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Crematística é a busca incessante por dinheiro, por acumulação de riqueza. Foi definida por Aristóteles. Será que é nisto que se tornou a economia, podemos definir a economia como a busca incessante por dinheiro? Tenho certeza que muitos economistas, especialmente aqueles do mercado financeiro, achariam uma boa definição, afinal o que importa é ganhar cada vez mais e ser o mais rico. Parecem o Gollum do filme Senhor dos Anéis (foto acima).
Abaixo vai um texto de
Anthony Esolen da revista Crisis Magazine, costumo gostar muito dos textos dele. Neste artigo ele menciona crematística para discutir a importância do casamento.
Healthy Societies Need Successful Marriages
The great error of most economic thinking these
days is not that it is too keenly focused on the economy, but that it
has all but forgotten it. A good friend of mine, a wise theologian, has
encouraged his students to distinguish between what Aristotle calls
chrematistics, the craft of amassing wealth, which Aristotle viewed with a healthy suspicion, and
economics, the laws governing the management of an
oikos, a household. Another way to put this is that man is not made for an economy, but economy is made for man, who is ineluctably a
social being, or, as Aristotle put it, a
political being.
Aristotle did not mean that man is made for the ridiculous charade of
self-government that we Americans enjoy every four years, with its
heaves of moronic marketing, evasion, and dishonesty. Aristotle is the
pagan with the flat feet. He stands squarely on the ground of common
things. A
political animal is a rational creature who thrives best within a
polis, a
smallish community of people who do not suffer edicts from afar, but
who adjust their civil laws to the laws of man’s nature, to secure
amongst themselves the common good.
There’s a nice analogy to draw, between mass politics which overwhelms the
polis, along
with its ally in mass “economics” or chrematistics whether of the left
or the right, which ignores what man is made for, and society properly
conceived, fashioned by healthy and thriving households. Catholic
Social Teaching will not allow us the ease of abstraction, as if
“society” could denote any aggregate of human beings organized (or
disorganized) according to any financial and, for want of a better word,
political laws whatsoever. In short, a society must be social—it must
be based upon the human good of friendship and what the medieval English
called “neighborhood,” meaning the virtue of getting along with and
assisting those among whom we live most closely. An economy, too, must
be economic—it must be based on the good of households, and must aim,
though in sometimes an intricate or circuitous way, at that same good.
We cannot make any headway understanding the encyclicals of Pope Leo
XIII unless we keep these things firmly in mind. The Pope’s teachings
on the nature of man, his eternal destiny, the sanctity of marriage, the
good of the family, and social and economic justice are all one
coherent and harmonious vision. So then let us turn to his encyclical
on Christian marriage,
Arcanum divinae (1880), for this too is eminently a
social letter.
Leo begins by observing that Christ came among us, as Saint Paul says, “to re-establish all things” in Him—
all things, not just the Sunday things, as it were. Just as, in
Aeterni patris, Leo
affirmed the assistance that faith lends to reason, elevating it to
heights it could never have scaled on its own, while reason in turn
clarifies faith and protects it from lapsing into error, so too this new
instauration in Christ “imparted a new form and fresh beauty to all
things, taking away the effects of their time-worn age.” That
refreshment came in the order of nature, too, redounding to the good of
nations and families. “The authority of rulers,” he writes, “became
more just and revered; the obedience of the people more ready and
unforced; the union of citizens closer; the rights of dominion more
secure.” Indeed, the Christian faith could hardly have done more to
procure the truly good things of a common life, had it been instituted
solely for that purpose.
Such is the context for Leo’s discussion of marriage—and marriage, in
turn, is the context for his economic and political thinking. The first
thing he insists upon is that marriage is not a human creation, much
less a creation of the State, but is of divine origin. Its fruition is
not in the satisfaction of individual desires, as potent or as harmless
as some of those may be. It is, because it is divine, by necessity
oriented towards the being of God Himself. Its fruitfulness participates
in His creative bounty. Its unity reflects the inner life of love that
is the Trinity. Its exclusivity and perpetuity reflect His faithfulness
and His eternity.
When Jesus teaches us that the two great commandments are like unto
one another, we are apt to remember that we cannot love God aright
unless we love our neighbor; but apt to forget that our love of neighbor
cannot be divorced from the love we owe to God. If, then, we sin
against marriage, demoting it to the status of a contract, which in
pagan times could be abrogated by the husband at a whim (and which now
can be so abrogated by either party), we sin against God and neighbor
both. We sow dissolution in what should be a society but degenerates
into a mass, an aggregate, a confounding of wills.
Thus, according to Leo, it was an act of the highest mercy and
justice at once, when Jesus blessed marriage at Cana, and went on to
bring back “matrimony to the nobility of its primeval origin,” in his
role as “supreme Lawgiver.” We misread things if we assume that only a
prohibition against divorce is involved. The marriage of man and woman,
grounded in their biological, earthly nature, is divine in origin and
end; it is the sphere in which most of us will be called to holiness,
with a procreation both physical and spiritual: “By the command of
Christ, [marriage] not only looks to the propagation of the human race,
but to the bringing forth of children for the Church,
fellow-citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God (Eph.
2:19).” Leo is ever at pains to show that the Church does for the
State what the State cannot well do for itself: she makes citizens of
the city of God, citizens who make for something like a just city here
below.
If we consider the matter carefully, we see not only that Christian
marriage is the foundation for a genuine society. It is a society in
itself, and a model for the society at large. Thus when Leo describes
the inner dynamic of a Christian marriage, it is in social terms. “The
mutual duties of husband and wife have been defined,” he writes, “and
their several rights accurately established. They are bound, namely, to
have such feelings for one another as to cherish always very great
mutual love, to be ever faithful to their marriage vow, and to give one
another an unfailing and unselfish help.” The key words here are
mutual and
several. They have profound implications for all genuine Catholic teaching on the just society.
We have almost lost the sense of
gift implied by the word
mutual. For
us, it means that if John does something, then Mary does the same, and
so on, until the end of time. We take it to imply a flat identity. But
the inner meaning of the word involves an exchange of gifts, a
reciprocity that is not arithmetical but human. Thus the mutuality of
the love between husband and wife is implied in their
several or separate, distinct duties. It is precisely because the husband and wife are
not the same
in their mode of being human and even in their physical relations to
one another that they can most fully embody the complete gift of self
that love demands. Each complements the other; each completes the
other, and this completion is not subjective but an objective, incarnate
fact. The two are one flesh. The man is for the woman, the woman for
the man, and both, as individuals and as a married couple, are for God.
From Christian marriages, says Leo, “the State may rightly expect a
race of citizens animated by a good spirit and filled with reverence and
love for God, recognizing in it their duty to obey those who rule
justly and lawfully, to love all, and to injure no one.” What, by
contrast, might we expect from an anti-society of self-will and
divorce? For some hedonists delight in riches, and others delight in
sex, and still others in prestige or ease or hectic excitements. Leo
won’t mince words. When Christian marriage is deprecated, man sinks
“into the slavery of [his] vicious nature and vile passions,” and
nothing, says Leo, “has such power to lay waste families and destroy the
mainstay of kingdoms as the corruption of morals.” Or are we to
believe that men who are shameless and shiftless in the most intimate
and most socially productive of human relations will, in any great
numbers, be animated by civic responsibility and love of neighbor in
their other public actions, where their duties are less clear, and the
opportunities for self-serving almost limitless?
Every sin against marriage is a sin against the very possibility of
any kind of society at all. Every Christian marriage begun in purity
and continued in faithfulness and duty and love is an exemplar for all
social relations, and allows us to imagine something better than the
loneliness of self-will “wedded,” in ghastly symbiosis, to the
inhumanity of economics without households, and a state without
citizens.
