While contemporary Christian theology is often concerned with reducing inequality, less attention is paid to those arguments that have maintained throughout history that inequality is part of the natural order, and is therefore in accordance with the will of God. Although Augustine often emphasized that there existed a "spiritual equality" of humanity, for him it did not eliminate the need for external social hierarchies. Aquinas made a similar point in the Summa, and it would become a commonplace in the Middle Ages that an equality of possessions or power in all sections of the community was inconvenient and inconsistent. As for political inequality, it was also often pointed out that the very concept of power presupposed it. Even democratic regimes were hierarchical, manifesting the power of the majority over a minority, against which the best antidote was not more equality, but more freedom, based on a careful balancing of different powers. Christian forerunners of social contract theory carefully distinguished between the origins of power itself and the act of choosing the person(s) by whom this power shall be exercised, preserving the divine status for the former. Since later, secular contractarianism tended to mix these two aspects, the Catholic critics of modernism once again reiterated the embeddedness of social and political hierarchy in the nature of creation, viewing it not as a constraint but as a guarantee of true freedom. That also explains the apparent paradox of Tocqueville's claim in his Democracy in America that Catholicism - despite its hierarchical structure - was more advantageous for democracy than those egalitarian movements that promoted not freedom but independence, strengthening the negative tendencies of social and political democracy. Moreover, the idea of absolute equality was even theologically dubious, for it undermined the distinction of the human and the divine, leading to a modern version of pantheism.