The Virtue of Charity

[Stella]

My question is... are non Christians who are kind, generous, philanthropic, with their own bounty, displaying the virtue of charity? If not, what motivates the self giving?

[gherkin]

Therefore charity can be in us neither naturally, nor through acquisition by the natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Ghost, Who is the love of the Father and the Son, and the participation of Whom in us is created charity, as stated above (II-II:23:2).

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3024.htm#article2

As Augustine says in the book on Infant Baptism (De Pecc. Merit. et Remiss. i) "the effect of Baptism is that the baptized are incorporated in Christ as His members." Now the fulness of grace and virtues flows from Christ the Head to all His members, according to John 1:16: "Of His fulness we all have received." Hence it is clear that man receives grace and virtues in Baptism.

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4069.htm#article4


Charity is not found in non-Christians. The theological virtues are the effects of grace, not nature, and are infused at baptism.

And since charity is fundamentally friendship with God and secondarily friendship with man, it follows that giving money to some "charity" to help the faceless stranger has nothing to do with the virtue of charity anyway. Friendship is a real relationship, not an imaginary one.

[peregrinator]

Charity is not found in non-Christians. The theological virtues are the effects of grace, not nature, and are infused at baptism.

I think you skipped a step - while it's true that the theological virtues are received through grace, and grace and virtues through baptism, it doesn't follow the baptism is the only way to receive grace (and therefore virtues). The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines charity (para. 1822) as

"the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God."

Since it is possible for a non-Christian to love God above all things, it seems to me that it is also possible for a non-Christian to have the virtue of charity.

[gherkin]

Charity is not found in non-Christians. The theological virtues are the effects of grace, not nature, and are infused at baptism.

I think you skipped a step - while it's true that the theological virtues are received through grace, and grace and virtues through baptism, it doesn't follow the baptism is the only way to receive grace (and therefore virtues). The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines charity (para. 1822) as

"the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God."

Since it is possible for a non-Christian to love God above all things, it seems to me that it is also possible for a non-Christian to have the virtue of charity.

I've definitely skipped steps since I'm just giving a quick answer. It's also possible I'm making a mistake, since this is far from my areas of expertise. Still...

It is possible for a non-Christian to love God above all things in the sense that God is not bound by the sacraments, and hence can bring about the effects of baptism without the person actually being baptized. But that is not the ordinary mode in which God elects to work, and we wouldn't want to take such miraculous interventions to be common, any more than mere physical healings are especially common.

The key word, I think, in the quotation from the CCC is 'theological', which is contrasted with 'acquired.' Whether the pagans can actually have the acquired virtues is a matter of some debate among the theologians, even despite the fact that they are natural virtues. But the theological virtues are not acquired, and so must be infused. Without the infusion of charity, it is not possible to love God above all things.

[Gandalf the Grey]

As an atheist both myself and others often argued that we don't need God to be charitable using the performance of acts of altruism as justification for that statement.

I don't think the question is whether or not what's active is the grace-filled theological virtue of charity as much as it's merely a matter of distinguishing that from a human form of altruism.

[gherkin]

I don't understand what you're saying. The point is to distinguish charity from a "human form of altruism," and the way the Church does that starts with distinguishing the infused from the acquired virtues. Nobody denies that a pagan can feel sympathy for someone who is suffering. What is denied is that in a natural case this feeling flows from charity. Perhaps someday the evolutionary scientists will tell us something about how "altruism" evolved despite it apparent incompatibility with darwinist modes of explanation. Such a story would have no bearing on acts actually flowing from charity.

[Gandalf the Grey]

I don't understand what you're saying. The point is to distinguish charity from a "human form of altruism," and the way the Church does that starts with distinguishing the infused from the acquired virtues. Nobody denies that a pagan can feel sympathy for someone who is suffering. What is denied is that in a natural case this feeling flows from charity. Perhaps someday the evolutionary scientists will tell us something about how "altruism" evolved despite it apparent incompatibility with darwinist modes of explanation. Such a story would have no bearing on acts actually flowing from charity.

I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that atheists often make the common mistake of conflating the two because they either won't or don't admit that altruism can and does contain within it certain qualities and degrees or self-interest that true charity doesn't.

[gherkin]

[BobCatholic]

People feel good when they do charitable things. There is a dopamine hit for that. There's also an ego-boost.

This is all about the self - even when outwardly unselfish.

This is why charity cannot exist naturally - charity and self are opposites.

[peregrinator]

Not so - love of self is prior to love of neighbor. What good does it do to love your neighbor as yourself if you don't love yourself?

[Stella]

Therefore charity can be in us neither naturally, nor through acquisition by the natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Ghost, Who is the love of the Father and the Son, and the participation of Whom in us is created charity, as stated above (II-II:23:2).

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3024.htm#article2

As Augustine says in the book on Infant Baptism (De Pecc. Merit. et Remiss. i) "the effect of Baptism is that the baptized are incorporated in Christ as His members." Now the fulness of grace and virtues flows from Christ the Head to all His members, according to John 1:16: "Of His fulness we all have received." Hence it is clear that man receives grace and virtues in Baptism.

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4069.htm#article4


Charity is not found in non-Christians. The theological virtues are the effects of grace, not nature, and are infused at baptism.

And since charity is fundamentally friendship with God and secondarily friendship with man, it follows that giving money to some "charity" to help the faceless stranger has nothing to do with the virtue of charity anyway. Friendship is a real relationship, not an imaginary one.

So I've been pondering on Aquinas' explanations for a few days and can't get my head around it. I'll have to file it with predestination of the elect which I also find difficult to apply to catechises.

[BobCatholic]

Not so - love of self is prior to love of neighbor. What good does it do to love your neighbor as yourself if you don't love yourself?

Ego is not the same as just love of self.

[Gandalf the Grey]

Not so - love of self is prior to love of neighbor. What good does it do to love your neighbor as yourself if you don't love yourself?

You could also ask the question of if there is even such a thing as true and authentic love of self while being an atheist?

According to my experience I would lean towards the answer being "no."

[gherkin]

So I've been pondering on Aquinas' explanations for a few days and can't get my head around it. I'll have to file it with predestination of the elect which I also find difficult to apply to catechises.

Well, the mystery of predestination is just that...a mystery, so there's no Catholic who should ever be so rash as to think he's gotten his head around it. What we know about it is some clear, bright things in the midst of some impenetrably dark matters. (Dark to us, anyway.)

But in terms of the virtue of charity, I think that while it's still shrouded in mystery, much of it is considerably easier to grasp. For example, what do you think happens at baptism? Clearly, the removal of the stain of original sin, but that's a negative thing. There's so much more. Grace is granted--grace, which is a sharing in the divine life. We are in a sense made deiform through this great sacrament. But God is love (caritas), as we know. Absent baptism, that divine life is radically absent in us. One way that shows up is the lack of charity in its proper sense.

The real question, if I may suggest it, is whether you've unwittingly allowed yourself to come to view Christianity in too natural a light. This kind of leveling of the Faith does tend to lead to suppositions like yours--that non-Christians are doing things more or less the same as Christians are doing when exteriorly there is a similarity. But due to the infusion of the theological graces and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Faith tells us this is simply not so.

Even at a merely natural level, it should be noted, there are acts which exteriorly resemble acts of virtue, but which are not really virtuous.

Sometimes a person performs the exterior act of a virtue without having the virtue, and from some other cause than virtue… [s]ometimes this is owing to a certain science and art, as in the case of soldiers who, through skill and practice in the use of arms, think little of the dangers of battle, as they reckon themselves capable of defending themselves against them; thus Vegetius says (De Re Milit. i), "No man fears to do what he is confident of having learned to do well."

ST II-II, 123, 1.

The distinction arises, roughly speaking, from where these acts arise from. In the case of the theological virtues, an act of such a virtue must arise from the infused virtue itself, or it just isn't an act of that virtue.

As I say, there's still mystery here, but it doesn't take a Christian mind to discern the point about natural virtues--it comes from Aristotle.

[Stella]

So I've been pondering on Aquinas' explanations for a few days and can't get my head around it. I'll have to file it with predestination of the elect which I also find difficult to apply to catechises.

Well, the mystery of predestination is just that...a mystery, so there's no Catholic who should ever be so rash as to think he's gotten his head around it. What we know about it is some clear, bright things in the midst of some impenetrably dark matters. (Dark to us, anyway.)

But in terms of the virtue of charity, I think that while it's still shrouded in mystery, much of it is considerably easier to grasp. For example, what do you think happens at baptism? Clearly, the removal of the stain of original sin, but that's a negative thing. There's so much more. Grace is granted--grace, which is a sharing in the divine life. We are in a sense made deiform through this great sacrament. But God is love (caritas), as we know. Absent baptism, that divine life is radically absent in us. One way that shows up is the lack of charity in its proper sense.

The real question, if I may suggest it, is whether you've unwittingly allowed yourself to come to view Christianity in too natural a light. This kind of leveling of the Faith does tend to lead to suppositions like yours--that non-Christians are doing things more or less the same as Christians are doing when exteriorly there is a similarity. But due to the infusion of the theological graces and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Faith tells us this is simply not so.

Even at a merely natural level, it should be noted, there are acts which exteriorly resemble acts of virtue, but which are not really virtuous.

Sometimes a person performs the exterior act of a virtue without having the virtue, and from some other cause than virtue… [s]ometimes this is owing to a certain science and art, as in the case of soldiers who, through skill and practice in the use of arms, think little of the dangers of battle, as they reckon themselves capable of defending themselves against them; thus Vegetius says (De Re Milit. i), "No man fears to do what he is confident of having learned to do well."

ST II-II, 123, 1.

The distinction arises, roughly speaking, from where these acts arise from. In the case of the theological virtues, an act of such a virtue must arise from the infused virtue itself, or it just isn't an act of that virtue.

As I say, there's still mystery here, but it doesn't take a Christian mind to discern the point about natural virtues--it comes from Aristotle.

Even before Pope Francis and his use of medical analogies, I've tended towards using that to explain things to my curious children. So against universalism, I've said that although a non Christian has love/charity, it's like using natural plants to heal illnesses which is the best that is available to them. Then science comes along with antibiotics which like baptism, targets the deeper cause of the illness. Why would we not want to share this incredible gift with others? It is an analogy that sustains my understanding. Perhaps that isn't faith? I don't know. If you are a curious Catholic, you want to understand with analogies. I wish one day I don't need that to believe. But I don't think I'm alone in needing something more than blind faith to live by in this journey.

[gherkin]

Even before Pope Francis and his use of medical analogies, I've tended towards using that to explain things to my curious children. So against universalism, I've said that although a non Christian has love/charity, it's like using natural plants to heal illnesses which is the best that is available to them. Then science comes along with antibiotics which like baptism, targets the deeper cause of the illness. Why would we not want to share this incredible gift with others? It is an analogy that sustains my understanding. Perhaps that isn't faith? I don't know. If you are a curious Catholic, you want to understand with analogies. I wish one day I don't need that to believe. But I don't think I'm alone in needing something more than blind faith to live by in this journey.

Well, we do want to use analogies (among other things), but we also want them to be accurate, as far as they go, and your analogy is not accurate. Non-Christians do not have the infused virtue of charity.

I'm not sure what you're getting at in your last sentence. Who is urging mere blind faith?

[gherkin]

I think I figured out what was going on there. You misunderstood what I meant by mystery. As though we can say nothing about them. But as I mentioned, with mysteries, there are the bright lights and then there's the darkness. We can know that God is just and merciful, and the better we love him the better we know it. But exactly how to reconcile these traits, particularly as they enter into the mystery of predestination, is beyond us. We can of course offer partial theological explanations of the mystery, as St. Thomas did, in great detail. But to confuse the attempts at explanation with a complete grasp of the thing itself is a grave error. As Chesterton put it, "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

But just as we shouldn't think we know the whole, we shouldn't deny we know the part. Some things have been revealed to us, and we need to cling to those truths. And yes seek to understand them, but knowing that even in the beatific vision where we will see God's essence, we will never comprehend it, in the sense of exhaustively knowing Him.

[gherkin]

The real question, if I may suggest it, is whether you've unwittingly allowed yourself to come to view Christianity in too natural a light.

Here's an interesting article on another facet of this habit of naturalizing (or horizontalizing) the Faith. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/202 ... ent-frame/

[Gandalf the Grey]

The real question, if I may suggest it, is whether you've unwittingly allowed yourself to come to view Christianity in too natural a light.

Here's an interesting article on another facet of this habit of naturalizing (or horizontalizing) the Faith. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/202 ... ent-frame/

Ahhhh....that good ole Hermetic principle of correspondence: "as below, so above," or as Marx called it "the inversion of praxis."

It's not so much as there is some God "out there" that I must conform to and in Whom I must depend on for the supernatural infusion of graces.

I just need to realize and awaken to the real "God" within myself and accept myself as that divinity that I was always made to be.

Ancient heresies never really die, they just put on new skins.

[Stella]

The real question, if I may suggest it, is whether you've unwittingly allowed yourself to come to view Christianity in too natural a light.

Here's an interesting article on another facet of this habit of naturalizing (or horizontalizing) the Faith. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/202 ... ent-frame/

Some people speculate that nature is base or evil. Perhaps a remnant of Calvin's theology. This explains my understanding in a more accurate way.

As a virtue, charity is that habit or power which disposes us to love God above all creatures for Himself, and to love ourselves and our neighbours for the sake of God. When this power or habit is directly infused into the soul by God, the virtue is supernatural; when it is acquired through repeated personal acts, it is natural. If, in the last sentence but one, for the words, "power or habit which disposes us to" we substitute the words, "act by which we", the definition will fit the act of charity. Such an act will be supernatural if it proceeds from the infused virtue of charity, and if its motive (God lovable because of His infinite perfections) is apprehended through revelation; if either of these conditions is wanting the act is only natural. Thus, when a person with the virtue of charity in his soul assists a needy neighbour on account of the words of Christ, "as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me", or simply because his Christian training tells him that the one in need is a child of God, the act is one of supernatural charity. It is likewise meritorious of eternal life. The same act performed by one who had never heard of the Christian revelation, and from the same motive of love of God, would be one of natural charity. When charity towards the neighbour is based upon love of God, it belongs to the same virtue (natural or supernatural according to circumstances) as charity towards God. However, it is not necessary that acts of brotherly love should rest upon this high motive in order to deserve a place under the head of charity. It is enough that they be prompted by consideration of the individual's dignity, qualities, or needs. Even when motivated by some purely extrinsic end, as popular approval or the ultimate injury of the recipient, they are in essence acts of charity.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03592a.htm