Property As Natural Right In Rerum Novarum

So, I need to make a confession. I’ve only read Rerum Novarum in its entirety yesterday. Sometimes, people who say you shouldn’t only rely on secondary literature are right. At the end of the day, I am still an amateur.

Anyway–a while back I wrote saying that a version of Enlightenment human rights, and the right to private property in particular, was a natural (ha) outgrowth of Catholic and Thomistic natural law theory (as the Enlightenment thinkers themselves believed) and that according to Catholic Tradition, private property is a natural right and not simply a public convenience invented by the state.

At the time, I was excoriated and even mocked for putting words in Aquinas’ mouth, for inventing novel readings of the Catholic Tradition, etc.

Well, it turns out that this is exactly what Pope Leo–not a friend of the Enlightenment; the “Thomist Pope” who wrote Aeterni Patris and was the chief promoter of the Thomistic Renaissance of the late 19th century–says in his own encyclical.

Here’s what Leo says about the right to private property:

• Property is “one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation.” Animals have no need for property because they do not plan for the future. Men, being endowed with reason, engage in planning, and therefore they must not only have use of natural resources, but property. Property is a necessary consequence of man’s rational nature (which is itself a part of man’s Imago Dei–the Pope doesn’t explicitly say this, but in Catholic thought it is always everywhere presupposed), which endows it with the character of a natural right. “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”
• Pope Leo even goes as far as to, at least, sidle up very closely to a Lockean-seeming(!!) labor desert theory of property (for the record, I don’t support the labor desert theory of property): “those who deny these rights do not perceive that they are defrauding man of what his own labor has produced. […] Is it just that the fruit of a man’s own sweat and labor should be possessed and enjoyed by any one else? 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.” His main point, there, at least, is that private property is a necessary element of both man’s co-creativity and of civilization as a whole (culture, after all, has the same root as cultivate, as Latin-speakers know well), which also happens to be one of my leitmotivs:  “Truly, that which is required for the preservation of life, and for life’s well-being, is produced in great abundance from the soil, but not until man has brought it into cultivation and expended upon it his solicitude and skill. 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”
• Civil law, therefore, does not create the right to property, but merely formalizes and enforces this pre-existing natural right: “The same principle is confirmed and enforced by the civil laws-laws which, so long as they are just, derive from the law of nature their binding force.” My gloss, but one which I believe to be faithful to the text: it is precisely because man is a cultural animal that there is no contradiction between the political/juridical aspects of property rights and the individual/natural aspects; because man is a cultural animal, his individual natural rights are “confirmed and enforced by the civil laws.”
• Indeed, the right of property isn’t just an element of the natural law, but of the divine law: “The authority of the divine law adds its sanction, forbidding us in severest terms even to covet that which is another’s: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife; nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his.'” Again, Pope Leo going even further than I have.
• And we are speaking of an individual natural right: “The rights here spoken of, belonging to each individual man”
• I just want to pause here and note just how Enlightenment-ish this all sounds from this anti-Modernism, very Thomist Pope: by virtue of natural law and human nature, man has prepolitical natural, individual rights; civil authority, because it draws its authority from the same natural law, exists at least in part to, and is legitimate insofar as, it protects these rights. Jefferson couldn’t have put it better.
• Pope Leo keeps going further into territory I wouldn’t have, by explicitly linking, and analogizing, property to marriage, which in Catholic Tradition is the ultimate “prepolitical”, sacred, social institution. It’s not just that property is necessary for the family to function. It is also that, like the right to marriage, the right to property is a necessary component of human flourishing, and therefore imbued with a similar prepolitical, almost sacred character. In an explicit analogy between family and property, Pope Leo writes: “Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, “at least equal rights”; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.”
• Now note that, nowhere for Pope Leo does this imply cuckoo-bird ideas like “taxation is theft” or the nightwatchman state. Pope Leo takes for granted the state’s authority to levy taxation, although he writes that a prosperous commonwealth will have “modera[te]” and “fair” taxes. He also allows for the need for public assistance to destitute families although, since he has his subsidarity wits about himself, he wants public help to be, as it were, the last line of defense against poverty, behind voluntary associations and especially the Church.
• At this point, perhaps judicious Catholic readers will get restless: what about the venerable, Patristic and Thomistic doctrine of the universal destination of goods? Of course there is such a destination, Pope Leo writes: “Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary [emphasis mine]. […] But, when what necessity demands has been supplied, and one’s standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty [emphasis mine] to give to the indigent out of what remains over.” But the universal destination of goods is a doctrine that issues, not in a mandate for the state to implement progressive taxation, but in a moral command binding on the personal conscience. The Pope is very explicit about this: “It is a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity – a duty not enforced by human law.” A duty not enforced by human law. This is not to be taken lightly; as the Pope writes, “the rich should tremble at the threatenings of Jesus Christ” Tremble! Indeed they should. Father Barron tells the story of Cardinal George telling wealthy donors (my paraphrase): “The poor need you because of your money; and you need them to avoid going to Hell.”
• That same paragraph ends with this lovely pericope: “To sum up, then, what has been said: Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind, has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others. ‘He that hath a talent,’ said St. Gregory the Great, ‘let him see that he hide it not; he that hath abundance, let him quicken himself to mercy and generosity; he that hath art and skill, let him do his best to share the use and the utility hereof with his neighbor.'” This is exactly right. This isn’t just about money, this is about our vocation to render our God-given gifts, vocations, and abilities, both for our own personal flourishing and for the flourishing of our neighbors. Just like the artist has a vocation to use these gifts for his own flourishing and also ultimately for the flourishing of all, so the businessman has a vocation to use his gifts for the flourishing of those around him.

What to say about all this?

Some will be quick to point out that Rerum Novarum is not the only, certainly not the definitive, statement of Catholic social doctrine on this issue. Of course. It’s clear that Pope Leo envisions a much more limited government than, say, Europe’s social democracies (though one still engaged in taxation and redistribution and welfare spending), but it’s equally clear that it would be ridiculous to suggest that because this is the case, a social-democratic-style settlement would be illegitimate from the standpoint of Catholic social doctrine; if only because subsequent Magisterial documents have explicitly said otherwise, but even if we had only this document to go on, because it leaves some doors open. This is clearly a matter for prudential judgement.

This post is not about “Catholic social doctrine” or “Pope Leo’s social doctrine” as such, it is about the much more specific and narrow question of property rights, and rights-language more generally, in Catholic Tradition.

And while on the topic of property rights specifically, since Pope Leo, the Magisterium has been, as it were, undulating along its axis, on the topic of rights-language more generally, the Magisterial warrant for such language has much, much increased since Pope Leo, and especially since the Second Vatican Council and Dignitatis Humanae.

And, at the very least, what ought to be said is that here we have a Pope, speaking in an authoritative voice, clearly describing property rights as not absolute (no right is), but natural, prepolitical, necessary for human and cultural flourishing, and even, in some sense, through the analogy with the family, sacred; a right which is not created ex nihilo as a mere contrivance, but “confirmed and enforced” by civil authorities; here we have a Pope, speaking in an authoritative voice, clearly saying that the doctrine of the universal destination of goods is “a duty not enforced by human law”; here we have a Pope, speaking in an authoritative voice, and, mind you, quoting the Angelic Doctor all along, using rights-language that, at least, sounds very coterminous to Enlightenment rights-language: natural law, natural rights, natural prepolitical rights, natural individual rights, natural individual rights that civil authorities do not create for convenience sake but are instead bound to respect and promote.

In other words, maybe, maybe, Leo’s version (and my version) of property rights is not the only version admissible within Catholic Tradition, but it is undoubtedly self-refuting to say that it is out of bounds of Catholic Tradition.

It’s also gratifying to see that Catholic theology really is a “science” in the Scholastic sense: Pope Leo and I independently reached the same conclusions from the same premises. I take it as a small demonstration that Catholic theology really has its own systematic logic and “works.”

Anyway–just to hammer it home–here we have a Pope, saying in an authoritative voice pretty much everything that I’ve been saying, and been scoffed at for saying, and been scoffed at for portraying as part and parcel of Catholic, and specifically Thomistic, Tradition. At the very least, you have to say that if I don’t understand Aquinas, then neither does Pope Leo XIII. You know, Pope Leo, the tireless promoter of the late-19th century Thomistic revival, author of Aeterni Patris, founder of the Pontifical Academy St Thomas Aquinas, sponsor of the “Leonine Edition” of the works of the Angelic Doctor. That Pope Leo. If that’s the hill you want to die on, be my guest. Personally, I’m done here.