Rightly Ordered Loves

This is a summary of Joan Lockwood O'Donovan's essay "Christian Platonism and Non-Proprietary Community."



Thesis: The possession of rights is always proprietorship.  In the Western tradition all natural rights originate in property right.

Pope John XXII proposed that from the moment of creation all mankind was collectively endowed with full lordship in the sense of ownership over earthly goods.

Patristic Foundations of Non-Proprietary Community

Augustine distinguished between two rights on which earthly goods are based: divine right, in which all things belong to the righteous, and human right--which is in the jusridiction of the kings of the earth (Ep. 93, NPNF (1) I:400.).

Eventually, this would be seen that in a just commonwealth, "the highest and truest common good, namely, God, is loved by all, and men love each other in Him without dissimulation" (Ep. 137.5.17).  Therefore, bonum commune is above all a sharing in rightly ordered loving--an activity that is entirely common in the sense of inclusive and participatory because entirely spiritual (JO, 80).

"By contrast, Augustine conceived of the disordered love of the soul as the privatization of good, in that it entails the soul's turning away from the universal common good to its private good, that is, to itself as privately possessed."

"In the body politic, disordered love is the destruction of community, of the bonum commune, because it involves radical loss of the shared spiritual possession of being, meaning, and value."

• regulated interaction of private spheres of degenerate freedom.

Franciscan Poverty: The Theology of Evangelical Non-Possession

In the later middle ages the distinction between common property and common non-proprietary possession never surfaced.

• Bonaventure moved the debate forward.  By drawing upon the Christian neo-Platonic tradition, he was able to posit the Trinity/Word as font and finis of thought and spirituality. 
• Christ's life revealed "Evangelical Perfection."
• This meant that Bonaventure's order saw the claiming of spiritual goods for oneself and against one another.  It disrupts the human response to divine love (84).
• Renouncing the property right means the wayfarer is not a self-possessor, but is possessed by Christ, receiving from Him all the good that he is, has, and does (85).  

Wyclif's Ecclesiological Revolution

Fitzralph (Wyclif's intellectual predecessor) argued that God's "gift of lordship to Adam is a communication or sharing of himself and his lordship rather than an alienating transfer of lordship, which would diminish God--a communicating and communicable possession and use of things according to rational necessity" (89).

• "Wyclif's core Augustinian insight is that just lordship over earthly goods involves rightly ordered love toward them, which in turn depends on the true knowledge of them available only in Christ"
• Evangelical dominion, therefore, is the just communal possession and use of earthly goods that shadows God's own dominion by conserving the being of non-human creatures...

Conclusion

"We are not our own but Christ's" (1 Cor. 6.19).  "As we are possessed by Christ and receive ourselves from him, the central act of our willing is one of conforming to his will" (92). 

• When we encounter other goods, we first possess them in their essential being, through knowledge illumined by the love of Christ, before answering the demand or claim that they present" (93).
• We are "claims," not "rights-possessors." 
• By conforming to Christ, we respond and recognize that the Other is.  We fulfill the demands of Justice, but not the demands of one another (this solves Hegel's problem.  We introduce the Other as loved).  

Righteous human lordship is communal chiefly because it is spiritual (this is where Reconstructionism in its libertarianism is so horribly wrong).

• Righteous "human community is a sharing in or communication of spiritual goods before physical goods."
• "Only the fellowship of the Holy Spirit entered into through the divine-human communication of Christ crucified and resurrected makes possible an inclusive communion in the use of physical goods.  No meum or teum. 
• Common possession means that no one acts as if any good belongs to him/her in any excluding or even particularizing sense (94).

Theological Economics of Medieval Usury Theory

From Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection.

medieval economics: A Christo-centric ethic of perfection that drew heavily upon the Stoic-Platonist tradition.  

• drew upon the Patristic vision of polarity of opposing loves of spiritual and earthly riches, “viewed avarice as the root of all evil,” property right as morally tainted (Lockwood O’Donovan, 99).  
• Not fully Aristotelian, though.  The Patristic vision viewed community primarily in terms of a common participation in invisible goods and a charitable sharing of divisible goods by its members.  

Canonical Development of the Usury Prohibition

The church recognized two intrinsic titles to interest (indemnity) on loans in the case of delayed repayment:  the title of damages sustained and that of profit foregone.  Further, contracts are distinguished from loans.

• The locatio: a rental contract on a piece of property
• The societas: partnership where profit and risk were shared
• The Census:  sale or purchase for life of a rent-charge (the return varied on the productivity)

The church in fact gave moral license to limited opportunities for investment and credit that favored the welfare of the poor but did not serve an expanding commercial economy (101-102).  However, as contracts became more complex over time, it was really hard to not engage in some form of usury.  

The Earlier Medieval Treatments of Usury

God’s original will for human community:  

• its members make common use of the goods of creation to relieve material want (104).  
• air, sun, rain, sea, seasons (divinely created as koinonia, unable to be monopolized; cf. modern American government attacking those who store rainwater for their gardens)
• Gratian argues this did not mean private ownership and amassing wealth.  It’s hard to see how this squares with Proverbs injunction that a godly man leaves an inheritance.  And if the wealth is to be distributed by the church, it’s hard to see how the church can make any claim to poverty and non-possessorship.

The usurer sells time:  time originally belongs to God, and secondarily belongs to all creatures.  Thus, to sell time is to injure all.  Further, time is a koinon, indivisibly shared by all creatures.  

Roman contract of loan (mutuum):  a fungible good is transferred from owner to borrower. Ownership is transferred because the borrower is not expected to repay the exact same item.  The borrower assumes the risk of loss and is bound to repay it.  Thefore, Lockwood O’Donovan argues, “The medieval theologians and canonists could argue, in the first place, that the usurer charges the debtor for what the debtor already owns” (107).

The Thomistic Treatment of Usury

Commutative justice (ST 2a2ae. 78)

Usury sins against justice in the exchange, a violation against equality in the exchange

Thomas does presuppose property right

• sterility of money theory
• Money is a means of measuring equivalence in an exchange.  It can only establish equivalence if it is formally equal to the thing itself in exchange (
• the usurer inflicts on the needy borrower a moral violence of making him repay more than he was lent.
• Thomas also argues that human industry, not money is the cause of profit.
• to charge separately for a thing

Luther’s restatement of the medieval inheritance

law of natural equity: we do not seek our profit in our neighbor’s loss.

Medieval Non-Proprietary Community

Outline from Bonds of Imperfection eds O'Donovan and O'Donovan (Eerdmans).

The Proprietary Subject and the Crisis of Liberal Rights

Key point:  The possession of rights is always proprietorship; all natural rights (for the West) originate in property rights (Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, 75).   This originated with Pope John XXIII (1329 AD).  He saw man as created with full lordship and ownership as possession (dominum).  His point was to discredit Fransiscan theologians who insisted on radical poverty.

This is the rights culture that would spring full-bloom in the modern world.  The problem it created was how to have community if the above take on rights is true.

Patristic Foundations of Non-Proprietary Community

• The fathers thought men should share as an imitation of God's sharing his goodness with us.

Augustine's Achievement

Augustine distinguished between two objective rights:  (a) divine right, by which all things belong to the righteous, and (b) human right, in which is the jurisdiction of earthly kings (79, quoting Epistle 93).

• Justice for Augustine is a rightly-ordered love seen in the body politic, which would mean men loving the highest and truest good, God, for God's sake.
• Therefore, the bonum commune is a sharing in a rightly-ordered love (City of God, BK 19.21).
• Because this sharing is spiritual, it is common and inclusive.  Thus we have a republic in the truest sense of the word:  res publica, public things.
• Conversely, a disordered love in the soul is the privatization of the good.
• Therefore, a disordered love will see the destruction of community.

O'Donovan comments,

It is the regulated interaction of private spheres of degenerate freedom, secured by the protection of property and enhanced by the provision of material benefits at the hands of unscrupulous tyrants (80).

Fransiscan Poverty: The Evangelical Theology of Non-Possession

• Renouncing property right means that the viator is not a self-possessor, but rather is possessed by Christ and receives his powers (85).  

Wyclif's Ecclesiological Revolution

Irony: Wyclif's reform program actually owed a great deal to Pope John XXIII's reflections.  

• Non-proprietary posession belonged not only to Adam's original state, but all the way forward to the episcopolate today: this should be seen in the church militant (88).  
• Divine lordship (dominum):  per Wyclif's predecessor, Fitzralph, God is the primary possessor and enjoyer of creation.  Therefore, his giving of creation to Adam is a communication and sharing of himself, rather than a transfer of Lordship (89).  
• For the church, for Wyclif, this is God's gift of himself as the love of Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13).  
• Therefore, all of the "justified," who coexist with Christ's love, share (communicant) in this lordship directly from Christ.
• Therefore, just dominion involves rightly-ordered love towards these communicable goods, which in turn depends on true knowledge of them available in Christ.

Notae Bene

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