Inventing the poor: how the early church practiced charity

Christian Century, June 14, 2003 by Walter Brueggemann

Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire.

By Peter Brown. University Press of New England, 176pp., $15.95 paperback.

UPON RECEIVING the Nobel Peace Prize, former president Jimmy Carter remarked that the "growing gap between the rich and poor" is the most elemental problem facing the world economy. But the gap between the rich and the poor is also a very old problem. Princeton historian Peter Brown takes up this issue of care for the poor as it was practiced in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era.

As usual, Brown combines erudition with an elegant style and makes his argument readily accessible. His concern with the social location of poverty is part of his larger effort to understand the character of Christianity as it negotiated its place in a still durable classical culture. The interface of classical and Christian culture has its obvious pivot point in Augustine, of whom Brown has written a classic study.

Brown begins by contrasting classical and Christian notions of care for society. In the former, euergesia (to do good) was a practice of the wealthy, who contributed to the well-being of society. Their giving was a much-celebrated civic virtue. But their contributions were given to an undifferentiated cultural system that made no social distinctions on the basis of need. Consequently, the poor were never visible.

Christians, on the other hand--and especially bishops--were charged to be "lovers of the poor," a category that comprised both those poor in fact ("deep poverty") and those who lived under the constant threat of poverty ("shallow poverty"). Such care constituted a major change in "social imagination," Brown says. "In a sense, it was the Christian bishops who invented the poor. They rose to leadership in late Roman society by bringing the poor into ever-sharper focus."

Brown does not oversimplify or sentimentalize the bishops' achievement. He observes that with the conversion of Constantine, which made Christianity the official religion of the empire, bishops were invested with social significance and huge financial resources, and were obligated to give evidence of a responsible use of this entitlement. "The clergy could be called to account by the state if they failed to make use of their privileges for the benefit of the poor." As a consequence, the bishops funded hospitals and houses of care that were concerned especially with the poor.

Brown observes that the main body of the church was made up of "middling persons" who were not wealthy but who made modest but steady contributions to the church's support of the poor. This means of funding was quite a contrast to the classical pattern of the wealthy giving large gifts. The church also had to make an effort to support and sustain this "middling" constituency, which itself was always under the threat of falling into poverty.

The sustained effort to care for the poor that came to characterize the church is derived, Brown suggests, from "an ancient Near Eastern model of justice" mediated through the church's liturgical use of the Old Testament. The Old Testament tradition accented the legitimate "cry" of the poor that elicited a response of "justice" from the powerful.

Brown appeals particularly to the word play of Isaiah 5:7: the monumental clarity and poetic elegance of the juxtaposition of the term z'daqah, "the cry," with its remedy, ze 'aqah, "justice." This was not lost on the great Hebraist, Saint Jerome. The movement from "cry" to "justice" conveyed an ethos of justice--firm, paternal and mercifully swift--that appealed to many humble late Roman people who found themselves living in a postclassical world in which Old Testament conditions reigned.

"I would suggest that an almost subliminal reception of the Hebrew Bible, through the chanting of the Psalms and through the solemn injunctions of the bishop in connection with the episcopalis audientia, came to offer a meaning to the word pauper very different from the 'pauperized' image of the merely 'economic' poor. The pauper was a person with a claim upon the great. As with the poor of Israel, those who used the court of the bishop and attended his church also expected to call upon him, in time of need, for justice and protection," Brown writes.

As the bishops developed ways to make this concern front and center in the church, a passion for the poor began to "seep out of the churches" into the horizons and practices of the empire. The language of cry-justice "added a novel tincture to the language of public relations. It became a language that was increasingly found to be apposite to describe the quality of the relation of the emperor to his subjects, and of the weak to the powerful." Thus over time the advocacy of the church began to redefine relationships between the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, well beyond the confines of the church.

IN HIS FINAL CHAPTER Brown observes that the growing appreciation of the legitimacy of the cry of the poor created a social awareness that the powerful were obligated to provide justice and protection for the poor. Through the work of the bishops the poor were given a voice that created "an advocacy revolution" and eventually a "culture of criticism." Brown observes that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." Through the church, the neediest were given permission to squeak!