Christian and Pagan Charity

Richard Finn begins his Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire with a summary of the Sentences of Sextus, a Hellenstic Pythatorean work adapted to Christian use by Rufinus.

According to the text, gifts of money, food, or clothing to the poor was “an activity which met with God’s blessing when rightly motivated, even though the gift itself might appear too small to excite the praise given in classical culture to a large and public benefaction: ‘God greatly favours the person who gives food to someone in need from the bottom of his heart, even though the gift is small.’” The carrot was backed up by a stick: “God does not listen to the plea of one who does not himself listen to the plea of those in need” (3).

To this extent, Finn agrees with Averil Cameron’s assessment that the in “moral and social teaching Christians came very near to pagans” (quoted 32). But Finn thinks that Cameron’s clam misses the way that “Christian almsgiving was distinctive in comparison with the pagan culture it competed with, where that distinction involves the range of practices but, more importantly, the meaning of those practices.” Finn sets out to explore a theme that Oswyn Murray identified: “how the Christian conception of the gift . . . disrupted the pagan system by its divergent conception of the function and consequences of the gift” (quoted, 33).

One of these differences was the introduction of the notion of liberalitas into almsgiving: “Whether or not almsgiving was understood by pagans as an act of piety and philanthropy, it was not normally seen as an expression of generosity. Wealthy pagans certainly showed generosity (liberalitas) by making grain available for citizens at prices well below the current market rate, both during times of shortage and to mark other special occasions. . . . But gifts to citizens are not to be equated with gifts to the destitute, whether citizens or not. Furthermore, gifts of alms to individual beggars were too small to be numbered among the actions of a benefactor” (217). Christian euergetism, like its pagan counterpart, raised the status of the donor, but also gave the recipient a “new value and place in the community as a reservoir of public and vocal support” (218).