约翰・克里索斯托的古代社会正义理想--来自考茨基、卢森堡的评价及其同代人的见解

John Chrysostom's Ideal of Ancient Social Justice:Comments from Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg with Views from their Contemporaries

卡尔•考茨基是较早系统运用唯物史观重构早期基督教历史的马克思主义者。他认为原初基督教会是穷人教会,其成员的财富共有理想在特定的意义上具有“共产主义”属性。尽管原初教会的财富共有模式并没有在实践中长久持续,但这种理想还是被后来的基督教父传承和保留,这方面最重要的证据来自著名的希腊教父约翰•克里索斯托为《使徒行传》所做的一篇布道词。基于同一篇布道词,罗莎•卢森堡与考茨基得出了相同的结论,即约翰等教父可以被视为现代社会主义的先驱,他们的社会正义理想同原初教会的类似观念一样是消费型共有模式,因其自身的经济弱点必将消亡。与考茨基和卢森堡的论断截然相反的是,同一时期的天主教学者普遍认为不存在“教父共产主义”,教父们也不主张财富共有,他们更倾向于从宗教道德劝勉而不是经济学角度解读约翰的布道词。围绕约翰这篇布道展开的争论集中体现了19世纪末、20世纪初社会主义思潮与基督教传统的激烈交锋。争论双方的态度经常是善意和开放的,但是对话双方都在某种程度上误读或忽视了对方立场中的一些关键元素,带来的冲突在整体上要大于相互理解。

Karl Kautsky(卡尔·考茨基) was among the first batches of Marxists who systematically applied historical materialism to the reconstruction of the early Christian history. He believed that the primitive Christian church was a church of the poor, whose members’ ideal of common possession of wealth was characterized with "communism" in a specific sense. Although the mode of common possession of wealth in the primitive Christian church did not last long in practice, their ideal was inherited and retained by the later Christian church fathers. The most important evidence in this regard came from a sermon written by the famous Greek church father John Chrysostom(约翰·克里索斯托) for the Acts(《使徒行传》). Based on the same sermon, Rosa Luxemburg(罗莎·卢森堡) came to the same conclusion with Karl Kautsky that John Chrysostom and other church fathers could be regarded as the pioneers of modern socialism. Their ideal of social justice was similar to those of the primitive church fathers, which was a shared consumption mode. But this mode was bound to perish due to its own economic weak point. Contrary to Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, their contemporary Catholic scholars held that there had never existed a so-called "Church Fathers’ Communism", nor had the Church fathers ever advocated the common possession of wealth. They preferred to interpret John Chrysostom’s sermon from the perspective of religious and moral exhortation rather than from the economic perspective. The debates extended from John’s sermon embodied the fierce confrontation between the trend of socialist thought and the Christian tradition in the late 19^(th) century and the early 20^(th) century. The two sides in the disputes often took well-intentioned and open attitudes towards each other, but both sides, to some extent, misunderstood or ignored some key elements of each other’s position in their dialogues. As a result, there emerged much more conflicts than mutual understanding.