I have come to light a fire on the earth... - Luke 12:49

 

One of the most intriguing—and original—ideas in Pope Benedict’s recent encyclical on the social order is that the ethics of obligation and mutuality have to be supplemented by an ethic of gratuity.  By an ethic of mutuality he means the moral logic that obtains in the marketplace, whereby people, according to the terms of a contract, give in order to receive something in return.  So you pay me a certain amount, and I provide certain goods and services to you. This is the essence of what the Catholic tradition calls commutative justice, the fair play among the various members of a society or economic community.  By an ethic of obligation, he means the moral logic that obtains within the political arena, whereby people are compelled by law to give to others in order to realize distributive justice, or a fairer allotting of the total goods of a society.  For example, through taxation, one is obliged to transfer some of one’s wealth to the government for the sake of the common good.  Now the Pope insists that these two types of giving are essential to the right ordering of any human community; we should never, he thinks, fall short of them, preferring injustice to justice.  Nevertheless, they must be complemented, leavened if you will, by a more radical type of giving, what he terms the ethic of gratuity.  According to this mode, one gives, not because he is contractually obligated or legally compelled to give, but simply because it is good so to do.  This is the kind of giving that mimics most fully the divine manner of giving.  The God who made the universe ex nihilo could never, even in principle, have done so out of contractual or legal obligation.  He received nothing in return for creation, and nothing outside of his own will could ever have compelled him to create.  He gave of himself and let the world be simply because it was good to do so.