Aquinas on Charity

 

Aquinas on Charity

 

I.                   Charity: The Latin word caritas is frequently used in the Vulgate (Latin)translation of the Bible to translate the Greek word agape.

A.     Faith and hope pass away, A. holds with St. Paul but not charity,  the greatest theological virtue.

1.       For A., it is charity that most unites us to God since it amounts to loving God for God's sake and to loving those whom God loves.

2.      The discussion of charity in the Summa is a long one (longer than the discussion of faith and hope put together) and it represents what Aquinas has been working toward all along.

3.      A's treatment of charity draws on his reading of the New Testament and on the tradition of post-biblical theology he inherited, the writings of St. Augustine being a key example.

a.      1 Cor. 13.13: ‘now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love’.

b.      Romans 5.5: ‘God's love has been poured into our hearts through
the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’

B.     For A. we have charity not just because we are actively concerned with the welfare of other people, but because we love what God loves and as God loves it.

1.       A. thinks that God is essentially loving because of the love between God the Father and God the Son.

2.      God from eternity loves the supremely lovable and the life of  God consists of this love even without reference to creatures.

3.      A. thinks of charity in people as a sharing in this eternal divine love; A. always
lays stress on the difference between God and creatures, but, he holds, God
has miraculously graced people with a way of being like or at one with the
divine nature, a way that involves them living as divinely as any creature can
do.

4.       "The divine essence itself is charity even as it is wisdom and goodness. Now we are said to be good with the goodness which is God, and wise with the wisdom which is God, because the very qualities which make us formally so are participations in the divine goodness and wisdom. So, too, the charity by which we formally love our neighbour is a sharing in the divine charity."

 

II.                Friendship with God: the theological virtue of charity enables us to love God, and he represents this love in terms of the notion of friendship with God.

A.     Generally speaking, A. with Aristotle takes friendship to be a relationship between equals:  "It makes no sense to talk of some- body being friends with wine or a horse."

1.       One might, therefore, reasonably expect Aquinas to recoil from the thought that God and human beings can be friends with each other.

2.      Instead, though, he takes his lead from John 15”15, in which Jesus, after having washed the feet of his disciples, declares: "I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my father."

B.     A's main idea here is that charity amounts first of all to a full and proper love of God, and then, based on this, to a full and proper love of what we ought to love in the realm of creatures.  

C.     "Charity is our friendship for God arising from our sharing in eternal happiness and therefore charity is beyond the resources of nature and therefore cannot be something natural, nor acquired by natural powers.

D.     Hence we have it neither by nature, nor as acquired, but as infused by the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father and tlie Son; our participation in this love is creaturely charity itself.

E.     Charity is the greatest of all virtues since it amounts to a sharing in God's life, because there can be no true virtue without charity since true virtue directs us to God and since charity directs us to God perfectly.

1.       Charity "directs the acts of all the other virtues to our final end.

2.      Accordingly, it shapes all these acts and to this extent is said to be the form of
the virtues"

3.       “Charity impresses its form on other true virtues; it supports and nourishes them and directs them to its own end; this is so, A.holds, even though charity can grow in people over time and even though charity can be lost by mortal sin.

 

III.             Is charity simply a matter of loving God? Aquinas clearly thinks that love of
God lies at the heart of charity, but he also insists that it has other objects.

A.     Pet lovers will, perhaps, be disgruntled to find that A. denies that charity
can extend to "irrational creatures." -- He does not think that we can seriously
be friends with them-friendship demanding equality and common purpose.

B.      He is clear, though, that human beings are proper objects of charity and he argues that charity includes loving our neighbor, loving charity itself , loving oneself, loving our bodies. loving sinners, loving our enemies , and loving angels), though not devils.