in the East, there's a bit more nuance. So clergy are prohibited from lending an interest.
Dylan:
[35:09] But if you look at Byzantine law, all it does is cap the rate of interest. And only once that I know of did they try to outlaw it. And that was Leo the Astorian, who famously was an iconoclast who murdered a bunch of Orthodox people. So not like the most pious emperor that we want to imitate or anything like that. And it didn't work. You know, I know about it because there's a law where he's repealing his previous law saying, well, you know, if you guys weren't so sinful, we could have pulled this off. But I guess we got to allow a little bit of interest. And so there's there's an interesting kind of east west difference there. And I think part of it is there's the nature of the relationship. Right. If someone comes to you poor and desperate, you don't say now's my chance to make a profit. Right. You say, how can I help? If you can, you do. And if you can't, you try to point them to someone who can. the other end, and similarly, if someone is a friend or family, they come to you and say, hey, man, you know, I'm having trouble making rent. Can you help me out? You don't say, oh, all right. You know, now's my chance. You say, yeah, here you go and pay me back if you can. If not, don't worry about it. Right. That's what Christ says, you know, lend expecting nothing in return.
Dylan:
[36:13] He literally says when your brother comes to you, he uses this familial word, if I remember it. whereas business people in a bank, that is an impersonal relationship. that is not a situation based on desperate economic need. Um, and we live in a very different context today. If we want to talk about the modern differences, we have things like bankruptcy laws. we have credit checks. We have, you know, things that just didn't exist in the ancient world. In the ancient world, if you're going to pay your debt, you were thrown in debtor's prison. Maybe you were thrown in, you know, sold into slavery. You know, debtor's prison was so bad, Jesus used it as a metaphor for hell, right? Like this is not at all what people have to face today, thankfully. But I do think there is lending that is usurious today. It is something we should reflect more on. So there is something to learn from that. But I don't think it's as simple as we can just pull like 13th century, treatise on usury off the shelf and say this is all we need. Again, we have to understand our context. We have to understand, you know, some of the...
Dylan:
[37:15] Misinformed ideas behind some of that attitude. There's, again, some of it was positive. Usury is a sin. We should care about it. But the kind of reasoning of what counted as usury was a bit too totalizing. So I don't know if that totally answered your question. Oh, I guess the last thing I'd add, in the East, you have this other difference, which is not necessarily a positive of thing. there are really no guilds in the East. Whereas in the West, they're a big player in terms of especially these industries, you know, merchants, traders, bankers, that kind of thing. In the East, what you end up having is markets are actually dominated by monasteries. In many cases, markets are on the, you know, literal markets are on the monastery grounds because monasteries have tax exempt status. So they had certain advantage, a competitive advantage over a lot of other people, now that there weren't other people, but they were even lending an interest in some cases, certainly in Kiev. I know that in medieval Kiev, I know that was the case. And I don't necessarily think that was a bad thing, right? I'm sure there are probably some instances of it being a bad thing, but fundamentally speaking, I don't think so, as long as we have these distinctions in mind.
Cody:
[38:27] That's really interesting. Yeah, I was just reading some history of a Western theologian. It seemed like the distinction that they were making in the medieval West, at least, was that usury was when a Jew lends money, which is pretty horrible.
Dylan:
[38:43] Well, yeah. So there was some anti-Semitism involved. That's definitely a part of it. But that comes from, so Deuteronomy, so again, to get back to the Bible, Deuteronomy actually does make an exception, that I think is in accord with this, you know, what I've just said about, you know, the nature of a relationship and mattering.
Dylan:
[39:02] It says, you know, don't lend an interest to your countrymen, right? And back then, this is a tribal society, so you're all kind of family, right? But to a foreigner, it's okay to lend an interest. Now, do we presume that God is saying it's okay to sin? I don't think so. I think he's saying the nature of the relationship is different. Who is the foreigner who's going to come by and ask for a loan? Probably a traveling merchant, right? Like this is a different sort of relationship. So in the Middle Ages, Jewish people could not lend an interest to each other because they followed the law very strictly. But because they followed the law very strictly, they said, well, we can lend an interest to these Christians. And the Christians, of course, needed loans for their businesses. And so you have this problem, not really a problem, but it became this kind of stereotype in that guilds often prohibited non-Christians and even people, you know, if you weren't born to a legitimate marriage, even if you were a Christian, you were barred from a guild. I mean, there were many negative things about the guilds. But so they were these kind of oligarchic organizations and they wouldn't allow Jewish people to join. And if you couldn't join the guild, you often couldn't get into the trade. So where could they go? Well, they could lend money because a lot of the Christians wouldn't do that or were prohibited from doing that. So there is that background to it as well. Sometimes.
Cody:
[40:21] Yeah.
Cody:
[40:22] Well, so do you think you mentioned earlier that there's a sense in which sort of a consensus that money on its own is not a bad thing. It's kind of maybe indifferent depending on how it's used. But would you say that there's a tendency among the fathers maybe to see wealth as inherently bad? And so I think of St. Basil and his argument that basically a just society is one where everyone has only what they need and anything beyond that should be given away. And that sounds really holy. And then you but then you start to think, OK, well, a subsistence economy doesn't grow. It doesn't make medical advancements. It's highly susceptible to famine. You know, you can't take your kids to Disney World. Is it is it more loving to our neighbors to create a society where everyone has a little bit but no more or a society where everyone or anyone, I guess, is capable of succeeding, but wealth isn't guaranteed? And it seems that some people have sort of leaned on this. It's better for everybody to be poor but have something than for there to be disparities of any kind.
Dylan:
[41:20] Yeah.
Cody:
[41:20] Anyway, I'm curious.
Dylan:
[41:21] That's a good question.
Cody:
[41:22] Yeah. I'm curious for either your opinion or if you feel like there's something in the tradition that says something about that.
Dylan:
[41:28] So economic historians will tell you that really until about 1800, world wealth was flat. Right. Like there was not year over year GDP growth anywhere. were some small ups and downs, but really nothing comparable to what we've experienced in the last, you know, 250 years or so. So that's an important context. They weren't seeing it around them, right?
Dylan:
[41:51] It's not like today. Somebody starts a business, it does well, we say, hey, good job. And, you know, it's a win-win for everyone. They're not seeing things like that back then. So I think that's an important difference. Another one is St. Basil is often taken out of context. So in some cases, his statements are he's talking to monks. It's like his ascetic discourses. Monks have taken a vow of poverty. They're not supposed to own anything, at least anything they don't need. Right. This is a very different vocation. And his words are appropriate to that vocation. only times, though, when people just aren't reading his words very carefully. So he says, you know, the the the cloak that's being eaten by moths in your closet or that belongs to the naked, the bread that's going moldy in your cupboard. So it's the stuff that you're wasting. Right. The stuff that it's not like, oh, don't have two pairs of shoes. Although, again, back then people barely had anything. So maybe it was a big sign of luxury if you had two pairs of shoes. But I think today, like, I have a more casual pair of shoes and I have a more dress pair of shoes. And I wear both of them. Right. None of neither of them are just riding in my closet.
Dylan:
[42:57] And last of all, we actually all the time go through our closets and. Put stuff in bags and take them to Goodwill and Salvation Army. Like we literally have whole ministries that are all about clear out your closets, right? So this is something that not only can we do today, we do today.
Dylan:
[43:14] And then lastly, and this is a really big one, I think it speaks to your question about medical advancements and things like that too, is St. Basil did not just criticize people. built an institution. So the new city outside of Caesarea Cappanosia, which later became known as the Basiliad, named for him, was the world's first hospital. He created it. So when he's preaching to these people, saying, hey, the extra stuff you have that you're not using, it belongs to the needy. We know how those people responded to that.
Dylan:
[43:45] All he got from the emperor was the land. In fact, the emperor was an Arian. He was just so impressed with St. Basil that he donated this land to him. But beyond that, there was no state aid involved in financing the Basiliad. It was all private donations from his community. So these sermons were effective. people who heard them, he wasn't just out there saying, shame on you for having wealth. That's not the point of it at all. He's saying there's people in need and we can help. And I have an idea. Will you invest? And they invested.
Dylan:
[44:16] And, you know, it changed the world. And literally, we don't have any hospital and anywhere in the world today without St. Basil in that act. And it's not just him, it's all those people in his community contributed their wealth to building that up. So, and then on top of all that, St. Basil, once again, is one of these fathers who has this distinction between goods, evils, and indifference. And he even goes so far. Is to adopt an additional Stoic distinction, which is between preferred and non-preferred indifference. So preferred are those that tend easily towards virtue, and non-preferred are those that tend towards vice. And he says, you know, health and sickness, riches and poverty, and so on and so forth. He has this list of pairs. He says all these are ultimately indifferent, but to the extent that you can obtain the former, that's to be preferred. So it's preferred to have health over sickness. It's preferred, according to St. Basil, to have wealth over poverty. And of course, what would be the motive to give, if poverty were inherently good. The whole point of giving is you want to alleviate people's poverty, right? If wealth is inherently evil, then you're actually doing them wrong by trying to alleviate their poverty. It completely undermines the whole logic of giving. I think St.
Dylan:
[45:31] Basil understood that. I just don't think he's really read in context and interpreted correctly.
Cody:
[45:36] Cool. Thanks for that historical context. That's helpful. So, we're getting kind of close to the end. I've got a lot of questions, I could ask. I have to be a little descending here about what I want to bring up. I think I'll ask about this one because I feel like it's one that when I'd asked you about this at Acton University, you had said that you felt that there was kind of a misunderstanding of the East on this point. And I think it's a very common one because Western Christians don't know a whole lot about the East. But if they do, they'll say, well, you know, in the East, the political structure was Cesaro papism. That's the idea that the king is the pope. The king of that region is essentially the head of that church, kind of like how the king of England is the head of the Church of England, right? And that's kind of all they have to say about it. So has that been correct historically or is it a little more complicated than that? Is it partially true?
Dylan:
[46:27] It's definitely more complicated. There certainly were emperors who wanted it to be that way. There were not patriarchs who wanted it to be that way. And there is often a difference of perspective, I think, between church and state. So... But even so, there's a lot of emperors, Constantine, Justinian, who are very clear that there's two domains of society, and they only have dominion over one of those. The other is the church, the patriarchs, the bishops, you know. Um, and, and so I think that's a pretty simplistic map of society, just church and state, but it's still better than only states, right? so that was an improvement historically. and, uh, there, there certainly is instances of, uh, emperors trying to, meddle in church affairs. In most cases, those are the heretical emperors who were martyring Orthodox people. Like they're not, they're not people that we are like holding up as saints in our tradition. I think it is fair to say, you know, in some ways, the East has not done as well at developing the kind of checks on state power that eventually you get in the West. But even that needs to be nuanced. So I've already mentioned we had medieval republics, you know, lasting for 350 years. That's 100 years longer than the United States. That's pretty successful, I would say.
Dylan:
[47:41] Again, not only could they vote for their prince, they could vote their prince out of office in some cases. So they have those things. And then the Russian Empire is the typical example, that people usually point to. there's a case, there's a sense in which this is true because officially the church becomes like a department of state where there's like a procurator, who's technically administering the whole thing. And then there's a holy synod of bishops and they're kind of parallel to the Senate in the Russian Empire. But for the first hundred years of the Russian Empire, the church kind of got to still do whatever it wanted. It's really not till the Decemberist uprising went so poorly that you get this kind of heavier, heavy handed approach from the czar.
Dylan:
[48:23] But on top of that, the irony to me is that all of that was inspired by Western church state models. The idea was we want to be like those Swedes, Lutherans. So we're going to copy their empire. So it wasn't like an inherently Eastern idea. It was something they got from the West. And as you mentioned, I think the perfect example of Cesaro-Papism is the Church of England, where the head of the church is actually the monarch. England's in the West, last I checked. So it's something that it's, yeah, it sounds there's no reality to it. But to me, it'd be as unfair as saying, oh, you're a Western Christian, so you're cool with the Crusades and the Inquisition, right? You don't just point out the worst and say, well, that must be the whole. I don't think that's very fair. So we have all these historical exceptions and complications that I think really make that an unhelpful lens to view the Eastern Christianity.
Cody:
[49:17] Is there a difference in regard to like, so in America, we kind of developed this idea of the separation of powers. And we sort of felt that, you know, if we had three different branches of government, they would each be sort of, you know, they didn't want to protect their domain. And so they wouldn't really let the other, which actually is not really panned out. But I feel like something like that happened in the West where you have the church that was trying to, was very zealous in guarding its power. And then you have the state, which was zealous in guarding its power. And so a lot of these dynamics and conversations around religious freedom and stuff are emerging from that conflict. And is it the case that the East, there was less conflict between church and state? So maybe some of those conversations didn't happen in the same way?
Dylan:
[49:57] Yes and no. Again, you know, we have a lot of martyrs who stood up to emperors and czars. Yeah, I think I mentioned Metropolitan Philip II of Moscow was martyred by Ivan the Terrible, and he was standing up to him for having a secret police that was oppressing the people. I mean, it was very explicitly political was the reasoning behind it. I think the church in general, just the emergence of the church, East and West, being legal and acknowledged within the structure of Christian Rome is a step towards this. And so you do see that in the East as much as in the West.
Dylan:
[50:33] But, yeah, you don't quite see, you know, this this idea of we're going to pit passion against passion. That's a very American idea. And it's it's it has a mixed history. I would say that, you know, we've lasted 250 years. That's pretty good. I am a little worried about, you know, is this going to continue? Because I see some of the trends you do as well. But but it's been a good I think our Constitution is a great document. I think if we continue to follow it, we could last another 250 years. And it's a matter of actually having people that respect it and do that. But so there's church and state. Again, I already mentioned the monastic tradition is kind of like a third unofficial, you know, power within society in a lot of cases. But I think I think one thing that's an interesting distinction, and I think you see this in at least the Roman Catholic West as well, is that. I think you see more freedom in especially like the medieval Rus and Slavic lands when they didn't have their own patriarch. So when technically they were all still under Constantinople.
Dylan:
[51:38] So it was only after the fall of Constantinople, and I think it was about 100 years later, that finally the metropolitan of Moscow is elevated to patriarch. Because they were like, look, this is impractical. We have to go to you to get ordained. You're under the Turks. You know, it was complicated and they're far away and yada, yada, yada. And so finally he said, OK, fine, we're just going to elevate you to Patriarch. But as soon as that happened, the czar said, all right, now's my chance. Right. Now I have someone close that I can control. Whereas when there was a divide in loyalty, you had more independence. So there's like this irony in American history that when John F. Kennedy ran for president, he had to go around telling everyone, don't worry, I'm not going to do what the pope tells me to. Whereas we should have wanted exactly that. I mean, not that he would just slavishly follow the Pope, but we actually want him to have his own convictions, his own principles, his own, you know, his interest that goes beyond.
Dylan:
[52:31] Something that can be captured within this particular context, right? And I yeah. So I think you can see that kind of an east and west thing. But that's something that you see in the east as well. But you can find, you know, Orthodox scholars late 19th, early 20th century lamenting exactly this point of, you know, we we were on this certain trajectory, but we never quite developed in the same way. And there were people working towards that until, you know, 1918 when things really went bad. Might have been a different story had had history gone a different way.
Cody:
[53:03] So, I'm curious because there is all this sort of kind of political foment that's happening around that period as we're talking about turn of the 20th century in Russia. I think when I asked you about this at Acton, you'd sort of said that, as you said just now, it sort of stopped a lot of the conversation. And I wondered if it, you know, in some ways it could have spurred on more political theology. And, you know, you have the rise of the Russian Empire, then the rise of the Soviet Union. You have, you know, these kind of Russian anarchists that are running around. And yeah, it was, were any Eastern Orthodox, you saints, theologians, lay people drawn into, well, I guess maybe specifically some of those kind of Russian anarchist ideas.
Dylan:
[53:46] So it's sort of both. You do have people, I think, within the generation of intellectuals that lived through the Russian Revolution. They are still writing about social issues and especially these bigger societal, civilizational questions. You already mentioned S.L. Frank. A very different perspective would be someone like Nikolai Bernaev, who is kind of an anarcho-communist, but very skeptical of any kind of power.
Dylan:
[54:12] And you have other figures too. Peter Struva, the economist.
Dylan:
[54:16] Who is more of a liberal in the classical sense. And you have people writing about this stuff, but I think once that generation died out, It's just, it's not a major focus. It's not that there's nothing. You do get things someone I wish I could have found a way to incorporate in my book, but I just didn't. But Charles Malik, he was Lebanese ambassador. He's an archon in the ecumenical patriarchy. He was Orthodox Christian. I believe he was vice president of the American Bible Society for a while. But he also was one of the drafters of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, probably one of the principal drafters, in fact. He was president of the UN at one point. And, you know, people might have mixed feelings about that document, but I think it's better than what came after it. And I think a lot of that is to his credit. There's also people like Father Alexander Schmemann, who wrote For the Life of the World. It's a great little book. It's about kind of our liturgical perspective on modern life. But he also, and this was recently published in two volumes, he did a series of like homilies and lectures on Radio Free Liberty. So he was actually very involved in trying to get a positive message about religion and liberty into Soviet Russia, just, you know, as part of his service and part of his love for his homeland, or at least his familial homeland. He was born in Estonia, but.
Dylan:
[55:32] So it's not there's nothing, but there's just so much less. And that's because, you know, people have to be concerned with the communities or the concerns of their communities, right? And the concerns of their communities where... Now they're all living as refugees. And how do we survive? How do we preserve our culture? How do we preserve our tradition? And what is it that does make us different? You know, are we just the same as all of the Western Christians? Or is there something unique about our Orthodox position? And so some of that was positive. Some of that I think is a bit too polemical if you read some of those kind of late 20th century theologians. But it's very understandable, I think, given that context.
Cody:
[56:09] Interesting well we're passing over an hour but i still it's at least one more question i'd like to get your opinion on yeah um and then maybe we'll do a little commercial for uh for your your latest book okay so, the eastern church had more direct contact with islam than the west did you know obviously medieval period they're always concerned about the turks and whatever but um but but obviously they maybe had some more successes in the east in some in some cases and they did in the West and breaking in. Do you feel that Eastern Christianity is more suspicious of Islam or more circumspect about it because of that closer interaction? I recently talked an Orthodox Bulgarian who told me that the sizable intergenerational Muslim minority in Bulgaria is really well integrated. And so they think of themselves as, and they're thought of as being, you know, true Bulgarians, right? Rather than these sort of, you know, of foreign invaders, as sometimes people in the West think about Muslim immigrants. But at the same time, he says, we don't feel that way necessarily about some of these new migrants that are coming in that have not really been here for a while and have not really been integrated. So I was just kind of curious, is Eastern Orthodoxy, I want to use a word that's a little polyvalent, I guess, but more Islamophobic, less Islamophobic? I mean, how does the East look at Islam compared to the West?
Dylan:
[57:28] So I think there's a variety of experiences with Islam. And so there's a variety of stances. So, I mean, Bulgaria, you know, you could even just contrast with neighboring Serbia and, you know, the civil war there and with Bosnia and everything like that. So very different attitudes, right, right in the same region. In Russia, there has always, or at least for a long time, been Muslim minorities that are pretty well integrated. I think even today, despite certain religious intolerances there, they tend to kind of put up with the Muslims they have. The Middle East is a little different in that, you know, you have Muslim conquerors coming through. And there's this interesting experience that comes out of it. So on the one hand, you know, Christians had no choice but to learn how to live side by side with Muslim neighbors.
Dylan:
[58:22] Muslims, in some cases, could be very tolerant, although everyone else was still kind of a second class citizen. Um, but one thing you get, I think, especially if you, um, in the, in the Antiochian Orthodox tradition, that's kind of based in Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Orthodox, They tend to be more familiar with religious liberty because they were all brought down to the same level. There were two other Christian churches and then eventually three when the Roman Catholics showed up. And they were all placed on equal level, whereas before that, they had been kind of favored by the Byzantine government. And centuries went by and there's a certain Christian solidarity that built up over time.
Dylan:
[59:03] But, yeah, it's just not uniform. I mean, there were some, sometimes you get a really bad caliph who, you know, would, go on a crusade, you know, or whatever, and it would be very bad for Christians or they'd be at war with Byzantium and now they're suspicious of all the Christians among them. And different periods have different responses and that's going to shape people's attitudes.
Dylan:
[59:25] But so, yeah, I think it really depends a lot on the Christian's experience. And I mean, really kind of same with the West as well. But there is more familiarity with Islam. I think that's true. There might be, and this would be something beyond my own experience or expertise, but there might be more of an ability to kind of, for lack of a better expression, say, oh, no, no, these are the good Muslims, right? You know, like, if you know it, you know it, you know, say, oh, no, we don't got to worry about these guys. They've been our neighbors for centuries, right? Or, and then there might be other ones that are like, no, these are actual terrorists are the problem, you know, whatever. So, yeah, there's a certain... There's a certain affection and tolerance that comes with familiarity, and then there's also a certain prejudice and hatred that can come with familiarity, and we probably have all of them, to be honest.
Cody:
[1:00:17] But maybe more from knowledge than just sort of general fear.
Dylan:
[1:00:21] Yeah.
Cody:
[1:00:22] Yeah. So, okay, so we've been talking about, in this interview, the kingdom of God and the common good, and it's available. You can get it. I think it came out in the last couple years. Was it 2024?
Dylan:
[1:00:31] Just last October.
Cody:
[1:00:32] Last October. Okay. Yeah. But you've been obviously really busy because you also just put out another book. Yes. And that book is called The Christian Roots of American Liberty. Can you talk about that for just a minute?
Dylan:
[1:00:43] Yeah. So this book came out in April. It's co-edited with John Pinero, who's director of research at Acton. And it started as paper I wrote for an ISI conference, actually, several years ago. We had a panel on kind of liberty before liberalism. And it was supposed to be ancient, medieval, modern. I was going to do ancient, colleague was going to do medieval, and then John was going to do modern. And then they accepted the panel proposal, and both John and the colleague, Michael, realized they had to be in Rome that day. So we found someone else to handle modern and I had to do medieval and ancient, which was fine. But it led to a very long paper that I couldn't quite figure out where to publish it. But it was good research. And so the idea we came up with was, well, what if we made a reader? So the point of the paper was to show that there's at least five, and I think you could do more, but we isolated five principles of the American founding. They're pretty common across founding fathers. So things in particular, natural law and natural rights, religious liberty, private property.
Dylan:
[1:01:48] Checks on state power, and democratic consent. So those five things are pretty fundamental to the American project. And they, it turns out, have a long Christian history. We kind of talk about it more as a prehistory, because the point is not to say that there's nothing original about the American founding, only to say that like these, they didn't just sit around and say, I've got a new never before thought of idea, right? Like they were drawing from a long political theological tradition. that's the point of the book is not to deny any of the illiberal instances of Christian history. There was an Inquisition. There was all sorts of examples of intolerance and autocracy and things like that. But that is not the whole story. And what we found is in recent years, it used to be a long time, the story on the kind of irreligious left, that's not to say that everyone on the left is irreligious, but there is a subset, right? Tended to be that, you know, before the modern era, there is just kind of this superstition and religion was really holding everyone back. And then finally, we get the enlightenment and we get these great ideas of human rights. And that's how we get the modern world we live in. That's not a very accurate history.
Dylan:
[1:03:00] But what we found is with people like, you know, the post liberals and the national conservatives and Christian nationalists, is they all basically accept that narrative, except they say, yeah, and that's why things like modern natural rights are a mistake.
Dylan:
[1:03:16] And the reality is, no, they came from Christianity. The question isn't, are you going to be liberal or a Christian? The question is, what kind of liberal or what kind of Christian do you want to be? You can be a Christian liberal. In fact, you would not have classical liberalism without this Christian prehistory for these ideas. So that's the idea. We have those five sections of the book. We took my paper and we divided it up. So the introductions came from that. And John added his own revisions. And then we actually put the sources in a book. It's a short book. It's only about 200 pages. you can then read, starting with the early Christian apologists to the Edict de Milan and, you know, later church fathers all the way through the Middle Ages and even the early modern era. We have some early Protestant reformers. We have Jesuit scholastic. We have even some selections from John Locke. And then, of course, the American founding, just to show that, like, look.
Dylan:
[1:04:10] Think what you want about it or accept it or reject it, but you can't say that's Christian, but that isn't. It's just not that simple. So it's a simple, small book, but the whole point is to complicate that narrative that's really unhelpful and frankly, untrue. You can be someone who loves our American founding and the principles behind it, at least the best of it. And you can be a faithful Christian, whatever your tradition may be. And I, you know, because I'm orthodox, we didn't, we were limited to what's in public domain or what Acton had the rights to. So there's no St. Nicholas Kabasilis in the reading section, but I do quote from him pretty heavily in the introduction to one of the sections. So I did still try to sample some orthodox sources for people of my own tradition. So it's really an ecumenical book, trying to show that everyone has contributed to this you know, reality of liberty that we take for granted today and really too much so today, whether you're Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, there's something that your tradition has contributed to this.
Cody:
[1:05:14] Terrific. Well, I look forward to reading that. I'm going to get a hold of it, probably do it right now. I think I got paid today, so I'll be able to take care of it.
Dylan:
[1:05:20] Oh, good.
Cody:
[1:05:22] Dr. Pomon, I want to thank you again for joining us, a book we've been talking about, The Kingdom of God and the Common Good, and then the newest book, The Christian Roots of American Liberty.
Dylan:
[1:05:31] And thanks so much for having me.
Cody:
[1:05:32] Thanks for being here.