History of Christian giving – part II
Meester Van Alkmaar: De zeven werken van barmhartigheid, 1504. Detail.
by Ethan Edwards.
This is part two of a three-part series on the early history of Christian charity. The first post on the early church discussed the greater cultural context of giving, the church’s early communal care for the poor, and the eventual extension of that care beyond the limits of the church. This post will explore how Christians changed and adapted after their empowerment as the favored religion of Rome.
The victory of a Christian emperor in the civil wars of the early 4th century came as a surprise to many Christians. In a short time, they went from a persecuted minority forced into insularity and secrecy to the preeminent religion of the Roman empire. This period saw an incredible increase in the number of Christians and in the power of the church to affect world affairs. Christian leaders of the time would grapple directly with how the church should engage with the wealthy and with the poor of their congregation, and how to build institutions which could better distribute its growing wealth to those in need.
Bishops and the new charity
While Constantine had portrayed himself in his own propaganda as a thoroughly Christian ruler, showing unusual mercy to his enemies and helping those in need, he did not leave any clear sense of what the role of the church would be in a Christian empire. The Roman state did not take on any sort of charitable policy, and largely left the sick and poor to the care of local Christian communities. In the century after, Bishops would manage to establish themselves as new figures within the politics of wealth and power as representatives of this previously unclaimed community.
Ambrose was a wealthy politician who unexpectedly became the Bishop of Milan in 374. In this position, he consolidated his family estates and turned them directly into the property of the church in Milan, using the funds generated for various purposes including almsgiving. The poor of Milan became his clients, similar to an old Roman patron-client relationship, and would become key supporters in Ambrose’s various clashes with his opponents including Emperors and Arians. He became involved in the issues of the day, using skills from his political background to advocate on the worldly stage for his own congregation. Ambrose was one of the first to set this paradigm of the church as the ultimate owner of wealth and its proper user.
Ambrose’s protege, Augustine, continued along this path in North Africa. Augustine strengthened the church through donations from wealthy patrons, and made it clear that it was the church’s duty to use its wealth wisely for the upkeep of Christian communities and for the poor. In his many writings and sermons, he criticizes wealthy Christians who still insist on civic giving to games and festivals when it would be far more virtuous to give to the poor. Elsewhere, he criticizes those who say the priests of the church are rich, because the clergy are only stewards who own nothing themselves. These early bishops set the standard that virtuous donations were supposed to be to the church, and the church was the ultimate arbiter of how those funds should be spent.
Renunciation by the Wealthy
Ambrose and Augustine lived in an age when many extremely wealthy individuals were becoming Christians and questioning what to do with their wealth after encountering Christ’s teaching to “sell everything [they] have and give to the poor” (Luke 18:22). Bishops advocated taking this quite seriously, and that the rich should give as much as possible. This direct attack on hereditary wealth as immoral was new to the ancient moral landscape, but held in common by the hierarchy of the church. John Chrysostrom, as bishop of Antioch, argued that it was the rich’s duty to give to the poor, even at one point suggesting that if the wealthiest 10 percent of the city’s population took care of the bottom 10 percent, poverty would be eliminated.
The wealthy who answered this call took on radical life changes, liquidating their assets and giving all their wealth to the church as they took on church orders. It also became increasingly common to leave all wealth to God in one’s will. Amid this incredible renunciation of wealth there was serious debate as to how the surrendered funds should actually be spent. Many of the donors wanted to control their funds, such as Paulinus of Nola, who spent much of his vast fortune on a shrine to St. Felix, or others who chose to fund independent Christian writers such as Pelagius, or monks such as Jerome. The Bishops believed that the wealth should go directly to the church hierarchy, and should be directed according to the needs of that community without donor control. Almost no one directly distributed their wealth as alms, instead giving them to a variety of holy causes including poor funds. Such tensions are not entirely surprising, as they still color the world of philanthropy today.
The Invention of Public Health
Christians also used their recently acquired wealth to invent new kinds of charitable institutions. In the 370s Basil the Great founded an institution referred to as the Basileias, a permanent building with a professional staff dedicated entirely to healing of the sick, now usually regarded as the first hospital. It is uncertain whether the institution was founded as a refuge specifically for lepers or in response to a plague or generally to heal the sick, but it is clear Basil intended it to be a place where physicians would heal the sick regardless of their means to pay. This was generally in the spirit of late antique Christianity, where those faithful with means were attempting to find new ways to tend to those in need. The first hospital in the West was founded by the wealthy noblewoman Fabiola in 390, who then devoted her time to tending to the patients. Various forms of permanent and temporary hospitals, poor houses, and refuges for foreigners were founded throughout the following centuries, flourishing especially in the East and becoming a recognized part of Eastern Roman society through the Middle Ages.
Christian philanthropy was not just top down. In the east there were a variety of lay orders, such as the Spoudaioi and Philoponoi, who would roam the streets of the cities and distribute aid and alms to the poor and provide care or transport for the sick. It was a universal and important part of Christian piety that one use what one has to help those in need, and Christians responded by finding new ways to do this.
The Practicality of Christian Charity
An important link between all of these philanthropic efforts was that the evils of poverty were to be conquered both with prayer and with practical efforts. Pagan society still regarded many of the calamities that befell both society and individual persons as divine punishment which could only be responded to with religious action. Famines caused by bad harvests were blamed on the Christian abandonment of the gods, and the suggested remedy was to return the Pagan gods to their place. Christians not only denied this, but actually sought to distribute food to those who were hungry. Those disabled by chronic illnesses were treated as beyond help by traditional Asclepian medical practices, but Christians provided both healing and palliative care to all. It is common from a post-Enlightenment perspective to see Christian giving as ignoring practical human needs in favor of religious issues, but within the broader historical perspective it was originally Christians who asserted this ideal.
These various giving practices would continue to develop in the following centuries, but as Rome became medieval Europe it lost some of its focus on those in need. The poor who the church was the first to welcome were gradually replaced with a new recipient of giving: monastics who had willingly taken on vows of poverty. Medieval donors tended to give to the church itself, and the clergy, especially monks, were themselves considered to be the “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). Thus rather than being the distribution nexus that Ambrose and Augustine had argued for, the church became a recipient of wealth itself, and a funnel for all societal giving. It is worth noting, though, that right from the beginning of monasticism monasteries engaged in significant charitable work. The church continued to give to the poor and needy, but institutional invention and experimentation largely ceased.
Christians responded to new wealth by taking on questions of charity and philanthropy more seriously. They found ways to better gather funds, debated over how best to use them, and how best to decide to use them. They founded new institutions which benefited the public in ways the state had failed to do so. But their efforts were not perfect, and some of the initial decisions around charity eventually led to a church that was less responsive to the poor. In the next and final post, I will move away from historical narrative to discuss some implications for Effective Altruists today.