Augustine on Property Rights

"The biblical account of Cain and Abel is surely of great interest for us. Cain represents the ambivalence of human civilization. He is the first to ascend to a cultivated the soil, the first who is said to have become the builder of a city. He was, in short, what we would call a benefactor of humanity and to that extent the first man susceptible of being praised by men. It is he who, properly speaking, begins human history, at least the history of civilization. It is he who puts to best use, in any case to the most active use, the resources he had in hand upon leaving the garden of Eden. At the same time, of course, he represents the violence and murder that come with human civilization.

"As for Abel, he was not concerned either to plant or to build. He was a shepherd who pastured small livestock. Where is Cain, farmer and builder, sought to dwell on the earth and settle it, Abel was, Augustine says... like a stranger -- a stranger to the earth, or on the earth.

"So Cain killed his brother Abel... Augustine explains things roughly in the following way. The character of the good, it's natural tendency so to speak, is to be shared. It becomes greater, it becomes better, by being shared. The goodness of Abel would not have been diminished if his brother had rejoiced and shared in the divine favor of Abel... The logic of the good, one could say, is as follows: the more it is shared, the more it is possessed. It is the contrary of the logic of appropriation, even though what we desire to appropriate are of course the same good things. Concerning the truly good things, 'anyone who refuses to enjoy this position in partnership will not enjoy it at all.'" -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, pp. 277-278

Of course, Augustine is not a Marxist: while private property is a symptom of our fallen state, one cannot cure the disease by getting rid of the symptom. While the desire to appropriate is sinful, in fact, in the City of Man, the best way to handle that desire is to define clear property rights. Otherwise, the desire will lead to violence. But private property is a "non-natural, remedial institution." Natural property rights grant the entire earth to the righteous, not to "first appropriators" or "the most productive." In the City of Man, instead, property rights are allocated by "the King" (the civil authorities). In general, secure private property rights are justified by the fact that they help secure civil order. But when they do not, it is clearly within the domain of the civil authorities to modify those rights: for instance, should a capitalist elite have arisen that has garnered a huge share of a polity's property through manipulating the legal system, it can be quite just to redistribute goods from them to the poor. Such a maneuver is certainly not "theft," per Augustine, since the ownership of all those goods on the part of the rich was, in the first place, simply a "remdial" step taken by the civil authorities to reduce conflict over goods in our post-lapsarian world.