Reality is stubborn and seems to speak a single language throughout history: domination, control, violence. Today it’s Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, Lebanon, Gaza… The list keeps changing, but not the methods of appropriating resources, imposing ideologies, viewing the other as an enemy, or using war as a justification.
Community disappears, dialogue is perceived as weakness, cooperation as naiveté, and fraternity as a strategy for failure. Others become enemies, threats, or instruments. And when the other disappears, God is also excluded.
Saint Augustine does not propose a political strategy or an economic system, but a radical transformation of the heart. His fraternal ideal rests on two dimensions: one spiritual, unity/community; the other material, the sharing of goods.
Sharing resources is not a romantic gesture, but the real way to break the power dynamic. When nothing is exclusively mine, the other ceases to be a rival and becomes a fellow traveler. More than a practical arrangement, the community of resources is a prophetic act opposed to appropriation or exclusion.
For Saint Augustine, goods are God’s creation and, therefore, good. The problem lies in the desire to possess as a principle that justifies all oppression, violence, indifference, or depersonalization of the “rival” who also wants to possess the same thing.
Augustine doesn’t propose “not having,” but rather possessing with austerity and simplicity, freeing oneself from the fear of loss and from consumerist materialism. This has a profoundly social dimension: when someone stops seeking their own interests to seek the things of God and the common good, they avoid all conflict at its root. War, repression, and colonialism have the same source as everyday selfishness: greed.
Saint Augustine says that “envy divides, charity unites. Unlike money, which diminishes when used, charity grows the more one loves” (Epistle 192, 1-2). When charity organizes life, power ceases to be an end and becomes a service. When everything is shared, violence loses its legitimacy; no one even considers it.
The God that Jesus Christ presents in the Gospel has the concrete face of the other, especially the one who suffers. There is no authentic relationship with God without a just relationship with our brothers and sisters. In this sense, security is not about accumulating weapons according to the concept of “deterrence,” but about replacing confrontation with encounter, imposition with dialogue, and self-interest with universal fraternity.
Achieving unity of heart brings us into harmony with God. And simplicity, detachment, austerity, and respect for the dignity of others are the tools to do so.
In the face of this violent and uncomfortable, ugly and angry world, bearing witness to austerity and simplicity is an alternative path, an act of evangelical resistance: emptying our hands allows us to shake them, emptying our hearts of things allows God and his children to enter.
