Zita of
Lucca was a thirteenth-century house servant. Patient and responsible, she was
given to meditation and heard Mass daily. But she was known and loved most of
all for her generosity. Whatever Zita had, she gave away to the poor.
One cold
morning, compelled by her master to wear his cloak on her journey to church,
she met a beggar and wrapped the cloak around him without a moment’s
hesitation. Returning home without it, she was roundly scolded. Later that day,
a mysterious stranger appeared at the door, the master’s cloak in hand. Another
time, called away from the kitchen while baking bread to attend to a sick
woman, her fellow servants were amazed to discover a company of angels tending
the ovens.
The lives of
the saints abound with stories like these. Saint Brigid gave her father’s
prized sword to a leper, and, after being exiled to a work in a dairy in
response, she slipped dozens of hampers of butter out the side door. Elizabeth
of Hungary was chased from her castle for pawning her jewels to build a
hospital during a plague, while Robert Bellarmine scandalized Renaissance Rome
by ripping the tapestries from his walls to have them cut up for clothing for
the poor. The walls, he assured his fellow clerics, wouldn’t catch cold. Even
Martin Luther, for all his hostility to works of supererogation, had to insist
that his wife Katie keep the key to the family strongbox. Otherwise, he would
be sure to give it all away.
Several
recent studies in neuroscience claim to have found a way to explain (or perhaps
explain away) this compulsion toward generosity. “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop
Giving” is an article by Sam Kean in the May 2015 issue of The Atlantic. It
traces the story of Joao, a Brazilian man who, after suffering a stroke, quit
his job at a Rio insurance company to sell French fries from a street cart. He
gave helpings of fries to whoever asked for them and spent most of the money
his profits on buying sweets for street children. Even after the cart went out
of business and he was reduced to subsisting on his mother’s pension, Joao
still couldn’t help giving away whatever he had. Nothing made him happier.
Jordan
Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University Medical School,
conducted a study a decade ago in which participants were placed in fMRI
machines and asked to make decisions about donating to charities. The scans
revealed that choosing to give money away was correlated with high levels of
activity in the brain’s mesolimbic system. This system is an important part of
the brain’s pleasure circuit, producing the happiness-inducing chemical
dopamine. Giving money away activated the circuits even more than receiving
money. In Kean’s words:
What your mother told you, then, is true: it is better to give
than to receive. She probably just didn’t realize that, neurologically, giving
is roughly on par with eating fudge or getting laid.
Even though
giving is deeply pleasurable, neuroscientists believe that our frontal lobes,
which are associated with social reasoning and weighing different alternatives,
suppress and regulate our desire to experience that pleasure. Reasoned
reflection shows us the downside of emptying our wallets, just as it warns us
against that third piece of fudge. But if our brain is damaged, as Joao’s was
by his stroke, the ability of the frontal lobes to control the process can be
disabled. Without regulating frontal lobes, we lose all impulse control, and
can become hopelessly addicted — or, perhaps, magnificently generous saints.
Whether
Saint Francis’s paroxysms of joy over Lady Poverty have something to do with
poor mesolimbic regulation is probably a question best left to a hagiographer
with better neuroscientific credentials. But Kean also alleges that this new
research challenges many of our deepest assumptions about why giving is a good
thing.
We normally
think of generosity as pure and noble, evidence of the soul, not evidence of
brain damage. But what if giving is largely a reflex or an instinct or even,
sometimes, a sign of mental derangement?
If giving is
pleasurable, if it makes us feel good, is it really pure? Shouldn’t all giving
be a form of self-sacrifice, something we do for the sake of the other, a duty
pursued for its own sake? For a Kantian, perhaps. But the Scriptures are rather
more ambivalent about the subject, as is the long trajectory of discussion about
almsgiving in ascetical theology.
* * *
Neurology’s
discovery that giving is pleasurable accords with a consistent theme in
Scripture. Job, for example, looks back with great fondness upon the days when
he was wealthy and able to give freely to all who asked for his help:
When the ear
heard, it called me blessed,
and when the
eye saw, it approved;
because I
delivered the poor who cried,
and the
fatherless who had none to help him.
The blessing
of him who was about to perish came upon me,
and I caused
the widow’s heart to sing for joy. (Job 29:11-13)
Saint Paul,
in his extended exhortation to the Corinthians about almsgiving, noted that God
“loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor. 9:7). All almsgiving, in a deeper sense,
gestures toward the joyful abundance of God the Father “who delights to give
you the kingdom” (Luke 12:35), as well as the self-offering of Christ, who laid
down his life, not merely out of duty, but “for the joy that was set before
him” (Heb. 12:2).
The
Scriptures are also rather less scrupulous about self-interest as a motivation
for giving than some modern moralists. Jesus, to be sure, rebuked the way that
the Pharisees gave to draw attention to themselves. He urged an inconspicuous
approach, “the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing” (Matt. 6:3).
But manifold benefits are promised by God to the generous, including an answer
in danger (Ps. 41:1), deliverance from death (Tob. 4:10), abundant blessings
(Mal. 3:10), and “a harvest of righteousness” (2 Cor. 9:10). Proverbs 16:6 (“By
love and faithfulness iniquity is atoned for.”) was widely interpreted by Jews
and early Christians as an assurance that giving, when accompanied by
contrition, expiated sins. The concept was echoed even more directly in
Daniel’s advice to repentant Nebuchadnezzar: “Atone for your sins by good deeds,
and for your misdeeds by kindness to the poor” (Dan. 4:27). This connection
may, in turn, lay behind Jesus’ association of sins and debts in the Lord’s
Prayer.
Sirach
straightforwardly suggests that giving to the poor is a kind of risk-free
investment.
A man’s almsgiving is like a signet with the Lord,
and he will keep a person’s kindness like the apple of his eye.
Afterward he will arise and requite them,
and he will bring their recompense on their heads. (17:22-23)
As Peter
Brown has detailed in his recent masterwork Through the Eye of a Needle,
Sirach’s reasoning played a central role in the early Christian redirection of
Roman civic largesse from pagan “bread and circuses” to Church-sponsored
charitable organizations. The theme that almsgiving stored up treasure in
heaven was reinforced in patristic sermons and treatises, through elaborate
offertory processions and even, in Augustine’s cathedral at Hippo, by a
poor-box described as winged chariots, ready to whisk off gifts to the heavenly
vault (85-86).
To many of
us, all this seems rather crude and extremely tacky. After the scandals of the
indulgence controversy and the prosperity preachers, we have good cause to be
wary of how this kind of reasoning can be misused.
But what of
those recklessly generous saints? Are they, in some important sense, models for
the rest of us? The traditional consensus has given much more attention to the
perennial problem of stinginess than the danger of giving too much.
In his
extensive section on almsgiving in the Summa
Theologiae’s treatise on charity, for example, Thomas Aquinas stresses
that, like all other virtuous acts, almsgiving must be conducted in due
proportion and governed by precept. The frontal lobes must be very active,
indeed. We cannot give what does not rightfully belong to us, though a person
in extreme need may have a greater claim than the putative owner (2a2ae.32, 7).
In keeping with Augustine’s teaching on the order of loves, Thomas stresses
that we must also be sure not to impoverish our dependents to relieve the
sufferings of those who have no claim on us (2a2ae.32, 9). Thomas’s entire line
of thought is governed by the concept that we should normally give from our
superfluous income, an idea he derives from a particularly odd Latin translation
of Luke 11:24 as “what is over and above give as alms.”
And yet, St.
Thomas allows that giving even out of poverty may be appropriate in some cases,
especially when entering religious life (2a2ae.32, 6). Similarly, in Holy
Living, Jeremy Taylor directly commends the over-zealous giver, noting:
If we do
give more than we are able, we have St. Paul for our encouragement; we have
Christ for our counsellor; we have God for our rewarder. (4.viii.13)
* * *
But if the
neurologists are right and abundant generosity is, as Kean speculates, “a sign
of mental derangement,” does that mean it has no value to the rest of us, who
occasionally wince when we slip the offering envelope into the plate, all too
aware of what generosity costs?
I’m not so
sure. Is there not a kind of holy madness in this God of ours, who abandons the
ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep, and sells all that he has to buy the
field rich in treasure? In the life of the blessed, when we feast together in
God’s abundance, will there be any need to hold ourselves back from sharing
what we have received? When love becomes complete, surely our fear of scarcity
and our need for self-preservation pass away. Our need to close the purse is a
curse of this life only, part of sin’s long shadow over all things.
Surely God
has designed us to be generous, fashioned us to rejoice in that which is for
our neighbor’s good? In the life of virtue, we come to love that which is good,
to do it easily and with pleasure. As the love of God is poured into our
hearts, our desires are gradually transformed, the theme of so many of our
Collects. Couldn’t neurochemical mechanisms be part of that habituating process
— a little dopamine pushing us on to what should be both our duty and our
delight?
“Seek ye
first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you” (Matt 6:33). Above all, that is the promise on which the
extravagantly generous lean. Perhaps theirs is a spiritual gift, a special
vocation, the “giving generously” of Romans 12:8. Or perhaps, in that dramatic
way of all the saints, they merely show the rest of us just how glorious life
can be when we cast ourselves completely upon God’s mercy. In the end, if he
who is rich in blessings intends that righteousness brings a reward and if his
angels occasionally take a turn at the ovens to make up the difference, who are
we to quibble?
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