AJR continues its #conversations series with an exchange between Daniel Caner and Erin Galgay Walsh on Caner’s book, The Rich and the Poor: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society in Early Byzantium (University of California Press, 2021).
Below is the transcript.
Erin Walsh: So why don't we begin with the genesis of this book project. How did this grow out of your previous work?
Dan Caner: I found that sources related to monasticism (perhaps paradoxically) give us access to the underbelly of the late Roman Empire. As a social historian, I'm interested in monasticism as a social phenomenon and in its relation to other social and political developments in the ancient world. One thing that really struck me as a graduate student was how isolated monastic history was, and that led to an interest in explaining the evolution and place of monasteries in the Roman world. Despite this omission or marginalization from mainstream social history, a lot of sources made it clear that monasteries were often very much integrated. Likewise, asceticism seemed an unduly neglected or suppressed aspect of ancient Christianity, specifically the notion of Christianity as possessing two tiers (or, as Eusebius of Caesarea put it, a religion of “two ways”): one for ordinary believers, another for those who aspire to Christian perfectionism. It’s always struck me that anyone who downplays or ignores ancient Christianity’s asceticism is neglecting something integral and distinctive about the nature of early Christianity itself.
Against this broader background, I started thinking about one of the core ascetic ideals of Christian monastic tradition in particular, namely voluntary poverty. It struck me as odd, given the radical poverty exemplified by Jesus and espoused in the Gospels, that mendicant monks like those known from the Christian Middle Ages, Buddhist traditions, and some forms of Roman religion, were absent from the history of standard, “orthodox” Christian monasticism. This led to my first book, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, which was about radical notions of apostolic poverty and why such ideas were watered down or suppressed during the fourth and fifth centuries. It was while writing that book that I stumbled onto one of the central topics of the current book on ascetic wealth and gift-giving. I discovered repeated references to a type of gift identified by the Greek word eulogia, “blessing.” This intrigued me, but only when I read Leslie Kurke’s Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece did I realize there was something significant here to explore. Kurke’s work directed my attention to how the emergence of new aristocratic societies raised questions about values and what tokens were used to symbolize them. It suggested to me that the sudden rise of Christian use of the term blessing (eulogia) to describe material gifts in the fourth and fifth centuries might reflect a similar development – with ascetics as a new religious aristocratic class in need of its own distinct way of symbolizing and protecting a certain type of gift ideal.
This term, eulogia, has often been translated as “alms” – even I translated it that way in my first book. But as I researched the term more, I realized that “alms” was inadequate. When the term eulogia is used, it is often not as a gift from a fortunate person to a less fortunate person, as is always the case with an “alms” (eleēmosynē, literally a gift of “mercy”). Instead, it often indicated a gift passed between peers, or even from someone of lesser to someone of higher social standing – neither of which fit with our conception of a Christian “alms.” That observation launched this investigation into the concept of blessing, and I discovered a very distinct gift ideal emerged among Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries. I found that the Christian concept of a material gift called a eulogia originated in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor 8: 5–12), but by the fifth century it had been further conceptualized as a gift from God that was passed by humans to other deserving humans without imposing any obligation upon either the giver or the recipient. This made it akin to what anthropological studies term a “pure gift ideal,” namely one that doesn’t impose any notion of reciprocation. The idea existed before this period, certainly, but it came to be well-defined in the late antique period because, with Constantine’s conversion and the gradual integration of church and state, it became increasingly important for church and monastic authorities to have some type of gift that remained distinct and ideally detached from the normal (and somewhat notorious) gift-giving practices of the secular, lay world.
My initial foray into the world of Christian religious gift giving started with clarifying what this gift ideal was. I found that eulogia became the perfect symbol of “clean,” sacred wealth. With this concept came the idea of a type of wealth that God passed to deserving people through human agents. Such a gift came with the responsibility that whoever received such God-given wealth had to pass some or all of it to others in need. This reflected a vision of religious economy as an opportunity to give rather than take, and of sacred wealth as a circular, non-static phenomenon, both countering the ancient image of the wretched miser who “freezes” the flow of resources by hoarding his wealth in his barns to increase its value and deprive ordinary people in need.
To my surprise, I soon found a lot of material on this, especially from the early Byzantine world of the fourth to seventh centuries. (Latin authors also adopted the term eulogia, but there are far fewer examples, partly because fewer monastic or hagiographical sources have survived from the western Roman Empire.) I believe the abundance of documentation from the East was due partly to the fact that late Roman imperial superstructure persisted in all its complexity in these regions, unlike what happened in the West. One example of this superstructure was the imperial grain supply, which in the East continued until the seventh century. A portion of it was extended to bishops in charge of major metropolitan sees (Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem). As a result, extra surplus resource regularly filtered down in the East to churchmen and affiliated monasteries, giving them extra grain and bread. Such supplementary rations were explicitly referred to as eulogiai, and used for various liturgical and charitable needs.
Once I started to think about this evidence of an unfamiliar “blessing“ ideal, I started to ask: What does eulogia mean? What concerns were related to it? How did it differ from a gift of alms and other types of charitable or religious gifts? I was especially interested in claims that monks were major almsgivers. Susan Ashbrook Harvey has always insisted that this was the case, but I was intrigued by how few depictions there actually were of monks as almsgivers. What you mainly find instead are depictions of monasteries giving material blessings to people who came to their gates. These were often depicted as given to poor people, but also often to pilgrims in need. So again, not quite the same as alms. This difference intrigued me and led to the writing of this book, which sought to clarify how blessings differed from alms and other religious gifts both in theory and practice.
Finally, during my time at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in 2011 when I thought I’d be writing most of the book, I instead discovered something that gave me a whole new angle. There I found a fifth type of gift to figure out— agapē, which I translate as “charity.” When looking for references to almsgiving in the apophthegmata patrum—sayings and stories of the desert fathers—I found few either to alms or blessings. Instead, these stories mainly used the term agapē, and gradually a profile of a Christian gift of charity emerged that was distinct from that of alms, and which was especially associated with anchoretic monks – i.e., with solitary ascetics who in theory had no or very few personal possessions to give anyone.
So there were these various Christian gift ideals. It was also clear that all were interrelated, but each term implied a distinctive set of resources and responsibilities while creating different types of relationships. And it also became clear that one type of gift could be converted into another if the need calls for it (a need that could be moral as well as just purely material).
EW: This context is helpful for situating your book. It was very clear to me upon reading that philology and familiarity with the sources were critical to your research. In addition to texts composed in Greek, can you say a little bit about how you engage Syriac sources? Did you find equivalent terms among Syriac authors or were there distinct conceptual categories?
DC: I found a great deal of consistency between the Greek use of eulogia and the Syriac term for blessing, burktā. This was no surprise, since Greek and Syriac authors drew common inspiration from 2 Cor 9: 5–12. But I was also puzzled by how Syriac authors used the term ṭaybutā which is usually translated as “grace” and is often used interchangeably with burktā. There seemed to be more slippage or variation than I found in Greek sources. I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out but didn’t get anywhere.
That was partly because consistency can be hard to gauge. To give a proper judgment you not only need several hagiographical or epistolary texts, but also sources describing similar gift-giving situations or philanthropic work as the Greek sources. You need to have similar episodes from Greek and Syriac sources to properly judge, and you don’t have as many instances of this in Syriac. There are select examples from authors like John of Ephesus and Jacob of Serugh. In the end, I found enough references in Syriac and Coptic to support my findings in Greek sources in general but did not have enough material to add significant nuance.
In any case, I was mainly interested in describing these gift categories in ways that an individual from late antiquity would recognize. I doubt that everyday lay people thought much about these gift ideals and related concerns but assume that “serious Christians” – especially monks or ascetically minded bishops—did reflect on them. My reasoning here is twofold:
First, asceticism resulted in both an actual and a theoretical reduction of material resources. One therefore had to think hard about how, what, and why one gave. This is one reason there was a spectrum of gift options, reflecting different resources and purposes: blessings from God-given material surplus or leftover resources that could be given to anyone without hesitation (an apple, a wooden cross); alms from man-made surplus wealth often derived through injustice towards the poor, given to expiate sin of those injustices; and charity, derived from one’s most essential resources, given to help both giver and recipient as part of a long-term relationship. Again, these ideas were most important to ascetic Christians, who had few resources but who also had to take seriously how to put into practice the various Gospel ideas of giving.
I imagine if we had a broader range of sources, we would discover that not all Christians valued asceticism and ascetic ideals in late antiquity to the same degree, so I realize that the perspective I present is conditioned by the extant sources I use. Nonetheless, I think the influence of asceticism was very important in this period and surely influenced non-ascetic people as well.
EW: I agree – it’s critical to appreciate how this ascetic impulse manifests itself within the literature of this period. I wanted to circle back to a comment you made earlier about the continuity of governmental structures within the eastern Roman Empire as an important context for the phenomena you explore. Could you say more about this relationship between government officials and monastic leaders?
DC: One of the critical developments of the fourth and fifth centuries is the emergence of lay patronage, especially by Christian aristocrats. As more Roman aristocrats became Christian, you see an expansion of patronage in a range of forms, including building hospitals, providing funds for large-scale almsgiving, and support for monasteries or individual monks. This becomes most prominent for the first time in the Theodosian Age, ca.379–450, when the imperial family and their courtiers became fully involved in patronizing monks and monasteries, often forming personal relationships with their leaders, who became personal spiritual advisors—spiritual advisors whose credibility was partly based on their demonstrable embrace of material poverty.
The result was that monastic leaders gained a base of wealth and power that could be exerted independently of church leaders. In my first book, I explored the tensions that resulted from this, but didn’t get into the question of how monks reconciled themselves to the increasing wealth of their institutions, or negotiated the problems (e.g., demands) often associated with patronal gifts.
So those questions related to patronage are central to The Rich and the Pure, prompting its social historical approach. But I should emphasize that in this book I’m also trying more broadly to explain the Christian concept of philanthropy in both theory and practice. I discovered that this ancient concept has been largely misunderstood. Whenever I heard this word in the past, it always struck me as a vague ideal that lacked any teeth and imposed no obligations. It’s almost always presented as “love of humanity,” implying kindness to all people. However, this way of describing it is imprecise. What I discovered was how challenging the ideal of philanthrōpia was during antiquity. It required being kind to others despite suspecting or knowing its recipients didn't actually deserve such kindness or mercy. It meant aiding people you knew might be hostile or dangerous to you.
Such conditions raised the stakes of this ancient ideal, posing an unusual and provocative ethical challenge. This goes back to the earliest usage. The Greek term itself, philanthrōpia, appears in the early fifth century BCE. Before it was ever ascribed to humans, it was identified with a small set of deities like Prometheus, Hermes or Demeter, and certain animals, like dogs, dolphins, and horses, who differed from all other gods or animals by being helpful to humans. Subsequently, this term starts to be adopted by Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors to mean something akin to clemency — i.e., an indulgence granted despite the fact that recipients didn’t technically or legally deserve it. We eventually see this usage adopted by Christian preachers in the fourth century to encourage giving alms to people whom one does not trust or sympathize with. Invocations of philanthrōpia are commonly found in sermons of John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nazianzus when trying to persuade almsgivers to show mercy (i.e., “alms”) to people they didn’t trust or believe deserved it. Such recipients might be lepers, whose condition many considered to be a sign of divine punishment, rendering them both abhorrent and easily ignorable. But cities also teemed with “professional” beggars. Gregory and Chrysostom counseled their audiences not to inquire about beggars’ past histories or moral backgrounds. Instead, it was time for philanthrōpia. Otherwise, no one would ever give anything, and innocent people in need would go hungry.
Scholars tend to overstate differences between the classical and Christian conceptualizations, and what was being asked of almsgivers within the Christian context. But Christian philanthropy tracks very closely to the ancient classical ideal. The use of philanthrōpia in the New Testament, although rare, clarifies how this term came to be used among Greek-speaking Christians. It appears in only three places: Acts 27:3; 28:2 and Titus 3:4. All are consistent with what I’ve described above. In the book of Acts, philanthrōpia and philanthrōpōs describe unexpected acts of kindnesses: a Roman prison guard who lets Paul see friends or when the locals who show Paul unusual kindness when he is shipwrecked. Most important, though, is the use of philanthropy in Titus 3:4 where the author affirms that he had been a sinner as among sinners who fought with each other and blasphemed in all sorts of ways. Nevertheless, the Christian God showed them mercy out of his philanthrōpia.
This passage offers two important points for understanding the future of Christian philanthropy: first, it identifies the god proclaimed by Christians as one who was willing to show kindness even to those who didn't deserve it. This is important, given the emphasis Christians later placed on penance and the sinfulness of all. How do you reform or transform for the better if God is going to punish you? As we know from the letters of ascetics, monks were always assuring others that there is hope because one of God’s essential qualities is his philanthrōpia, rendering this epistolary evidence key for understanding the term.
Second, Titus 3:4 ties mercy (eleos) to philanthropy, as an expression of God’s philanthrōpia. This seems to have been something new. In classical sources, eleos is more often discussed as an ethical concept related to feelings of shared sympathy that prompt you to help someone you identified with. One finds it used this way in Greek tragedy as well as ancient philosophy. It is an exclusive or tribal impulse, oriented toward one’s group. In theory, it could be directed toward humans in general, but rarely is. By contrast, classical philanthrōpia was an inclusive impulse, about being kind to people outside one’s group: it is usually used of aristocrats who deigned to speak or even provide loans to everyone in a city. It implied mercy, but that term is rarely combined with it before Christian times. From the fourth century onwards, almsgiving becomes a basic expression of Christian philanthropy, especially when given without questioning to “all who ask.” Ascetics thought in terms of a hierarchy of almsgiving and distinguished between better and worse almsgiving motives, but all almsgiving was considered good, because it imitated in some degree God’s capacity to share His material resources with all humanity.
I should mention the connection between philanthrōpia and Jesus’s command in Matthew 5:42-45 (“Give to the one who asks of you… that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”). The word philanthrōpia does not appear in these Gospel verses, but these verses provided important background for preachers trying to explain what this concept was supposed to mean in practice. I.e., Christians were supposed to share their material resources with other humans indiscriminately, just as God shined upon good and evil people alike. If taken seriously, this had serious implications for ascetics and serious believers who wanted to understand how to fulfill all such commands. Thus Christian philanthropy forced all sorts of issues about gift giving.
EW: I’m especially intrigued by the ways you identify Christian thinkers modifying and adapting received views of philanthrōpia. I suppose my final question is two-fold: first, what role has research on alms and charity within Jewish sources played in the development of your thought? Second, can you say more about the where and how Christians interacted with competing conceptions of gift giving across the religiously pluralistic world of late antiquity?
DC: In the book I don’t spend an extensive amount of time exploring the connections with Jewish sources, partly because I didn’t have enough time or material. Michael Satlow engaged with my work on blessings in an article called “’Fruit and the Fruit of Fruit’: Charity and Piety among Jews in Late Antique Palestine,” and raised the intriguing possibility that Paul (and later monastic authors) were adopting and developing notions of abundance that were held by Jewish lay folk of the Second Temple era.
My own work owes a lot to The Origins of Organized Charity in Rabbinic Judaism by Gregg E. Gardner. His investigation uncovers theoretical reasons for rabbinic charitable programs and how they worked institutionally. There are resonances with practices developed among Christians, such as distributing aid according to need, an approach which resulted in both cases in providing more for distressed gentlefolk. In Christian sources we find special focus on people who have fallen from prosperity due to a tragic reversal in health or wealth – lepers are a perfect example of this phenomenon (in Greek Christian discourse, the basic word for a poor person needing aid, ptōchos, was understood to literally mean a person “fallen from wealth or health”). Ideologically, it was important that Jesus was identified (as monks would later be) as just such a “fallen one,” who had voluntarily become impoverished, coming down from wealth for the sake of humanity (cf. 2 Cor 8:9). Gregory of Nazianzus acknowledges the deep shame such individuals felt who fell into poverty, a sentiment consonant with what Gardner finds in the rabbinic sources.
This common concern with the loss of dignity within late antique Christian and rabbinic sources reflects the similar aristocratic nature and outlook of both these societies. To describe a society as “aristocratic” does not just mean that it includes an isolated group of elites, but rather there is an understanding pervading it that some people are intrinsically better or more deserving than others, usually due to their birth, legal or religious status. Both Jewish and Christian sources were written by educated people (i.e., low-level aristocrats), and assume an aristocratic perspective.
But even without the universalism added by the ancient concept of philanthrōpia (not commonly found in Jewish sources, except among Hellenized Jews), Jewish and Christian authors were both promoting monotheistic religions with universalist aspirations, and so both urged giving to all (admittedly, this seems more explicit in Christianity). In both Jewish and Christian settings, such universalism posed practical institutional challenges. It’s clear that the resources of Jewish soup kitchens and Church poor funds were never sufficiently plentiful to permit equal distribution to everyone. The privileged poor—distressed gentlefolk, “fallen” people —therefore received preferential treatment, after which whatever was leftover was distributed to casual claimants. In fact, John Chrysostom envisions individual almsgivers making up for the inadequacies of this institutional approach, urging them to provide for people not included in the church doles. This is where philanthropy comes in, pressuring individual Christians to give to those who were not privileged by the church. Individual Christian almsgivers were to give, despite their distrust that the beggars to whom they were giving were actually “fallen,” and hence deserving of their alms.
Despite these clear commonalities in Jewish and Christian institutional approaches, I only found a handful of instances that showed clear influence between Christian and Jewish thinking on philanthropy. The fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate famously wanted to incorporate charitable facilities into the “pagan” revival he was fostering. He mentions in his letters that such facilities can be found in both Christian and Jewish quarters, making clear that they were a visible feature of some late Roman cities in the East, though also raising questions about how universally open they were (his remarks about Jews not having to worry about hunger can be construed to mean that Jewish soup kitchens catered exclusively to Jews). Another intriguing reference in the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus describes how Basil of Caesarea responded to a famine at about the same time in the fourth century. No one was doing anything to help the people streaming in from the countryside, so Basil had his slaves set up cauldrons of soup in the city square to feed everyone coming in. (His brother, Gregory of Nyssa, reports that Basil exemplified his philanthrōpia on this occasion by “even” providing food to children of local Jews—another indication that Christian philanthropy meant going beyond your normal group!) While Basil’s actions are not framed in relation to Jewish approaches to charitable giving, there was obviously a large Jewish community in that area, and the use of soup suggests knowledge of Jewish approaches. I bring up this example to show how parallels exist, but also how difficult it is to draw hard conclusions from the limited evidence we have.
That said, it’s clear that from the Christian perspective, philanthropy had become a major area of religious competition by the late fourth century, something Christians claimed made them different and marked them off from non-Christians. I pay perhaps too much attention to the “pagan,” classical cultural background, but this is where Christians drew the sharpest contrast themselves, in their effort to claim to enact a superior form of civic benefaction. Here I rely heavily on other scholars. Évelyne Patlagean’s Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance 4c-7c siècles is the great pioneering work, an ocean of detail and observations. It goes without saying the influence of Peter Brown’s work, especially his voluminous Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Brown traces many turns and shifts of emphasis, but a consistent thread is the questions of what aristocratic Christians should be doing with their wealth. His western setting and the personal nature of his evidence (much of it is based on exchange of personal letters) gave his book a very different orientation from my own, which focus more on concepts and the dilemmas that Christian philanthropy imposed on people with limited resources.
Finally, a third scholar whose work really helped me is Susan R. Holman. In particular, her book The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia, with its fine-grained study of the “Cappadocian Fathers” (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus) and the clear differences between those provincial writers and John Chrysostom writing in the imperial capital, gave me so much to think about.
There are so many more scholars who shaped my thinking on this subject, but those three are primary.
One thing I most enjoyed about this project was it gave me the sense I was studying something perennial and admirable about human nature. I really came to admire how seriously people grappled with questions about generosity. In the process they came up with subtle but important observations, nuances, and consistent solutions. In the end I felt I received insight about how human generosity might arise when backed by equal measures of self-sacrifice, imagination, and an admirable desire to enact goodness on earth.
Daniel F. Caner is Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. He held a joint position in the departments of History and Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, from 1999 to 2016, after receiving his PhD in 1998 from the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. His Rich and the Pure: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society in Early Byzantium was awarded the Philip Schaff prize by the American Society of Church History for the best book on Christian History published in 2021.