I originally wrote a form of the following as a comment down yonder, but thought I’d bump it up to the main blog area because of how interesting the idea is.
My Benedictine friend wrote:
The [Rule of St. Benedict] explicitly directs monks to avoid all greed in business, and to sell or barter their goods at prices lower than others asked.
Following which, a reader asked the very perceptive question:
I know this was really not St. Benedict’s plan, but…
If the monks were to sell their goods at prices lower than others asked, wouldn’t that undercut other purveyors of goods?
Fr. Pedrano (a Benedictine) then said:
In St. Benedict’s culture of bartering and trade (not everyone had cold, hard, cash; no one had plastic), merchants always tried to keep their "prices" high. Maybe St. Benedict’s injunction about charging low prices ended up "undercutting other purveyors. I don’t know. He did write of situations where a monastery could be too poor even to hire laborers to help them with the fields, or to keep certain cultural "dietary" standards–specifically wine–on the table. In those cases, he tells his monks to be satisfied with poverty and work, and to be consoled by the resulting fact of being "true monks."
This–the calling to be "true monks"–seems to me to hold the key to the economic dilemma.
Every free economic transaction involves the exchange of a good or service for something or some things perceived to be of comparable value.
But the things of comparable value are not necessarily money or even material. One might, for example, have a transaction in which one person will give a loaf of bread in exchange for having a song sung or in which one sings a sing in exchange for having an essay proofread.
It seems to me that in this case, the monks received some money in exchange for their goods but they also received other, non-material things of value, such as the chance to make a statement about charity, the importance of the spiritual over the temporal, the chance to themselves make a monetary sacrifice, etc.
As a result, it seems to me that, if they were willing to accept these things in exchange for particular goods or services they had to offer that it would constitute a legitimate transaction in a free market, since the market does not presuppose that all transactions are monetary (barter, for example, may be used, and having the chance to make a statement against greed would seem to be a form of non-material barter).
Should the monks carry this too far, it seems that normal market correction methods would likely address the situation. For example, if they accept so little for their goods and services that their monastery can no longer support itself then they’ll either modify their practice or go out of business as monks.
Similarly, if they are undercutting others so much that they are driving people out of business, impoverishing families who were struggling to begin with, and gravely harming the local economy and are so hardcore in their practice that they won’t modify it when this is made known to them then the amount of ill will generated against them is likely to be such that the Medieval town being harmed would would stop patronizing them, dry up their vocations, burn down the monastery, etc.
The market has a way of correcting for severely disruptive business practices, at least in the long run, since nobody has the unlimited resources needed to permanently sustain fundamentally unsound business practices.
As long as extremes are not pursued, though, it seems that the value of being able to make sacrifices and statements about greed and charity can (and even should) form a legitimate part of economic transactions.
What I want to know is: Does this mean I can get a discount next time I’m at the Prince of Peace Abbey book & gift shop? (Kidding!)
Maybe I am missing something, but a crucial part of analysis seems absent: namely, monks have other sources of income, donations. Hence, clergy are under less pressure to sell at market value because the sale of goods is less a percentage of their income than it is for folks who don’t get donations, large or small. Hence they can, to some degree, disrupt the market. One need not look far for real life examples: a priest, say, can work in a school for $ 15,000 p/a, because his housing is paid for, and his car, and medical insurance, etc etc. A layman, to provide for his responsibilities (not to get rich) needs to earn $ 45,000 just to cover the bills. So the school hires the priest. I know, I know, there are other factors, but, shall we say “concern” about clergy and religious in the market place is not idle.
At the Catholic high school at which my wife worked (run by a religious order), the nuns who taught there were paid the same as the lay teachers who taught there. Of course the nuns then gave most of their money right back to the religious order.
The monastery in Cluny, France, was founded in A.D. 910. The French Revolution brought on its shutdown in 1790. The records of the monastery’s periodic visitations (inspections by outside monastic or episcopal authority) are still in existence. These records show that the abbey raised swine in the thousands. This industry was a major employer for the local population, and also allowed the monastery to be the principal regional source of dole for the poor. As for the monks, the visitation records indicate that for the whole of the history of Cluny, its monks never departed from St. Benedict’s decree of perpetual abstinence from meat.
The abbey of Einsiedeln, Switzerland, founded in 934 and still quite alive, early on became a pilgrimage site for its Black Madonna shrine. The small town or large village surrounding the monastery has always “lived off” the monastery by way of providing inns and hotels for the pilgrims, and working the farms that sustain the abbey and the people of the village. Some families in Einsiedeln can document their having been in the employment of the abbey for 700 years. The abbey runs a co-ed “gymnasium” (university track junior high school, high school and junior college) and also a small school of theology for candidates for the priesthood. They abbey is also a center of music study, particularly for polyphony and chant. The parchment drawn up in A.D. 934 still exists, and names the founding superior, the band of monks and the laity who all jointly settled the site and built the monastery and village. From day one until today, the monastery’s economy was the local laity’s economy.
A modern day manifestation of this question is the lasermonks, who sell toner cartridges:
http://lasermonks.com/
I compared their toner prices for my printer, and they’re cheaper $10 than a local business where I live. One advantage they may have in pricing their products is lack of income taxes.
I can’t imagine their share of the market for their products is large enough to drive any commercial competitors out of business. I guess we’ll need to be wary if we notice these brothers have taken to driving Hummers!
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