Augustine's Homily on Almsgiving

ABSTRACT

Only one of Augustine's homilies (Sermo 350b) has been entitled by the various editors of his more than five hundred homilies as being on almsgiving, even though it is a topic that occurs in quite a number of them. In fact, his ideas about almsgiving are more developed in some of them than in this particular sermon. This paper examines this homily, in which the poor are painted in unusally stark terms for Augustine, to discover what, if any, information he provides about the socioeconomic realities of wealth and poverty among Christians in North Africa in the early years of the fifth century. Although the bishop did make reference to a specific amount of money, we are unable to tell whether 300 solidi was meant to be an astronomically large amount or one that could be contemplated realistically by his congregation, so evidence is inconclusive. Augustine's strategy was to encourage almsgiving by the members of his community by appealing to their self-interest in salvation and by attempting to get them to have a better regard for beggars, who are presented actively (mendici) and passively (egeni), by asking the congregation to consider themselves as beggars before God. The concepts of being rich and poor are elasticized in Augustine.

Keywords:

• Augustine
• poverty
• almsgiving
• homilies