Browsing by Subject "Charity"

This study examines how rabbinic texts from the land of Israel explain and respond to poverty. Through this investigation, I also analyze images of the poor in this literature, asking whether the rabbis considered poor persons to be full participants in communal religious life. Within the context of rabbinic almsgiving, this study describes how Palestinian rabbis negotiated both the biblical commands to care for the poor and Greco-Roman notions of hierarchy, benefaction and patronage.

The sources at the heart of this study are Tannaitic texts: the Mishnah, the Tosefta and Tannaitic midrashim; and Amoraic texts: the Yerushalmi (Palestinian Talmud) and the classical Amoraic Midrashim - Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta de Rab Kahana. Other texts such as Babylonian Talmud, non-rabbinic and non-Jewish texts are included in this study only when they are able to shed light on the texts mentioned above. In reading rabbinic texts, I pay close attention to several textual features: distinctions between Tannaitic and Amoraic compositions, as well as between rabbinic texts from the land of Israel and the Babylonian Talmud, and evidence of texts that were influenced by the Babylonian Talmud. This method of careful assessment of texts according to their time of composition and geographic origin forms the basis of this investigation.

The investigation yields several key findings:

I suggest various factors that shaped Palestinian rabbinic approaches to poverty and almsgiving, including: the biblical heritage, the Greco-Roman and Byzantine environments, the diverse socio-economic status of the rabbis, and their adherence to "measure for measure" as a key hermeneutic principle.

The study also portrays how the rabbinic charitable system evolved as an expansion of the biblical framework and through engagement with Greco-Roman notions and practices. This unique system for supporting the poor shows evidence of the adoption of select Greco-Roman customs and views, as well as the rejection of other aspects of its hegemonic patterns. We have seen that the language of patronage is absent from the Mishnah's articulation of the rabbinic charitable model.

Several of the texts analyzed in this study indicate that, for the rabbis, the poor were not necessarily outsiders. Following the main stream of biblical thinking, where the ordinary poor are rarely considered sinners who bear responsibility for their abject situation, Palestinian rabbinic texts seldom link ordinary poverty to sinful behavior. In these texts, the poor are not presented as passive recipients of gifts and support, but as independent agents who are responsible for their conduct. Moreover, rabbinic teachings about support for the poor reveal not only provisions for basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter but also attention to the dignity and the feelings of the poor, as well as their physical safety and the value of their time.

This dissertation examines the vice of envy in the thought of St. Augustine. Though much has been written on many aspects of Augustine’s moral theology, his theology of envy remains virtually unexplored in scholarship. This is surprising for several reasons: first because of the frequency with which Augustine writes about envy; second because of the way he links envy intrinsically with pride; and third because of the way he opposes it distinctively to charity, the virtue in terms of which he interprets the whole of Christian life. This study aims both to fill this lacuna in Augustinian scholarship and—in doing so—to contribute in a modest way to Catholic moral theology. The dissertation takes an integrated approach to this topic by exploring Augustine’s thought about envy across all the different genres, temporal periods, and polemical contexts of his writings. In particular the study focuses on envy’s relation to grief, pride, and charity—the three most significant moral contexts in which Augustine reflects on the nature of envy.

This dissertation unfolds over four chapters. The first chapter lays the conceptual groundwork by inquiring into the meaning of invidia in Augustine’s writings. How does Augustine understand the nature and various forms of this vice? Which scriptural texts stimulate and norm his thinking about it? What does it mean for Augustine to refer to envy as a vice (vitium)? The second chapter extends this foundational work by exploring the nature of envy as a passion of grief. It does so by juxtaposing the Augustinian account of the passions and grief with that of Stoicism, a philosophy which not only informed Augustine’s own thought but in contrast with which he articulated his view of the passions in his City of God. The third chapter examines pride as the origin of envy. What, for Augustine, is the nature of pride? Why does he think that pride is the mother of envy? And why does envy always follow upon pride as the second sin? The fourth and final chapter explores charity as the antithesis and healing of envy. In several texts, Augustine suggests that envy represents a paradigmatic sin against the second greatest commandment: to love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:39). Why does Augustine think that envy is distinctive in its opposition to charity? What does the nature of this connection reveal about Augustine’s understanding of the two great commandments of love? And how is envy healed in the right ordo amoris? The conclusion recapitulates the major findings of this dissertation and suggests four trajectories for further study.

This dissertation argues that invidia has three principal shades of meaning in Augustine’s writings, and that we occasionally see Augustine gesture toward a fourth suggestive but largely undeveloped possibility (invidere as non-videre). For Augustine, emotions are fundamentally expressions of will (voluntas), and expressions of will are, at root, movements of love (amor). This means that envy is most properly understood as a form of defective love. In striking contrast to the Stoics, who declared envy to be vicious because grief of all kinds was vicious, Augustine held envy to be a perversion of the grief which is indispensable to the life of wisdom in the present age of pilgrimage. Finally, I argue that envy is the second sin in Augustine’s moral theology. It is second in the sense that it always follows upon the first sin of pride and in the sense that it is the paradigmatic sin against the second greatest commandment: to love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:39).