Caritas

Let’s leave aside for the moment how I feel about the Apostle Paul (a.k.a. Saul of Tarsus).

Or not.

Gary T. McDonald, author of The Gospel of Thomas (the Younger), said, “Paul comes off as a narcissist and hypocrite who pretty much single-handedly turned the compassion of the Sermon on the Mount into a highly judgmental believe-or-burn imperative religion.”¹

Thomas Jefferson called him “the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.”²

On the other hand, the quote he is best remembered by is a good one: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

At least that’s the King James Version. Most other translations, including the Revised Standard, now substitute “love” for “charity.”³ That’s because of semantic drift—“charity” doesn’t mean what it used to.

A friend of mine wrote an essay recently on the difference between mercy and charity, using that as a springboard to talk about the ways precision in language keeps getting trampled by people who don’t know better.⁴ Mercy, he rightly points out, is where somebody with power over somebody else cuts them a break. Charity, he says, is “the voluntary giving of help…to those in need,” with no implied power inequality. He worried that there might be an implication of condescension in the word “charity” as it’s used today. He got past it, but I think there is some cause for concern. And that gets back to semantic drift.

We get the word “charity” from the Latin “caritas.” Latin’s drifting days are over, so it’s a good place to see what “charity” meant when the other Romance languages split off from it. Wiktionary translates it (among other things) as “the attitude of kindness and understanding towards others.”⁵ A Christian site puts it in the context of other languages and religions: “Charity comes from the Latin word caritas, which is Latin for [the Greek] agape. This is the highest form of Christian love….It demonstrates love through actions….The agape concept is found in Buddhism as mettā (Pali) or maitrī (Sanskrit) meaning benevolence, loving-kindness, friendliness, good will, and active interest in others.”⁶

Loving kindness is a central concept in Buddhism, and, in my non-expert view, the best translation of “caritas” that money can’t buy. I even like the sound of it: Faith, hope, and loving kindness abide, and the greatest of these is loving kindness.

Where do I sign up?

Notes

1
Email with the author.
2
Thomas Jefferson, H. A. Washington (ed.), “Letter to William Short, 1820,” The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, (Washington DC: Taylor & Maury) p. 156.
3
1 Corinthians 13. For a side-by-side comparison, see https://www.biblestudytools.com/1-corinthians/13-13-compare.html.
4
Nathan Bell, “A Songwriter and Mercy,” I Don’t Do This For Love (Homage to the Songwriter). https://nathanbell.substack.com/p/a-songwriter-and-mercy.
5
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caritas.
6
https://www.agapeaid.org/.

Related interest:

Was Jesus a Buddhist? The Gospel of Thomas (the Younger) is a terrific novel by my friend Gary T. McDonald that deals with this question, while giving Paul the drubbing he deserves.

“Cari-Caridad” by Orchestra Harlow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjeaLJsmsIU) comes from the album Hommy, a salsa version of the Who’s Tommy. As much as this sounds like a terrible idea in the abstract, the album is wonderful and is all about the loving kindness under discussion here. (The Spanish word “caridad” has not drifted much from the Latin “caritas.”)

“Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Loving-kindness” shows that Schopenhauer was all over the caritas/Buddhist connection back in 1840. (https://www.monsalvat.no/caritas.htm.)

[created 27 Nov 2022; revised 1 Jan 2023]