Daniel Caner. The Rich and the Pure: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society in Early Byzantium.

Abstract

In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius recounted how in 250 Christians in Alexandria courageously cared for the victims of an epidemic. Without thinking of their safety, they embraced their loved ones as death approached. Their pagan neighbors, on the other hand, abandoned their family members in fear and left them to die alone in the streets. These Alexandrian Christians were practicing philanthropia, the virtue the apostle Paul called agape (love, charity), but they did not extend this philanthropy to pagans. In the next hundred years, however, Christians began to assist all men and women regardless of their religious beliefs. Scholars studying Christian philanthropy in the Early Byzantine period (323 to 642) attribute this expanding scope of Christian charity to Constantine’s conversion and the subsequent Christianization of the Roman state. In The Rich and the Pure: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society in Early Byzantium, Daniel Caner has undertaken a far more thorough analysis of this shift in Christian philanthropy. By examining various terms that Christian writers chose to emphasize different aspects of Paul’s agape, Caner traces out more precisely how these shifts occurred.