History of Christian giving – part I

Meester Van Alkmaar: De zeven werken van barmhartigheid, 1504. Detail.

by Ethan Edwards.

This is the first post in a three-part series about the history of Christian charity. The series aims to examine the Christian history of giving for ethical and theological insight into some problems that confront us today.

The Roman Emperor Julian, known later as “The Apostate” for his attempt to roll back the Christian transformation begun by his uncle, Constantine, faced an uphill battle. He wanted to bring people back from Christianity to their ancestral religion, but found that his own priests could not compete with the generosity and charity of the Christians. In a letter to one of his priests he writes: “why then do we think that this is sufficient and do not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has done the most to advance their cause?” In response to this he ordered that they copy the Christians in establishing institutions that welcomed strangers and gave to the poor. Julian’s reign lasted only two years. Christianity would win, and its new creation, charity, would grow.

Giving – to family, to the poor, to the sick, to the community – has a place in nearly every culture. But what we now call charity or philanthropy owes a great deal to the specifically Christian culture that grew in the first centuries after Christ’s death and that has now expanded to the rest of the world with globalization. Effective Altruists hope to change and improve this culture by redirecting efforts and energy to those most in need using methods backed by more rigorous care. In the service of such a transformation of charity, this post will explore some of the early history of Christian charity and philanthropy, hoping to draw lessons both practical and moral that might be applicable today.

This post focuses on giving in the church before Constantine within certain parts of the Roman empire, a necessity arising from the paucity of sources from other Christian communities. Christian giving was initially based on communal and mutual support for the poorest believers and was eventually expanded to more systematic care of all who suffered, values which distinguished it from the dominant pagan culture of the time.

Philanthropy before Christianity

Christianity grew quickly in its first centuries, spreading to the major cities of the Mediterranean thanks to the preaching of the apostles. However, after the first persecutions began and the apostles died as martyrs, open evangelism slowed and Christians began to withdraw into their own communities. These Christian communities had members drawn from many different classes, which included rich men as well as poor widows and invalids who would gather to share common meals in early forms of the church service. These early Christians distinguished themselves from the surrounding pagan culture through many marks of changed behavior, but one of the most distinct was in charity.

In the ancient world, there was no true concept or duty of helping the helpless - widows, the sick, cripples, or beggars. These people were largely regarded as nuisances, and neither private individuals nor the state had any interest in them. Civic philanthropy was a distinct concept: rich and powerful individuals (almost always synonymous in the ancient world) redistributing wealth to less wealthy citizens in the form of food, money, and entertainment. The plebeians of Rome, the lowest class of official citizens of the city, were far from outcasts. They treasured their hereditary rights to free provisions which had been provided since the 2nd century B.C., and defended them jealously. There could be no confusion between the plebs and the truly poor (the plebs would have strenuously objected!) and it was the plebs that the rich favored as part of their civic duty. In one notable case the pagan senator and prefect of Rome Symmachus responded to a famine in 384 by expelling all foreigners from Rome to ensure that food would go only to hereditary citizens of the city itself. Giving and privileges associated with private religious organizations worked on a similar basis: generosity was given to friends or fellow group members, but if someone failed to pay their dues or fell on truly hard times there was no duty to help them. Generosity was only a virtue if it could be reciprocated.

The new culture of Christian giving

Christian church communities were much smaller than the civic sphere of the Roman empire but took a very different approach to belonging and charity. The poor, typically defined as those who had fallen from a state of stability into destitution, were considered to be valuable members of the church who were to be cared for. This included especially widows and the sick. From the beginning the church considered their care for these to come more from love (agape) than from the condescension of philanthropy (philanthropia). Collecting funds was an early part of church services, and at the direction of the presbyters or bishops, both deacons and catechumens (converts preparing for baptism) were responsible for distributing them to the church’s needy. Giving to the poor was considered part of the training of catechumens, and seemed to be a core value for Christians and those interested in becoming ones. Prayers were initially spoken audibly out loud in the church, with Origen of Alexandria noting that God would direct those who were rich to fulfill the prayers of the poor they overhead. Rich Christians who avoided church because of fear of being reminded of their obligations were chastised.

Even within this communal and local context of giving, there was much disagreement. While many, such as Justin Martyr and Origen, felt charitable giving was important as an act, Clement of Alexandria argued that alms should be given to those who were most spiritually advanced and deserving, but that a difficulty in discerning the elect made general giving a good policy. In one passage of a later writing describing the life of Clement, Bishop of Rome, Clement is lectured by his mentor the apostle Peter, on how philanthropy is only truly philanthropy if it is given to one’s enemies, and cannot be motivated by any sympathetic emotions, presaging the later ideas of ethical philosophers in the Kantian tradition. There was an active intellectual debate on who the church should give to and how they should go about it, an important reminder that easy consensus has always evaded the church.

What is fairly clear, though, is that charity initially was distributed within the church community and not to poor pagans. However, changing circumstances caused Christians to begin directing their charity outwards.

Medicine and the Expansion of Charity

Plagues were a regular occurrence in the ancient world and could rapidly kill large parts of the population. There were no serious public health mechanisms controlled by governments or citizens, and the main survival technique was isolation and avoidance. Accounts of many ancient plagues indicate that bodies were usually allowed to simply pile up in the streets and infected people were often evicted by their families. The plague of Cyprian in 251 was one such plague, but we know that at least the churches of North Africa began to take a different approach. Christians actively tended to the sick, many contracting the plague themselves and dying as a result, an act that was considered highly virtuous. They also organized squads of burial workers who, as a minor order within the church, would bury any dead they came across. Either during the plague of Cyprian or soon after it, this charity extended to all in need, and the church community would minister to the sick and bury the dead, even when they were pagan. This was especially remarkable timing as the plague of Cyprian coincided with the persecution of the emperor Decian, a period where Christians were actively executed for refusing to make sacrifices to the pagan gods. What began as community mutual aid to the poor of the church began to broaden into care for the poor of all humanity.

Christian charity began with something new: an insistence that all mattered based on a bond in Christ, instead of any connections of wealth, citizenship, or social status. Initially, this new care for the poor was restricted to those within the Christian community exclusively. But as the means of Christians and the circumstances of society began to change, the practices of charity changed with it. Christians today are seeing their own changing circumstances as they come into awareness of more global problems, and if we are to follow tradition, we should question whether we should change our practices yet more. In the following post, I will examine how the church responded to their sudden empowerment as the preeminent religion of Rome with new institutions and conventions surrounding giving and charity.