Charitable Love: Bearing the Other's Transcendence

Abstract

According to a popular view charity is reduced to mercy and benevolence. Through an exploration of traditional, Christian, charitable acts – both corporeal and spiritual in nature – I set out to develop an alternative view. Why, for example, is the simple act of laying the dead to rest considered an act of charity? Feelings of pity and commiseration offer an insufficiently firm basis for justifying such an attribution. By adopting the burial of the dead as a sort of touchstone, I suggest that the (corporeally or spiritually) indigent other finds him- or herself in need of charity at the precise moment that he or she loses the ability to react as a person. Sometimes being charitable comes to expression in relinquishing one’s demands that the other behave as morally responsible people ought to behave. Charity involves the question of how to bear the other’s ‘transcendence’.