August 1, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Charity is not one of Adler’s great ideas, despite the fact that St. Paul claims: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (King James Version, 1Cor. 13:13). Charity is not one of Adler’s great ideas, despite the fact that many of the great authors construct entire sections of ethics based on charity itself.
Love, however, is one of the great ideas, and although charity often aligns with certain virtuous aspects of love, it seems erroneous to label them as true synonyms. As we discussed in our recent Quarterly Discussion, charity and love overlap in a Venn diagram sort of way, though we could not even agree on precisely how they overlap.
We agreed that human love is a subset of charity granted by divine love (or the concept of perfect love). To be in right relationship with a deity means that you must be in right relationship with everything else. According to some of these texts, charity guides right relationships. Which begs the question: what is charity and why aren’t we talking about it?
Contemporary society tends to define charity in the sense of giving. Seen as a sort of generosity to the poor or needy, charity loses some of its depth and dimension. Therefore, our recent Quarterly Discussion, led by HMU Tutor Peter Ponzio, began with a dictionary, but quickly transitioned into texts which enabled closer examination.
This discussion helped me understand how The Parable of the Good Samaritan epitomizes charity. The notion of a good Samaritan would have shocked its contemporaries. Connecting goodness to a Samaritan would have been unthinkable. Rather, Samaritans were viewed as the most despicable of creatures, completely rejected by the majority of society. Yet, in this parable, a Samaritan finds an injured and helpless man on the side of the road. The Samaritan decides to help. The fact that a Samaritan would help anyone would have been shocking enough, but even more surprising is the fact that a priest and a Levite both passed by the injured man without offering assistance. In other words, those trained to help people failed to do so.
The parable outlines many of society’s problems. It asks us to think deeply about how we are in relationship with others. It forces us to confront stereotypes. We then moved from the Parable into excerpts from Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Pope Francis. We found that these thinkers viewed charity as a transformative act. It not only transforms the receiver, but it transforms the individual who participates in charity. In City of God, Augustine states: “He who resolves to love God, and to love his neighbor as himself, not according to man but according to God, is on account of his love said to be of good will; and this is in Scripture more commonly called charity, but it is also, even in the same books, called love.” (Book XIV, Chapter 7) Each charitable act, in other words, leads to a closer identification with rightness and with divine love.
Both Augustine and Aquinas further explain that because of human dignity we are bound to love all humans. Though we feel a stronger bond to those who are in our family or are considered close friends, we mourn suffering of all humankind, we feel kinship with all humankind, we seek better situations for all humankind. In the “Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America,” Pope Francis explained: “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is subject to dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the Parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception.”
Pope Francis returns us to the place where we began: the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Each one of these readings asks for deep contemplation of what it means to love, how we love, and what charity truly is. If, as these thinkers believe, charity is truly transformative, then maybe we would benefit from more time spent on this conversation.
Thanks to Peter Ponzio for the excellent reading selections! And thanks to the participants of the July Quarterly Discussion.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Jacob Lund
