Philanthrophy in Gregory of Nazianzus

In a land where the sick, suffering, poor, and needy cried out for aid, one Father of the Church called upon his congregation to enact their Christian duties. He did not advocate for “faith, hope, and charity,” but for the virtue that subsumed these three: philanthropy.

Famine, Annonae, and Frumentationes

For 741 years (123 B.C.E. in the reign of Sempronius Gracchus until 618 C.E.), Rome provided at least some of its impoverished citizens with free or subsidized grain, called frumentationes. By Octavian’s reign (27 B.C.E. – 14 C.E.), every third Roman citizen received free grain allotments. The administrative burden had grown enough by his rule that this first Augustus appointed a new office—the praefectus annonae (prefect of the provisions)—to administer the allotments.[1] The program never extended to all citizens, nor did any city receive complete coverage under its aegis; however, the subsidies reliably supplemented the diets of roughly a third of Roman citizens. Commodus (r. 177–192 C.E.) built huge granaries.[2] Septimius Severus (r. 193–211 C.E.) added oil to the distribution, paid by tariffs on Tripolitanian oil. Aurelian (r. 270–275 C.E.) added pork and wine. All of these additions required minimal maintenance: Oil, wine, and even grain boast long shelf lives, and pigs could be fed nearly anything until ready for slaughter.[3] Constantine (r. 306–337) assured food to families who would otherwise be compelled to kill their starving children.[4] In another law, he mandated imperial officials to supply food to those whom they considered likely to expose children.[5]

Hospitality constituted a chief element of the law of pietas.[6] Though famous for his apostasy from the Christian faith, Julian (r. 360–363) exemplified pagan piety in calling for hospitality to the poor. He quotes Eumaeus, Odysseus’s faithful swineherd, to argue that pagan piety had required physical care for the poor since antiquity, “For from Zeus come all strangers and beggars [ξεῖνοί τε πτωχοί τε].”[7] Roman houses for the poor—xenodocheion—were places where people would gather to receive allotments of the grain dole (annona). Christians might have used these during Constantine’s reign, according to the ninth‐century Theophanis Chronographia.[8] In any case, they admired the institution. Perhaps as early as 350 but certainly by 368 C.E., a Christian neologism—ptōchotropheion, “food for the poor”—would replace the Greek word for a “neighbor house,” shifting the emphasis away from shared citizenship and toward common physical need.[9]

Christians wrote extensively concerning how to relate to the poor. Clement and Pachomius, viewed almsgiving as a necessary but insufficient cause of salvation.[10] Basil’s poor house, Basileias/ptōchotrophos, (completed between 369 and 372) exemplified (though it did not typify) the Christian response to the poor.[11] Theodoret in his Eccelsiastical History suggests that the emperor Valens supplied land for the project, suggesting imperial cooperation with Christian groups, but the evidence invites speculation.[12] The house ameliorated but did not eradicate acute local starvation, inevitably relying on imperfect supply routes. In antiquity as ever, famine entailed people having insufficient food. It did not imply there being insufficient food to feed everyone.[13]

Money-Lending

Classical views concerning money-lending varied widely.  Both Plato and Aristotle contemned not only money-lending, but also money itself.[14] For Plato, care for soul and body superseded this third and final concern. Aristotle counted money’s compound accrual a deviant “reproduction” (tokos).[15]  Some Romans idealized lending without interest.[16] Others—Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny among them—considered interest a matter of course.[17] Both Constantine and Theodosius legally limited interest rates to one percent per month (or 12 percent per year in ten-month years); Justinian would limit interest rates on all loans to six percent.[18] In practice, laws penalizing usury had only modest effects. Landowners received regular compulsory loans from the Roman government at five percent interest, putatively creating value for landowners, their customers, and the government, but actually burying landowners in debt.[19] Some emperors bucked this trend. For example, when Pliny advocated imposing a nine percent interest rate on Asia Minor’s decurions, Trajan declared such rates inconsonant with contemporary justice.[20] Interest averaged between 5 and 12 percent, but period literature evinces higher rates. In fact, one commercial area remained exempt from interest caps, regularly selling at rates of 50%: That area was food production.[21]

A first-century B.C.E. papyrus suggests that grain loans had long sold at extortionate rates.[22] A mid-forth-century Egyptian Christian, Pamonthius, a wine dealer unable to repay a loan. Creditors seized and enslaved his children.[23] Pamonthius’s friend appealed to the local church for aid, requesting only enough to liberate the children. The record here falls silent, but what survives suggests that at least some fourth-century Christians looked to their churches for debt relief in times of crisis.[24] Still, Christians could not boast a clean conscience on this point. Basil lamented that Hellenic philanthropy put Christians to shame.[25] The third-century Latin Christian poet Commodianus reports Christians’ lending at twenty-four percent with one hand and giving alms with the other.[26] The Apostolic Constitutions decry widows who receive alms but lend to others at interest.[27] The Teaching of the Apostles consider usury sufficiently transgressive to justify the removal of ministerial privileges, suggesting such threats proved necessary.[28]

Oration 14: On the Love of the Poor

Gregory Nazianzen campaigned for aid for the poor and ill in the wake of an outbreak of leprosy in Caesarea between 369 and 371 A.D.[29] A famine began at roughly the same period, and it appears possible that acute undernourishment, in tandem with chronic malnourishment, caused or at least exacerbated the skin conditions that Gregory reports. Basil the Great (bishop 370–79 C.E.) would eventually open a hostel during the early years of his bishopric, but he had probably not completed this project at the time Nazianzen wrote Oration 14, since the oration mentions homeless poor who lack recourse to local aid. The letter also does not seem to appeal directly for a hostel’s construction, as it mentions neither Basil nor any seminal project.[30] Instead it argues for individual Christians to take action. While Gregory employs many arguments, three of the central arguments are particularly apt in a study of Gregory’s philosophical suffering: the argument for spiritual health, the argument from vicissitude, and the argument for service.

The letter centers on a meditation on virtue, which leads Gregory to conclude that benevolence (φιλανθρωπία) makes humans most resemble God. Gregory relates lepers and the poor first to kin, referring to them repeatedly as adelphoi, then to Christ and God, ever underlining their physical and spiritual proximity to his Christian audience. Considering some twenty virtues in turn, Gregory deems each virtue “a fine thing.” Together, the virtues form “a single road to salvation,” one which some people may excel in one virtue, others in another, and still others in several or even all.[31] But, he says,

Following Paul and Christ himself, we must regard charity as the first and greatest of the commandments since it is the very sum of the Law and the Prophets, its most vital part I find is the love of the poor along with compassion and sympathy for our fellow man. Of all things, nothing so serves God as mercy because no other thing is more proper to God, whose mercy and truth go before, and to whom we must demonstrate our capacity for mercy rather than condemnation; and by nothing else more than by showing compassion to our fellow man do we receive compassionate treatment [ἣ φιλανθρωπίᾳ τὸ φιλάνθρωπον ἀντιδίδοται] in turn at the hands of him who weighs mercy in his scale and balance and gives just recompense.[32]

Who were these poor people whom Gregory calls brothers, sisters, and members of Christ’s body? While noting several causes of poverty, Gregory emphasizes leprosy, which made its sufferers outcasts not only from normal social engagements and work, but also from their own families.[33] Lepers’ condition—“alive yet dead, disfigured . . . barely recognizable”—repulsed even mothers and fathers.[34] In a gripping passage reminiscent of Odysseus’s visit to the underworld and his attempt to embrace his mother’s shade,[35] Gregory relates a mother’s words to her leprous son.

“Why did you not die untimely, before tasting the sorrows of life? Why did your knees receive you . . . when you were doomed to a life of misery, a life worse than death?” As she says these words she unleashes a flood of tears; the poor woman wants to embrace her child’s flesh but shrinks from it in hostile fear.[36]

Gregory goes on to discuss in macabre, almost grotesque detail these lepers’ physical state. Whether or not leprosy spread through contact—and Nazianzen left the possibility open—Christians had a duty to fulfill. Failure to fulfill the Christian duty to do good constituted a spiritual disease analogous to leprosy, a living death of one’s soul. Christ had enjoined them to love the poor. Practically, this injunction implied providing shelter and food, dressing wounds, and showing basic compassion and fellow feeling. So heinously have these individuals been treated that “To them a kind benefactor [φιλάνθρωπος = benignis] is not someone who has supplied their need but anyone who has not cruelly sent them away.”[37] Their poor reception enables Christians to become the reliable issuers of charity whom the poor needed.

To goad his audience to philanthropic action, Gregory invoked the classical principle of vicissitude. This principle, first dramatized by Homer and later epitomized in Greek tragedy, had its fullest statement in Herodotus: “a human being is entirely chance . . . before one dies, call him not happy, but lucky.”[38] This principle applied directly to the contemporary famine and health crisis. Mendicant lepers, Gregory argues, “can serve as reminders to us of our own weakness and dissuade us from attaching ourselves to any single circumstance in our present visible world as though it were permanent.”[39] To care for one’s bodily wellbeing more than for the wellbeing of the Body of Christ constituted a perverse inversion of reason, a sickness in its own right. Worse, it entailed the impertinent presumption of prescience, the claim to special foreknowledge that one’s current status of wealth, health, and liberty would remain undisturbed indefinitely.

Time, Gregory claimed, issued no such guarantees. In fact, to forecast continued bliss and ease was to invite their opposites: pride precedes the fall. While time allowed, therefore, Christians should employ wealth, health, and liberty to serve others, or, in Gregory’s apt nautical metaphor, “lend a hand to the castaway as long as you sail with the wind at your back.” [40] Only in this way could one fulfill Christ’s law and begin to attain wisdom. Through wisdom, in turn, one might adopt the three hopes of the wise: first, to avoid misfortune if possible; second, to have the good grace to perceive misfortune as part of a greater divine plan; or third, to be able to call on the generosity of those whom they have previously rendered aid.[41] The opulent and uncharitable people whom Gregory decries had neither sufficient foresight to embrace the second hope, nor any history of charitable deeds to adopt the third.To forestall charity constituted an attempt to frustrate the single clear trajectory of the Divine Economy, toward ultimate unity in the Godhead.[42] Almsgiving moved one anabatically along this trajectory toward the Divine Presence and potentiated (though did not enable) God’s katabasis to humankind.[43] Through almsgiving, Christians relinquished ownership of their lives, thereby becoming the true owner of their souls. As Gregory writes, “Let us through almsgiving become owners of our own souls; let us give of what is ours to the poor . . .  You will never outdo God’s generosity . . . for to be given to God, this is also to receive him.”[44] God’s command and the present famine demanded urgent response: “Do not let anything come between your impulse to do good and its execution: compassion, this alone, cannot be put off.”[45] While time allows, therefore, Christians needed to develop the riches not only of property (for the express purpose of helping others), but also, and more importantly, of virtue.[46] Charity, for Gregory, proved salvific both for the helped and the helper.

[Christ] will say to your soul, I am your deliverance, and Your faith has made you well, and see, you are well, and all his words of compassion [φιλανθρωπίας], provided he sees you compassionate [φιλάνθρωπον] towards those in pain.[47]

Philanthropy Theosizes

Though almsgiving—as any fruitful human action—constituted an insufficient means of attaining prelapsarian liberty and ultimately theosis, it proved necessary. Giving charitably, whether of one’s abundance of material goods, in time dedicated to the sick, or even—for the poorest Christians—through prayer alone for those worse off than they, underlay “the surest form of ascent to the divine.”[48] As John McGuckin has noted, “What Gregory is offering, therefore, is more than a new social policy, it is a fundamentally renewed anthropology based upon the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, when image and archetype were reconciled in the homonisation of God as a poor man.”[49] For Gregory, Almsgiving alone returns humans to prelapsarian liberty but manumitting them from enslavement to cupidity.

[1]Susan R Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (New York: New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 39.

[2]For further, see Geoffrey Rickman, Roman Granaries and Store Buildings (Cambridge: University Press, 1971).

[3]Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 40.

[4]CT 11.27.1.

[5]CT 11.27.2. See discussion of Roman exposure practices in Rebecca Flemming, “Fertility Control in Ancient Rome,” Women’s History Review 30, no. 6 (2021): 896–914.

[6]See the monumental study on the term, assessing classical and Christian literature: James Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021). Piety centered on civic duty, familial piety, and familial gods, clearly imaged in Aeneus’s escape from Troy, in which he brings his father, son, family pyre, and household gods. See Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual (Harvard University Press, 2014).

[7]Julian, Ep. 22, citing Homer, Odyssey 14.56–9.

[8]Cited in Timothy S. Miller, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire, Johns Hopkins pbk. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 21.

[9]Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 74.

[10]Holman, ibid., 50­­–56.

[11]Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 144–8.

[12]Theodoret HE, 4.16; PG 82.1160C. Stanislas Giet, Les idees et l’action sociales de saint Basile (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1941), argues that Valens would not have supported his political rival Basil with land. Contrast R Van Dam, “Emperor, Bishopes, and Friends in Late Antique Cappadocia,” Journal of Theological Studies 37, no. 1 (1986): 53–76. Ammianus Marcellinus alludes to Valens’ building projects but declines to detail them. John Carew Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus : With an English Translation, Rev., vol. 3, 3 vols., Loeb Classical Library 331 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971), 484–5.

[13]A study by the United States: Society for Applied Anthropology finds that, in Burkina Faso, food security increased overall during the early 2000’s while those dependent on grain for sustenance “are becoming more food insecure.” Colin Thor West, Aime Some, and Elisabeth Kago Nebie, “Famines Are a Thing of the Past: Food Security Trends in Northern Burkina Faso,” Hum Organ 73, no. 4 (2014): 340–50. “Pre-harvest losses due to diseases, animal pests, weeds, and abiotic stresses and harvest destroy yearly amount to about 35% of the total possible biological product of 3.153 mt, with 1051.5 mt being lost before harvest,” Akos Mesterhazy, Judit Olah, and Jozsef Popp, “Losses in the Grain Supply Chain: Causes and Solutions,” Sustainability (Basel, Switzerland) 12, no. 6 (2020).

[14]Plato, Laws 5.743DE; Aristotle, Politics 1.10.

[15]Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 115–19. Ironically, the land on which “naturally” reproducing crops grow cannot itself reproduce. Holman’s work has pointed me to several of the primary sources referenced in this section.

[16]P. Lond. 1915 in Arthur S Hunt, C. C Edgar, and D. L Page, Select Papyri, 4 vols., vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U niversity Press, 1932), 377–9.

[17]Seneca, Epistle 41.7; Tacitus, Annales 1.16; Pliny, Epistle 10.54–55.

[18]Constantine: CT 2.33.1b. Theodosius: CT 2.33.2. Justinian: CJ 4.32.

[19]Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 117. Constantine believed responsible debtors beneficial to municipalities (CT 12.11.1.1).

[20]Non est ex iustitia nostrorum temporum. Pliny, Letters, 10.54–55.

[21]CT 2.33.1.

[22]P Tebt. 110 in Arthur S Hunt, C. C Edgar, and D. L Page, Select Papyri, 4 vols., vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 202–3.

[23]Hunt, Edgar, and Page. The manuscript is British Library Papyrus 2544, full citation (P.Lond. VI 1915, SB Kopt. III 1668, TM 16853).

[24]Holman, The Hungry Are Dying.

[25]Basil, Homily, 8.8. Contrastingly, Julian claimed that Christian charity put Romans to shame: “For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg and the impious Galileans support not only their own [poor] but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.” Julian, Letter to Arsacius.

[26]Commodianus, Writings, 55.

[27]Apostolic Constitutions 3.1.7.

[28]Didascalia Apostolorum 15. R. Hugh Connolly, Didascalia Apostolorum (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1929), 136.

[29]Brian E. Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, The Early Church Fathers (Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2006), 75.

[30]Gallay, La vie de saint Grégoire de Nazianze, 87, quoted in Bernardi, La Prédication, 104; Coulie, Les richesses, 171; Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 146. Contrast John A. McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 146–47.

[31]Oration 14.5; trans. Vinson 42.

[32]Oration 14.5; trans. Vinson, 42; PG 35.864B–C.

[33]Among poverty’s causes, Gregory mentions “widowhood, orphanhood, exile from homeland, savagery of tyrants, callousness of magistrates, ruthlessness of tax-collectors, brutality of bandits, rapacity of thieves, confiscation or shipwreck” and particularly “those wasted with the sacred disease that devours their flesh and bones.” Oration 14.6, trans. Vinson 42–43; While “sacred disease” usually refers to epilepsy (seizures mimicking ecstatic revelations), the context clearly implies leprosy [cite something from Holman].

[34]Oration 14.10, trans. Vinson, 45.

[35]Gregory’s account echoes Homer’s both in the fact that Anticlea cannot at first recognize Odysseus and in their later inability to embrace. Homer Odyssey 11.205–209. Compare Virgil, Aeneid 6.700–703.

[36]Oration 14.11, trans. Vinson 46. Job 3.11–12. Cf. Iliad 1.414–116: ὤ μοι τέκνον ἐμόν, τί νύ σ᾽ ἔτρεφον αἰνὰ τεκοῦσα; / αἴθ᾽ ὄφελες παρὰ νηυσὶν ἀδάκρυτος καὶ ἀπήμων / ἧσθαι, ἐπεί νύ τοι αἶσα μίνυνθά περ οὔ τι μάλα δήν.

[37](47, Oration 14.12; PG 35.872C–874A).

[38]πᾶν ἐστὶ ἄνθρωπος συμφορή . . . πρὶν δ᾽ ἂν τελευτήσῃ, ἐπισχεῖν, μηδὲ καλέειν κω ὄλβιον ἀλλ᾽ εὐτυχέα. Herodotus, Histories, 1.32.4–7. This macabre injunction identifies the gravest implication of what modern behavioral science calls the “peak-end” effect.

[39]Oration 14.12. Translation Gregory and Martha Pollard Vinson, Select Orations, Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 47.

[40]Oration 14.28. PG 25.895B–896B.

[41]Oration 14.19; Vinson, Select Orations, 53. Compare the discussion of primary things in accordance with nature, secondary things in accordance with nature, and externals. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

[42]John A. McGuckin, Witnessing the Kingdom: Studies in New Testament and Theology, vol. 1, 3 vols., Collected Studies (Yonkers, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017), p. 216. McGuckin argues that, for Gregory, the interpreter of Scripture needed to recognize the “Macro-coherence of the idea of salvation” and the “single clear trajectory of the Economy,” a principle that constituted, for Gregory as for Origen, “the ‘theological grammar’ of the whole divine dispensation for the world.

[43]John A. McGuckin, Illumined in the Spirit: Studies in Orthodox Spirituality, vol. 3, 3 vols., Collected Studies (Yonkers, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017), 51.

[44]Oration 14.22; Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 152–53, citing trans. Toal, Sunday Sermons, 4.54.

[45]τοῦτο μόνον, οὐ δέχεται ἀναβολὴν ἡ φιλανθρωπία = sola enim beneficentia moram non admittit (Oration 14.38; trans. Vincent 69; PG 35.907C–908C).

[46]Oration 14.26; PG 891C–892C. Note the chiastic structure of the first clause, nouns embracing conjunctions: “Πλούτησον μὴ περιουσίαν μόνον, ἀλλὰ χαὶ εὐσέθειαν • μὴ τὸ χρυσίον μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὴν ἀρετὴν, μᾶλλον ὃὲ ταύτην μόνον = Da operam, ut non solum ibibus, sed etiam pietate, non solum auro, sed etiam virtute, imo virtute sola sis locuples.”

[47]μόνον ἂν ἴδῃ σε τοῖς ἀλγοῦσι φιλάνθρωπον = qui in dolore versantur benignum et humanum esse videat] (Oration 14.37, PG. 35.907B–908B).

[48]McGuckin, Intellectual Biography, 151.

[49]Ibid. 155.