Natural Law and the Two Somethings (VanDrunen Review II.1)

May 1, 2010

To write a chapter called “Precursors of the Reformed Tradition” seems a rather risky way to proceed, as it invites the criticism that you have set up the Reformed tradition as the perfected endpoint, and have scripted all of previous Church history into a narrative of development towards and imperfect realizations of this ideal.  Indeed, it is perhaps inevitable that this structural decision will lead to a somewhat imperfect and one-sided treatment of the history.  But I confess that VanDrunen does quite a good job (at least, so it seems on a first reading) of steering clear of the pitfalls that accompany this approach.  I was impressed and (I must confess) surprised by VanDrunen’s careful, even-handed treatment of the history, allowing each author to speak more or less for himself, rather than forcing him into the preconceived schema of what he was going to try and prove later, and by his sympathetic use of medieval Catholic sources, treating them as part of the single, continuous heritage of the Church’s teaching.  

I say “surprised” because this has not been, in my experience, typical of what you expect to find from Westminster Seminary professor, but perhaps times are changing.  Moreover, from my experience with Darryl Hart, I’d come to expect his brand of “spirituality of the church” advocate (as I’d perhaps over-hastily classified VanDrunen) to imaginatively project their idiosyncratic view backwards onto other figures with rather different views.  But, in any case, on the basis of chapter 2 I repent somewhat of these negative stereotypes.  This is not to say that I don’t have some lingering questions and objections, but on the whole I must admit this chapter to be coherent, balanced, and enlightening.

In it, VanDrunen examines five variants of the “Two Cities” and the “Two Swords” doctrines of the Patristic and Middle Ages, considering them to each be, in certain respects, precursors of the mature “Two Kingdoms” doctrine.  Then he looks at the use of natural law in the three leading medieval philosophers: Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.  Finally, he argues that both of these strands are picked up by Martin Luther in his political theology, which provides the direct precursor to Reformed political theology.  

Let’s look at each of these three sections in turn.  

A criticism immediately suggests itself regarding the first section.  Has not VanDrunen simply taken up every different sort of “Two somethings” theory in Church history and treated them as variations on a theme, so that he can then portray the Reformed Two Kingdoms theory as the heir to and perfection of this continuous tradition?  No doubt he would deny that this was his purpose, but it is hard not to feel that something of this sort is going on.  The Epistle to Diognetus, Augustine, Gelasius, Boniface VIII, and Ockham all get discussed in turn, all as having articulated some form of duality between Church and State, or Church and world, and all (except perhaps Boniface) as having some positive features that VanDrunen wants to pick up on.  Political-theological models that have often been treated as starkly contrasting or even standing at opposite poles are here narrated together as variations on this duality theme.  However, this exercise is prevented from becoming irresponsible or absurd by the fact that VanDrunen examines each of these models carefully on its own terms, and with attention to varying scholarly interpretations.    He then considers carefully how each one relates to and differs from the others that he has considered.  

Particularly satisfying was his engagement with Augustine, whose City of God  has often been distorted to represent a varied array of mutually contradictory political theologies.  Although, in my estimation, VanDrunen is too much indebted to R.A. Markus’s saeculum reading, he knows better than to follow it too far, and tempers it with a healthy dose of O’Donovan.  I don’t think that he sufficiently recognizes the ramifications of O’Donovan’s adjustment to Markus’s thesis, and so he lives us with a reading of Augustine that is rather murky and undecided on some of the key disputed issues.  This is fine, of course, as long as VanDrunen does not want to use Augustine as a key pillar later on his argument.  For that, we’ll have to wait and see.  

From the “two cities” doctrine, espoused in some form or another by Augustine and the “Epistle to Diognetus,” VanDrunen derives the idea of “commonality amid antithesis.”  Christians are fundamentally and unavoidably different from the surrounding culture of unbelievers, characterized by a different love and a different end, and yet they are inextricably intermingled in the present age, such that the Church is able to make use of, and even participate in to a limited extent, the goods and institutions of the earthly city.  Civil government, in this picture, belongs (though somewhat ambiguously) within the province of the earthly city--ultimately condemned, though it serves limited goods for the present.  VanDrunen is particularly pleased with the way that Augustine “refused to embrace an idyllic, theocratic, or Christianized view of the world.  Christians here on earth are a people on pilgrimage, their citizenship and their hope lying in an everlasting, heavenly city” (32).  In other words, he like Augustine’s amillenialism.  This unspoken eschatological commitment of VanDrunen’s is worth keeping in mind.  VanDrunen’s main complaint against Augustine is that he “does not emphasize the legitimate and God-ordained status of civil government as a positive matter” (32).  

VanDrunen thus examines the “two swords” doctrine, which differs significantly from the “two cities” in that it conceives a unified Christian society with two types of rule, rather than two different societies living side-by-side.  This idea is of course associated first of all by Pope Gelasius, who asserted that the Christian society was ruled by two authorities, the “spiritual” and the “temporal,” each with their proper functions upon which the other ought not to encroach.  VanDrunen notes that this distinction covers somewhat different ground than Augustine’s distinction: “Augustine’s two cities are first and foremost eschatological concepts, with present institutional expression in church and empire only a secondary matter.  Here, in contrast, Gelasius’s two swords doctrine is specifically institutional in its focus.  This fact cautions interpreters not to be hasty in setting these two models in opposition to one another, for the ‘two cities’ and the ‘two swords’ had slightly different referents in mind” (33-4).  Having established this caveat, he draws the following comparisons: the Gelasian doctrine sees none of the antithesis that the Augustinian does between church and world, since the world is now conceived of as Christian; second, Gelasius gives the state a specific institutional legitimacy that Augustine did not give it.  

He briefly sketches Boniface VIII’s alteration of the Gelasian doctrine, which made both swords the proper domain of the church, yet such that the church delegated one to the civil authority.  Needless to say, VanDrunen does not have much use for this view; he mainly introduces it, it seems, to provide the backdrop for William of Ockham’s doctrine of Church and State, to which he gives a few pages of attention.  He is particularly interested in Ockham’s teaching that “true lordship of temporal things” and “true temporal jurisdiction” existed among unbelievers, such authority was thus part of the natural order, and did not depend upon the Pope or the Church.  Temporal authority, on this view, is established directly by God, as a separate, yet complementary sphere of authority to that of the Church.  Ockham’s view, VanDrunen believes, puts him in many ways alongside Gelasius, but with the important different that “whereas Gelasius’ model seems to presume that there is one body of people being governed by both powers, with both powers mutually submitting to each other, Ockham seems less tied to such a vision.  The idea of a Christian empire, even one not entirely controlled by the pope, seems to play no essential role in Ockham’s political thought” (40-41).  Therefore, for Ockham, as for Augustine, we may speak of the realm of temporal authority as a realm of overlap, of commonality between believers and unbelievers.  But unlike Augustine, he sees this realm as a positive good, rather than as something shadowy and suspicious.  It is clear that VanDrunen has considerable sympathies with this Ockhamite synthesis.  

At this point, VanDrunen turns to consider medieval doctrines of natural law, but let us pause a moment to see what has been gained from the foregoing.  First, we have seen that the Christian tradition has been in broad agreement that there is an inescapable duality in the Church’s life in the world, a recognition that two different types of authority hold sway in the present life--”spiritual” and “temporal.”  Second, we have seen that the best thinkers in the tradition have recognized that the Christian’s relationship to the unbelieving world is one of “commonality amid antithesis,” fundamentally different orientations toward shared settings, goods, and even institutions.  Third, we have seen that, for many in the tradition, civil authority is not just something we have to live with, but is a positive good instituted by God for ruling the temporal realm, and VanDrunen prefers this conception. 

Now, this isn’t much, I think we will agree--it’s all quite vague and underdetermined.  Many key questions remain unanswered.  For instance, what is the relationship between “spiritual” and “temporal”?  Is it a spatial relationship, or a, well, a temporal one?  That is to say, do we conceive of the two realms as occupying two different spheres of social “space” at the same time, or of occupying two different “times,” so to speak, as the common language of “temporal” vs. “eternal” would imply?  This distinction makes an important difference when considering some Patristic and medieval writers.  And what do we mean by asserting that temporal authority is something that is “common” to both believers and unbelievers?  We could say that worship is common to believers and unbelievers, in the sense that all men worship; they just differ in what they worship.  Or we could say that food is common to believers and unbelievers, in that both believers and unbelievers eat basically the same things in basically the same way.  In which sense is civil authority common?  Clearly VanDrunen wants us to think in something much more like the second sense.  But is that what all these writers intend?  Indeed, by attempting to point us toward this notion of “commonality amid antithesis,” I can’t see that VanDrunen has told us anything at all, for what Christian would deny that a Christian’s relationship to the world is one of “commonality amid antithesis”?   But, to be fair, VanDrunen is merely laying groundwork at this stage, and so we should not ask too much.  Nevertheless, these remain distinctions he will have to flesh out at a later point in order to put forth a coherent political theological proposal.

Now, what about natural law?  Here VanDrunen turns first, of course, to Thomas Aquinas, and then seeks to show that, contra standard stereotypes, much the same concept is operative in Scotus and Ockham.  The account he gives of Aquinas is fairly standard and uncontroversial.  Natural law is “the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law,” it is the rational principles by which nature is meant to operate, reflecting the nature of God its Creator.  Mankind has been created able to ascertain these principles, and so to know how to conduct himself, and though his reason is distorted after the fall by sensual impulses, it is still able, in principle, to understand the natural law.  Human law is a particular determination of natural law to address particular circumstances.  

Before moving on from Aquinas, he mentions briefly the relationship between divine law (divided into Old Law and New Law) and natural law, listing Aquinas’s four reasons for the necessity of the divine law.  He then discusses the relationship between the Old Law and the natural law (namely, that the moral law, summarized in the Decalogue, can be equated with the natural law), but he does not at any point discuss the relationship between the New Law and the natural law, which seems to me a very serious omission, given that how we articulate this relationship is utterly crucial to the matter at hand--namely, the relationship between the Church, ruled by the New Law, and the civil authority, ruled by the natural law.  

His purpose in looking at Scotus and Ockham is not to develop their views of natural law in depth, but simply to show that, despite what we might expect from their voluntarist metaphysics, they retained the category and it played an important role in their ethics and political thought.  I don’t know enough about either of these figures to challenge VanDrunen if he has misconstrued or omitted something, but his account here seemed persuasive.  This argument allows him to move into the Reformation having established that “Whatever medieval school or schools may have influenced particular Reformers, therefore, natural law was part of a common, catholic theological inheritance” (55).  

Now, one brief comments about this section.  I have the same concern as I raised in the previous section--namely, that he has only established vague generalities so far.  The fact that there was a pervasive doctrine of natural law in the late Middle Ages, which was understood to be a crucial source for civil law, really tells us very little about the questions at hand--namely, how civil law is to relate to the Church and to what extent natural law, or at least its application in civil law, are to be transformed by Christian faith.  If grace perfects nature, does the evangelical law of the gospel perfect or transform in some way natural law, so that a Christian state would look very different fron a non-Christian? Careful attention to Aquinas’s views of the relationship between the New Law and the natural law could have helped move us toward some answers to this question, but VanDrunen simply omitted this.  Frustrating, but again, we are only at the groundwork stage, so I will merely flag this question for later.  

In the next (considerably briefer) post I will look at VanDrunen’s discussion of natural law and the two kingdoms in Luther.

Catholic Theories of Property III: Belloc and Conclusion

April 27, 2010

Within the few decades following the publication of Rerum Novarum, the dominance of capitalism and the threat of militant socialism remain, but the alternatives become somewhat clearer.  By the time Hilaire Belloc is writing The Servile State in 1913, and certainly by his Essay on the Restoration of Property in 1936, it has become clear that socialism does not mean, as Leo perhaps still imagined, the abolition of property ownership, but rather, the concentration of property ownership in the hands of the state.  Belloc is thus able to recognize socialism not as the opposite of capitalism, but simply as an essentially pragmatic development of the same impulse, underlying industrial capitalism, of centralizing control of the means of production.  Hence, in contrast to Leo, Belloc believes the situation calls a defense, not of private ownership in the abstract against common ownership, but of well-distributed private ownership against concentrated ownership--it is empty, in his mind, to defend the right of private property if only a small sliver of the population are to enjoy that right.  It is worth noting also that, perhaps due to his English setting, he does not want to explicitly situate himself in the Catholic tradition, though we can surmise that it lies in the background of his thought.

Like both Aquinas and Leo, Belloc’s endorsement of private property combines aspects of an appeal to nature and to practical considerations, but the form of his argument has more in common with Aquinas than Leo: private property does not derive directly from nature, but the structure of nature is such that private property proves most beneficial to man.  The content of Belloc’s argument, however, has more in common with Leo, focusing more on the good of the individual possessor, rather than the benefits accruing to society as a whole, and bears the stamp of modernity in its consideration of “freedom” as a preeminent value.  Assuming, with Leo, the priority of the family as the basic economic unit, he focuses and provides a clear basis for Leo’s concern that each family be able to provide for itself.  “It is obvious that whoever controls the means of production controls the supply of wealth.  If, therefore, the means for the production of that wealth which a family needs are in the control of others than the family, the family will be dependent upon those others; it will not be economically free.”  He of course acknowledges that such pure freedom and independence is neither possible nor desirable, since man is a social animal, but he nevertheless thinks it importance that the family retain as much freedom as possible.  

But why?  Why is economic freedom important?  Because, it is needed to properly realize social and individual needs residing in man’s nature.  First, the social needs: “In its absence general culture ultimately fails and so certainly does citizenship.  The cells of the body politic are atrophied and the mass of men have not even, at last, an opinion of their own, but are moulded by the few who retain ownership of land and endowments and reserves.  So essential is property to full life.”  Second, the individual needs: 

"Now, there is discoverable in man, Freewill.  His actions are of moral value to him if they are undertaken upon his own initiative; not if they are undertaken upon compulsion.  Therefore the use of choice is necessary to human dignity....Next, economic freedom is a good because man’s actions are multiple, both his desires and his creative faculties; but it is only in the possession of economic freedom that this multiplicity can be effective."

This appeal has the basic structure of Aquinas’s justification of private property, resting not, as it were, on the esse of mankind, but on the bene esse of man’s life in the world.  It has not, then, as for Leo, the character of an a priori appeal to the nature of things, but a deductive application of the natural law to the current state of mankind.  

But the differences from Aquinas far eclipse the similarities.  The principle of common use, for Aquinas the foundation of all discussion of property, and for Leo still present as a restraint on private property, seems to have vanished entirely.  Belloc has lost faith in Thomas’s crucial distinction between administration and use--whereas Aquinas could be read as saying that some individuals or groups could justly administer the world’s goods for the benefit of all, Belloc argues forcefully that each family must have not just the use of that portion of the world’s goods that they need, but the power of administration to produce all that they need.  The basic problem then is not that industrial capitalism had failed to genuinely use private possessions for common use, though Belloc certainly thought it had; rather, for Belloc, common use is not enough, because man must have the power not merely to live, but to administer his life according to his own desires and with regard to his own interests.  This becomes clear in a crucial passage from The Servile State: “What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the state, or is only a part of the state...but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions.” Thus far has the fundamental value of capitalism triumphed over Belloc’s mind--that everyone ought to be able to use his own goods for his own advantage, not for others.  

Aquinas’s hierarchy of values has been inverted--potestas dispensandi, has, as it were, taken priority over usum--for Belloc, the fruits of the world do not exist primarily to enable man to provide for his material needs, but to enable him to realize his human dignity by giving him the power of disposing of them as he sees fit.  Of course, this may well provide a useful augmentation of the Thomist justification for private property: by highlighting its value not merely for society as a whole but also for developing the full moral character and dignity of the proprietor (which thus further benefits society), Belloc’s argument suggests that Aquinas should have attended not merely to the importance of the existence of private property, but also of its wide distribution.  However, Belloc shifts the emphasis so far that the value of freedom is at risk of trumping those of justice and charity, leaving distributism, unlike Thomism, able to say very little when it comes to questions of just use of property.

In conclusion, then, we have seen that both Leo and Belloc, responding to the threats of socialism and (particularly for Belloc) capitalism, alter the tenor of Catholic thinking on property by shifting the emphasis from the priority of common use to the priority of private proprietorship.  Leo does this by making private property a principle of the natural law, and thus justified a priori, rather than by virtue of its benefit to the rest of society, while Belloc does it by rooting the good of private property in its contribution to individual self-realization through freedom.  In both cases, the result is a gravely weakened and theologically impoverished account of the social function of property, and the obligations of justice that govern its use.  While Aquinas, though taking note of Aristotle, sought to subordinate him to the Christian moral tradition, Leo and Belloc both end up marginalizing any theological and Christian account of property in favor of values and premises drawn from philosophies outside the Christian tradition.  

Finally, these changes seem, in the end, basically unnecessary.  Could not Leo have adequately addressed the threat of socialism by reiterating the ways in which neither society as a whole nor the individual worker is well-served by destroying the right of private property?  Could not Belloc have augmented, without disregarding, Thomas’s statement of the social good of property by drawing attention to the benefits accruing to society when it is characterized by free proprietors rather than wage laborers?  In light of these considerations, an essentially Thomist stance regarding the ethics of property appears to remain the best alternative for a society attempting to cope with the fallout of industrial capitalism while avoiding the threats of socialism.  

Catholic Theories of Property II: Rerum Novarum

Six hundred years later, the growth of capitalism has called forth a militant socialism in reaction.  Its call for the abolition of all private property by the state incites Leo XIII to respond with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, inaugurating the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.  At the center of this document is a full-blown attack on socialism, based on a sturdy defense of the right of private property, a right that Leo feels the need to affirm more strongly than Aquinas did.  While seeking (and no doubt perceiving himself) to be in line with Thomist teaching, Leo comes close to simply rooting the right of property in nature, in a way that Thomas never does.  He does this by importing a Lockean metaphysical account of property, suggesting that a right to private property simply arises out of one’s labor upon that property.  It is worth attending carefully to how he constructs his justification and how it differs from Aquinas’s.

According to Matthew Habiger, Leo’s case for private property is based on four main arguments.  First, “property is man’s wages in another form,” an argument that Leo develops in paragraph 5 of the encyclical, saying, “It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own.”  The worker ought to be free to dispose of his wages as he sees fit, and this means he should be free to buy property as he desires.  This argument seems to be a bit of a petitio principii, since, if private property is illegitimate, the mere fact that a worker wants to use his wages to acquire it can scarcely make it legitimate; Leo’s main point in this argument seems to be to convince the socialists that, on a pragmatic level, their proposals to help workers will actually make life worse for workers.  It is worth remembering this appeal to the importance of the worker’s freedom, because it will resurface in Belloc in a much stronger form.

In paragraph 6, Leo moves on to what he sees as the crux of the issue: “What is of far greater moment, however, is the fact that the remedy they propose is manifestly against justice. For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.”  His second and third arguments are elaborations of this appeal to nature.  Habiger summarizes the second, “Of all animals, only man can plan for future needs.  He therefore has a right to permanent possession” (developed in RN 6-7), and the third, “Man’s cultivation of nature entitles him to possess that which he cultivates” (developed in RN 9-10).  I will return to these in a moment, as they deserve to be considered in careful detail. 

Leo considers these arguments of justice to be conclusive, saying (perhaps a bit pompously) “So strong and convincing are these arguments that it seems amazing that some should now be setting up anew certain obsolete opinions in opposition to what is here laid down” (10).  Nevertheless, he adds one more pragmatic argument, which Habiger summarizes, “Man, as a father, must provide for those he has begotten.  Property enables him to do so with security” (developed in RN 12-13).  This argument does not seem to hold much water on its own, since the socialists might well reply that under their system, each family would be provided for with much more security and reliability than private property would allow, and each father could rest assured that his offspring were taken care of.  Although Leo seems to state very strongly that each father has the obligation to himself provide, out of his own resources, for the needs of his family (“It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten” [13]), it is unclear why this must necessarily be the case.  The main burden of Leo’s defense of private property, then, falls on his second and third arguments, from nature and justice. 

The first of these is recognizably Thomistic, though it has changed significantly from its original use.  Leo appeals to the rational nature of man, unique among animals in his ability to plan for the future, and to administer this world’s goods, by his reason and will, for his present and future needs.  “And on this very account--that man alone among the animal creation is endowed with reason--it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession” (6).  Jose María Díez-Alegría points out that, in arguing from man’s reason to his right of possession, Leo seems here to be following Aquinas’s argument from articulus 1: “Whether it is lawful for man to possess external things.”  However, whereas for Aquinas this argument established the right of mankind in general to possess external things (prior to consideration of the issue of private property), for Leo, this shows that “every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own” (6, emphasis mine).  This marks a “seriously erroneous interpretation” of Aquinas’s argument, and loses much of the logical coherence of the original. 

The next argument has nothing in common with Aquinas, as it seeks to justify private property on metaphysical, rather than social, grounds, following closely in the footsteps of Locke.  Indeed, the echoes of Locke are hardly subtle: 

Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature's field which he cultivates - that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right. (9)

One wonders whether this argument actually proves rather more than Leo would wish to, for by saying that ownership of a thing arises directly and automatically from the application of one’s labor to it (“As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor” [10]), he would seem to undermine the whole capitalist arrangement, in which the laborer is always bestowing his labor on things that remain the property of the capital owner.  He does not seem aware, however, of the tensions that arise from his application of a metaphysically-determined property right to a system governed by socially-determined property rights.  Distributism, indeed, might fit more comfortably with Leo’s arguments than the capitalist arrangement he basically accepts.

Although Leo appeals to the Thomistic distinction between common use and private ownership, quoting Thomas directly in paragraph 22 regarding the duty that every man has to use his possessions for the common good of all, he significantly alters the relationship between the two.  We can see this clearly in paragraph 8: 

The fact that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race can in no way be a bar to the owning of private property. For God has granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that no part of it was assigned to any one in particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man's own industry, and by the laws of individual races.  

This seems intended as something of a restatement of Aquinas’s argument in a. 2 ad 1, regarding the senses in which the natural law does and does not prescribe common ownership, but, as already discussed above, it basically removes the caesura that Aquinas has carefully placed between the natural law and the institution of private property.  

Aquinas resolutely affirms (whatever his remaining ambiguities) that the right of private property does not arise directly from nature, but is the product of a natural state of common ownership that has been subsequently modifed by social arrangements resulting from prudent deliberation, and can be justified only on the basis of its social value.  Leo, on the contrary, has made himself quite clear in stating that the right of private property is given directly by nature, and holds irrespective of its social value (though Leo does seek to  bolster his case with arguments from social value).  Habiger affirms that this is Leo’s intent, and demonstrates moreover that it was the intent of the two main drafters of the document: “It is clear from the final redaction of Rerum Novarum, approved by Pope Leo XIII, and from the thought of the two theologians who composed the earlier drafts of the document, that the right (or principle) of private property is established by a direct appeal to the natural law....The foundation of the right is located ultimately in the natural law.”  Habiger indeed tries repeatedly to show, contra Leo’s critics, that this is no departure from Thomas’s teaching, but is simply a different emphasis.  He reads Aquinas as rooting private property in the natural law: “Already we see that St. Thomas would hold that private property is an enhancement of the natural law principle of common property, made necessary by man’s Fall, and is a permanent, although derived secondary principle in man’s post-lapsarian condition.” 

Even if Habiger’s reading of Thomas is correct, however, and Aquinas does make private property a “derived principle,” the derivation is quite different from Leo’s, since Aquinas derives it from man’s obligations to other men, to effectively facilitate the common use of property, while Leo roots it in man himself, and his relationship to the world.  Common use is thus severely marginalized in Leo’s account, and there is no hint of Aquinas’s suggestion that private property ceases to be justified if it ceases to serve common use. 

Catholic Theories of Property I: Aquinas

Still traveling, so I haven't had the opportunity to write up anything new, but I thought that, since I've been saying for so long in comments, "Oh, I discuss this at more length in the papers I'm writing" I should post those papers, now that they're done.  I must confess that they don't include much of what I claimed they would, because there's this abominable 5,000-word limit at University of Edinburgh that O'Donovan thinks is complete rubbish.  But, all that can be saved for another day.  So, first, the paper on Catholic Theories of Property--this post will include the introduction and section on Aquinas.

For western Christians living after Fukuyama’s fabled “end of history”--the demise of communism and triumph of capitalism--it is easy to feel as if the problem of private property is not a problem at all.  All sides of the political spectrum, whatever their differences, would agree that private property is good and necessary, and that, on the whole, we have succeeded in assuring adequate access to it in our societies (though conservatives would gripe that it is not sufficiently free from government predation, and liberals would implore us to make it more a reality for the lower strata of society).  But in Christian history, it started as quite a serious problem, with many Church Fathers denying the legitimacy of private property altogether.  In the Middle Ages, theologians developed a more nuanced view, influentially crystallized by Thomas Aquinas, who affirmed the good of private property, but made it subordinate to the right of common use.  

The gradual growth of capitalism over the ensuing centuries, favoring increasingly unrestricted private property rights, finally incited a radical reaction back towards the abolition of private property, in the form of socialism and communism, in the 19th-century.  Within the Catholic tradition, this evoked fresh reflection on the question of private property, and a particular urgency to unequivocally justify it against these new threats, as we see in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.  Leo, however, achieved this unequivocal justification at the cost of theological coherence and of loyalty to the tradition, particularly on the priority of common use and the relationship of private property to the natural law.  In the early 20th-century, an intriguing new current of Catholic social thought emerged in the form of Distributism, propounded by the English writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.  They radicalized Rerum Novarum’s somewhat superficial critique of capitalism and socialism and articulated more clearly the importance of private property, but in the process lost sight of theological criteria and the principle of common use altogether.

In this essay, I propose to compare these two modern forms of Catholic reflection on property rights to Thomas Aquinas’s account of private property in the Summa Theologiae.  I will argue that, although Distributism in particular highlights some key issues that are insufficiently present in Aquinas, both Leo and Belloc’s arguments manifest troubling capitulations to modern, non-theological paradigms, undermining their ability to critically engage the dangers of modern economic rationality.  Moreover, I will suggest that their departures from the Thomist tradition are ultimately unnecessary to meet the threats they perceive, as this tradition possesses adequate resources for a response to the social problems of both capitalism and socialism.  Although a full account of property ethics would involve a number of other issues, in this brief essay, I will limit myself to the questions “Is private property legitimate and desirable?  If so, on what basis and for what ends?”

To understand Aquinas’s answer, we should first understand the two traditions to which he seeks to do justice.  The early Church Fathers are full of statements which seem deeply hostile to the institution of private property, and, although we may make allowances for rhetorical exaggeration, there is little doubt that the Patristic era essentially viewed private property as, at best, a deeply ambiguous imposition upon the natural state of common ownership (a teaching derived from the ancient Stoics).  Aristotle, on the other hand, had offered a much stronger endorsement of private property, and by the thirteenth-century, his thought was gaining a great deal of authority in Western Christendom.  Aquinas thus faced the dilemma of reconciling, on the one hand, a long Christian teaching on the unnaturalness of private possession, and, on the other hand, an Aristotelian insistence on its naturalness, together with the testimony of practical experience that showed the prudence of such an institution.

His solution was to affirm, with the Christian tradition, that the natural law prescribed common ownership, while arguing that it did not thereby proscribe private ownership.  Private ownership, then, although not natural, was not thereby unnatural; rather, it was a legitimate and (perhaps) necessary development and augmentation of the natural law.  He arrives at this solution by means of a number of subtle distinctions, which I will seek to carefully spell out.

First, in article 1 of the question on property, Aquinas establishes that it is lawful “for man [speaking of mankind in general] to possess external things” (art.).  Although only God can have dominion over the world and its fruits in terms of their nature, yet he has given to mankind the right to exercise dominion over them “with regard to the use of them” (resp.).  This natural right exists in virtue of man’s reason, the divine image in him, by which “he is able to make use of external things to his own advantage” (resp.).

This, however, is an entirely distinct question from “Whether it is lawful for anyone to possess something as his own,” (art. 2) that is, the question of private property.  Here, he invokes a further distinction to resolve the problem--between “use” and “the power to procure and dispose” (potestas procurandi et dispensandi), which we could call “administration” for short.  The use of external things is given to all men in common, and yet, in order that the goal of common use may be best achieved, it is generally more effective that individuals be given the right, or perhaps better, the responsibility, to administer a certain portion of the world’s goods for their own use and that of others.  Aquinas gives three reasons for this: 1) the tendency towards laziness and abdication when working on something commonly possessed, 2) the confusion that results from the attempt at common administration, and 3) the quarrels that result when each tries to claim his just share of the common property.  In view of these practical concerns, he argues that “it is necessary to human life” to allow a private right of disposition, while keeping the use of external things common, “that is, in such a way that he [the owner] is ready to share them with others in the event of need” (resp.).  

In this account, since the common use of the earth’s goods is according to natural law, common use has priority over private disposition, and the latter exists to serve the former.  For this reason, private property cannot be justified in itself, but only insofar as it serves as a means to facilitate common use.  According to John Finnis, the justications for particular property rights are based on “general justice”--the advantages they will bring to the whole community.  Private property is “derivatory and secondary” right, with “the obligation to realize the primary purpose of property, namely, use,” (96) according to Parel, who even says, “if there is conflict between use and ownership, there was no doubt in Aquinas’ mind which should prevail.”

But how exactly does this “derivatory” right of private possession relate to the common possession given in natural law?  Aquinas carefully states that common possession is natural not in the sense that the natural law 

dictates that all things should be possessed in common and that nothing should be possessed as one’s own, but because the division of possessions is not according to natural right, but, rather, according to human agreement, which belongs to positive right, as stated above.  Hence the ownership of possessions is not contrary to natural right; rather, it is an addition to natural right derived by human reason (a. 2 ad 1).

It is possible to read this in at least two crucially differing senses.  On the one hand, one can read “the division of possessions” as meaning “any division of possessions, as opposed to the initial common ownership.”  On this reading, Aquinas is saying that the fact of private property does not arise from nature, but from contingent, pragmatic arrangements that human societies may make, which are nevertheless, insofar as they serve common use, legitimate augmentations of natural right.  Parel, taking this reading, goes so far as to say that property right “is to be sought rather in historical conditions which vary from time and place and culture....But this is something for the times, for the cultures, and the good legislators to determine.”  If we take this reading, then private property rights are derived from the natural law only in the same sense that, say, legal penalties for adultery are; they can be prescribed based on rational application of the natural law to particular circumstances, but they are not part of it.  In other words, private property is permitted (and in practice, generally very desirable), but not mandated.

On the other hand, one can read “the division of possessions” as meaning “any particular schema for dividing up possessions at a particular time and place,” such that it is only such particular arrangements that are not “according to natural right, but, rather, according to human agreement.”  Presumably, then, on this interpretation, the general fact of divided possessions is not merely a matter of human agreement, but is, in some sense, according to natural right.  On this reading (taken by Leo in Rerum Novarum, as we shall see shortly), private property is still not a primary postulate of the natural law (it is clear that, for Aquinas, it is not), but is still, as it were, part of the natural law as a “derived principle.”  An example of such a derived principle might be “Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed.”  For Aquinas, such a principle, although not straightforwardly given in the natural law, can be deduced from it as a necessary consequence, not a historically contingent application, and this is how Leo and his followers want to read Aquinas on property.  In other words, private property is mandated by the natural law.  

It is not easy to adjudicate between these two interpretations.  The former, while it seems to square with Aquinas’ emphasis on the priority of common ownership (which is reduced to little more than a cipher in the latter reading), runs into the problem that Aquinas speaks of division into private property as “necessary to human life,” not, as Parel does, as “something for the times, for the cultures, and the good legislators to determine.”  The latter, while it does justice to the idea of private property as a necessary augmentation of the natural law, makes Aquinas’s statement in ad 1 terribly banal--did Aquinas really mean to state the obvious fact that “natural right does not itself determine the specific property arrangements for any given time and place”?  The ambiguity here, it should be pointed out, is not unique to this issue, but resides in the ambiguous role that the ius gentium (in which private property seems clearly to belong for Aquinas) plays in Aquinas’s thought, as a sort of middle axiom linking natural law and positive law.  In any case, we can probably safely say that Parel’s interpretation is rather too weak, and Leo’s certainly too strong.  

Moreover, we can say this much with certainty about Aquinas’s view of the right of private possession, distinguishing it in crucial ways from some later theories: unlike the general right of man’s possession of the earth, the right of private possession does not derive from anything inherent in the nature of the world, or man’s relationship with it, but from the requirements of the common good arising from man’s relationship with other men.  As John Finnis puts it, 

The moral or juridical relationships to such an entity that we call property rights are relationships to other people.  They are matters of interpersonal justice.  Arguments for founding property rights on alleged ‘metaphysical’ relationships between persons and the things with which they have ‘mixed their labour’, or to which craftsmen have ‘extended their personality’, are foreign to Aquinas.

A few more responses on the taxation issue

April 16, 2010

Since a few people have told me they appreciated the stuff I’ve been posting on taxation and theft here, I thought I’d post just a bit more from the Facebook discussion--the text below was in reply to a section of a large rebuttal someone wrote up there, but it should basically make sense on its own.  Also, since it’s that time of the year again, and the Tea Partiers were out in force yesterday, I recall my first little essay on this whole business, which I wrote last Tax Day, and you can find here.

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You then make a statement that my problem is that I “blur the concepts of necessary taxes and redistributive taxes....Taxes for the common defense fall in the first category, taxes for the redistributive principle fall in the second.”  Yes, it is precisely my point to blur these categories.  Why are taxes paid for defense necessary?  Well, they’re not absolutely necessary, but we generally think that they’re important for the preservation of society.  In an economy characterized by dangerous inequality and serious poverty, one might argue that redistributive taxes are just as necessary for the preservation of society.  Moreover, many taxes are “redistributive” in the sense of benefiting some more than others, including taxes for the “common” defense, as I argued in the original post and in my comments after the first post.

Then you extol the virtues of voluntary giving.  Great--let’s have more of that.  If the Church can motivate people to give voluntarily, and care for the poor, then let it do so, and the government will have no reason to get involved.  I remember reading about some 19th-century Scotch Presbyterian who organized such an effective and generous church system of poor relief that the local government was able to vastly scale back their welfare program.  But if the Church is failing, she can hardly complain when other institutions try to pick up the slack.  A couple quibbles with what you said in this paragraph, “None of these services were based on an enforced-tax or upon a social principle of wealth distribution”--neither of those is strictly true; in many nations in Christendom at various times, the tithe was enforced, whether or not it should’ve been; second, in the early Church, church charity was based upon “a social principle of wealth distribution”--many of the Church Fathers called explicitly for the rich to sell all their excess and give the proceeds to the Church for it to distribute equitably, Acts 4 style.  Also, you say, “Nor did the apostles, church fathers, or any others enforce any such standard, but leave it with the conscience.”  Well, it depends what you mean by that; the Church Fathers may have “left it with the conscience” but they raked consciences over the coals regularly on this subject, so you can’t quite characterize it as a hands-off approach.

At this point you move on to make some (to put it charitably) rather ignorant and snarky comments about Popes Pius XI and John Paul II.  If you don’t agree with them, fine, but I think you need to respect them, and the great body of teaching they represent.  I don’t know enough about Pius XI to defend him specifically (but I doubt you know enough about him to attack him specifically) but John Paul II was, by all counts, a very holy man and a noble leader, who devoted himself to the good of the Church, so far as he understood it, and the cause of the oppressed.  The Catholic Church in the past few decades has put Protestants (especially conservative ones) to shame when it comes to defending the cause of the poor, and sacrificing much for them, so let’s not throw around charges of “hypocrisy.” 

Your reading of Pius XI’s quote here was particularly odd.  Pius said, “[the state] does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and rushing to its own destruction.”  You seem to have a problem with the last clause, somehow reading it as if Pius was against “material things.”  What Pius says here seems self-evidently true--that the private possession of goods, in itself a good thing, will, if unrestrained, cause intolerable evils and eventually its own destruction.  Wasn’t it the Apostle James who said “The love of money is the root of all evil”?  Private property is a dangerous thing, because private owners can easily fall into selfishness and greed, and, unless restrained by laws, destroy others in their greed.  There’s no opposition to material things here, just the cold hard truth about human nature.

Then you tell me all this stuff from Richard Bonney’s book.  I appreciate all the extra information, but I’m not sure exactly which parts are relevant to the matter at hand.  Yes, taxes are higher now than historically; yes, Rome had a very oppressive tax system, particularly oppressive because it disproportionately afflicted the poor--it was if anything a reverse redistribution at times, as some of your own citations show.  Indeed, you cite Basil the Great calling for the poor to be exempted from taxes--this sounds like what conservatives would decry as a redistributive system--everyone receiving the benefits of government, though only some people pay for them!  

This line jumped out at me: “In the past, as Brad points out, other Christians have failed to realize the full Biblical principle of private property”--OK, so here we have at least a concession that our modern teaching on this matter is not the Early Church’s teaching.  Good.  I do not think that we have to adopt the Early Church’s teaching on this matter wholesale; but my point is that we must acknowledge that some of our claims on this subject (e.g., redistribution=theft) run contrary to their attitudes, and that should cause us to be rather more modest in our claims.

A bit later, you point out that “Nowhere in Chrysostom’s explanation of taxation is any theory about the State providing for the poor to accomplish wealth redistribution or equity, or any other socialist idea.”  To be sure.  Chrysostom wanted the Church to handle all that redistribution--he was thoroughly socialist, actually, but he wanted an ecclesial, not a state socialism.  What I want people to realize though is that the reason no one back then envisioned the state involved in redistribution was because the state had not yet been Christianized.  When the State did increasingly get in the business of supporting the poor, taxing the rich, providing free education and healthcare, etc., the people who were the driving forces behind this were Christians, trying to fulfill gospel mandates in the political sphere.  A pre-Christian state would not be likely to think of redistributing to the poor; for a Christian state, such began to seem like a mandate.  I don’t mean to say that this was the right conclusion to reach--that these socializing Christians had the right idea, but it’s important for us to understand the genealogy of this development.  That’s why, for instance, I cite Martin Bucer, who encouraged aggressive intervention by the civil authorities to protect the poor and control the rich.  But you just breezed over Bucer, surprising, since as a Protestant, he would seem to be the most significant figure to you.

Now, you say some things about Aquinas.  For one, you say that Aquinas is a shaky source because he used Aristotle.  Ah!  But do you not realize that his use of Aristotle in his teaching on property is to moderate the radical stance of the early Church Fathers?  In other words, he uses Aristotle to establish a much more pro-private-property stance than that of the earlier tradition.  So it doesn’t work for you to say, “Oh, we can’t trust his negative attitude toward private property, since he was using Aristotle.”  Now, to be sure, Finnis attempts to make explicit what is merely implicit in Aquinas--or perhaps, to construct an argument out of building blocks that are in Aquinas, and we cannot be sure how much Aquinas would agree with his claims for redistributive taxation (for Aquinas, the Church would’ve been the most natural institution to be handling such things, not the state).  My point though is that the building blocks are there in Aquinas--Finnis isn’t just cooking things up out of thin air; and we as modern Christians need to reckon with Aquinas’s tremendously influential teaching here.

I’m impressed that you consulted Finnis’s book for your rebuttal, and would admire your thoroughness, but I think you were not sufficiently attentive on the subject of superflua.  It is a bit more complicated than this.  I’m running out of time right now, so I will just post the notes and quotes I had taken a few weeks ago on this section of Finnis:

There is a threefold distinction in Thomas between “(a) resources one needs for the very survival of oneself and one’s dependants, (b) resources one needs in order to fulfil one’s responsibilities for the support and education of one’s relatives and household, for maintaining one’s business or profession or other vocation, for launching one’s children in such ways of life, for paying one’s debts, and other such genuine responsibilities, and (c) resources which are left over {superflua} after one has made reasonable provision for both type (a) ‘absolute necessity’ and type (b) ‘relative necessity {necessitas conditionata}.  Then Aquinas’ theorem is twofold: (I) everything one has is ‘held as common (or in common)’ in the sense that it is morally available, as a matter of right and justice, to anyone who needs it to survive; (2) one’s superflua are all ‘held as common’, in the sense that one has a duty of justice to dispose of them for the benefit of the poor.”

I: those in life-threatening need can take whatever will relieve that need, and “this entitlement overrides anyone else’s otherwise legitimate title or property right.” II: Furthermore, if I am aware of someone in such strict need [go take a look at II-II q. 71 a. Ic], and there is no other who is available to provide it, I have a “duty of strict justice (not merely ‘charity’)” to help them, not merely out of my superflua, but out of what I use for relative necessity....when no one is in extreme necessity, property-owners may keep their property “just as far as their type (b) need to maintain themselves (with their dependants) in the form of life which they have reasonably adopted.”  All superflua should then be made available to those who lack the resources for their type b) needs.  “The poor have a natural right that the whole of this residuum be distributed in their favour.”  

In other words, your claim that Aquinas says that we are only responsible to give what is left over after we have tended to all reasonable needs and responsibilities is oversimplistic--that is only true if you know of no one in extreme necessity, and quite possibly that is true for most of us (though in an era of globalization, the question can be asked how far our responsibility extends to global neighbors).  Plus, I do not, I’m afraid, share your rosy reading of Christian America: “Now, that rather sounds to me like how most Christians today live – we pay for our expenses, and tithe, and give of what was left over to the church, to family, to friends, to mission work, and other things. Most people do not have much, if any, ‘superflua’ in this sense. After all, if you’re saving up for a house to provide for your family, that clearly falls under the necessities of life. If you’re saving up for a new car because the one you have is suffering, that’s clearly providing for your family, and in my case, providing for my livelihood since I drive to the businesses I meet with.”  My experience of Christian America (and I do not in any way exclude myself from this indictment) is that we convince ourselves that we “need” any number of little luxuries--a new article of clothing every couple weeks, several cups of coffee a day, an iPhone, a flat-screen TV, a rather large house, a rather nice car, a generous supply of junk food, etc.--and then, if all that is covered, we might reach into our pockets and call ourselves generous.  This is not an easy teaching, and I don’t pretend that it is; it’s given me a great deal of pause and hard thinking over the past few months.