What Was Never Fully Mine Can't Truly Be Stolen

Meditations on the 8th Commandment, Pt. 1

Welcome back to the ongoing series on the Decalogue. Thanks for your patience, and hope to return to a more regular writing pace now—The Management

What’s In A Theft?

Throughout this series, we’ve been tracing the ways in which the Decalogue turns on questions of security and precarity. I started doing it this way in part because, theologically, these questions seem inseparable from questions of identifying God, proper worship, and the life of the world.

There are any number of ways to name our desire for security, and the desert rarely appears particularly hospitable to such a life. But the Decalogue does not think precarity such a bad thing, I think: God is the God of the people in Egypt or on the move, and the desert is one more place for this to be true. The various commands of the Decalogue point us into this way. In managing who lives and dies, in refusing the future laid out by commitment to this one spouse, in offering our bodies to the gods, we and Israel return again and again to Egypt. And the commands illuminate those different ways of turning away from the God who moves us through the desert, and toward the living death of Egypt.

Some of these more occasional temptations—toward murder, toward adultery, toward idolatry—are felt more oppressively in the temptation toward theft. For our enemies and lovers are come and go.

But daily bread exists always.

The question is not, then, whether theft—both statistically and as a temptation—is more prevalent. Our tendency is to treat loss of goods with theft, frequently assuming that if a good has come to me, it is mine to dispose of. The problem with this—long before our goods are stolen—is that daily bread passes from hand to hand, both willingly and unwillingly, with our knowledge and without it. When the birds of the air take from my yard, or time takes from my strength, I do not hold them accountable. When someone borrows my idea and does something with it, I cannot call it theft—my best ideas were barely mine to begin with.

Loss of our goods happens, and happens all the time, and sometimes in the middle of the. night. And so, before we can get down to asking about what theft does, we have to broach the more interesting question is what counts as theft¹.

Much of the question, I think, turns on what exactly goods are.

The world is given to us in common, and so, it seems that the burden falls to those who would emphasize accumulation. Humans are given into the world as part of a community, entering apart from their own will, and without a say over the kinds of inheritances they have. The intractable questions of ecology remind us that the world as we have it comes to us as a common good, and not those kind of things which only exist because we have laid hold of them or added our labor to them².

Though the world has been given in common, not all things can remain in common. If I drink water, that water becomes inseparable from my own body; the air I breathe is not in anyone else’s lungs. But they become mine because they are first shared: the air I breathe is affected by and depends on so many things beyond my control.

I mention this ordinary state—this common state—because it is the lost backdrop of our reflection, but the most important. For it is here that the question of theft gets muddy. Possession may very well be 9/10 of the law, but 9/10 of the world is not the kind of thing which can be possessed.

Theft as Judgment On the World

In one of the most interesting questions of the Summa Theologica, Aquinas describes the difference between theft and robbery by what is added to taking from another person. Theft is taking something from another person in secret, while robbery, he says, is taking something by violence. But in either case, Aquinas has a curious allowance that helps us to see more of what is theft is.

In article 7 of the question, Aquinas answers the question of whether it is lawful to steal from need with the following:

On the contrary, In cases of need all things are common property, so that there would seem to be no sin in taking another's property, for need has made it common….

Since, however, there are many who are in need, while it is impossible for all to be succored by means of the same thing, each one is entrusted with the stewardship of his own things, so that out of them he may come to the aid of those who are in need. Nevertheless, if the need be so manifest and urgent, that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible remedy), then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another's property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.

Our goods are meant for the common welfare, for the benefit of not just ourselves, but for the uplift of all persons in a society. And so, if that condition is not met—if the distribution of goods does not fit what people need—then theft is permitted as a last resort. Why? Because theft stands as a judgment on a society meant for having goods in common, but which has devolved and treated all goods as private.

The voice of the poor is not heard, as Ecclesiastes puts it, and so, they will make themselves heard. Theft, it seems, remains a possibility only in a world where daily bread is given out in a just manner. Our appetites for what we need remains askew, but Thomas’ point is pretty straightforward. Quoting Ambrose of Milan, Thomas writes

For this reason Ambrose [Loc. cit., Article 2, Objection 3] says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals (Dist. xlvii, can. Sicut ii): "It is the hungry man's bread that you withhold, the naked man's cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man's ransom and freedom."

This sentiment, found in Basil, John Chrysostom, and James, pushes us to see theft because of need as an act which requires us to ask questions not of the one who stole, but of the society whose forms of distribution made that act a necessity to begin with. Theft becomes an act of judgment on the concealed ways in which we justify personal goods over against their starting point as common gifts.

Only when we start in this deeper place—of goods in common—can we find ourselves capable of asking what theft does. For by Thomas’ lights, if someone steals from me out of need, I ought to be oddly grateful, for I have been given the eyes to see that the world I live in is unjust, and that what I have is already and always the gift of God to be shared. Theft does us, in this case, the odd privilege of helping us to see what was always true about the things we have lost.

1. Libertarians are infamous for calling taxation theft, the appropriation by a government of those things which a person accumulates through their labor. This has always struck me as a bit nonsensical for many reasons, as the world always takes things which we have accumulated. Taxes, at least, serve the common good by finding those services which build up others—all boats rise even if through coerced generosity. But what governments do in their taking is benign by the standards of nature. Time takes our youth, and moths and rust steal and destroy. I suppose, by libertarian logic, that if one could arrest Time or Rust, it too could be charged and locked away. Governments, in no way as natural as time or decay, can at least often be petitioned and challenged. Rust, on the other hand, we deal with unwillingly.

2. This is famously John Locke’s position: that the world is inert, and that our labor makes it what it is. As such, whatever we work, we possess, for we have made that land or thing into what it is.