The essays gathered in this issue take up the question of property: the origins of the Church’s teachings regarding it, its relationship to the individual person and to the common good, the dangers it occasions, and its metaphysical meaning. We are also pleased to offer reflections on marriage, pedagogy, and the God-world relation.

While it is commonplace enough to see the modern concept of property as the consequence of a liberal notion of “rights,” deriving in its turn from the nominalism of the Middle Ages, Olivier Boulnois, in “From Medieval Dominium to Modern Property,” sees our understanding of property as emerging instead from medieval debates over dominium, or lordship. Augustine and Gratian had regarded private property as a concession to Original Sin, a convention sanctioned by human law, while the original plan of the Creator was that the goods of the world should be used in common. The medieval discussion thus constituted a change of direction, or even a corrective. For Aquinas, human nature entails the capacity rationally and freely to use external goods; private property is therefore a prudent institution of positive law, ordered to human affairs and relationships and, precisely for that reason, subordinate to the common good.

The Franciscan ideal of evangelical poverty appeared to reject this emerging endorsement of private property, but the controversy it provoked helped develop the same principles further. Aquinas had distinguished use from possession, but the Franciscans pressed the question whether they could be separated in practice: could one use without dominium, while another possessed without using? Their solution was a bare “use of fact,” possessing no juridical right.

This forced the question of what distinguished such use from theft. Their opponents argued that licit use necessarily implied the authority to use—a potestas iuris, or power of right, residing in the acting subject. This coincided with the emerging conception of the human person as possessing mastery over his own acts. Even the voluntary renunciation of dominium therefore helped expose ownership as a power exercised by a free subject. Pope John XXII rejected the Franciscan separation of licit use from dominium and went beyond Aquinas by grounding private property itself in natural and divine law. For Boulnois, this developmenSt was neither specifically Franciscan nor nominalist; nor did subjective right mean an absolute power of the individual will, since such a right remained valid only insofar as it conformed to objective justice and law.

What place ought private property to have in political society? Thomas Philip’s “Private Property and the Common Good” answers by treating property not as an end in itself but as an instrumental good ordered to the common good. Drawing on the insights first of Aristotle, Philip distinguishes external goods (defined as those goods that diminish when shared) from higher and genuinely common goods, such as virtuous activity and civic friendship. The guiding question for this article depends on this distinction: “Granted that external goods are a mere instrument for the virtuous activity that is the goal of political community, what is the best way of supplying these instruments? Should they be held in common by the political community . . . [o]r should they rather be held as private property?” Because it promotes responsible care for external goods, private ownership is reasonable, but only when it is ordered toward the good of the community. When wealth and exchange become ends in themselves, they subordinate the political and moral life to the accumulation of an external good that by definition is not and cannot be shared.

Philip finds a similar view in Roman thought, which did not see private property as an absolute power enjoyed by its owner, but rather as situated within an objective juridical order directed toward the common good. The Fathers of the Church, moreover, concur, and deepen the classical account with the notion of the universal destination of goods and the unique claims of the poor. These Christian teachings were further synthesized by Aquinas, who saw private ownership as inseparable from the obligation of common use. Finally, Philip demonstrates, modern Catholic Social Teaching applies this inheritance to industrial capitalism. Since Rerum novarum, the popes have defended private property while insisting that it must be directed toward genuinely human goods through the realities of political authority, economic associations, broader ownership, and regulation.

Why does St. Thomas warn so insistently against riches? Jacob Imam’s “Hindering Charity by Distracting the Mind: St. Thomas Aquinas on the Nature of Money” seeks the answer in the peculiar nature of money itself. For Aquinas, the substance of a consumable thing is, in a certain sense, its use. This raises a disturbing problem for money: in contrast to natural goods, money qua money is an artificial good with no intrinsic use determined by its own nature. Rather, its identity derives from a social agreement to use it as a tool for rendering otherwise incommensurable goods commensurate with one another for the sake of sale and exchange. It is, moreover, a way of exercising power over other members of the community, insofar as it represents a debt that one is owed; but this power itself masks a kind of unreality, insofar as it becomes actualized only when the money is spent.

Making incommensurate goods commensurate with one another produces what Imam calls a “metaphysical flattening” of reality: a quality (“good for”) is expressed in terms of a quantity (“how much”). Money thereby disposes those who participate in its use to evaluate more and more of reality according to its logic. In other words, it takes on the appearance of a universal good in light of which other goods can be understood.

As difficult as it is to imagine a different mode of exchange, something very different takes place in friendship, according to Aquinas. Among friends, exchange occurs because of and for the sake of charity and fidelity, with a gratuity that does not “keep score.” Monetary exchange, by contrast, makes possible a relationship governed principally by utility: instead of mutual dependence and enduring communion, it can substitute a limited contractual exchange. This is why, concludes Imam, the mendicant vow of poverty is so radical. In Bonaventure’s terms, it deliberately renounces a “modality of possession” in order to habituate the friar to a “modality of love.”

Marriage belongs at once to the order of creation and, for the baptized, to the mystery of Christ and the Church. From this starting point, Margaret H. McCarthy argues in “Man and Woman, Church and Society: ‘What God Joins, Let No Man Separate’” that the Church is the proper authority and custodian of Christian marriage and, consequently, a custodian of the social order that springs from it. The modern world, McCarthy shows, attempts to separate the marriage contract from the sacrament in order to take away the authority of the Church with regard to this fundamental reality, and to place it instead under civil authority. With Leo XIII, McCarthy insists that the natural reality of marriage is always and from the origin of the human race inherently ordered toward its supernatural fulfillment. A marriage that is sacramental is not merely a natural reality with grace added on top of it extrinsically. Rather, as Scheeben and John Paul II argue, the natural reality is—and is from the beginning made to be—taken up into and permeated by Christ’s union with the Church. This is why, for the baptized, marriage is always both natural and sacramental: the contract is itself the sacrament. The union of man and woman therefore reveals both the goodness of creation and its orientation toward communion with God.

If Christian marriage constitutes the restoration and perfection of the natural reality, then the abolition of the Church from the civil reality of marriage is an attack on it precisely as a natural institution. And because the family is the “basic cell” of society, the separation of sacrament from natural institution is only to the detriment of society itself. This is why marriage enjoys a central role in the Church’s social teaching. Work, education, economics, war, immigration, and ecology all depend upon the natural relations of man, woman, and child; and when marriage is redefined as a voluntary relationship between otherwise unrelated individuals, society itself takes on the same logic of separateness. The Church’s defense of marriage is therefore a defense of society and of the created order itself.

In “God-Beloved: Storytelling as a Method of Discovery and Renewal in Phaedrus,” Erik van Versendaal contemplates Socrates’s palinode in the Phaedrus as a poetic expression of a philosophical pedagogy that forms its hearers through story rather than simply by argument. For Socrates, storytelling then becomes the very way in which his teaching is carried out. It also reflects the unique personalization of true pedagogy, and this, reciprocally: the philosopher himself is made to possess the truth more fully to the extent that he tailors his presentation of it to the specific needs of a particular student. In his myth Socrates presents teacher and student as archetypes of lover and beloved, and in presenting his relationship with Phaedrus with story rather than speaking of it directly, Socrates invites Phaedrus into an understanding of his actual situation without coercion or seduction—which is precisely what happens in Lysias’s rhetoric.

The overarching goal of presenting pedagogy in this way is, van Versendaal makes clear, to offer a corrective to an extrinsic relationship between teacher and student, as is the case with Kierkegaard’s dichotomy between Socrates and Christ. For Kierkegaard, Socrates the teacher is in reality superfluous: he is at best the occasion for coming to know truths that the student might have come to know by himself; and in this view, successful teaching is measured by the extent to which the student comes to view the teacher in precisely this way. Against this van Versendaal offers a more profound reading. The good pedagog—meant in both moral terms and in terms of excellence at his craft—does exercise a kind of “superfluity,” but as an expression, not an abdication of his authority. With the images of the sower and the midwife, Socrates demonstrates that the teacher remains causally, permanently operative in the student’s memory by forming the student so interiorly with the Good that the student experiences it as truly his own, and on the basis of this communion with the Good, is able to offer it to others in his own original and fruitful words. The student’s expression of the Good he has appropriated is then a kind of echo or answer to the teacher’s words, and so the student’s words are a testimony to the fact that the teacher’s words abide in his soul.

Van Versendaal closes his argument by presenting the act of teaching as a kind of martyrdom, with an analysis of the Republic’s allegory of the cave. Why should the philosopher, having glimpsed the Good, return to those who will misunderstand, mock, and finally kill him? What does he hope to gain, and whom does he hope to win over, when those in the cave below know neither themselves nor the truth of the world they inhabit? Van Versendaal argues that the philosopher returns to the darkness of the cave out of a sense of inward compulsion, not of force but of fidelity to the Good, the kenotic self-diffusiveness of which he imitates in his own martyrdom. Because he has come to see his former fellow-prisoners themselves as images apt to reflect the Good, he is drawn back in order to draw that capacity out of them. This sets up the trilogy’s final installment, promised to turn from Socrates’s spoken word to Plato’s own writing, and from the palinode’s teacher to Christ as the Teacher whom Socrates unknowingly prefigures.

In “God and the World in Nietzsche and Ratzinger,” Maurice Agbaw-Ebai considers the question of what becomes of the human being and the world itself when God is either affirmed or denied, through the divergent views of Friedrich Nietzsche and Joseph Ratzinger. For the former, the proclamation of the death of God, voiced through the Mad Man in the marketplace, was meant to bring freedom and empowerment. This abolition of God from the world would make way for the Übermensch, the man liberated from Christianity’s poisoning of eros and strength. And for what, precisely, was he made free? To become God, “the ultimate principle in one’s subjective existence.” Yet even in Nietzsche this presentation is accompanied by a kind of disquiet: the Mad Man’s lament after the killing of God (“Who will wipe this blood off us?”) shows that Nietzsche’s view—which Agbaw-Ebai calls an “ana-theism”—in fact leaves the God-question open.

Agbaw-Ebai then turns to Ratzinger’s response to the challenges that Nietzsche levelled with such devastating effect. Against Nietzsche’s charge that Christianity poisoned eros, Ratzinger argues (in Deus caritas est) that Christianity instead redeemed eros by opening it to agape. By this disciplining and purification, eros was not diminished but saved from the corruption it saw in other religions, such as in the fertility cults that objectified women and enslaved their practitioners to their lusts. Where Nietzsche rebelled even against “faith in grammar” as a last, unacknowledged faith in God, Ratzinger sees in grammar a universal manifestation of reason, a structure by which logos purifies and liberates faith. As Agbaw-Ebai puts it, “rebuilding a post-Nietzschean world would demand, from the Ratzingerian perspective, both a transcendent reason and a reasonable faith.” Finally, against the hollowing-out of culture that occurs when cultus is exiled from the world, Ratzinger insists that only worship, the act of kneeling before God, frees human beings from the idolatry of the will to power, materialism, and consumerism, which inevitably fill the vacuum God leaves behind.

It is of no small consequence, Agbaw-Ebai says, whether Nietzsche or Ratzinger is more faithful to reality. The world that Nietzsche promised, a world of men become gods, is instead merely a world of competition and the dominance of the weak by the strong. It is a “dictatorship of relativism,” which enslaves humanity in a meaningless world with no truth. Against such a bleak view of the world and of man, Ratzinger proposes a “will to love,” according to which true freedom is self-gift, and for which the real Übermensch is the one who accepts his creatureliness and receives life in abundance through Christ.

If one were to ask what the Church teaches about property, the most immediate angle that probably would come to mind is that of moral theology: What ought one do with the things one owns, and how much or how little should one own? In D.C. Schindler’s “Notes toward a Theology of Property,” we are invited to consider property in a metaphysical light: what is property? What does it mean to relate to a thing outside of oneself as its owner? In the Middle Ages, Schindler notes, it was surprisingly common to explain the sacraments by means of an analogy between them and property; and so it may be fruitful, he suggests, to explore property in turn by way of analogy with the sacraments. Created things always possess “a meaningfulness—a meaning fullness, which is to say a fullness that means”—that communicates something of their Creator. Our knowledge of a thing, then, and our reception of it as a gift by which God communicates himself to us, are deepened by a stable relationship that allows the thing’s meaning to unfold “meaning-fully” over time, for the nature of the thing to reveal itself naturally. And this, Schindler offers, is precisely what ownership allows a thing to do for us: by possessing something, we enter into a profound and binding relationship with it, and are thereby given an opportunity to encounter the presence of God and so to grow in holiness. Property is also an inherently social reality. All communication with others takes place through the medium of some created reality; ownership allows things to mediate our presence to others and to become the basis for a shared life with others as members of one’s family, culture, or political community. A theology of property therefore reveals that the ownership of things is meant to be an expression of the Church’s mission “to gather up the whole cosmos in Christ.”