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Between pagans and pelagians:

Almsgiving and the crisis of unity in Augustine’s preaching, 410-4201

Dr. Jonathan D. Teubner Bourse Fernand Braudel

Labex RESMED UMR 8167 Orient et Méditerranée

Introduction

Few topics dominate Augustine’s sermons so thoroughly as almsgiving. According to

one scholar, twenty percent of Augustine’s 567 sermons include some call to almsgiving.2 The

themes that Augustine constellates under the topic of almsgiving are, of course, bewilderingly

diverse: wealth and poverty, sin and redemption, faith and love, to name only a few.

Augustine’s discourse on almsgiving is, however, never far from the controversies of Roman

African churches. In this paper, I hope to bring to light the complexity of Augustine’s

understanding of almsgiving during the denouement of the Donatist controversy and first stage

of the Pelagian controversy, a period that spans the 410s.

Augustine promoted almsgiving as an act of solidarity by arguing that, through the act of

sharing wealth and property, the church can be united as a single inter-dependent community.

As Patout Burns and Robin Jenson have argued, ‘The sharing of goods within a congregation

                                                                                                               1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 - MSCA-COFUND) under grant agreement n°245743 - Post-doctoral programme Braudel-IFER-FMSH, in collaboration with Orient et Méditerranée (UMR 8167), CNRS. 2 Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313-450). Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 147-50. Finn (2006), 148ff has provided a comprehensive list of references to almsgiving in Augustine’s sermons: (1) ten sermons that are primarily devoted to the promotion of almsgiving: s. 61, 86, 113, 164A, 350B, 350C, 367, 388, 389, 390; (2) ten sermons in which almsgiving features as the right use of wealth: s. 14, 36, 39, 41, 42, 50, 60, 85, 107A, 177; and (3) 45 sermons in which almsgiving features as one important topic among others: s. 11, 18, 25, 25A, 32, 37, 53, 53A, 56, 58, 93, 103, 104, 105A, 113B, 114A, 114B = Dolbeau 5, 149, 164, 172, 178, 198 = Dolbeau 26, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211A, 217, 236, 239, 259, 299E, 302, 305A, 335C, 338, 339, 345, 352, 356, 358A, 359A, 399.

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realized the church’s unity and symbolized its hope of sharing eternal life’.3 However

theologically accurate this statement might be, things were far from being so simple. This vision

of unity inherent in almsgiving conflicts with Augustine’s conception of unity crafted over the

many years of debates with the Donatists. Through his debates with the Donatists, Augustine

effectively forestalled full solidarity until the age to come, suggesting instead that one cannot

ever know the difference between the ‘wheat’ and the ‘chaff’, the saved and the damned here

on earth. Whatever unity does exist in this age is not that of the communion of saints.

Augustine’s eschatologically delayed conception of unity and the presently enacted conception

of unity thus causes some conceptual friction. But this is more than a conceptual friction for

Augustine: in the contested social space of Roman Africa, Augustine must navigate between

addressing the exclusivist claims of the Pelagians and finding some account of the place of non-

Christian communities in the present-day social solidarities. The fragile unity of the Donatist

controversy is thus put under stress in Augustine’s crisis of unity between pagans and pelagians.

In this paper, I shall first summarize the vision of unity that emerges from his debates

with the Donatists, and then consider how Augustine’s promotion of almsgiving enters the

contested social space of Roman Africa with its shifting centers of solidarity. While he is most

famous for his emergent anti-Pelagian polemics of sin and grace during the 410s, Augustine

turns to a discourse on the invisibility of righteousness to address the virtuosic manifestations of

morality advocated by Pelagius and his supporters in his sermons on almsgiving. As we shall see,

subtly different strategies of making visible the invisible divide Pelagius and Augustine, but the

consequences will be far from insignificant. In the final section, we will consider a surprising

effect of Augustine’s Christological figuration of wealth and alms. Augustine’s greatest

achievement in this debate is also his ultimate failure: charitable giving that is ultimately justified

and promoted by a shared dependence on Christ simultaneously offers a fractious community a

shared object of love while erecting boundaries between the Christian and non-Christian

communities.

                                                                                                               3 J. Patout Burns and Robin Jenson, Christianity in Roman Africa: The Development of its Practices and Beliefs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 570.

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Sociological Analysis of Money

There is a broad scholarly consensus that Augustine treats wealth as a ‘spiritual’

problem.4 According to this spiritualization, wealth and poverty is not, theologically speaking, a

matter of money, but rather one of pride or avarice. In Through the Eye of a Needle, Peter Brown

provided a compelling account of how a certain rhetoric of almsgiving, less rigorous and less

insistent on the need to radically change your life, emerged from Augustine’s internalization of

wealth and poverty: the rich, just as much as the poor, could be humble, that is, spiritually

‘poor’.5 These social speculations highlight, however, that the relationship between the rhetoric

of money and the social relations is never far from the topic of almsgiving. In this paper, I will

thus extend this kind of analysis to a sociological analysis of money in Augustine’s sermons.

It is not, however, a straightforward matter to apply sociological categories to pre-

modern texts and cultures, but two aspects of Augustine’s preaching on alms suggest that this

would be a promising approach. First, Augustine constantly blends the social and theological in

his preaching. In his own reflections on preaching in De doctrina Christiana, Augustine suggests

that questions of money, when discussed in the forum, are about small things, but in the

context of the Christian sermon are about eternal salvation.6 Any account, whether it is

sociological or historical, must address both the sociological and theological aspects of money.

But the relationship between the social and theological must not be told as a ‘causal’ story. Max

Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus has routinely been misunderstood

                                                                                                               4 See, e.g., Gerald Brown, St Augustine of Hippo (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2002); Nello Cipriani, “La morale pelagiana e la retorica,” Augustinianum 31:2 (December 1991), 309-27; Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313-450) (Oxford: OUP, 2006); Andreas Kessler, Reichtumskritik und Pelagianismus. Die pelagianische Diatribe de diuitiis: Situierung, Lesetext, Übersetzung, Kommentar. Paradosis 43 (Fribourg Suisse: Éditions universitaires Fribourg, 1999); Jean-Marie Salamito, Les virtuoses et la multitude. Aspects sociaux de la controverse entre Augustin et les pélagiens (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2005); Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in Western Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 5 Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) takes this to comprise the central tenet of Augustine’s riposte to Pelagian insistence in De Divitiis that one must renounce all of his or her wealth to be following the command in Matt 19:21-26. 6 doctr. chr. 4.34-37; see also Jean-Marie Salamiot, ‘Pecunia’ in Robert Dodaro, Cornelius Mayer, and Christof Müller, eds. Augustinus-Lexikon, vol. 4 (Basel: Schwabe, 2014), 615-22.

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on this point. The Reformation did not create capitalism, just as capitalism did not create the

Reformation. Rather, the conditions were ‘matched’ with each other. Likewise, I am arguing

that there is, to borrow a famous phrase from Weber, an ‘elective affinity’ between the social

and the theological.7

And second, for reasons that are neither strictly theological nor narrowly economical,

Augustine does not think there is an absolute right to possess money.8 Rather, the possession of

money creates an obligation to give alms. For Augustine then the mere possession of money

entails an obligation to give to others. Money is, in other words, intrinsically social, and

comprehending the dynamics of these social relations can be aided by the sociology of money.

In his classical study Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel argues that money functions as both centripetal

and centrifugal forces in society. On the one hand, money facilitates person-to-person contact.

But, on the other hand, the transferability of money undercuts the formation of dependent

relationships within those interactions. There are, in other words, gathering and dispersal

movements that money initiates in a community, and a religious community is likely to

confront this tension in increasingly intense ways as the available wealth in a community rises.9

This study will focus in particular on the social phenomenon of monetary almsgiving.

Recent work in the Simmelian tradition has taken issue with Simmel’s argument that money

homogenizes social life. According to Simmel, money turns qualitative differences into

quantitative disparities. But Viviana Zelizer and Nigel Dodd have argued that Simmelians

‘unnecessarily dramatize the moral dangers of the market with “nightmarish visions of a fully

commoditized world”’.10 Zelizer has shown how, even in a world as saturated by money as our

own, people continue to differentiate between different kinds of money through such practices

as earmarking certain monies for distinct purposes.11 These practices have, according to Zelizer

(and Dodd concurs), effectively created different kinds of currencies. My application of

                                                                                                               7 I am indebted to Salamito (2005) for this application of Weber to the theological and social controversies of Augustine’s milieu. 8 Salamito (2014), 617. 9 See Jacques Ellul, L’Homme et l’argent, 2nd ed. (Lausanne: Presses Bibliques Universitaires, 1979). 10 Nigel Dodd, The Social Life of Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 287; quoting Viviana Zelizer, Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 370). 11 Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 11.

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Simmel’s centripetal and centrifugal forces will thus appreciate the social complexity of the use

of money, paying equal attention to ways in which it cheapens and enriches sociality and its

discourse. This is a ‘relational approach’ to money, through which we can detect the social

boundaries and solidarities people form. I thus do not presume that within either the centripetal

or centrifugal force human relations are being homogenized, but rather through the sociality of

money humans are simultaneously forming solidarities and erecting boundaries within their

communities.

A fragile unity

Any account of the Donatist controversy must begin with Cyprian the third century

Bishop of Carthage. Both the Donatist and Catholic churches appeal to the authority of Cyprian

to underwrite their understanding of the unity and boundaries of the church. While Cyprian

represents for the Donatists the Bishop who preserved the purity of the Christian faith in the

face of persecution, for the Catholics he represents the Bishop who decided to readmit apostates

to communion.12 Above all, Cyprian’s church was characterized by the unifying power of the

bishop, and both the Donatist and Catholic bishops drew on this legacy. The bishop stood at the

center of the church and relation to him defined the community’s boundaries. But as Patout

Burns notes, ‘the Catholic church of the late fourth and early fifth centuries in Africa had a

boundary which was less well defined than it had been in Cyprian’s church of the third

century’.13 In Augustine’s Africa, Christians had many different ways to relate to the

community; some were full communicants, while others were baptized but not

communicating, and still others were awaiting baptism to a later date, possibly until their

deathbed.14 This internal differentiation required a more flexible sense and location of unity.

Rather than placing union in the current and sustained communion with the bishop, Augustine

chose instead to ground it in his understanding of charity.15

                                                                                                               12 Burns, Cyprian the Bishop (London: Routledge, 2002), 167, 169. 13 Burns, ‘Establishing Unity in Diversity’, Perspectives in Religious Studies 32:4 (Winter 2005), 381-99, 391. 14 Burns (2005), 392. 15 Burns (2005), 392.

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There are two inter-related aspects of Augustine’s grounding unity in charity that I want

to highlight here. First, the bond of unity is not an external sign or act such as eucharistic

participation, but is rather the spirit or even the intention of the members. For Augustine, it was

the belief in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in individual members that held open the promise

of the good intentions of individuals to translate into a reality of union.16 And second, since it is

an internal mark that distinguishes the ‘saved’ from the ‘damned’, and humans cannot know

which are which. To put it in other terms, there is no criteria available to humans to know who

is a ‘true Christian’ and who is a ‘Christian in name only’. Both Augustine and the Donatist

bishops agree that only true Christians, christianum verum, will be saved. But they disagree on

their epistemic access. For Augustine, this famously informed his vision of the ‘two cities’

tangled in this age. While the current age of the church is a ‘time of winnowing’ the false from

the true, one will not know the righteous from the unrighteous until the final judgment.17 In the

terms of unity, there is in fact a true solidarity, but Christians will not know who is included

and who is excluded until the age to come. In light of this uncertainty, Augustine taught that it

was better to err on the side of inclusion.

In the context of the Donatist controversy, this inclusive policy primarily occasioned the

extension of charity to Donatist schismatics. But it also resulted in a level of inclusion of non-

Christians. In the third exposition of Psalm 32, Augustine directly associates the extension of

alms to ‘pagans’ with that of the Donatists:

Finally, brothers, I exhort you above all to practice this charity not only among yourselves but also toward people outside, whether they are still pagans who do not yet believe in Christ, or people divided from us who confess the Head along with us but are separated from the body.18

                                                                                                               16 For a similar account but with important differences in some critical aspects, see Adam Ployd, Augustine, the Trinity, and the Church: A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11-16. 17 cat. rud. 25.48: Sed maxime cavendum est ne per homines qui sunt in ipsa catholica ecclesia, quos velut paleam usque ad tempus ventilationis suae sustinet, unusquisque tentetur et decipiatur (BA 11.1: 120). See also, Salamito (2005), 194. 18 en. Ps. 32.3.29: Erog, fratres, ad hanc maxime exhortamur uos caritatem, non solum in uos ipsos, sed in eos etiam qui foris sunt, siue adhuc pagani, nondum credentes in Christum, siue diuisi a nobis, nobiscum caput confitentes et a corpore separati (CCSL 38: 272). I owe a debt of gratitude to Patout Burns for bringing this passage to my attention.

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By internalizing the principle of unity in the ‘love’ of the individual Christians, Augustine sets

the groundwork for an inclusive policy. Inclusion, however, only takes on a positive

connotation when those being included reciprocate. In other words, if neither ‘pagans’ nor

Donatists want to be included, the Catholic position might remind both parties of previous

violent, proto-imperialist attempts to create solidarity, an issue we will return to below. For

the moment, it is important to take note of Augustine’s removal of external markers of

membership to ground unity in the intention and practice of charity.

Making visible the invisible: a pelagian response

The sack of Rome in 410 was felt throughout the Roman empire. For elite Romans, it

occasioned a season in the far-flung provinces of the empire. Many of the glamorously wealthy

Roman widows we have come to know through Augustine’s correspondence passed through

Hippo or Carthage to other more desirable locales around 411. Among those who passed

through Roman Africa en route to Palestine was Pelagius. At the time of his arrival Augustine

was still embroiled in the lingering Donatist controversy, the culmination of which was the

Council of Carthage in 411. On the southern shore of Mediterranean sea, Pelagius encountered

the ‘Bible belt’ of Latin Christianity, and he was, in many ways, unprepared to respond to the

particular form of Christianity that had survived on the far side of what Romans liked to image

was mare nostrum, ‘our sea’. Whether he was familiar or not with the particularities of the

Donatist controversy, Pelagius’ words would be heard as a new front in the nearly century-long

battle over the identity of African Christianity. Two issues in particular will highlight the subtle

yet consequential differences between Pelagius’ and Augustine’s theological programs: the

perspicacity of the interior life to God and others and the role of Christ in sanctification. These

two doctrinal themes will become fault lines with immense social consequences for Augustine’s

inclusivist understanding of unity.

No document highlights more starkly the tone-deafness of Pelagius to the particular

form of Christianity that had taken shape in Carthage and Hippo than what Winrich Löhr calls

Pelagius’ chef-d’oeuvre, his letter to the young virgin Demetrius.19 In his letter to Demetrius, the

daughter of a wealthy and noble Roman family, Pelagius encouraged her to let her spiritual

                                                                                                               19 Winrich Löhr, Pélage et pélagianisme (Paris: Cerf, 2015), 80.

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virtues shine in the same way that her family’s nobility and wealth were conspicuously

displayed. Pelagius had, according to Jean-Marie Salamito, adopted an ‘interest in the visibility

of the virtues, in all of the manifest signs of moral and religious excellence’.20 This externality of

moral and religious excellence is also detected in Pelagius’ commentaries on the Pauline

corpus.21 In Pelagius’ letter to Demetrius, the cultivation of virtue is a kind of battle against the

devil here on earth with a coronation in eternity for the victorious.22 Brown follows Salamito’s

characterization of this as the convergence ‘nobility of birth with a “natural” nobility of mind’.23

In Michele Renee Salzman’s characterization, it is the Christian transformation of ‘senatorial

virtues’:24 just as a noble woman ought to be recognizable by her dress and manners, so too

must a Christian display her spiritual nobility. The virtues ought to be a kind of spectacle.

One of the consequences of this visible righteousness can be detected in the ‘pelagian’

treatise De divitiis or On Riches.25 According to this treatise, a true Christian, the kind that Jesus

instructed the Rich Young Ruler to be (Lk 18:18-23), must renounce his wealth and follow

Christ. In De divitiis, there is no option for half measures. In order to follow Christ one must

renounce his wealth. The one strictly follows the other. Riches in De divitiis do not have a

neutral status; rather, they are purely for the purposes of renunciation.26 The author of this

treatise is not so much concerned with the manner in which they were acquired, for there were

neither morally neutral nor morally good ways to acquire wealth. Andreas Kessler has put

                                                                                                               20 Salamito (2005), 49 [translated from French]; see also Salamito, ‘Excellence chrétienne et valeurs aristocratiques: la morale de Pélage dans son context ecclésial et social’, in Gérard Freyburger and Laurent Pernot, eds. Du héros païen au saint chrétien. Actes du colloque organisé par le C.A.R.R.A., Strasbourg, 1er-2 décembre 1995 (Paris: Collection des etudes augustiniennes, 1997), 139-57. 21 Pelagius, Exp. Eph. 4.25: ‘Hic describit ipsas species sanctitatis, quibus novus homo agnoscitur’ (Souter (1926), 369); Exp. Rom. 6.4: ‘… ut ne signe quidem veteris hominis agnoscantur in nobis’ (Souter (1926), 49); and Exp. 1 Tim. 5.10: ‘Si hospitio recepit, si sanctorum pedes lavit. Si non solum humanitas, sed etiam humilitatis habet insignia, cui non sufficit hospitio recipere, sed etiam hospitum pedes manu propria lavare’ (Souter (1926), 495). References and quotations taken from Salamito (2005), 49. 22 Dem. 14: ‘tibi contra diabolum dimicanti parat aeternitatis coronam, et caeleste praemium incitamentum victoria facit. Huic tanto spectaculo uide quem animum, quam debeas effere virtutem, et certaminis magnitudinem de spectantium dignitate metire’ (PL 30, col. 30 D). 23 Brown (2012), 308. 24 Salzman (2002). 25 See ‘On Riches’ in B.R. Rees, Pelagius: Life and Letters reprint (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 2.171-211. 26 Brown (2012), 309.

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forward the theory that the author of this treatise was an Anonymus Romanus who articulates not

so much a plan for social reform but a ‘diatribe’ against wealth tout court.27

Augustine’s inclination to interiorize wealth contests the materialist understanding of

wealth in De divitiis. This anonymous text that Augustine is unlikely to have ever read directly

nevertheless sits in the background of Augustine’s ‘spiritual’ interpretation of wealth.28

Interiorization has been a fairly consistent feature of Augustine’s theology.29 While it would be

difficult to sustain the claim that interiorization is specific to Augustine,30 the interiorization of

wealth is an important variation on the theme of charity as the invisible bond of unity.

But if we look closely at some of Pelagius’ writings, we see that Pelagius proposes his

own kind of interiorization. Returning to Pelagius’ Epistula ad Demetriadem, we can see in the

theme of humility a hint of how Pelagius interiorizes:

It is very easy to wear a modest garment, to give a more submissive greeting, to kiss the hands and knees with warm affection, to promise humility and gentleness with head bent to the ground and eyes downcast… It was another sort of humility that Christ taught us, encouraging us to follow his example when he said: Learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart (Mt 11:29)… this kind of humility is what the blessed Peter instills in us, saying: A tender heart and a humble mind, not returning evil for evil or reviling for reviling (1 Pet. 3:9).31

                                                                                                               27 Kessler (1999), 118. 28 In ep. 156 (414/415), Hilary informs Augustine of a claim that is also found in De divitiis: Divitem manentem in divitiis suis, regnum Dei non posse ingredi, nisi omnia sua vendiderit; nec prodesse eidem posse, si forte ex ipsis divitiis fecerit mandata. Non debere iurare omnino (PL). In ep. 157, Augustine responds to Hilary as if he was already aware of this position (see §§ 23-41). Salamito (2005) cites Spir. et litt. 8.14 (55); see also s. Dolbeau 11.13 (ln. 243-248). 29 See mag. 11.38, s. dom. m. 2.3.11, conf. 10.25.36-27.38, c. ep. Parm. 1.7.12. On the theme of ‘interiorization’ more generally in Augustine, see Jérôme Lagouanère, Intériorité et réflexivité dans la penée de saint Augustin (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2012). 30 Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’espace intérieur (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2014) shows the relevant continuity of the cubiculum cordis in late antique Christian thought through representative examples of Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. 31 Ep. Dem. 20.1: Perfacile est enim aliquam vestem habere contentam, salutare submissius, manus et genua deosculari, inclinato in terram capite, oculisque dejectis, humilitatem ac mansuetudinem polliceri… Aliam nos humilitatem Christus docuit, qui nos ad exemplum suum hortatur, dicens: Discite a me, quia mitis sum et humilis corde… Quam nobis humilitatem beatus Petrus insinuat: Misericordes, inquit, et humiles, non reddentes malum pro malo, nec maledictum pro maledicto (I Pet. II, 22) (PL 30, col. 36 B-C).

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This view is reiterated in the Epistula ad Celantiam32:

Truly you must follow that humility, not the kind that is displayed and simulated by bodily gesture or by subduing the utterance of one’s words but that which is expressed in the natural disposition of one’s heart. For it is one thing to pursue the shade of things, another the reality.33

Two things are worth noticing in these passages. First, Pelagius does not insist on the interior

space being visible only to God, a point to which Augustine returns throughout his career.34

This reticence proves consequential: humility is likewise a disposition for Pelagius, but Pelagius

does not presume that a disposition can lack any physical markers of its presence. To test this,

one might ask, ‘can one be humble yet fail to live modestly?’ That is, can one simply be humble

in heart or mind but materially rich? The response from the author of De divitiis is a resolute

‘no’: ‘Let no man have more than he really needs’.35 To have Christ’s humility is, then, so the

theory derived from De divitiis implies, to take on Christ’s material poverty.

And second, in Epistula ad Demetriadem, Pelagius holds up Christ as an example: ‘It was

another sort of humility that Christ taught us, encouraging us to follow his example’ (nos

humilitatem Christus docuit, qui nos ad exemplum suum hortatur). The phrase you must follow that

humility is an example of Pelagius’ Christus exemplum Christology.36 Moreover, if I am right to

detect a hesitation in Pelagius from ascribing to God the sole vision of the disposition of

                                                                                                               32 Regarding the authorship of Ep. Cel, Georges de Plinval has attributed this letter to Pelagius (‘Recherches sur l’oeuvre littéraire de Pélage’, Revue de Philologie 60 (1934), 9-12. R.F. Evans has endorsed this view (Four Letters of Pelagius (London: Seabury Press, 1968), 22), a view that seems endorsed by Rees (1998), 127. The best evidence for this regards a passage in the quotation offered. The phrase Multi enim hujus virtutis umbram, veritatem ejus sequuntur pauci from Ep. Dem. 20.1 is nearly repeated at Ep. Cel. 20: aliud est rerum umbram sequi, aliud ueritatem (CSEL 56, p. 346, ln. 23-24). 33 Ep. Cel. 20: uerum tu eam humilitatem sequere, non quae ostenditur atque simulator gestu corporis aut fracta uoce uerborum, sed quae puro affect cordis exprimitur. Aliud est enim uirtutem habere, aiud uirtutis similitudinem; aliud est rerum umbram sequi, aliud ueritatem (CSEL 56, p. 346, ln. 20-24). 34 e.g. en. Ps. 32(2).22: Homo factum hominis moto eius corpore videt, Deus autem in corde videt (CCSL 38, p. 269, ln. 7-8). 35 De div. 12.2 36 For the exemplum idea in Pelagius, see G. Greshake, Gnade as konkrete Freiheit. Eine Untersuchung zur Gnadenlehre des Pelagius (Mainz: Grünewald, 1972); C. Garcia-Sanchez, Pelagius and Christian Initiation: A Study in Historical Theology (Ph.D. diss. Catholic University, Washington, 1978); and, more recently, Lamberigts (2005).

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humility, we might also expect a ‘pelagian’ command to follow Christ to be a matter of

external habits or ways of living. A Christus exemplum sanctification would, in other words, be

visible to all. For the author of De divitiis this takes an austere form:

What pattern of Christ is revealed in such a rich man? What likeness to him is shown in such a possessor of wealth? … let us see if the rich man’s way of life has any similarity with that of Christ. There is none that I can see: the one is haughty, the other downcast; the one is proud, the other humble… The rich, with that vainglorious and proud spirit in which they covet for themselves the glory of this world, are sometimes accustomed to solicit earthly power and to take their seat upon that tribunal before which Christ stood and was heard. How intolerable is the presumption of human pride! He stood humbly before the tribunal; you sit on the tribunal, above those who stand before you, propped up by your pride, perhaps about to judge a poor man.37

In De divitiis, the externality of the virtues are coaxed out of the interior by following the

example of Christ. This is a program with just as much purity as any that the Donatist bishops

proposed, so it is no surprise that once Augustine takes the measure of the ‘pelagian’ program

he attacks with vengeance. The visibility of the virtues makes all too clear the difference

between the wheat and the chaff. Moreover, there is nothing provisional or half-way about the

unity between those who share in a manifestation of Christ’s virtues. Turning now to

Augustine, we will see how a rhetorical shift in the conception of wealth dramatically

transforms Augustine’s teaching on money and almsgiving. It is through the figure of Christ that

wealth is rhetorically purified and, as we shall see, the decisive move in his anti-pelagian gambit

that serves to restrict the scope of redemptively significant almsgiving.

Christological figuration of wealth

In Augustine’s sermons on almsgiving, cosmic and terrestrial worlds collide. These

sermons become a touch-point not only for his responses to wealth and poverty, but also to

salvation and redemption. We cannot overappreciate the social and political power of the

sermon. As Brent Shaw argues, ‘The Christian practice in Africa of having an authoritative

figure (usually a bishop, but sometimes a priest) speak several times a week to an assembly of

                                                                                                               37 De div. 6.2

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his people was a hugely significant innovation in the communication of new pedagogies to mass

audiences’.38 But we miss something equally significant if we fail to capture the rhetorical

power of Christological reference. In Roman North African Christianity, the figure of Christ is

a powerful tool of persuasion, and the preacher who can effectively marshal Christ to his side

can displace competing appeals from bishops and provincial policies. Augustine, more so than

many others, was able to deploy a persuasive case for almsgiving that centralized the figure of

Christ as he who is both the ultimate receiver and giver of alms.

The scene for Augustine’s Christological persuasions is set in the pulpits of Hippo

Regius and Carthage, where between 410-420 he preached many of his sermons on

almsgiving.39 While it is difficult to date Augustine’s sermons, there is good reason to suppose

that s. 36 was preached around 415.40 Part of the argument for the dating of this sermon hinges

on Augustine’s extempore style. No longer shackled to the careful rhetorical composition that

was common in his early sermons, the Bishop of Hippo comfortably engages in what André

Mandouze called his dialogues avec le foule.41 The voices of the sermon are not, however,

restricted to the bishop and his congregation, but include the ‘voice’ of Christ speaking through

scripture.42 This strategy, common in his Enarratione in Psalmos, is employed in s. 36 in order to

form a three-way conversation between the the rich, the poor, and Christ.43

                                                                                                               38 Brent Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 411. 39 The sermones ad populum that are most relevant: s. 14, 36, 39, 41, 42, 50, 56, 58, 60, 66, 85, 86, 107A, 177, 356. For a full list of sermones ad populum that address almsgiving, see Finn (2006), 148ff. 40 Anne Marie La Bonnardière dates s. 36 as 410-413 (Recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1965), but more recent evidence suggests it could be as late as 418 (Finn (2006), 148). My speculation is that the dating is somewhat closer to 415 on two accounts: first, it has substantial overlap with themes found in ep. 157 written in 414/415; and second, Augustine’s use of 1 Tim. 6:17 is employed in a very similar fashion to s. 14 and en. Ps. 51, both of which have been dated after 414. In any case, there is broad agreement that dates this sermon around the time Augustine encountered certain ‘Pelagian’ teachings on wealth. 41 Brown (2012), 339ff. 42 s. 36.1: Sancta Scriptura quae modo in auribus vestris lecta est admonuit nos, immo per illam Dominus qui iubet nobis loqui ad vos, quaerere vobiscum et pertractare quid sit et quid sibi velit quod lectum est (CCSL 41, p. 434, ln. 6-9). 43 Introductions to Augustine’s sermones: G. Lawless, ‘Augustine as Preacher’ (1994); Christine Mohrmann, Études sur le Latin des Chrétiens (1958); G. Parteons, ‘Augustin als Prediger’ (Augustinus Handbuch); M. Pellegrino, ‘Introduction’ to Sermons (1-19), On the Old Testament (New York: New City Press, 1990); M. Pontet, L’exégèse de S. Augustin prédicateur (1946); Éric

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Sermone 36 is framed by Proverbs 13:7 (‘There are those who affect to be rich though

they have nothing, and there are those who humble themselves though they are rich’).44

Augustine suggests, apparently in dialogue with some of the more boisterous present that day,

that those who masquerade as rich are to be despised.45 But what of the rich who humble

themselves? Augustine conjectures that the crowd does not particularly like the humble rich

because they are rich, but rather because they humble themselves. This sets up the distinction

Augustine likely had in mind for the sermon: ‘the thing really to be afraid of with riches, you

see, is pride’.46 While commentators have been quick to see in this move an acceptance of

worldly wealth that distinguishes Augustine from the author of De divitiis,47 we overlook

something essential about Augustine’s teaching on this theme if we fail to see that Christ is the

central referent for this sermon.

Pivoting on 1 Tim. 6:17 (‘Command the rich of this world not to have proud

thoughts’), a text cited in every post-410 sermon in which almsgiving figures as a prominent

theme, Augustine follows the implication that, if there are rich of this world, then there are rich

who are not of this world. This is, for Augustine, a reference to Christ.48 The verse from Prov.

13:7 – ‘those who humble themselves though they are rich’ – is thus figuratively read by

Augustine as referring to the Incarnation of the Word. Augustine further glosses these passages

with 2 Cor. 8:9 saying, ‘He became poor for us, though he was rich’. Blending the plutological

and christological, Augustine draws a line of continuity between worldly wealth and non-

worldly wealth that runs through Christ:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Rebillard, ‘Sermons’ (Augustine through the Ages); E. Biser, ‘Im Geist der Sprache: eine Vorbesinnung auf Augustinus als Prediger’ (1997); G. May, ‘Augustin als Prediger, Seelsorger und Bischof’ (2003). 44 Cited from s. 36:1: Sunt qui se divites affectant, nihil habentes, et sunt qui se humiliant, cum sint divites (CCSL 41, p. 434, ln. 9-10). 45 The somewhat colorless phrase Accipimus ergo et hoc at the beginning of s. 36 is thought to be one such instance. See André Mandouze, L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1968), 591ff. 46 s. 36.2: Nihil enim tam timendum est in divitiis quam superbia (CCSL 41, p. 434, ln. 26-27). 47 e.g. Brown (2012); Salamito (2005). 48 Augustine is likely drawing on a pre-existing interpretive tradition. Basil of Caesarea (Ascetica, R 98 = B 100), Gregory of Nazianzus (Or. 45.9), and Ambrose of Milan (De Nabuthae 12.53) all equally equate Christ with the rich who are not of this world.

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So true riches are immortality. That is where true plenty is to be found, where there is no destitution. So it is because we could not become immortal unless Christ had been made mortal for us, that he became poor, though he was rich. And it doesn’t say, “He became poor though he had been rich.” He took on poverty without losing riches. Inwardly rich, outwardly poor. Unseen as God in his riches, visible as man in his poverty.49

The nature of this exchange is not, literally speaking, an impoverishment: Christ maintained his

‘riches’, i.e., his divinity, inwardly and seen only by God, while also taking on human

‘poverty’, i.e. human flesh, outwardly and seen by both God and creature. The interiority of

‘riches’ is not so much here a spiritualization but rather a figuration of a discourse on wealth and

poverty.

The social upshot of this is that Augustine maintains the rhetorical value of both the rich

and the poor, whereas the diatribe found in De divitiis admitted no such quarter to the wealthy.

Throughout s. 36 Augustine reiterates a standard theological response to wealth in the late

Roman Empire and its dissolution: Christ’s permanent wealth is set against the experience of

money as temporary, liable to lose value, and likely to be taken from you by corruption, legal

machination, or government fiat.50 But it is ultimately the redemptive aspects that Augustine

asserts most forcefully. ‘Scripture signifies’, Augustine clarifies, ‘that it is talking about another

kind of riches, because it goes on to add, ‘The redemption of a man’s soul is his riches; but the

poor man does not endure threats’.51 Proverbs 13:8 – the redemption of a man’s soul is his

riches – serves to justify Augustine’s interiorization of wealth: ‘You see, the more profoundly

rich, rich in heart and mind, staunchness being their capital, commitment their fat rents, charity

their dividends, are rich in themselves, their riches are within’.52 The rhetoric of this passage –

                                                                                                               49 s. 36.3: Ergo divitiae verae immortalitas. Ibi enim vera copia, ubi nulla indigentia. Quia ergo nos immortales fieri non possemus, nisi pro nobis Christus mortalis esset effectus, ideo pauper factus est, cum dives esset. Et non ait: Pauper factus est, cum dives fuisset, sed: Pauper factus est, cum dives esset. Paupertatem assumpsit et divitias non amisit. Intus dives, foris pauper. Latens Deus in divitiis, apparens homo in paupertate (CCSL 41, p. 435, ln. 48-54). 50 See A.H.M. Jones, The later Roman Empire 284-602 : a social, economic, and administrative survey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 415-25. 51 s. 36:7: Verumtamen de aliis divitiis se dicere Scriptura testatur. Secuta enim adiunxit: Redemptio animae viri divitiae eius; pauper autem non suffert minas (CCSL 41, p. 439, ln. 151-154). 52 s. 36.7: Altius enim diuites, in corde diuites, pleni fortitudine, opimi pietate, abundantes caritate, secum sunt diuites, interiores sunt diuites (CCSL 41, p. 439, ln. 156-60).

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e.g. plenus and opimus – is shared with the author of De divitiis but the tone could not be more

different.

The two clauses of Proverbs 13:8 – ‘the redemption of man’s soul is his riches’ and ‘the

poor man does not endure threats’ – are oriented toward explicating the soteriological

exchange inherent in almsgiving. Riches are safely kept in the ‘bellies of the poor’ (ventres

pauperum). The poor man in this verse is not the man whose belly would be filled, but rather the

man who chooses to fill his barns and storehouses with grain instead of the bellies of the poor. It

is, instead, martyrs whose riches are ‘solidly based on inner capital’ (thesaurus interior). And

more specifically, Christ is he ‘who is truly rich’ and Augustine thus implores his congregation

to seek Christ ‘to make a rich capital investment’ in their hearts by confessing their poverty.53

The bellies of the poor, the rich man’s storehouses, and the transfer between them is not, then,

primarily a matter of wealth transfer but rather of a unity between the rich and the poor in their

need to confess their poverty and seek for Christ to endow them with riches of faith. This

depends, as we shall see, on the Christological figuration of wealth.

Spiritual dependence of rich and poor

The center-piece of Christian liturgical practice in Roman North Africa is the chanting

and singing of the Psalms. It is through the memory of these Psalms that the congregants carried

with them not only the message bishops and priests attempted to communicate, but also the

sentiments and passions they wanted to instill. As Brent Shaw has argued, the churches’ chants

and songs were a powerful force for mobilizing the faithful, sometimes violently so.54 For

Augustine, they augur a community yet to come: anyone who sings the Psalms in the hope of

the new Jerusalem is already singing there.55 It is little wonder then why the Psalms played such

                                                                                                               53 s. 36.11: Simus ergo diuites, et timeamus esse pauperes. Quaeramus autem impleri cor nostrum diuitiis ab illo qui uere diues est. Et si forte unusquisque uestrum intrat in cor suum et illic diuitias istas non inuenit, pulset ad diuitem, fait ante ianuam diuitis illius pius mendicus, ut sit illo donante diues impletus. Et uere, fratres mei, paupertatem nostram, egestatem nostram debemus domino deo nostro confiteri. (CCSL 41, p. 443, ln. 262-268). 54 Shaw (2011), 442-4. 55 en. Ps. 64:3: Qui ergo secundum hanc spem cantat, ibi cantat; ergo dicat: Te decet hymbus, Deus, in Sion. In Sion, non in Babylone (CCSL 39: 825).

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a central role in Augustine’s own thought and practice.56 Augustine’s preaching on almsgiving in

the Psalms take on a double feature. Reflecting on almsgiving in the Psalms gives Augustine yet

more opportunity to promote the practice. But the ‘exchange of voices’, as Jean-Louis Chrétien

has described Augustine’s liturgical practice of psalmody, underwrites the Bishop’s pleas for

solidarity: When the words of the Psalms are prayed, ‘the words become ours, the “I” who

speaks in them becomes “us”’.57 Augustine’s sermons on the Psalms are thus the occasion when

he not only ‘educated, instructed, cajoled, urged, reprimanded, hectored, and guided his

flock’,58 but also sought to effect some kind of unity in the practice itself. As we shall see,

Augustine’s famous Christus totus, the ‘whole Christ’, both the ‘head’ (Christ) and the ‘body’

(Church), becomes the rhetorical form for effecting social solidarity. But it is the practice of

almsgiving that gives legs, arms, feet, and hands to this rhetoric.

The practice of almsgiving is the concrete practice of unity. The rich and poor are

formally unified in the figure of Christ, as we saw in s. 36, but it is the practice of almsgiving

that enacts this as a social solidarity. A crucial aspect of Augustine’s teaching on almsgiving is that

the rich and poor are equally dependent on each other for almsgiving to be redemptively

significant. In other words, without the two-way commerce of alms between the rich and poor,

the practice bears no cosmic significance. This occurs, in particularly striking terms, in the first

exposition of Psalm 48, which is likely preached during the same calendar year as s. 36 (415).

Augustine’s multi-vocal approach is amplified in his Enarrationes in Psalmos.59 The Psalms are a

rich source for Augustine’s reflection on almsgiving, for the voice of the psalmist is the

‘paradigmatic human sufferer and struggler’.60 The exchange of voices is particularly significant

between Christ and the church, for the Psalms are Augustine’s laboratories for experimenting

with the unity of the Christ and the church in the doctrine of the totus Christus – the whole

Christ is both Christ as head and Christ’s body as the church. In the voice of the church Christ

                                                                                                               56 conf. 10.33.49; See also Michael Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis (Oxford: OUP, 2012) and Rowan Williams, ‘Augustine and the Psalms’, Interpretation 58:1 (January 2004), 17-27 demonstrate the pervasiveness of the Psalms in Augustine’s thought. 57 Jean-Louis Chrétien, ‘Introduction: L’Échange des voix’ in Discours sur les psaumes I: De psaume 1 au psaume 80 (Paris: Cerf, 2007), 7-19, 11. 58 Shaw (2011), 408. 59 See, e.g., Cameron (2012); Paul Kolbet, Augustine and the Cure of Souls: Revising a Classical Ideal (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Williams (2004). 60 Williams (2004), 21.

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cries out the woes of human existence; in the voice of Christ the church answers back the words

of love Christ speaks to the father. The verticality of this unity and exchange is marvelously

displayed in a number of Augustine’s Enarrationes.61 But I want to focus here on an implied

horizontal unity in the practice of almsgiving that is drawn into Augustine’s discourse on the

Christus totus.

Enarratio in Psalmo 48(1) is no less, a product of Augustine’s strife with his ‘pelagian’

foes (real and imaginary) than s. 36. Indeed, Augustine freely interprets ‘both all you earthlings

and sons of men’ as references to those who belong to Adam (‘earthlings’) and those who

belong to Christ (‘sons of men’). Because we do not know who is saved and who is damned, the

commands are to be heard by all. The invisibility of righteousness is a major plank in

Augustine’s own diatribe against his Pelagians, one that is extended from his debates with

Donatists and formulated in the City of God as the commingling of the two cities here on earth,62

and as we saw in s. 36 an important aspect of his Christological figuration of wealth. It is

therefore not surprising that Augustine would employ this polemic in the glacially paced debates

with Pelagians over wealth:

Rich and poor together. This is a reiteration of the same idea. The word rich applies to the earthlings, and poor to the sons of men. Take the rich to be the proud, the poor to be the humble. Someone may have plenty of money and resources, and yet not be haughty about it, and then he is poor. Another may have nothing, yet be covetous and puffed up, and then God classes him with the rich and reprobate. God questions both rich and poor in their hearts, not in their treasure-chests (in arca) or their houses. They are truly poor who take to heart the advice given by the apostle to Timothy: Instruct the rich of this world not to be high-minded (1 Tm 6:17).63

                                                                                                               61 See en. Ps. 118-132; Gerard McLarney, St. Augustine’s Interpretation of the Psalms of Ascent (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014). 62 ciu. 1.35 63 en. Ps. 48(1).3: Simul in unum dives et pauper. Iterum ipsa sunt repetita. Quod ait dives, ad terrigenas pertinet; quod ait, pauper, ad filios hominum. Divites intellege superbos, pauperes humiles. Habeat multas facultates pecuniarum; si in eis non extollitur, pauper est: non habeat aliquid, et cupiat et infletur; inter divites et reprobos eum deputat Deus. Et divites et pauperes in corde interrogat Deus, non in arca et domo. Nonne pauperes sunt qui accipiunt mandatum Apostoli dicentis Timotheo: Praecipe divitibus huius saeculi non superbe sapere? (CCSL 38, p. 552, ln. 13-23). See also en. Ps. 48(1).3: Audiant ergo ista peccatores et iusti, gentes et qui habitant orbem, terrigenae et filii hominum, simul in unum dives et pauper: non divisi, non separati. Tempus messis hoc faciet, manus ventilatoris hoc poterit. Nunc simul in unum audiant dives et pauper,

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Not only are the rich and poor unified, but somehow, according to Augustine, Paul turned

‘these rich people into poor people’64 by taking away ‘their reason for wanting to be rich’, that

is, to exalt themselves above their fellow humans. The category of ‘rich’ in en. Ps. 48(1) is

equally applicable to the materially poor. As it was above in s. 36, the theological question of

wealth is a decidedly internal matter. An unexpected practical corollary of this is that all are

required to give alms. This is, in part, because of the command to offer propitiation to God:

A person who will not offer propitiation to God, that is, one who will not attempt to placate God for his sins, is the one who trusts in his own strength and boasts of his abundant wealth. Nor does a person who relies on his own strength, friends or riches offer to God the cost of redeeming his soul.65

This rhetoric – not trusting in one’s own strength or spiritual wealth – is pitted against the

morally virtuosic rhetoric of Pelagius. There is one salvation and thus one command to share in

the practices of charity; just as no one is exempt from faith in Christ, so too is no one exempt

from almsgiving. But the propitiation for sins through alms is filtered through the christological

exchange observed above in s. 36. ‘You must lend your money to Christ; make sure he receives

these trifling things on earth, that he may pay you back most handsomely in heaven’.66 Giving to

one another is thus an act of giving to Christ. In s. 18, Augustine memorably articulates this as,

‘Had you given to my members, what you gave would have also reached the head’.67

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       simul in unum pascantur haedi et agni, donec veniat qui segreget alios ad dexteram, alios ad sinistram. Simul in unum audiant docentem, ne segregati ab invicem audiant iudicantem. (CCSL 38, p. 553, ln. 52-60). 64 en. Ps. 48(1).3: Quomodo eos qui divites erant fecit pauperes? (CCSL 38, p. 552, ln. 23). 65 en. Ps. 48(1).9: Ille confidit in virtute sua, et in abundantia divitiarum suarum gloriatur, qui non dabit Deo depropitiationem suam; id est placationem qua flectat Deum pro peccatis: nec pretium redemptionis animae suae, qui praesumit de virtute sua, et de amicis, et de divitiis suis. (CCSL 38, p. 557, ln. 2-7). 66 en. Ps. 48(1).9: Feneres Christum; accipiat in terra parva, ut reddat tibi in coelo multa (CCSL 38, p. 558, ln. 38-39). 67 s. 18.4: Et ille: Quando uni ex minimis meis non fecistis, nec mihi fecistis. Minimos meos egentes posueram vobis in terra. Ego tamquam caput, dicet, in caelo, sedebam ad dexteram Patris, sed membra mea in terra laborabant, membra mea in terra egebant. Membris meis daretis, et ad caput perveniret quod daretis. Et sciretis quia minimos meos egentes quando vobis in terram posui, laturarios vobis institui qui opera vestra in thesaurum meum portarent. Et nihil in eorum manibus posuistis, propterea apud me nihil invenistis (PL)

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The equalization of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, moreover, sufficiently confuses the social

expectations of who is giving to whom. Augustine’s insistence that the unity of the body

depends upon each member supplying what is lacking for the other highlights that, despite their

unequal material means, the rich and poor alike are to give to one another.68 While the rich

bring money, the poor bring faith; one’s richness is exchanged for another’s richness. However,

the poor are commanded also to bring money, just as the rich are expected to bring faith.

Neither money nor faith is, for Augustine, considered any less an act of almsgiving than the

other. But, for alms to be propitious, they must be made both in money and faith, and while

individuals are expected to do so it is primarily the community as a whole that gives in such a

way. For alms to be propitious, they must be given within a community of exchange between

the rich and the poor. To borrow Jean-Marie Salamito’s terms, it is the ‘spirituality of

dependence’ that Augustine opposes to a ‘pelagian’ ‘spirituality of autonomy’ in his teaching on

almsgiving.69

In en. Ps. 48(1), Augustine attempted to craft a kind of ‘spiritual dependence’ between

rich and poor by centralizing Christ in the practice of almsgiving. In en. Ps. 51, the Christology

is pitched in even broader terms that attempt to effect a mutuality and co-dependence between

rich and poor that is, here, spiritually significant. Augustine opposes here not the rich and poor,

but rather self-reliance and dependency. Using 1 Tim 6:17-19 to ‘talk back’ to Matt 19:24,

Augustine shifts the stress from the moral status of wealth and poverty to a problem of avarice,

which both the rich and the poor can evince.70 By evading a direct engagement with social and

economic categories, Augustine attempts to instill a mutual or co-dependence between the rich

and poor.

More so than any other verse on this topic, Matthew 19:21 has produced much

theological consternation for Augustine. ‘Go and sell all you possess and give the money to the

poor: you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me’ (Mt 19:21). It seems all too

simple, all too mechanical for the Bishop who puzzled about divine providence that carried him

                                                                                                               68 Williams (2004), 22. 69 Salamito (2005), 85ff. 70 I reference here Augustine’s rhetorical strategy of answering one verse with another. For more on the wide-spread use of this strategy in late antiquity, see Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation. Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

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from the arms of a Christian mother over the waves of secular ambition and back into the

embrace of Mother Church. In Enarratio 51, however, Augustine’s hesitation is not with the

mechanical simplicity, but because it would seem to make the disciples’ reaction incoherent.

‘Who can be saved, then?’, the disciples ask in verse 25. ‘Should they not have been saying to

each other,’ Augustine suggests, ‘“Well, perhaps it is difficult, even impossible, for the rich to

get into heaven, just as it is impossible for a camel to squeeze through a needle’s eye, but at

least let all the poor get in”?’71 In other words, why are the disciples so worried about a small

fraction of the population?

So who are these ‘rich’ and ‘poor’? The ‘rich’ are those who ‘would not take God as a

helper’.72 This partial quotation from the Psalm is interpreted as picking out the greedy, the

grasping, those for whom the maxim ‘you are as great as your possessions’ (quantum habebis,

tantus eris) is true. The rich’s possessions turn out to have a fleeting quality that bring their sense

of security to comic proportions. But the ‘poor’ do not fare much better. In a peculiarly

condescending spirit, Augustine ridicules their presumption that the Psalmist is referring to the

materially rich standing beside them. ‘Do not think yourself exonerated’, Augustine suggests,

for ‘what credit is it to you that you lack resources?’73 The defining mark for the poor is

whether they are ‘aflame with desire’ (ardere cupiditate) for material goods. Whereas the rich are

guilty of believing themselves to be self-reliant, the poor, in this context, suffer from a desire to

be self-reliant. The difference is between those who possess social delusion and those who

aspire to such delusion.

The disciples’ dismay at the impossibility of the camel’s eye trick suggest for Augustine

that the relevant concern is not with resources but with desires. ‘[The disciples] saw that those

same people, though poor, still harbored avarice’.74 Augustine uses the story of Lazarus and the

Rich Man to illustrate this.75 Lazarus was poor, and the man who refused him help was rich. Yet

                                                                                                               71 en. Ps. 51.14: Non sibi poterant dicere: Si difficile est, immo impossibile ut intrent diuites in regnum caelorum, sicut impossibile est ut intret camelus per foramen acus, omnes pauperes intrent in regnum caelorum, diuites soli excludantur? (CCSL 39: 634). 72 en. Ps. 51.14: Ecce homo qui non posuit Deum adiutorem suum (CCSL 39: 633). 73 en. Ps. 51.14: Noli inde te te excipere, noli separare, nisi uideris et timueris, ut postea rideas. Nam quid tibi prodest, si eges facultate et ardes cupiditate? (CCSL 39: 633). 74 en. Ps. 51:14: Viderunt enim etiam ipsos pauperes, etsi non habentes pecuniam, tamen habere auaritiam (CCSL 39: 634). 75 en. Ps. 51.14.

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Lazarus was carried off into Abraham’s arms, a man with plenty of wealth. For Augustine, this

demonstrates that it is not riches that make a person guilty. ‘A poor man rests in the embrace of

a rich man – or would it be truer to say that both are rich in God, both poor in greed?’76

The particularity of this still seems elusive. But Augustine discusses only one particular

case, and significantly it is a negative example. Doeg the Edomite, who in Rabbinical literature

represents malice, jealousy, and calumnious tongue, figures for Augustine lack of inward piety

and is, not incidentally, paradigmatically Jewish:

What, then, does scripture condemn in this man Doeg? It did not say, “Look at a man who was rich,” but, Look at the person who would not take God as helper, but trusted in the amplitude of his riches. Such a person is not censured for having wealth, but for trusting in it and not trusting in God. This is why he is condemned, and punished, and turned out of his tent as an “earthly movement,” like the dust which the wind sweeps away from the face of the earth; this is why his root is torn out of the land of the living.77

Doeg is the camel who cannot traverse the eye of the needle; the person who takes refuge in his

wealth. He is Augustine’s symbol of self-reliance.

It is through the figure of Doeg that Augustine has 1 Timothy 6:17-18 ‘talk back’ to

Matthew 19:21:

Very different are the rich of whom the apostle Paul says, Instruct the rich of this world not to be high-minded (like Doeg), nor to put their trust in unreliable wealth (as did the one who trusted in the amplitude of his riches), but in the living God (unlike Doeg, who would not take God as helper).78

                                                                                                               76 en. Ps. 51.14: In sinum diuitis pauper; an potius ambo Deo diuites, ambo a cupiditate pauperes? (CCSL 39: 634). 77 en. Ps. 51.15: Quid ergo in hoc Doech culpat scriptura? Non dixit: Ecce homo qui fuit diues; sed: Ecce homo qui non posuit Deum adiutorem suum, sed sperauit in multitudine diuitiarum suarum. Non quia habuit diuitas, sed quia in ipsis sperauit, et in Deo non sperauit, ideo damnatur, ideo punitur, ideo mouetur de tabernaculo, tamquam motus ille terrenus, sicut puluis quem proicit uentus a facie terrae; ideo exstirpatur radix eius de terra uiuentium (CCSL 39: 634). 78 en. Ps. 51.15: Numquid huic similes sunt diuites, de quibus Paulus apostolus loquitur: Praecipe diuitibus huius mundi, non superbe sapere, sicut Doech; neque sperare in incerto diuitiarum, sicut ipse sperauit in multitudine diuitiarum suarum; sed in Deo uiuo, non quomodo iste qui non posuit Deum adiutorem suum? (CCSL 39: 634-5).

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The mechanical simplicity of Matthew 19:21 thus receives a rebuttal from the psychological

complexity of 1 Timothy 6:17-18.

In Enarratio 51, however, this shift must be understood in the context of the failure of

Doeg the Edomite to make it through the eye of the needle. The alternative to Doeg’s

figuration of the self-reliant rich is not the poor, but rather Christ:

There was One who went through [the eye of the needle] first, One on whom none could have laid the burden of his passion, as a camel is loaded, if he had not first lowered himself to the ground. He told us himself that what is impossible for human beings is easy for God (Mt 19:26).79

Successful passage through the eye of the needle is made only by virtue of Christ’s prioor

successful passage. In contrast to Doeg the Edomite’s self-reliance is thus Christ’s lowering

himself to the ground. Loading passions onto Christ is, for Augustine, achieved through

almsgiving. Almsgiving is thus redemptively significant not because the alms themselves bear

special significance, but because Christ went through the eye of the needle first. By placing

Christ at the center of almsgiving, Augustine thus calls into question the direct link between alms

and forgiveness of sins. The centrality of Christ does not remove the redemptive significance of

almsgiving, but rather questions the one-to-one relation between alms and sins.

Making visible the invisible: Augustine’s response

The Christological figuration and subsequent spiritual co-dependence of Augustine’s

promotion of almsgiving might seem a world away from the humming masses standing at his

feet. No doubt, as Bishop and pastor, Augustine’s main concern was instilling a common

reliance on God. Augustine summarizes this in en. Ps. 51, ‘If we may not rely on riches, much

less may we rely on poverty; our only reliance is on the living God’.80 But what of that human

mass of rich and poor dwelling at his feet? The social and economic inequalities are significant if

                                                                                                               79 en. Ps. 51.15: Ipse enim prior intrauit, quem sicut camelum nemo sarcina passionis oneraret, nisi se ipse in terram deponeret. Quia et ipse hoc dixit: Quod hominibus impossibile est, Deo facile est (CCSL 39: 635). 80 en. Ps. 51.15: Si enim non est praesumendum de diuitiis, quanto magis non est praesumendum de paupertate, sed de Deo uiuo? (CCSL 39: 635).

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both the rich and the poor are to embrace their dependence. While it is easy to imagine the

poor embracing dependence, the rich are harder to picture. But Augustine insists that the rich

need to see alms as something they receive from the poor in order to become aware of their

dependence on the poor. The hurdle to unity, Augustine thinks, is not bonding the poor to the

rich, but bonding the rich to the poor.

It is not hard to imagine how Augustine’s account of almsgiving could be criticized as a

paean to the wealthy. Augustine offers his congregants not the moralism of the author of De

divitiis nor the communism of Ambrose, but rather lessons in how to be better rich and better

poor. There is very little urgency in changing one’s place, and it would be surprising if a

managerial bishop like Augustine sought a whole-scale shift in the socioeconomic order.

However, the account of Augustine’s Christological figuration and subsequent spiritual co-

dependence can shine new light on several famous passages where Augustine employs the

language of usury, even referring to the poor as ‘bankers’. It is, in particular, the social

significance of naming the poor as porters or bankers of money (depositum) that introduces

conflicting social forces.

In late antiquity, usury (lending at extortionate rates of interest) was a common

practice, and anyone in dire need of money might expect to seek a loan with interest. While the

denunciation of usury in sermons was common throughout the 4th century, there had yet to

emerge a consensus until the Council of Carthage in 419, which condemned the practice by

clergy and lay people.81 Usury shot to the heart of the Christian social system as it was

considered almsgiving’s antithesis.82 But this did not stop preachers from co-opting the language

of usury. Indeed, in one sermon Augustine goes so far to recommend that his congregation

‘make a mercantile loan’ (fac trajectitium) to God by giving alms to the poor.83 A mercantile loan

                                                                                                               81 Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410-590): A Survey of the Evidence from Episcopal Letters (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 147-8; see also, Angelo Di Berardino, ‘La défense du pauvre: saint Augustin et l’usure’ in Pierre-Yves Fux, Jean-Michel Roessli, and Otto Wermelinger, eds. Augustinus Afer. Saint Augustin: africanité et universalité. Actes du colloque international Alger-Annaba, 1-7 avril 2001 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 2003), 257-62 and C.L. Hanson, ‘Usury and the World of St. Augustine of Hippo’, Augustinian Studies 19 (1988), 141-64. 82 Allen and Neil (2013), 148. 83 s. 390.2: Quaeres fortasse quomodo illuc rem tuam leves? Noli aestuare, et cogitando scalas aut aliqua machinamenta quaerere. Sed quomodo solet fieri civibus peregre constitutis, fac traiectitium. Multi sane hoc faciunt, cum idoneos inveniunt, dant impigre. Fecit Dominus tuus

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had one of the highest rates of interest because it had to factor in the risk of a sea journey. This

kind of loan was most common for people who needed to get back home but did not have the

money. For example, if a person was in Ostia on the Italian peninsula and needed to get back to

Hippo Regius, he could borrow the money from a merchant who trades in Hippo Regius and

promise to pay him in that city when he arrives. The use of a mercantile loan was a particularly

inequitable arrangement. While there was the additional risk of a sea journey, the merchant was

going to take that risk in any case, and would be far more worse off if his cargo was lost than the

principle amount of the loan. Under good circumstances, the borrower was simply the victim

of extortionate loan terms.

Augustine’s frequent reference to ‘loaning to God at high rates’ is, on the face of it, a

rhetorical ploy to communicate just how good of a deal almsgiving was. But the more we learn

about the social world of Roman African in the early fifth century, the clearer it is that

Augustine’s rhetoric finds, in Weberian terms, an ‘elective affinity’ with the social mentality of

wealthy Romans. Putting almsgiving in the terms of mercantile loans re-introduces the

hierarchical system of the late Roman economy. While the Christian rhetoric suggested a radical

equality between rich and poor, an aspect that Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil have shown to

underpin this Christian vision,84 the disparity of rewards between the rich and poor in

almsgiving subtly subverts it. In other words, the wealthy have the occasion to give at high rates

of interests, but none of that money accrues to the poor. The poor were thus a representation

or proxy for the heavenly bank account of the wealthy: The more poor you had at the end of

your hands the larger your heavenly vault. The poor were thus ‘visible’ not simply as recipients

of charity,85 but also as proxies of wealth.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Christus, sursum dives, hic pauper. Esurit hic: traiectitium at te petit, aequum restituet. (PL 1706); see also s. 42.2, 86.11, and 114A.4. 84 Allen and Neil (2013), 171; see also, Pauline Allen, Wendy Meyer, and Bronwen Neil, eds. Preaching Poverty in the Late Roman World: Perceptions and Realities (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2009), 219ff. 85 Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: The University Press of New England, 2002) creatively demonstrates the new ‘visibility’ of the poor; for the original insight, see E. Patlagean, Pauvrété économique et pauvrété sociale à Byzance 4e-7e siècles (Paris: Mouton & École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1977) .

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Yet, the poor also had their own kind of agency. The poor in Roman Africa have been

characterized as, on the one hand, ‘passive recipients’ of alms,86 and, on the other hand, ‘moral

agents’.87 Both seem to miss the mark. The poor are not static or passive objects of reception, as

Augustine description of the poor as ‘porters’ or ‘bankers’ suggests.88 ‘I have made the poor

your porters’,89 ‘make out a mercantile loan’,90 and ‘deposit your works in the bank’91 all give

the impression that the poor are active parts of this divine commerce. However, the context of

these passages all suggest that their audience is the wealthy, and is intended to entice them into

the use of mercantile loans: ‘“Don’t worry,” God says to you, “don’t worry. Seeing that I made

you rich, that I gave you the stuff to give, I have made the poor your porters”’, ‘So listen to

what Christ says to you: “Make out a letter of credit; give to me there, and I will pay you back

here.” Christ says, “Give to me there on earth where you have plenty, and I will pay it back to

you here”’, and ‘When you deposited your works in the bank, you see, you were buying the

kingdom of heaven’. Moreover, referring to the poor as ‘porters’ and ‘bankers’ should be

understood within the context of the practice of making deposits (depositum). One who left a

depositum with a ‘banker’ would expect to do so completely free of charge.92 The imagery of the

poor as porters and bankers suggest, then, that the rich expect to use them free-of-charge,

while they accumulate vast sums of spiritual interest. The poor are thus something between a

full-fledged ‘moral agent’ and ‘passive recipient’.

                                                                                                               86 Allen and Neil (2013), 172. 87 Kate Ward, ‘Porters to Heaven: Wealth, the Poor, and Moral Agency in Augustine’, Journal of Religious Ethics 42:2 (July 2014), 216-242, 230ff. 88 e.g., s. 18.4, 38.9, 53A.6, 60.2, 86.3, 11-12, 114A.4, and 390.2. 89 s. 38.9: ‘Noli’ inquit tibi deus ‘laborare, noli laborare. Qui te diuitem feci, qui tibi quod dares dedi, laturarios tibi pauperes feci’. (CCSL 41: 485). 90 s. 53A.6: Audi ergo quid tibi dicit Christus: “Traiecticium fac; illic mihi da, et ego tibi hic reddo.” (CCSL 41Aa: 116-7). 91 s. 18.4: Quando enim opera uestra in thesaurum mittebatis, regnum caelorum emebatis... Membris meis daretis, et ad caput perueniret quod daretis. Et sciretis quia minimos meos egentes quando uobis in terram posui, laturarios uobis institui qui opera uestra in thesaurum meum portarent (CCSL 41: 248-9). 92 Jean Andreau, ‘Depositum’ in Cornelius Mayer, ed. Augustinus-Lexikon, vol. 2 (Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1996-2000), 297-99.

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The rhetoric of ‘porter’ and ‘banker’, however, has connections with the pre-existing

commerce of alms.93 The ‘elective affinity’ that exists between the wealthy and mercantile loans

is matched by an ‘elective affinity’ between the poor and bankers. Allen and Neil highlight four

agents in late antique charity: giver, receiver, God, and the conduit/steward who mediates the

goods. According to these scholars, the stewardship of charity was a role for the bishop or

ascetic.94 But, in Augustine’s imagery, the poor are not so much recipients, but rather conduits

or stewards of wealth. In other words, in Augustine’s scheme, the poor displace the bishops and

ascetics as stewards of the divine commerce of almsgiving. Alms thus bypass the bishop and

circulate within the community without intermediation

While the movement of money occurs directly between the wealthy and the poor, it is

Christ who underwrites the loan on one side and grants authority to the bank on the other side.

As we saw in Augustine’s account of ‘spiritual dependence’ between rich and poor, there is a

‘social dependence’ between rich and poor, through which the invisible spiritual unity might be

made visible. But this social dependence proves, paradoxically, to leave the existing social order

in place for the wealthy and yet still manage to improve the social position of the poor. If the

co-dependence of almsgiving we observed in en. Ps. 48(1) and 51 were mapped directly onto the

actual social practices, a more egalitarian community would seem to emerge, one where the

rich and the poor make transfers between each other until social and financial equilibrium is

achieved, a proto-type of Scandinavian socioeconomic policy. Yet, as we saw, the co-

dependence was, in fact, on Christ as the ultimate giver and receiver of alms. This

Christological move sought to subvert the one-to-one connection between alms and salvation

that presaged ‘works righteousness’, a worst-case scenario for the anti-pelagian fighter in

Augustine. The social mapping occurs, however, through the transference of Christ onto the

social world, not in the form of the all-knowing managerial bishop, but rather in the form of the

poor – the hungry, the sick, the migrant.

The social intermediation of the figure of Christ allows for the two movements of

money to take place, the centripetal and the centrifugal. The rich giving to the poor bring the

two parties together, not simply through relation of giver to passive recipient, but rather as a

                                                                                                               93 Génelle, Gérard. “Un exemple de l’utilisation des realia chez Augustin: du sac d’argent au rachat de l’humanité.” Revue D’études Augustiniennes et Patristiques 53 (2007): 65–80. 94 Allen and Neil (2013), 172.

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wealthy landowner might partner with a banker. Just as a banker’s intermediation would be

necessary for the purchase of more land or labor, so too must the poor and the wealthy

cooperate in a system of mutual exchange, interaction, and even implicit respect for the role

each plays. However, the language of a mercantile loan introduces a centrifugal force that leaves

in place the hierarchical social world of late antiquity. Although the rich and poor are partnered

as industrialist-banker pair, the rich’s interaction with the poor is one of unequal gain. Through

giving to the poor, the rich are ascribed the exponentially expanding reward that extortionate

loans represent while the poor simply receive the principle amount. While it is certainly to

Augustine’s credit that he promoted the advancement of the poor, his rhetoric of mercantile

loans subverts the radicalness of this program. However, through this exchange, a new type of

unity between rich and poor emerges, one that entrenches the rich’s social position while

improving the poor’s material existence.

We cannot forget the soft-rumbling of the crowd standing at Augustine’s feet is also a

potential body of support in the intra- and inter-community battles of the early 5th century. The

appeal Pelagius made to Demetrius to make her virtues shine as her family’s honor and wealth

did was hard for Augustine to counter. Yet, Augustine, in a clever rhetorical move, happened

upon the language of mercantile loans that might counter this appeal. Both Pelagius and

Augustine present the wealthy with a visualization of their virtues: Pelagius in the form of moral

excellence, Augustine in the form of pragmatic charity. For Augustine, there is an added

benefit. He could also see a form of unity that emerges that preserves the social idiosyncrasies of

the wealthy and improves the material deficits of the poor. In short, Augustine discovered a

socially stable form of economic leveling. But with any solidarity, there is also an exclusion. The

solidarity between the Christian rich and poor left the non-Christian community in an

ambiguous place. While the exchange between the rich and poor forms a more tightly knit

community, it potentially closes off non-community members from being incorporated.

Exclusion and Embrace

The intensity of Christian rhetoric from and for the Christian community should not

obscure the fact that Roman Africa was ‘in the organization and attitudes of belief and cult...

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strongly dimorphic – Christian and “pagan”’, as Brent Shaw has highlighted.95Augustine’s

preaching on almsgiving reflects this reality. On the theme of almsgiving to pagans, Augustine

presents an ambiguous picture that matches the underlying anxieties of unity and solidarity in

Roman Africa. ‘Pagans’ were keenly aware of the power-grab that the denunciation of their

‘good-luck’ presents symbolize: a re-direction of the gifts toward alms placed the bishop, not

the senatorial class, at the center of the charity system that went from the distribution of bread

to the hosting of circuses.96 However, the displacement of the bishop by the poor as conduits

and stewards took away from the bishop a measure of control and power over the broader civic

community. The price of solidarity was exclusion, a fact that Augustine never fully embraced.

Yet, in some of his sermons preached during 410-420 we can detect a latent anxiety over the

promotion of alms as a project of shoring up the Christian community, on the one hand, and the

use of alms as a social program that was blind to the beliefs and practices of the recipients, on

the other hand.

Giving to all no matter their religious affiliation not surprisingly first emerged in

Augustine’s anti-Donatist sermons. In the final section of the third enarratio of Psalm 32,

Augustine exhorts his congregation to avoid favoritism:

I exhort you above all to practice this charity not only among yourselves but also toward people outside, whether they are still pagans who do not yet believe in Christ, or people divided from us who confess the Head along with us but are separated from the body. Let us grieve over them, my brothers and sisters, grieve over them as our brethren. Whether they like it or not, our brothers and sisters they are.97

The policy of inclusion extended, in this case, to giving alms to ‘pagans’. The benevolence of

the blindness of the unity within the Christian community thus extended to the non-Christian

community. This inclusion came, no doubt, with a double-edge. On the one side, non-Christian

                                                                                                               95 Shaw (2011), 199; Christopher P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 107ff. 96 s. 198(= Dolbeau 198/Mainz 62).2: Dant illi strenas, uos date eleemosynas (Dolbeau rev. ed. (2009): 91); see also Shaw (2011), 211. 97 en. Ps. 32.3.29: Ergo, fratres, ad hanc maxime exhortamur uos caritatem, non solum in uos ipsos, sed in eos etiam qui foris sunt, siue adhuc pagani, nondum credentes in Christum, siue diuisi a nobis, nobiscum caput confitentes et a corpore separati. Doleamus illos, fratres, tamquam fratres nostros. Velint nolint, fratres nostri sunt (CCSL 38: 272).

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beggars were all the better for this policy that shores up the charitable giving from non-

Christian institutions. But, on the other side, it reminded the local elites that they were no

longer the great benefactors of their cities.98 With not the slightest hint of triumphalism,

Augustine says in en. Ps. 46:

What crowds of people, not yet Christians themselves, come running to the Church and begging the Church to help them! They want temporal assistance from us, even if they are still unwilling to reign eternally with us. Since everyone wants help from the Church, including those who are not yet its members, can it not be truly said that he has subjected peoples to us, put nations under our feet?99

Augustine’s is not a case of proto-secularism, for ambiguities, tensions, and a world saturated

with tribal interest still prevailed. Jerome sums it up well: ‘Give to whoever asks you, but

especially to those who belong to the household of faith’.100

Augustine-the-pagan-accepting is alas just as rife with ambiguities and ironies.

Augustine’s censure of giving alms from stolen property in s. 178 illustrates the divisions

between the Christian and non-Christian communities that emerges in the fight over charity. In

Augustine’s imagined discourse, the thief attempts to morally launder his plunder by hosting

‘agape meals’ that would have been attended by both rich and poor.101 Augustine sets the moral

terms by drawing on the Christological figuration: ‘When you feed a Christian, you’re feeding

Christ; when you strip a Christian, you’re stripping Christ’.102 But, in the imagined back and

forth, Augustine seems to protect the right of the pagan not to be plundered for Christians.

                                                                                                               98 C. Lepley, ‘Le lieu des valeurs communes. La cité terrain neutre entre païens et chrétiens dans l’Afrique romaine tardive’, in H. Inglebert, ed., Idéologies et valeurs civiques dans le monde romain: Hommage à Claude Lepelley (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 2002), 271-85. See also Shaw (2011), 272. 99 en. Ps. 46.5: Quanti enim modo currunt ad ecclesiam nondum christiani, rogant auxilium ecclesiae; subueniri sibi temporaliter uolunt, etiamsi in aeternum nobiscum regnare adhuc nolunt. Cum omnes quaerunt auxilium ecclesiae, et qui nondum sunt in ecclesia, nonne subiecit plebes et gentes sub pedibus nostris? (CCSL 38: 532). 100 Jerome, ep. 54.2. 101 See Finn (2006), 103-6. 102 s. 178.4: Intellege ergo, stulte, qui vis eleemosynam facere de rapina, quoniam si quando pascis Christianum, pascis Christum; quando spolias Christianum, spolias Christum (PL 963).

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‘When you, a Christian, you see, strip a pagan bare, you prevent him becoming a Christian’.103

It is the impetus to conversion that dominates, and Augustine presages a dark turn when he

accepts his imagined interlocutor’s argument that he is not stripping the ‘pagan’ but giving a

‘harsh and salutary discipline’. ‘I would listen to you and believe you, if what you have taken

from him as a pagan, you gave back to him as a Christian’.104 It is unclear whether the irony of

this last statement is missed by Augustine, but it is nevertheless clear that lay almsgiving

presents another front in the battle between two social worlds.

The bishop, often thought to be Christian late antiquity’s version of the strongman, is,

in Augustine’s rendering, a man peculiarly over-stretched by the need to unify the Christian

community in the context of internal and external threats of division. It is chiefly the sermon,

that new tool for persuasion, that the bishop has to cajole, ridicule, encourage, inspire, and

berate into forming a social solidarity. But with any new solidarity there is always a different

exclusion, and Augustine’s sermons on almsgiving testify to this social reality.

Conclusion

‘The sharing of goods within a congregation realized the church’s unity and symbolized

its hope of sharing eternal life’, Patout Burns and Robin Jensen have thusly recently summarized

the practice of almsgiving.105 I have tried here to provide an account of the actual arguments

that Augustine uses. Undoubtedly theological – it would be surprising if it were not so –

Augustine’s move toward centralizing Christ in the exchange between rich and poor pays

dividends for the spiritual or affective unity between the rich and poor, but comes with the cost

of a restricted scope of social dependency. Augustine was, to his final days, what we might call a

‘law and order man’, and his promotion of lay almsgiving reflects this inclination. However, as

the history of the rhetoric of almsgiving suggests, the exclusion that parallels every new

solidarity will portend dark periods in Christian history. But within Augustine’s own age, the

                                                                                                               103 s. 178.5: Cum enim Christianus spolias Paganum, impedius fieri Christianum (PL 963). 104 s. 178.5: Etiam et hic fortasse respondebis adhuc: Ego non odio poenam ingero, sed dilectione potius disciplinae; ideo spolio Paganum, ut per hanc asperam et salubrem disciplinam faciam Christianum. Audirem et crederem, si quod abstulisti Pagano, redderes Christiano (PL 963). 105 Burns and Jensen (2014), 570.

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anxieties of unity, preserving the fragile Donatist settlement and countering the radically

different spirituality of Pelagius, would force a man to make decisions and promote solidarities

that would one day subvert the inclusivity of his brighter days.