Ransoming Captives and Burying the Dead

This is that perfect justice which protects human society — the justice the philosophers talk about. And this is the chief and truest advantage of riches: not to spend wealth on one man’s private pleasure, but on the good of many; not for your own enjoyment now, but for justice, which is the one thing that does not perish. So we have to keep this firmly in mind: any hope of getting something back must be entirely absent from the duty of showing mercy. The reward for this work and this duty is to be looked for from God alone. If you look for it from a person, it will not be kindness but a loan — a favor put out at interest. And a man cannot be thought to have done well by someone else when what he does is done not for the other man but for himself. And yet it comes to this in the end: whatever a man gives to another while hoping for no advantage from him, he really gives to himself, since he will receive his reward from God. God has also commanded that whenever we put on a dinner, we invite to it the people who cannot invite us back and repay us, so that no part of our life is left without mercy at work in it. No one should think, though, that he is shut off from the company of his friends or from ordinary kindness to his neighbors. God has simply shown us what our true and just work is. We should go on living with our neighbors — as long as we know that the one way of living has a man in view, and the other has God. [a]

So hospitality is a leading virtue, as the philosophers also say — but they twist it away from true justice and haul it over to profit. Cicero says: “Hospitality was rightly praised by Theophrastus. For it seems to me highly becoming that the houses of illustrious men should stand open to illustrious guests.” Here he has made the same mistake he made before, when he said we should spend our generosity on “suitable” people. The house of a just and wise man ought not to stand open to the distinguished, but to the low and the destitute. Distinguished and powerful men cannot be in need of anything; their own wealth protects them and honors them well enough. And a just man should do nothing except what is a real benefit. If the benefit is paid back, it is destroyed and finished, because we cannot hold a thing whole once a price has been handed to us for it. So justice works with the benefits that have stayed safe and unspoiled — and there is no other way for them to stay so than to be given to men who can do nothing for us in return.

But in taking in distinguished guests, Cicero had nothing in view except usefulness, and the clever man did not hide what advantage he hoped for. He says that whoever does it will become influential abroad through the goodwill of leading men, whom he will have tied to himself by the bond of hospitality and friendship. How many arguments could be brought to show Cicero contradicting himself, if that were what I was after! And he would be convicted less by my words than by his own. He says himself that the more a man refers all his actions to his own advantage, the less good a man he is. He says too that it is no part of a straightforward, open man to go canvassing for other people’s favor, to pretend and to allege anything, to look as though he is doing one thing when he is doing something else, to make a show of giving to another what he is really giving to himself — that this belongs instead to the scheming and the crafty, the deceitful and the treacherous. Then how could he hold that this office-seeker’s hospitality of his was not sharp practice? You run round to every gate of the city so that you can invite the leading men of the provinces and towns to your house as they arrive, and use them to gain influence with their fellow citizens; and you want to be called just and kind and hospitable, when what you are working at is your own advantage. But did he not let that slip rather carelessly? What could suit Cicero less? Through not knowing true justice he walked into this trap wittingly and deliberately. And so as to be excused for it, he declared that he was not laying down rules with reference to true justice, which he does not possess, but with reference to a sketch and outline of justice. So we must pardon this teacher of shadows and images, and not demand the truth from a man who admits that he does not know it.

Ransoming prisoners is a great and noble exercise of justice, and the same Cicero approved of it. “And this kind of generosity,” he says, “is useful even to the state: that prisoners be ransomed out of slavery, and that men of small means be provided for. I much prefer this practice of generosity to lavish spending on public shows. This belongs to great and outstanding men.” So supporting the poor and ransoming prisoners is the work that properly belongs to the just, since even among the unjust anyone who does these things is called great and outstanding. For it deserves the highest praise when help comes from people nobody expected it from. A man who does good to a relative, or a neighbor, or a friend either earns no praise or certainly no great praise, because he is bound to do it; he would be a man who had failed in plain family duty, and detestable for it, if he did not do what both nature itself and kinship require. And when he does it, he does it not so much to win credit as to avoid blame. But the man who does it for a stranger, someone he does not know — he is the one who truly deserves praise, because nothing but kindness led him to it. Justice exists, then, where there is no compulsion of necessity to confer the benefit. He should not, then, have preferred this duty of generosity to spending on shows. That is what a man does who is drawing a comparison and choosing the better of two goods. The extravagance of men throwing their property into the sea is empty and frivolous, and about as far from all justice as anything can be. They should not even be called gifts, since the only people who receive anything from them are the people who deserve to receive nothing.

It is no less a great work of justice to protect and defend orphans and widows who are destitute and in need of help. That is why the divine law lays this on everyone; and all good judges hold it part of their office to treat such people with natural kindness and to work hard for their good. But these works are ours in a special way, since we have received the law and the very words of God instructing us. Other men see that it is naturally just to protect those who need protecting, but they do not see why it is. God, to whom everlasting mercy belongs, commands that widows and orphans be defended and cherished for this reason: so that no one, out of concern and pity for his own children, should be held back from going to his death for justice and for faith, but should meet it promptly and boldly, knowing that he is leaving the people he loves in God’s care and that they will never lack protection. Taking on the care and support of the sick, who need someone to help them, is also the greatest kindness and a great work. Whoever does it will both win a living sacrifice for God, and what he has given to another for a time he will himself receive back from God for eternity. And the last and greatest duty of piety is burying strangers and the poor — a subject those teachers of virtue and justice never touched at all. Men who measured every duty by usefulness could not see it. In the other matters mentioned above they did not keep to the true road, but since they found some advantage in them they were held, as it were, by a faint scent of the truth, and did not wander so far. This one they abandoned altogether, because they could see no advantage in it.

There have even been men who thought burial unnecessary and said that it was no evil to lie unburied and uncared for. Their godless wisdom is rejected alike by the whole human race and by the words of God, which command that the rite be performed. They do not go so far as to say it ought not to be done, only that if it happens to be left undone, no harm follows. So on that point they are not so much laying down a rule as offering consolation: if it should happen to a wise man, he is not to think himself wretched over it. But we are not talking about what a wise man ought to put up with; we are talking about what he himself ought to do. So we are not asking now whether the whole business of burial is useful or not. Even if it is useless, as they imagine, it must still be done, if only because among men it is seen as the right and kind thing to do. What is being examined is the feeling behind it; what is being weighed is the intention. So we will not let the image and handiwork of God lie out in the open as prey for animals and birds; we will give it back to the earth it came from. And even when the dead man is a stranger, we will do for him what his relatives would do; since they are not there, let kindness take their place. Wherever there is need of a human being, that is where we will judge our duty is owed. And what does the nature of justice consist in more than this — giving to strangers out of kindness what we give our own family out of love? This kindness is far more certain and far more just when it is done, not for the man himself, who no longer feels anything, but for God alone, to whom a just work is the most acceptable sacrifice.

Someone will perhaps say: “If I do all these things, I will have nothing left. What if great numbers of men are in need, or suffering cold, or taken prisoner, or dying? A man acting this way must strip himself of his property inside a single day. Am I to throw away an estate got by my own work or by my ancestors’, so that afterward I have to live off other people’s pity?”

Why are you such a coward about poverty — the thing your own philosophers praise, testifying that nothing is safer and nothing more peaceful? What you are afraid of is a harbor out of the reach of anxiety. Do you not know how many dangers and how many accidents you are exposed to with these wicked resources of yours? They will have treated you well if they pass without your blood being shed. You walk about loaded with plunder, and you carry spoils that could stir up even your own relatives. Why hesitate, then, to lay out well what a single robbery may snatch away from you — or a proscription springing up out of nowhere, or an enemy’s looting? Why are you afraid to make a frail and perishable good everlasting, or to hand your treasures over to God to keep, where you need not fear thief or robber, or rust, or a tyrant? The man who is rich toward God can never be poor. If you value justice so highly, put down the loads that press on you and follow her; get yourself free of shackles and chains, so that you can run to God with nothing holding you back. It belongs to a great and lofty mind to look down on mortal things and trample them underfoot. But if you cannot rise to that virtue — laying your riches on the altar of God so as to get yourself possessions steadier than these frail ones — then I will free you from your fear. All these instructions are not given to you alone, but to the whole people, who are one in mind and hold together as one man. If you are not equal on your own to great works, practice justice with all the power you have — but in such a way that you outdo others in the work as far as you outdo them in riches. And do not think you are being advised to reduce or drain away your property. What you would have spent on luxuries, turn to better uses. Spend on ransoming prisoners what you spend buying wild animals; keep the poor alive on what you spend feeding beasts; bury the innocent dead with what you spend supplying men for the sword. What good does it do to make rich men out of utterly worthless creatures who fight beasts in the arena, and to fit them out for their crimes? Take what is about to be miserably thrown away and move it over to the great sacrifice, so that in return for these true gifts you may have an everlasting gift from God. Mercy has a great reward, for God promises that in return for it he will remit every sin. “If you listen to the prayer of the man begging from you, I too will listen to yours. If you pity people in distress, I too will pity you in your distress. But if you take no notice of them and do not help them, I will hold the same mind toward you that you held toward them, and I will judge you by your own laws.”

So every time you are asked for help, believe that God is testing you, to see whether you deserve to be heard yourself. Search your own conscience, and heal your wounds as far as you can. But do not think that because offenses are taken away by generosity, you have been handed permission to sin. They are taken away if you are generous toward God because you have sinned; if you sin in reliance on your generosity, they are not taken away. For what God wants above all is that men be cleansed of their sins, and that is why he commands them to repent. And to repent is nothing else than to declare and promise that you will not sin again. So those who slide into sin unawares and off their guard are pardoned; the man who sins deliberately has no pardon. And if anyone has been cleansed of every stain of sin, he must not think that he may leave off the work of generosity because he has no faults left to blot out. On the contrary, he is bound to practice justice all the more once he has become just, so that what he once did to heal his own wounds he may afterward do for the praise and glory of virtue. Add to this that no one can be free of fault as long as he is weighed down by a covering of flesh, whose weakness is under the rule of sin in three ways — in deeds, in words, and in thoughts. [v]

By these same steps justice climbs to its greatest height. The first step of virtue is to keep away from evil deeds; the second, to keep away from evil words as well; the third, to keep away even from the thought of evil things. The man who climbs the first step is just enough; the man who climbs the second now has virtue complete, since he offends neither in what he does nor in what he says; the man who climbs the third seems truly to have reached the likeness of God. For it is almost past the measure of a human being not even to let into his thoughts what is bad in action or improper in speech. So even just men, who can hold back from every unjust act, are sometimes overcome by frailty itself, so that they either speak evil in anger or, at the sight of delightful things, desire them in silent thought. But if the mortal condition does not allow a man to be clean of every stain, then the faults of the flesh ought to be wiped away by continual generosity. For it is the one work of a man who is wise and just and worthy of life to lay out his riches on justice alone; and certainly the man without her, even if he outdid Croesus or Crassus in riches, is to be counted poor, and naked, and a beggar. So we must put out our effort to be clothed in the garment of justice and piety, which no one can strip from us, and which will supply us with an ornament that lasts forever. For if the worshipers of the gods bow down to images that cannot feel, and hand over to them whatever precious thing they own — though the images can neither make any use of it nor give thanks for having received it — how much more just and true it is to reverence the living images of God, so as to earn the favor of the living God! For these do make use of what they receive, and do give thanks; and God, in whose sight you will have done what is good, will both approve it and reward your piety.