The Betrayal of Charity: An Excerpt

In The Betrayal of Charity , rising Catholic theologian Matthew Levering shows how the sins against love - hatred, sloth, envy, discord and contention, schism, war and strife and sedition and scandal - threaten love's concrete efforts by rebelling against dependence on God and undermining interdependence on others. Read an excerpt from the book below. Visit the Patheos Book Club Roundtable to read responses from prominent scholars and bloggers about The Betrayal of Charity and join the conversation. The Betrayal of Charity—Conclusion Quoting Étienne Gilson's remark that "the most marvelous of all things a being can do is to be," Josef Pieper attempts to describe the basis of love: "For what the lover gazing upon his beloved says and means is not : How good that you are so (so clever, useful, capable, skillful), but: It's good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!" [i] God's creative act, pouring forth the goodness of finite being, is sheer love. God loves us into existence and rejoices in created goodness: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen 1:31). When by God's gift we experience the joy of loving God in himself-his Trinitarian communion-our joy involves peace. Our rational appetite finds its fulfillment in loving the infinite goodness of God (and the participated goodness of our neighbors). [ii] Faced with evils or defects in goodness, the charitable person's response is mercy. God has mercy upon us by bountifully healing our defects through his causal love, and in light of our defects we have mercy on each other by seeking to do good to each other. As regards outward acts, this manifests itself as beneficence-the bestowal of gifts-and the works of mercy, among which Aquinas numbers "to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to harbor the harborless, to visit the sick, to ransom the captive, to bury the dead," as well as "to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to reprove the sinner, to forgive injuries, to bear with those who trouble and annoy us, and to pray for all." [iii] The works of mercy also include fraternal correction, to which Aquinas gives special place because of its difficult but necessary role in sustaining the communion of the people of God. In all these ways, we say to the beloved, whether God or our neighbor: "It's good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!" We say this not merely on the natural level, but in light of God's gift of a participation in his own Trinitarian life, eternal life with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. With the Father, Son, and Spirit we proclaim, "It's good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!" In this proclamation is the joy and peace of charity. [iv] By contrast, the sins against charity bespeak the opposite of this joy and wonder in another's existence. Far from rejoicing in God or neighbor, hatred sees the existence of God or neighbor as opposed to our own good. The freshness of joy and wonder is lost in sloth, which sorrows rather than exults about God's gifting, with the result that the slothful person falls into despair, cowardice, sluggishness, spite, malice, and unlawful bodily pleasures. In its selfish joylessness, envy cries out, "How sad it is that you exist more perfectly than I do!" rather than "How wonderful that you exist!" Discord and contention, rooted in pride, set up one's own opinion over against the gift of communion with God and neighbor; joy and wonder are squelched by the desire to dominate others. Schism severs the visible unity of the people of God, the body of Christ to which we should rather respond, with ever greater praise, "How wonderful that you exist!" War, as unjust slaughter driven by the desire to dominate, distorts and destroys human life, and strife and sedition aggressively seek to harm human communion. Scandal actually seeks the eternal spiritual harm of others. How profoundly opposed these actions are to joy and wonder in another's being! It is one thing to urge others to understand these sins and avoid them; it is another thing to avoid them oneself. If we imagine ourselves as the primary agent of our charitable formation, we lose contact with the giver and become graspers-with the predictable result of joyless and restless hatred, envy, sloth, discord, contention, schism, war, strife, sedition, and scandal. What happens, however, when we know that God can heal us and elevate us into charitable communion with God and neighbor, and yet we freely sin against charity anyway? Consider the justification offered by Peter Bamm, a German army physician in World War II who knew but did nothing about the killing of the Jews in Sevastopol by S.S. units, as quoted by Hannah Arendt: The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning. [v] Jesus teaches that the life of charity means taking up one's cross and following him, even to the point of death (Matt 16:24-26). As he puts it in the gospel of John, "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you" (John 15:18). When we suppose that charity is not difficult for fallen people in a fallen world, we can slip into the sins against charity almost unconsciously, out of concern for our own lives and for our families who depend on us: in our jobs, our communities, our culture, why undertake "a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning"? This is what Arendt puts her finger on through her phrase "the banality of evil." On the other hand, sins against charity often do not slip up upon us; we may act against charity in a more obviously direct manner. After King David has sexual intercourse with Uriah's wife Bathsheba, David calls back Uriah from the siege at Rabbah in order to entice Uriah to have intercourse with Bathsheba so that he will suppose that Bathsheba's child is his own. David is unsuccessful, and he then conceives a hatred toward Uriah's existence. He instructs his general, Joab, to orchestrate the siege in a manner that will result in Uriah's death, and Joab carries out these orders. The prophet Nathan informs David of the violence that will come upon David's family as a result of his sin. Speaking on behalf of God, Nathan says, "Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have slain him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house" (2 Sam 12:9-10). How can we respond to such crushing awareness that we, knowing better and filled with God's gifts, have deliberately sinned against charity and caused irredeemable harm? David's response to the prophet Nathan, who risked his own life to correct David on behalf of God, is instructive. David says simply, "I have sinned against the Lord" (2 Sam 12:13). He repents. He does not thereby avoid punishment, but he avoids the deadly punishment of separating himself from God, the giver of all goodness. As Jesus exhorts us, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel" (Mark 1:14). God wants to give us his gifts, beginning with the gift of repentance. To repent we must acknowledge, terrible though it be, that "I have sinned against the Lord." [vi] As Walter Brueggemann writes in commenting upon 2 Samuel 12, "Passive verbs are wonderful. They describe the action but without suggesting there is an agent who must answer. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers love to speak with passive verbs: 'At 1100 hours the bomb was dropped.'" [vii] Brueggemann is right to express surprise that David managed, at this critical juncture in his life, to avoid passive verbs. As Brueggemann observes, "Who would have thought him capable of that?" [viii] The answer is God. Discussing Aquinas' moral theology, Paul Wadell states, "A God of perfect love wants what is best for us, but only a God of such stunning goodness can make it possible for us. Our radical need is never overcome. From first to last we depend on God to offer us what we cannot give ourselves." [ix] David Bentley Hart, in drawing attention to the violence of pagan culture and the change that Christianity wrought, argues that "Christians brought something new into the ancient world: a vision of the good without precedent in pagan society, a creed that prescribed charitable service to others as a religious obligation, a story about a God of self-outpouring love." [x] In studying the sins against charity, we have in a roundabout way been studying this God of self-outpouring love. It is his triune love that enables humans to overcome the reality of Hobbesian scarcity and the desire for domination and to seek to live a life of God-reliance based upon God's gifting. Hart identifies the joy and wonder, the freshness, of this way of life despite the ever-present sins against charity: "Over the course of many centuries, Christianity displaced the reigning values of a civilization with its own values, and for a time its rather extraordinary idea of the human, illumined by the unearthly radiance of charity, became the shining sun around which other values were made to revolve, and in the light of which the good or evil of any act had to be judged." [xi] He draws attention to the figure of Peter weeping over his sin of denying Jesus three times, and points out that in Peter we find the human person in full greatness as a moral agent called to a supreme destiny while being, in worldly terms, not a king or an eminent man but a Galilean peasant. [xii] Hart calls this "the face of the faceless." [xiii] In the repentant Peter, we see the weeping of charity-a renewed charity that ensures that the sins against charity do not have the last word, but instead are markers for a new life. Jesus, too, wept (John 11:35). The sins against charity, and their deadly fruit, demand our weeping. But joy and peace, not weeping, are the last word: "The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, every man to his home, and will leave me alone; yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16:32-33). Conclusion [i] Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love , 170; Gilson's remark is from his History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed & Ward, 1955), 83. Emphasis original. [ii] See Miroslav Volf's eloquent Free of Charge , 61-71, 107-10. [iii] Aquinas, Summa , 2-2.32.2. See also Hart, Atheist Delusions , 29-31. [iv] The feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay argues that it is from the experience of dependence that we come to recognize "independence" as inter dependence. By exploring dependence, we learn that we are not "essentially independent," but rather are essentially interdependent. This interdependence has its sustaining source, Aquinas would add, in God's gifting. See Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999), xii; cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). [v] Peter Bamm, Die Unsichtbare Flagge (Munich: Kösel, 1952), quoted in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1994), 232. [vi] See John Chrysostom, "On Repentance and Prayer," in On Repentance and Almsgiving , trans. Gus George Christo (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 50-53. In his homily "On Repentance and Compunction" in the same volume (86-110), Chrysostom connects repentance with almsgiving. [vii] Walter Brueggemann, David's Truth in Israel's Imagination and Memory , 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 60. [viii] Brueggemann, David's Truth , 61. [ix] Paul Wadell, The Primacy of Love: An Introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 148. [x] Hart, Atheist Delusions , 45. [xi] Hart, Atheist Delusions , 237. [xii] Hart, Atheist Delusions , 166-67, drawing upon Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature , trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 41. [xiii] Hart, Atheist Delusions , 166 (title of chapter 13). One thinks here also of C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956).