Why Would Anyone Promise to Own Nothing? Renunciation as an Institution

The vow concerns personal ownership rather than the use of anything, and the distinction carries all the practical weight. Somebody under such a vow may use clothing, tools, books and buildings while owning none of them, with title held by the community, by an order or by a trust. Income earned belongs to the community rather than the individual. Gifts received are surrendered. What the vow removes is the right to dispose of things, to accumulate and to make independent decisions about material matters, and what it leaves is dependence on the community for everything, which is the substance of the arrangement and is frequently described as its point rather than an awkward consequence.

The justifications offered are consistent across traditions:

• •Removing the distraction and anxiety that managing property involves
• •Solidarity with the poor, which several traditions state explicitly
• •Dependence on providence or on the community, taken as a spiritual discipline
• •Availability, since somebody with no property can be sent anywhere
• •Equality within the community, since nobody holds more than anybody else
• •Detachment as an end in itself, which is the framing in several Asian traditions

Communities of individually propertyless people have repeatedly become collectively rich, and the tension has generated centuries of argument and several schisms. Members work, receive gifts and endowments and do not consume much, so assets accumulate, and the community acquires land, buildings and eventually substantial wealth while every individual in it owns nothing. Reform movements have repeatedly arisen insisting on corporate as well as personal poverty, with medieval orders splitting over exactly this question and with papal rulings addressing whether an order could own property at all, at one point resolved by holding that the property belonged to the church while the order merely used it. Similar disputes appear in Buddhist monastic history. The structural pressure is the same wherever the arrangement exists.

Comparable arrangements exist outside religion and the comparison clarifies what the vow is doing. Intentional communities sharing all property have been founded repeatedly, with several surviving for over a century by holding assets communally, assigning work without individual wages and providing for members from common funds. Cooperative and communal living arrangements adopt parts of the structure without the whole. Several political movements have advocated it. What the durable examples share with religious orders is a defined membership, a procedure for joining and leaving, an agreed authority for allocating resources and a purpose the arrangement serves, and the cases that fail generally lack at least one of those. That correspondence suggests the vow is as much an institutional design as a spiritual one.

Modern arrangements have to interface with legal and financial systems built around individual ownership. Members typically assign earnings and inheritances to the community by legal instrument, which requires the community to have legal personality. Pensions and social security are handled by the community rather than the individual, which has produced specific legislation in several countries. Medical care and old age are the community's responsibility, which is a substantial commitment as membership ages. Tax treatment varies and is generally provided for explicitly. Leaving requires provision, since somebody departing after decades has no assets, no employment record and frequently no pension, and the arrangements for that differ enormously between orders and have been criticised where they are inadequate.

The vow removes ownership while leaving use, so somebody may use a building, tools and books that the community owns, which makes them dependent on it for everything. Communities of propertyless individuals accumulate wealth collectively, which has produced schisms and formal rulings for centuries. Leaving after decades with no assets and no employment record is a real problem the arrangements address unevenly.