Following a long hiatus, I'm posting about another chapter in the book recently published by the Davenant Institute, Protestant Social Teaching. Earlier posts in this irregular series started with an introduction here followed with brief comments on four chapters here, here, here, and here.
Quoting from my first post to reset the project that is Protestant Social Teaching:
"We hope to offer a unified body of social teaching not be way of creation but recovery." In other words, this volume is backward-looking (essentially the 16th through the early 19th centuries). While some of the chapters proffer contemporary applications, most of the contributors to Protestant Social Teaching are content to flesh out the insights of the Magisterial Reformers and those of the following couple of hundred years. Yet this is a significant feat. It turns out that the Reformers and their progeny had a great depth and wide breadth of insight into the social conditions of their day, as well as substantive arguments for what should be done.
Chapter 10, "Private Property," contributed by Eric Enlow does not fit neatly into this project of resourcement. None of the Magisterial Reformers or their theological progeny bear a mention in this chapter. This is not to say, however, that their pre-Enlightenment vision of the relationship of man to things in the divine cosmic order is missing from Enlow's account.
Drawing on "Legal Fiction," an early five-stanza meditation by literary critic William Empson, Enlow places the law of property in the realm of an ongoing test of the law's human subjects. Empson (and thus Enlow), begin with the common law's maxim: cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos ("To whomsoever the soil belongs, that also is his to the heights of heaven and the depths of hell.") Coupled with Blackstone's description of property as "that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe," Enlow outlines the temptation: lookiing upwards, does each person who owns land really believe that he jointly own an undivided potion of the expanse of heaven itself? Or, instead, is my property ultimately an infintessimally small but absolutey exclusive interest in that which stands as far from heaven as possible? Restated more simply, does the law of property tempt us to believe that we ourselves are gods? Which, if Milton is right, means we are Satan's.
To function as law, that is, an exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis), the law of property necessarily creates this temptation. Any law worth its salt must give reasonably clear and predictable answers to the question of what is mine and what is yours. This is the case whether we find ourselves in a regime of liberal or of socialist property law. As befits any polity, both liberalism and socialism place a great premium on property. Whether the locus of ownership is the individual or the state doesn't eliminate the temptation to see ourselves (individually or collectively, as the case may be) as gods, free from the limitations of God.
Neither the Scriptures nor the historic Christian tradition, including Catholics and Protestants through and after the Reformation, understood property and its ownership as sole, despotic dominion. There is only one despotēs who graciously grants humans a usufruct in His property. Property is a good but not the Good.
In Enlow's words,
Depending on one's orientation, the certainty and exclusivity of human ownership [evidenced in law] draws some (most?) owners to a common ownership in the tiniest Hell shared with those who also share this downward focus on the surface of the law; some (a few?) who have an upward sense from the surface to the broader cosmic spectacle, to where their greatest property lies, toward an ever-expanding and personal share of God. The latter do not have so much as receive with a joy that provides occasion for further sharing as God has shared with them (cf. 1 Cor. 7:29-31).
In short, Enlow's is a fine contribution to Protestant Social Teaching.
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