Only the Perfect

The Christian church faced the same problem from the fourth century onwards, when it became the state church: how to reconcile the feudal class society where rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants with the egalitarian poverty of the collective of believers as described in the Gospels? The solution of Thomas Aquinas was that, while in principle shared property is better, this holds only for perfect human beings; for the majority of us who dwell in sin, private property and difference in wealth are natural, and it is even sinful to demand egalitarianism or the abolishment of private property in our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect.

Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End times, 19