Augustine may well have identified more than a shred of Roman sentiment in today’s American discourse, where citizenship is the defining question in so many cases of human need, and the prerogatives of the rich are treated more credibly than the demands of the poor.
It is not only in the church that we are prone, today, to the fetishism of wealth and ownership: our unlimited rights to property and subsequent capacity to store up unthinkable masses of wealth are closely correlated with our freedoms as Americans, with our very Americanness. It’s under this odd, quasi-spiritual penumbra that we treat commodities with an idolatrous reverence, and see in the acquisition of immense lucre the possibility of elevating ourselves into a kind of perfection. Our world isn’t exactly disenchanted, as the usual story about modernity tends to go; it’s rather that the spirit that enchants our age is malevolent.
Christians might do well to reconsider Augustine’s patient certitude that God made the world for the flourishing of humankind, meaning that hoarding it from the many is not only a misuse, but a rejection of God’s will, a sin. Christian or not, our culture could do much worse than to take heed of Augustine’s observation that the way we use our wealth—either in haughty shows of philanthropy or more modest and regular giving—is a matter of habit, meaning that it can be formed for our betterment or our worsening. Nothing I can see in American culture today frames the use of wealth as an arena for the education of the soul, which suggests that Augustine’s radicalism would be worth our investment. Now as then, lives depend on it.