Against Rome Augustine had argued that since property originates in the divine act of creation, the ownership and use of property should always be related to a divine and transcendent conception of justice in which God gives to each sufficient to meet their needs. In the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas elaborated the implications of this Augustinian view when he founds his account of natural right and property on its derivation from providential relations between creator and creation, and between creatures. In Thomist political thought property involves responsibilities to uphold the common good, as well as rights to individual use, for if it is used in such a way as to deny the sufficiency of others then its original ordering to the individual by providence is undermined. In these circumstances the householder whose children are hungry for want of sustenance acquires a divinely given right to take bread from a person who has excess of bread who loses the right to call such an act theft.14 For Aquinas the act of taking what is needed by he who lacks does not involve a foundational conflict since the individual property owner is not an autonomous rights holder but steward of that which emanates from the providence of God and that remains part of created order, and not just a humanly constructed domain.

From Northcott, Michael S. 2011. Parochial ecology on st briavels common: Rebalancing the local and the universal in anglican ecclesiology and practice. Journal of Anglican Studies Pending Publication: page 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1740355311000167.

See also Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, ‘Natural Law and Perfect Community: Contributions of Christian Platonism to Political Theory’, Modern Theology 14 (1998), pp. 19-46.