Brian Hamilton

Aquinas and Property

These are notes towards a paper I’m working on now, on medieval responses to the movement from a feudal to a proto-capitalistic economy. Likely I’ll be posting various thoughts on this topic, scattered rather than systematic, over the next few weeks.

I’m not sure that Janet Coleman quite has it right in saying that “the juridical aspect of the question of property was, for [Aquinas], rooted in the metaphysics of Greek, Roman and patristic thought, in which, more generally, material goods were taken to be means to a higher end for man, to be used rather than enjoyed in their own right” (622). There’s a gnostic phantom in this way of framing the issue, where material goods fall away on the journey to our beatific end, where for Aquinas the material is indeed good in its own right. While Thomas is clear that riches are not themselves the ultimate end of human life, that’s not the line of reasoning he invokes in his discussion of the naturalness of property (ST II-II 66.1–2). Rather, he insists that dominium of external things is natural to the human person only with respect to their use, because only God has dominium over external things with respect to their nature, and God has by nature ordained those things to the sustenance of humankind. Coleman says that “the primary recognition of the purpose of property is its use for men in pursuance of higher ends”; it seems to me that for Aquinas the primary recognition of the purpose of property is the ordered disbursal of goods to those who have need, for God alone is truly dominus, and God has made provision for all. The juridical aspect of the question of property, then, is not primarily individual but social: How do we implement a notion of privacy that makes room for individuals to procure and dispense material goods (which is natural to them) without encouraging avarice or depriving those who have need? That’s why Thomas follows up on these basic questions of the natural and legal foundations of ownership with caveats about the right of the person in need to (for example) take from another what is needed.

27 November 2006 |
tags: Money, Thomas Aquinas