Eleanore Stump
Eleonore Stump is Robert J. Henle, S.J. Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University. She has a Ph.D. in medieval studies and medieval philosophy from Cornell University. Published works include Reasoned Faith (1993); Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (1998); the Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (1993); the Cambridge Companion to Augustine (1999); and Aquinas in the series "Arguments of the Philosophers" (2003). Her Gifford lectures, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering, are forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
The following essay was published in the December 2004 edition of Reconsiderations, the quarterly publication of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, available at www.christianstudycenter.org.
Editor's note: In the fall of 2004, the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, in cooperation with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida, sponsored a Culture Seminar lecture series on Issues in Contemporary Philosophy. The series concluded on November 18 when St. Louis University Professor of Philosophy Eleonore Stump spoke at the University of Florida on “Personal Relations and Moral Residue: The Holocaust and Stain on the Soul.” As a moral philosopher Prof. Stump draws from medieval Christian thought to address issues such as evil, pain, and suffering. Because of her acclaimed work on this topic, in 2003 Prof. Stump was asked to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, Scotland. The day after her lecture at UF, Prof. Stump addressed a gathering of Christian faculty and graduate students at the Study Center, discussing the Medieval notion of bodily and spiritual almsdeeds. We offer here a print version of that talk.
From the time Augustine decisively bested his opponents in the Pelagian controversy, orthodox Christian theologians and philosophers in all periods and places have agreed that we are saved by faith, and only by faith. Our works do not save us. Our faith in Christ does. I emphasize this point at the outset because I want to talk about our works, and I want to make sure that no one supposes I am talking about what we need to do in order to win salvation. I do want to talk about our responsibilities as Christians, however, and not just as Christians but as educated Christians.
The first thing to see in this connection is that in virtue of the education we have received, we are among the aristocrats of the earth. I don't mean to say, and you must not get mixed up and think that I am saying, that we are better than other people in virtue of being educated. Anybody who thinks that aristocrats are better than other people hasn't thought enough about aristocrats. What makes aristocrats different from other people is definitely not that they are better than other people but rather only this, that an enormous amount of the good things of this earth have been lavished on them. For how many people, in how many places and times, has our sort of education been possible even to dream about? Imagine how many people at the margins of society could have been supported on what it takes to put one American student through college for a year? And so this is the sense in which our education has made aristocrats of each one of us. A vast quantity of the good things the earth has to offer has been bestowed on us in the process of our education.
Now the only excuse that anyone has ever thought up to justify aristocracy is service. And the same thought is in the Gospels: a person to whom much has been given is a person from whom much will be required, too. And so each of us has a serious, weighty responsibility to serve others with those very good things that have been given to us.
Sometimes when we think about our responsibility as Christians, we think about our responsibility to the poor. And this is a good thing to think about. In fact, during the medieval period, it was thought that there are seven acts of help which are owed to those in need. These acts are called the seven acts of corporal almsgiving, and the medieval list is instructive for us. They are feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, providing shelter to the homeless, preparing clothing for those without it, visiting the prisoners, ransoming the captives, and burying the dead. It is worth repeating them because they are certainly worth remembering. The seven acts of corporal almsgiving are feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, providing shelter to the homeless, preparing clothing for those without it, visiting the prisoners, ransoming the captives, and burying the dead. Whatever our special obligations are as educated Christians, they do not absolve us from the ordinary obligations attendant on all Christians, to care for those in some bodily need.
But I mention this list of seven acts of almsgiving only to set it to one side, because I want to talk about a different list of almsdeeds. The medieval period had a second list of seven, and it's that second list I want us to think about. This is the list of the seven acts of spiritual almsgiving. This list is obligatory, too. This second list of acts of almsgiving is especially important for us, insofar as at least some of the things on the list are things which we, in virtue of our education, are more able to do well than we would be without our education. This list is specially instructive for us, specially obligatory for us.
The list of seven spiritual acts of almsgiving are: instructing the ignorant, counseling those troubled in faith, consoling the sorrowful, speaking up for those victimized by injustice, forgiving injuries done to us, bearing with those who trouble us, and praying for everybody. Shall we hear that list again as well? The seven spiritual acts of almsgiving are: instructing the ignorant, counseling those troubled in faith, consoling the sorrowful, speaking up for those victimized by injustice, forgiving injuries done to us, bearing with those who trouble us, and praying for everybody.
This is a wonderful list, in my view, and it only makes things better that the acts on the list are obligatory for us.
That is, consider the person who always blows his nose loudly, with juicy sniffing, at the dinner table. If you manage somehow to avoid giving him a sharp rebuke or a disgusted glance, if you manage even to avoid being irritated with him in your heart, on the medieval view you have achieved only what bare justice requires. The poor of the earth, including those who are poor in the sense of being a pain to their fellow human beings, these poor have a right, in justice, to love and care from us. So bearing with those who trouble us is an act justice requires of us.
In an even more paradoxical way, acts of mercy are obligatory on us. We are obligated to forgive those who are unjust to us; and we are unjust to them if we do not. You can see for yourself that this claim is true, however odd it sounds. Consider the parable of the prodigal son, and imagine a different ending to the story. Imagine that the prodigal son came home and said to his father, "Father, forgive me! I have sinned against heaven and against you and am no more worthy to be called your son"; and then imagine that the father said to his son, "Well, I've considered being merciful and forgiving you, but I've decided against it. You're right: you're not worthy to be my son. So off with you! Go some place else!" Surely, surely, we would think ill of that father and blame him for hard-heartedness. None of us would approve of him, would we? And so as you can see, there's something morally wrong with the father if he doesn't forgive his son. The father has to forgive him, if he wants to retain our moral approval.
Speaking up against injustice done to others is also obligatory. We might understand the sort of self-protectiveness or cowardice that makes a person silent when he should step forward to protect those victimized by injustice, but we certainly think less of people who give in to that sort of cowardice. When we learn that a Catholic bishop knew about the sexual abuse being perpetrated by a priest in his diocese but protected the priest rather than the victims of that priest, we feel moral scorn for the bishop. In order to avoid moral scorn, there are times when we have to speak up, even if it is at cost to ourselves.
And so the spiritual almsdeeds are obligatory on all Christians. But clearly some of the acts of spiritual almsgiving on the medieval list are especially obligatory for educated Christians, and those are the acts of instructing the ignorant and counseling those doubtful in faith. These are acts of spiritual almsdeeds where our gift of an education gives us a special responsibility to others.
Furthermore, the medievals thought that the spiritual almsdeeds are more important than the corporal almsdeeds. They believed this because they saw that there is a hunger of the body and then there is a hunger of the soul, for faith, for understanding, for company and consolation in affliction. And the medievals thought there would be more pain and more peril for a person who doesn't get fed when he is hungry in soul than when he doesn't get fed but is hungry only in his body.
Whether or not they were right in their rank ordering, what is clear is that there are terrible hungers of mind and spirit as well as hungers of the body, and that those with some education have a special responsibility to do what they can to meet those psychic needs. We are called to do what we can to pass on our education by teaching, in any way we can -- by research, by formal classroom teaching, or by any kind of informal teaching -- those people with whom we can share what we ourselves have been given.
It isn't possible to give a specific set of formulations about our obligations with regard to learning which will fit everybody. But here is one thing which will apply to all of us who find ourselves in higher education. We do no one any good with mediocrity. Sometimes we get tired. Sometimes we get lazy. Sometimes we feel defeated. Sometimes we get mixed up and think that there is some virtue in selling ourselves short; and so we excuse our failure even to try for mastery and excellence by telling ourselves that we don't have much talent. But none of this is acceptable, is it? Our God is a consuming fire. If we let ourselves get close to that fire, in the love of the life of faith, we will blaze, too, won't we?
Mother Teresa's nuns are all over the world now. She built an incredibly powerful and influential organization. And she started as one small, obscure, powerless woman; she started by picking up a broom in the house of a poor family in Calcutta and sweeping the floor for them. Augustine's mother thought he would never convert to Christianity. Aquinas's classmates thought he was dumb. Milton wrote virtually all his great poetry when he had lost his sight, his property, his job, and his community. Our job is not to try to determine how much talent or opportunity we have been given, in order to avoid having to go too far or try too much. Our job is to give everything we've got and let God determine what to make of it. And so we need to strive hard for all the excellence we can in whatever work God gives us to do.
I want to finish by reflecting briefly on how we are to evaluate our success in our efforts to fulfill our obligations when we have struggled for excellence.
What is most instructive for us, as we reflect on where we are and what we have achieved, is, I think, the story of Cyril and Methodius. They were brothers, born in the 9th century AD in the Greek-speaking part of the Christian world. They took it as their lives' work to convert the Slavs, the people of Russia and other territories where Slavonic was spoken. But at that time there was no written language for Slavonic. So Cyril invented an alphabet for Slavonic, and Cyril and Methodius translated the Scriptures into Slavonic, writing them down in Cyril's invented language. Then they set out for the Slavonic-speaking countries to evangelize, with their newly made Slavonic Bibles. They gave their lives to that effort. But they made very few converts, and then they died. Their work and their Slavonic Bible were largely forgotten.
But later, much later, when there was a new move to evangelize Slavic peoples, the missionaries took the Bibles made by Cyril and Methodius with them and began a wave of conversion which brought one nation after another to Christianity, until in the 10th century all of Russia was converted.
Cyril and Methodius might have thought that they had spent their labor in vain. They might have thought, at the end of their lives, that they had been entirely unsuccessful in what they set out to do. But they were faithful. They gave all they had to what they saw as their vocation, as educated Christians in the service of the Lord. And the fruit that crowned their labor and sacrifice was enormous - only it came after their deaths, and not before.
And so success for us has to be defined differently from the way in which it is defined in the secular world. For us, success is being faithful in all we do, to the best of our ability, to give back all that has been bestowed on us as educated Christians, to understand what our calling obligates us to. What happens to our efforts is in God's hand, and it's his business, not ours.
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