The Earth and its Fullness are the Lord’s

Aurelius Augustinus is widely considered the most substantial Christian thinker of the early Church and many, both Catholic and Protestant, consider him the greatest Christian theologian of all time. So it is significant that so little attention has been given to his economic philosophy while his thoughts on war and other political topics have been so exhaustively examined. As with so much of Augustine’s thought, it is the inner dimension, its effect on the soul, of the human reality under consideration which draws his most intense scrutiny. Augustine’s philosophy of property centered on justice, rather than the legal conception of absolute ownership which is regarded in our time as an immutable institution. Augustine, along with most other early Christian thinkers, regarded private property as justified only by the fulfillment of its moral purpose – the sharing of the goods of the earth with all.

For Augustine, the root of morality is found in the love of God. God is to be loved above all other realities, both earthly and spiritual. For Augustine, only the perfect good can be enjoyed for its own sake. Therefore, true enjoyment is found only in God. Other realities are to be used as pathways which bring us closer to God. Earthly realities find their fulfillment only by leading us to God. All lower values point toward the highest value – our hearts are ever restless until they rest in him.
Since property is an earthy reality that tends to possess its possessors, tempting them to enjoy it as if it were an absolute value, how should Christians use it? Morality, not the law of the Empire, is the true criteria of ownership, “Property is wrongly possessed by evil persons; while good persons who love it least have the best right to it” and later, “Whence does anyone possess what he or she has? Is it not from human law? For by divine law, the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s (cf. Psalm 23:1); the poor and the rich God has made from one mud and the poor and the rich he sustains on one earth. Nevertheless, by human law, one says, ‘This estate is mine, this house is mine, this servant is mine.’ This is by human law therefore – by the law of the Emperors.” ¹ Property is the gift of God best owned by those who use it as a means to reach him who gave it. The emperor’s law grants absolute ownership without regard to how the possessor uses his or her property, but in God’s eyes right use is the criteria of just ownership.

For Augustine, private ownership was an expression of sin when it was not used to fulfill God’s plan for the just distribution of the world’s resources. This sin was a failure to recognize that all being participates in God, the source of being. Private property in the Roman (and American) sense of absolute ownership seeks a fraudulent autonomy from the rest of creation. As William Cavanaugh put it, “To be left to our own devices, cut off from God, is to be lost in sin, which is the negation of being.” ² Yet this autonomy is exactly what Milton Friedman and other neoliberals praise as “freedom” as in the famous phrase, “Free to Choose.” To be encased in “one’s own choice” is to be the slave of sin. Such “freedom” is slavery to one’s own will which has not yet been healed by God’s power. The beginning of healing is the recognition of God’s sovereignty: “…freedom of choice is not made void but established by grace, since grace heals the will whereby righteousness may freely be loved.” – Augustine, The Spirit and the Letter. “Humans need a community of virtue in which to learn to desire rightly.” ³

The Creator has not made human beings a sequence of autonomous units each pursuing its own atomistic interests utterly divorced from all the others. Such fantasies are the result of sin. When this sin is healed, we begin to see in each other the faces of single human family, made from the same mud and sustained by God’s love on one planet. Augustine’s view of property is a scandal to those who pride themselves on what they own: “Both the person to whom a wealthy inheritance has fallen, and the one who has happened on impoverished conditions, have the same fundamental claim to the goods of earth, which neither of them originally possessed. For both, the most basic rule to consider in ownership is what one really needs. If one therefore keeps more than what is sufficient, ethically speaking one is really keeping others’ property, because these others, by virtue of their need, have a fundamentally greater right to those material goods.” ⁴ Right ownership is a function of need rather than the laws of the Empire.

In addition, property flows to those who know how to use it rightly. “Gold and silver therefore belong to those who know how to use gold and silver. For even among human beings themselves, each must be said to possess something [only] when he or she uses it well. For what a person does not treat justly, that person does not possess rightly. If one should call one’s own what one does not possess rightly, this will not be the voice of a just possessor.” ⁵ True ownership is granted only to the one who uses property justly – otherwise one is a thief and one’s property can be justly expropriated by those who will use it rightly. Those who abuse their property and by extension degrade the ecological integrity of God’s earth, “…have forfeited their participation in God’s true ownership” ⁶

A prime example of such forfeiture can be found in BP’s abuse of its undersea property in the Gulf of Mexico, Such behavior, though sanctioned by law, involves a direct violation of Augustine’s principles of right ownership. This violation can only be healed by a sincere effort to restore the ecological system which has been so critically damaged. Otherwise, if BP’s concern for profit prevails over the obligation to set right what has been destroyed, world citizens have the right and obligation to expropriate the property which has been so abused for the sake of profit. God’s justice demands it.

In Augustine’s view, property must never abuse the common wealth which God has granted as a gift to all people. Otherwise, “Instead of ownership being used to foster community, it becomes a means to destroy human solidarity. In the Roman law concept of private property, then, a means has become an end. It has ceased to be relative and inclusive, and has become absolute and exclusive” ⁷ The scandal which Augustine presents to modern Americans is that there is a higher law that sanctions private property only when it is a means to greater human solidarity, not when it is treated as an absolute right walling people off from each other. The corporate person also cannot do with its property whatever garners the greatest profit regardless of the human and natural consequences, but must follow God’s law – “because each of us is a member of the one great human family.” ⁸

The law of the New Jerusalem does not acknowledge “mine” and “not mine”, but only “ours:”

Those who wish to make room for the Lord must find pleasure not in private, but in common property…Redouble your charity. For, on account of the things which each one of us possesses singly, wars exist, hatreds, discords, strifes among human beings, tumults, dissensions, scandals, sins, injustices, and murders. On what account? On account of these things which each of us possesses singly. Do we fight over the things we possess in common? We inhale this air in common with others, we all see the sun in common. Blessed therefore are those who make room for the Lord, so as not to take pleasure in private property.⁹

As we saw in my previous article The Meaning of ‘Mine’ and ‘Not Mine’ in Early Christianity, the Church fathers were not simply making a critique of “greed” the way many churches do today. We live in a society so fundamentally anti-Christian that the subjective attitude of greed is openly celebrated and must be countered by the remaining bastions of moral sanity. But the Church fathers’ critique was much deeper than that. They had the courage to openly challenge one of the most powerful institutions of their time, the law sanctioning absolute ownership, rejecting it as undesirable and dangerous. As Charles Avila put it, “In [Augustine’s] view, private property is the chief enemy of peace.” ¹⁰

As one would expect from Augustine, his interest centers on the sinful attitudes which private property engenders. It does not merely isolate us from our fellow creatures, but bloats our sense of self, encasing us in prideful fantasies. These fantasies are the result of the tyranny of our own wills which fail to acknowledge membership in the family God wishes to create among us. “In Augustine’s thought, we desperately need not to be left to the tyranny of our own wills. The key to true freedom is not just following whatever desires we happen to have, but cultivating the right desires. This means that the internal movement of the will is not a sufficient condition for freedom; we must consider the end toward which the will is moved.” ¹¹ Cultivating a right desire regarding property requires us to view it as a means of building up solidarity in God’s family, and envision a world in which “mine” and “not mine” are subsumed into “ours.”

Capitalism is often justified as a way to redirect the unalterable facts of human selfishness into socially beneficial channels, but the early Christians were not so pessimistic about human nature. For them, every earthly reality was a path that leads to God because God’s power to save was real. As with Chrysostom, Augustine did not believe that property was in itself evil. It was the Roman law of absolute ownership which permitted owners to wall themselves off from the human family that was evil. In this philosophy of the right use of property, as in so much else from the early years of Christianity, Augustine uncovered the revolution embedded in the teachings of Christ.

1. Avila, Charles, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching, Orbis Books: 1983, p. 111 
2. Cavanaugh, William T., Being Consumed, Eerdmans: 2008, p. 8 
3. Cavanaugh, p. 9 
4. Avila, p. 114 
5. Augustine, Sermo L, 1, PL 38:326
6. Avila, p. 116 
7. Avila, p. 118 
8. Avila, p. 118 
9. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXI, 5, PL 37:1718 
10. Avila, p. 121 
11. Cavanaugh, p. 12