As a resident for two years of Greece, an ostensibly Orthodox Christian country, I grew accustomed to seeing graffiti which proclaimed, "Down with capitalism!", or some such thing. But concerning "capitalism" merely as a way of organising a country's economic system, Orthodox Christians can have rather little to say qua Orthodox Christians. There is no clear teaching either in the New Testament or in subsequent Orthodox tradition that government policy, businesses, the "marketplace", or – to use that loathsome word – "consumers" should have greater or lesser control over the flow of capital. Given the right circumstances, economies which lean toward any of these factors can either help or hinder Orthodox in living in accordance with Christianity. After all, contra Max Weber, an economic system cannot have a "spirit" in the theological sense.

It is true, however, that the free market, if treated as sacrosanct, can subtly or explicitly encourage attitudes which are inimical to Christian life. This is particularly true in our day of mega-corporations, advertising, and consumerism. Some ideology, no matter how tacit in expression or apparently objective in conception, must lie at the root of all economic policies or decisions. Even the most scientific of economists, if such a characterisation is not already somewhat misleading, must have some conception of "good" or at least "desirable" if he or she is to have any criteria for acting.

In this area, without in any way suggesting that right action can be deduced infallibly from the principles Orthodoxy offers, we at least have something to say. Human beings are made in the image of God, and to attain to his likeness, he desires first that we love him with all of our heart and strength and second that we love our neighbour as ourselves. This means that the chief good, and with it the essential nature of man, is non-material. We mustn't set our hearts on earthly treasure. It also means that we must constantly go out from ourselves if we are to behave as moral creatures. The basic posture of the Christian is an altruistic one, centred on self-sacrifice. Christ says, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these … " (Matthew 25:40). St Basil the Great says, "Resolve to treat the things in your possession as belonging to others".

It is surely clear that such an ethic is basically incompatible with any kind of ideological capitalism. A case can be, and sometimes is, made that people must be entirely unconstrained in order for their altruism to have any moral justification. This is a debatable point. What is not debatable is that this argument is typically only a way of dismissing objections to unrestrained capitalism in the economic sense. No one to my knowledge seriously justifies the free market on the grounds that it enables a morally efficacious altruism. We do not object to socialised medicine because we want so badly to build free hospitals out of our own pockets. This is seen most clearly in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who speaks of "the virtue of selfishness".

Is ideological capitalism a spiritual failure? Not, perhaps, per se. But it seems dangerous from a truly Orthodox Christian perspective to regard economic capitalism as much more than the lesser of two, equally materialist, evils. As that perceptive critic of both Soviet and American society, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, saw so clearly, the explicit tyranny of communism at least had the virtue of highlighting in a rather stark way for those who suffered from it the essentially spiritual nature of man. Capitalism, by contrast, while it does us the favour of sparing our lives, tends to lull us into a kind of moral sleep. We begin to forget that "here have we no continuing city" (Hebrews 13:14). It is difficult to say which is, in the end, worse.