Only negative emotions had the power to lead humans astray from their essential nature and to cause them to commit harm against others. Control of such emotions offered the path to true wisdom; too much anger or even too much joy could disrupt the soul and limit its capacity to do good.25 Clementia was therefore the quality that humans were to cultivate most fervently, for it created peace and calm out of potential strife and conflict.26 It was the primary attribute that separated a low human spirit from an exalted one.27
Importantly, however, while the Stoics strongly encouraged the affects that tempered overly harsh justice, they still recognized firm limits for the application of those affects in human affairs. Compassion and indulgence, although vitally important to society, remained subordinate to the ideal of balance. One had to acknowledge, in other words, the existence of faults that blatantly undermined social cohesion and that therefore deserved proper punishment. Those who committed such faults were the enemies of society and the common good. Compassion and indulgence did not apply to them and in fact posed danger when exercised in relation to them. This was an ancient sensibility, inherited from Platonic and Aristotelian traditions that had both warned repeatedly against the abuses of compassion and indulgence, as well as the potential problems that such abuses posed to social well-being.28 Infractions of the law constituted an attack against the very forces that bound society together; too much compassion and indulgence could lead to complete social collapse. Thus, such ideals applied most to human interactions within limited boundaries—mainly the family or the immediate community. One had to be compassionate and indulgent with friends but severe with potential enemies. In the power politics between city-states, for example, indulgence held little place at all.29
And so even in advocating clementia, Stoic philosophy still acknowledged the existence of enemies who were real threats to communal peace and the common good and argued that the compassionate indulgence of clementia could not and did not apply to them. Again, Seneca serves as an authoritative voice. “It is not proper to grant pardon indiscriminately,” he wrote; “the reason is that when the distinction between the bad and the good is removed, the result is confusion and an outbreak of bad behavior.”30 To ward against this danger, Seneca outlined a semantic distinction between clementia and a second related term, misericordia, which he defined as compassion for and indulgence of human suffering without regard to its causes. Misericordia in Seneca’s usage was a negative quality, associated with “elderly women and silly females who are so affected by the tears of the nastiest criminals that they would break open the prison if they could. Misericordia focuses on the situation, not its cause, whereas clementia sides with reason.”31 Unchecked emotional connection with hardened criminals was not clementia, for it worked against the common good. Nor was it manly, as his misogynistic gendering of the behavior makes clear to his reader. Clementia only made sense when it was controlled, placed within limits, and combined with the firm maintenance of order. Public welfare depended on this delicate balance of compassion and firmness. When it descended (in Seneca’s view) into misericordia, it threatened the very fabric that held society together.
It was precisely this definition of misericordia to which Augustine referred when discussing the new Christian vernacular usage of pietas as a term for works of misericordia. Augustine wrote in De civitate Dei that he was deeply uncomfortable with the Stoic conception of misericordia as a vice, preferring instead to follow Cicero, who lauded Caesar’s misericordia as a virtue.32 Like the Stoics, Augustine was careful to note the necessity of enacting misericordia according to reason and without violating social well-being, signaling his awareness of the potential danger that misericordia could pose.33 Yet he had considerable trouble bringing himself to think of it as a negative quality. “What is misericordia,” he queried rhetorically, “but a kind of fellow feeling in our hearts for the misery of another which compels us to help him if we can?”34 For “fellow-feeling,” he uses the Latin term compassio—literally the “fellow suffering.” The Sermon on the Mount’s call for love of one’s enemy, coupled with the Gospels’ emphasis on simple penitence as the only requirement for God’s ultimate absolution of sins, made difficult the notion that a human society could identify specific crimes that were entirely unworthy of forgiveness.
Indeed, unlimited emotional interconnection among humans could never be a sin for Augustine because it was part of the very nature of God. “From this manner of speaking,” he wrote, in further discussion of misericordia and the common meaning of pietas, “it has also come about that God himself is called pius. The Greeks, however, never call him eusebes in their own discourse, although they also commonly use eusebeia to mean misericordia.”35 Pietas in the Christian idiom was thus similar to the more ancient notion of philanthropia in that it referred to an innate disposition, but where philanthropia most often referred generally to a disposition of calm and nonviolence, Christian pietas referred to a disposition of caritas—the embodiment, that is, of unlimited love and fellow-feeling toward all others, friend and enemy alike.36 No longer hemmed in by practical sensibilities or classical ideals of the public interest, Christian ethical philosophy in the Augustinian tradition was the completion and perfection of what he considered to be the flawed moral and social paradigms that had dominated the ancient world.
“Not in the Body but in the Heart”
In the earliest centuries of Christianity, the public performance of this radical form of emotional interconnection became a key marker of elite Christian discipleship.37 Incredulous Romans described Christians acting out New Testament moral extremity in very literal ways in defiance and protest of imperial authority.38 These Christians were, of course, the holy martyrs—witnesses to God’s love who willingly suffered, even sought out persecution through their strict adherence to pacifism, nonviolence, and nonresistance toward their oppressors and executioners. They were quite literal incarnations of caritas to the absolute letter of the Gospel. As the Western Roman imperial elite slowly converted to Christianity over the course of the fourth century CE, however, Christianity had to adapt to its new majority status. Martyrdom could no longer signify discipleship in the same manner that it once did. This sea change in circumstance rendered the performance of unlimited love to the letter of the Gospel far more theologically complex.39
Sulpicius Severus wrote his story of St. Martin and the Beggar during precisely this transitional moment in the history of Christian social thought. At the turn of the fifth century CE, he and a remarkable concentration of talented contemporaries—not just Augustine and Jerome but also Ausonius of Bordeaux (d. c. 395), Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), and Paulinus of Nola (d. 431), among others—contemplated what Christian society and practice should become. Christianity was now the “official” spiritual affiliation of the Empire, and as the fifth century continued, political, social, and economic distress made redefinition of its worldly identity imperative. Wealth poured into churches like never before, and the Christian elite needed to reconcile their new political and social power with the countercultural energy of early Christian moral philosophy.40
The story of St. Martin and the Beggar depicts one of the most prominent developments: the association of caritas with new Christian figures who lived beyond the borders of society and chose to escape the normative structures of worldly life. These new types of Christians actively defined themselves in separation from the general population and elected to live their lives within artificial societies that were designed to resemble more closely the Kingdom of Heaven in their laws and structures. These were the hermitages and cells of the first cenobitics. Ascetics withdrew from society not only because they wished to live beyond the structures that governed it but also because they believed