“Pity, Empathy, and the Tragic Spectacle of Human Suffering: Exploring the Emotional Culture of...

Journal of Early Christian Studies 18:1, 1–27 © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

I wish to express my gratitude to Profs. Pauline Allen and Wendy Mayer for help-ful critical comments that greatly aided my final drafting of this essay.

2009 NAPS Presidential Address Pity, Empathy, and the Tragic Spectacle

of Human Suffering: Exploring the

Emotional Culture of Compassion in

Late Ancient Christianity

PAUL M. BLOWERS

While abundant recent studies have illuminated the social and cultural reali-ties underlying Christian responses to poverty in late antiquity, the present essay investigates the unique challenges to Christian preachers in cultivating a moral psychology of compassion. Drawing on the recent work of Martha Nussbaum on the “moral intelligence” of emotions in ancient philosophy, on classicist David Konstan’s analysis of the contours of Greco-Roman pity, and on classicist Robert Kaster’s notion of “narrative scripts” of human emotion, I explore three key dimensions of the emotional culture of pity and compas-sion in late ancient Christianity: (1) the engagement of classical, philosophical, and poetic discourse about pity and pity’s moral valorization, (2) the refining of the “scripts” of Christian mercy in a culture of socio-economic envy and rivalry, and (3) the Christian reinvention of tragic pity in the face of the spectacle of graphic human suffering. An integrating focus is the negotiation of the dialectic of likeness and otherness, proximity and distance, which underlay the morality of mercy and eleemosynary action. This leads in the end to a consideration of precisely how Christian preachers and moralists constructed empathy, the deep identification with the suffering other who embodies Christ, as a theological or uniquely deifying virtue.

2 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

1. Confessiones 3.2–3 (CCL 27:27–28). The translated segment here is from Henry Chadwick, World’s Classics series (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 36.

2. Augustine appears to follow Plato in Rep. 10 (602C–607A); Phil. (48A–B). Cf. also De civitate Dei 2.8 (CCL 47:40–41), where he concedes the less offensive char-acter of some classic tragedies and comedies.

3. According to Chadwick in his translation of the Confessions (36 n. 3), this pas-sage was “the most extended ancient discussion of tragic pity and catharsis.”

In the opening of Book 3 of his Confessions, famously musing on his ado-lescent infatuation with theatrical shows in Carthage, Augustine poses two timeless questions for spectators of tragedy. Why would you want to expe-rience suffering by watching grievous events that you would never wish to endure yourself? And why is the very pain felt at the sight of another’s tragic suffering uniquely pleasurable? He begins an answer by distinguishing the merely relative misery (miseria) one shares with the actors on stage and the pleasure of the mercy (misericordia) one feels toward them. Mercy—certainly a morally decent emotion—is nonetheless in this case ill-begotten of a mere theatrical contrivance, and will inevitably empty into a stream of illicit and self-serving passions, fated to have become little more than a cheap thrill. “This feeling flows from friendship; but where does it go? Where does it flow to? Why does it run down into the torrent of boiling pitch, the monstrous heats of black desires into which it is transformed?” Recalling that God’s mercy is unmixed with pain or pleasure, Augustine projects that his own mercy might still clean up its act if directed at one whose tragedy is altogether real, such as a sinner reveling in wickedness, who sparks in his soul a genuine compassion, a pain that holds no plea-sure whatsoever.1

One important thrust of this text, to be sure, is the resonant patristic criticism of the theater and Augustine’s attack on the warped mimetic pre-sentation of human suffering in the tragedies, in which he echoes Plato’s rebuke of the poets.2 Another provocative aspect, however, particularly relevant to my presentation further on, is Augustine’s admission that he, like others, was compelled by the sheer emotional power of tragic pity and catharsis, and his implication that tragic pity might actually aid reflec-tion on the dynamics of mercy in real life. This is one of a precious few texts where a patristic author examines the properly emotional anatomy of mercy (ἔλεος, οἴκτος, misericordia) apart from its normative definition as a Christian virtue.3 Not only does Augustine consider the emotional susceptibility and moral malleability of pity, including its capacity to be subverted or re-contextualized by other emotions, he recognizes the critical issue of how the distance between self and suffering other—so important

BLOWERS / CULTURE OF COMPASSION 3

4. Among the early encomiums, see, e.g., Testamentum Zabulon (ed. Marinus de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text [Leiden: Brill, 1978], 89–101); Cyprian, De opere et eleemosynis (CCL 3A.2:53–72); more specifically on philanthropia, see Homilia Clementina 12.25–33 (GCS 42:186–91). For the fourth and fifth centuries, see, e.g., Ambrose, De Officiis 1.11.38–39 (ed. Ivor Davidson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 1:138); Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio de beatitudinibus 5 (GNO 7.2:123–36); John Chrysostom, Homilia de eleemosyna (PG 51:261–72); hom. in 2 Tim. 6.3–4 (PG 62:633–35); hom. in Tit. 6 (PG 62:696–700); hom. in Heb. 32.3 (PG 63:223); Augustine, Sermones 206–7 (PL 38:1041–44); Val-erian of Cimiez, Homiliae 7–9 (de misericordia) (PG 52:713A–722C); Caesarius of Arles, Sermones 25, 26, 28 (CCL 103:111–18, 122–25).

5. John Chrysostom calls almsgiving (ἐλεημοσύνη) the “mother of love” (μήτηρ ἀγάπης) in hom. in Tit. 6.3 (PG 62:698).

6. Apologeticum 42.8 (CCL 1:157–58). 7. Divinarum institutionum lib. 6.10.1–6.12.41 (SC 509:200–46).

in Greco-Roman discourse on the nature of pity—could begin to be nego-tiated in Christian terms, opening the way for deeper forms of empathy and identification.

Holding Augustine’s dilemma in mind, my interest in this essay is to probe further into what I shall call the “emotional culture” of compas-sion in late ancient Christianity. Early Christians fully knew they were supposed to be merciful people. The Bible and an expanding literature of encomiums on mercy and almsgiving told them so.4 Christian apologists, moreover, reassured them that beyond the humanitarian and eleemosynary “gestures” of pagans, it had taken Christianity truly to rescue pity from its philosophical detractors and to instate mercy as a virtue—perhaps the virtue.5 While Tertullian boasted of Christians spending more on alms in the streets than pagans did in their temples,6 Lactantius blasted the Stoics for making pity a vice or weakness, and imagined Christianity as gener-ating a whole new piety out of pity, setting unprecedented standards of generosity, hospitality, and unconditional charity.7 Nevertheless, as John Chrysostom and other episcopal preachers of the fourth and fifth centu-ries would discover in due course, the rhetoric of the triumph of Christian mercy, to which they added their own unrelenting exhortations to alms-giving, often fell on relatively deaf ears.

That resistance has been explained partially in terms of social and eco-nomic realities of which we now know far more through the excellent grow-ing scholarship on poverty, wealth, and almsgiving in the early church. But here I propose to look at the issue more from the inside out, in terms of the moral psychology of mercy. In this connection I am indebted to the work of Martha Nussbaum, who, in excavating ancient emotional theory, has emphasized the moral “intelligence” of emotions (especially compassion)


8. See in particular her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19–237.

9. Introduction to Pity and Power in Ancient Athens, ed. Rachel Hall Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–5; Sternberg, “The Nature of Pity,” in Pity and Power, ed. Sternberg, 15–47. On the ambiguity of pity specifically in Greek philosophy, see also Rein Ferwerda, “Pity in the Life and Thought of Ploti-nus,” in Plotinus amid Gnostics and Christians, ed. David Runia (Amsterdam: Free University, 1984), 53–72.

and their role in culture as embodied “ways of seeing” and interpreting the world.8 My focus will be the challenges for Christian leaders in culti-vating and synthesizing the kinds of compassionate emotions that would condition the faithful to see human suffering in a new dramatic light and to act redemptively on what they saw.

By the “emotional culture” of compassion in late ancient Christian-ity, I will be speaking of the fruition of a set of complex and concurrent developments. One is the Christian engagement of classical philosophi-cal and poetic discourse about pity and pity’s moral valorization. Here I have greatly benefited from the work of David Konstan, Rachel Sternberg, and other classicists who have produced significant recent studies on the contexts and dimensions of pity in Greece and Rome before the rise of Christianity. Sternberg notes the paradox that for Greeks “pity was not a virtue, yet somehow it was meritorious,” a fact increasingly registered in the works of philosophers, orators, and historians, as well as in Greek “folk psychology.”9 Early Christian writers, on the other hand, started with pity or mercy as intrinsically virtuous but were challenged to articulate their own moral psychology of compassion as they integrated philosophi-cal theories of emotion, interpretation of biblical narratives of virtue and vice, and theological ethics.

A second development is the moral tempering and texturing of pity and related sympathetic emotions in the context of a late ancient society where enduring rivalry for wealth and honor constantly ignited envy and other competitive passions which, while threatening to undermine Christian compassion, proved also to be, existentially, its refiner’s fire. Here I refer-ence classicist Robert Kaster, who wisely urges us to study ancient emo-tions not simply through lexical or philosophical definitions but through the contextually grounded “narrative scripts” or scenarios of individual emotions as they play out, overlap, and transmute in social experience, and more importantly as those emotional scripts tell the story, in the networks of human relationships, of what a culture—in our case the moral culture of the late ancient church—holds ultimately valuable or honorable.

A third development, signaled by Augustine, and all the more interesting


10. Rhet. 2.8.1–2 (1385B). 11. See David Konstan’s summary of the cognitive and social (so too ethical) aspects

of Greek pity in his The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 201–2; also his Pity Transformed (London: Duckworth, 2001), 49–51, 125–26.

12. On empathy’s modest place, see Rachel Sternberg, Tragedy Offstage: Suffer-ing and Sympathy in Ancient Athens (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), 15–16, 138–41, 171–73.

because of the longstanding patristic repudiation of theatrical art, is the reworking of tragic pity in the light of Christian reinterpretation of trag-edy itself, including the patristic reading of biblical narratives in a tragic light. I will argue that as tragic pity was ultimately finding new scripts in Christian discourse and experience, Christian preachers were cultivating such scripts in the service of generating compassion and engrossing audi-ences in their portrayals of the drama of redemption that was unfolding precisely, they believed, in the “spectacle” of suffering bodies.

In concluding the essay, I will expand more specifically on empathy as an aspiring “theological virtue” and as the true moral frontier in this emotional culture of compassion, just as it is now in some postmodern theologies of compassion. I will address some of the complexities and chal-lenges specific to empathy as an emotional strategy of identification with the suffering other, and how such identification, conceived by some of its patristic exponents also as an embodied means of communion with the incarnate Christ, sanctified and elevated empathetic mercy as a uniquely deifying virtue.

THE CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT OF GRECO-ROMAN PITY

Aristotle’s classic definition of pity in his Rhetoric as the pain (λύπη) felt toward another’s undeserved misfortune, a misfortune that could very well befall oneself or one’s friends, was both a rallying point of accumu-lated reflection and the standard for future discussion in antiquity.10 Aris-totle shared with Stoics the sense that pity, like other emotions, entailed cognitive judgments—judgments that might be tentative, inchoate, even errant, but that also carried engrained assumptions about what is good and desirable in life. But pity’s judgments presupposed a distance between pitier and pitied; to feel it required recognition that one was similar to the suffering other but not in exactly the same circumstance.11 Greek pity, moreover, did not intrinsically necessitate empathy, though something tantamount to empathy gradually found a modest place in the Athenian emotional repertoire.12


13. Aristotle’s account of friendship (φιλία) in Books 8 and 9 of his Nicomachean Ethics conspicuously lacks any mention of pity, as highlighted by Konstan, Pity Transformed, 58–60.

14. Konstan, Pity Transformed, 73–74.15. Greek orators like Demosthenes eulogized philanthropia as a civic virtue bind-

ing together Athenian society (Kata Aristogeiton 87). On clementia, see in the Roman tradition Seneca’s De clementia.

16. Eth. Nic. 2.5 (1105B); however, cf. De virtutibus et vitiis (1250B) where he positively associates pity with philanthropia.

17. Poet. (1452A–1453B). See also Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mime-sis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 207–8.

18. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 304–27; also her “Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion,” Social Philosophy and Policy 13 (1996): 27–58; “The ‘Morality of Pity’: Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” in Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 148–69. Similarly arguing for the relative altruism in Aristotelian tragic pity, and for the shared vulnerability that such pity entails, is Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 168–84.

19. On the educative aspect of pity and catharsis, see her The Fragility of Good-ness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 390–91.

Pity thus conceived by Greeks was different from more intimate forms of fellow-feeling shared among family and friends.13 At one end of the spec-trum, pity could instantiate itself as basic decency toward fellow humans in crisis. At the other end it could be a springboard to deeper compas-sion.14 But pity was hardly self-evidently virtuous, as were its emotional cousins like philanthropia and clementia.15 Aristotle dwells on the simple empirical fact that persons feel pity when, faced with the unmerited suffer-ing of one of similar social status and character, their fear kicks in as they estimate the suffering too close for comfort. In his Ethics pity notoriously qualifies as an emotion but not a virtue.16 And in his Poetics, analyzing the dynamics and effects of tragedy, there is not a sustained moral or psy-chological account of tragic pity.17 On the other hand, the very fact that Aristotle’s pity engaged a judgment of whether the pitied deserved their suffering presupposed an incipient moral reasoning. As Martha Nussbaum has noted, Greek pity included projections of responsibility and blame, but also the projection that pitier and pitied lived in a world where for-tune did not necessarily mete out to persons what they deserved. The key to pity was to identify with those similar to oneself who were undergo-ing misfortune, all the while maintaining the distance between pitier and pitied that enabled a “community” of feeling and a healthy sharing of vulnerability.18 Nussbaum wants to argue that for Aristotle and his heirs, pity was morally laden and educable.19 But classicists continue to debate


20. For a critical appraisal of Nussbaum’s perspective, see Brian Carr, “Pity and Compassion as Social Virtues,” Philosophy 74 (1999): 411–29. Carr emphasizes, for instance, that in Aristotle’s pity, the pitying subject, not the pitied person, ultimately calls the shots as to whether the pitied is really suffering or not. See also Michael Weber, “Compassion and Pity: An Evaluation of Nussbaum’s Analysis and Defense,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2004): 487–511.

21. Basil, hom. in Ps. 22.3 (PG 29:489B), with translations my own unless other-wise noted. For a similar outlook on pity vis-à-vis the fall from paradise, see Gregory of Nyssa, beat. 5 (GNO 7.2:131–33).

22. eleem. 6 (PG 51:269); hom. in Matt. 35 (PG 57:405–12); hom. in Heb. 10.4 (PG 63:87–88); hom. in Heb. 11.3–4 (PG 63:93–95). In the Latin tradition, see Val-erian of Cimiez, who like Chrysostom discourages such inquiries: Nulla est discretio postulantis; nec est necessitas exploranda pauperis (hom. 8.2 [PL 52:717B]).

whether, at the end of the day, Aristotle’s pity remained ultimately self-centered in its judgment, having no intrinsically altruistic motivation or obligation to relieve another’s suffering.20

Late ancient Christian writers for their part widely accepted that pity was a species of emotional pain (λύπη) associated with judgments about undeserved suffering, and that pity thrived on an abiding dialectic of prox-imity and distance, identification and alienation, between the pitier and the pitied. Basil of Caesarea defines pity (ἔλεος) specifically as

. . . an emotion (πάθος) experienced toward those who have been degraded beyond what they deserve, expressed in those who are sympathetically disposed (συμπαθῶς διατιθεμενῶν). We pity one who has fallen from great wealth into the ultimate poverty, one who has been reduced from the peak of bodily vigor to extreme weakness, one who gloried in bodily beauty and the prime of life and then was ruined by most disgraceful passions. And therefore since we too were glorying once upon a time in the life of paradise, yet have become inglorious and lowly because of our banishment, our God shows mercy (Ps 114.5, LXX) as he looks upon what we have become from what we once were.21

To the classic philosophical definition of pity, which appears in this homily in a discussion of how God’s mercy and justice are thoroughly integrated, Basil has added a theological gloss accentuating the utter moral leveling of humanity in view of the Adamic fall, which qualifies all human pretensions about who “deserves” what. And yet the moral reasoning and human sense of justice intrinsic to mercy became an acute issue in John Chrysostom, who repeatedly in his preaching reproves Christian audiences for trying to avoid the responsibility of almsgiving precisely by conducting miniature “inquisitions” (ἐξετάσεις) as to whether the wretched in their midst were not, after all, already getting exactly what they deserved.22 Some might be cheats, liars, and schemers, runaway slaves, Jews, foreigners,


23. hom. in Jo. 77.4 (PG 59:418); hom. in Matt. 35.3–4 (PG 57:409–10); hom. in Heb. 10.4 (PG 63:88–89); hom. in Heb. 11.3–4 (PG 63:94–95); eleem. 6 (PG 51:269).

24. hom. in Heb. 10.4 (PG 63:87). 25. hom. in Heb. 11.4 (PG 63:95); hom. de Lazaro 2.5 (PG 48:989–90). 26. hom. in Gen. 29 (PG 53:267).27. Collationes 7.30–31 (CSEL 13:207–10); cf. John Chrysostom, hom. in Heb.

23.3 (PG 63:163).28. hom. In Heb. 11.4 (PG 63:95); cf. eleem. 6 (PG 51:270); hom. de Laz. 2.5

(PG 48:989–90): “To be a judge is one thing, to be merciful is another. Mercy is called mercy because it gives even to the unworthy.” Cf. Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.29–31 (PG 35:897A–900C), on not second-guessing the divine justice governing human circumstances.

29. De doctrina christiana 2.7.11 (ed. R. P. H. Green, OECT [Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1995], 64); De sermone domini in monte 1.3.10 (CCL 35:8); 1.4.11–12 (CCL 35:10, 11); 1.18.55 (CCL 35:63); 1.23.80 (CCL 35:90); cf. serm. 53.5 (PL 38:366). On the consilium misericordiae, see also Pamela Bright, “Augustine and the Counsel of Compassion in the Spiritual Life,” Papers of the Western Pacific Rim Patris-tics Society, 25–26 September 2004 (online: http://www.cecs.acu.edu.au/wprpspapers/ Bright.pdf).

pagans.23 They might also be secular rather than religious, and it is always easier to pity monks.24 But had Abraham been so probing (περίεργος; περιεργαζόμενος) he would never have entertained the three angels who appeared to him as perfect strangers in need of hospitality (Gen 18).25 Still, a certain measure of justice in mercy seemed inevitable. As Chrysostom himself advises, better to pity the demon-possessed than the drunkard;26 and John Cassian similarly concedes the greater ease of showing mercy to demon-possessed sinners than to the utterly impenitent without evidence of such possession—even though the latter, who seem to thrive in their vice, remain far more pathetic.27

The key, however, was to avoid a disastrous scenario in which pity’s moral intelligence degenerated into a fallacious logic of justice unbecoming of the gospel’s injunctions of undiscriminating love of neighbor. Chrysos-tom avows that always for the faithful “it is the season of loving-kindness, not exacting investigation; of mercy, not reckoning” (φιλανθρωπίας ἐστιν ὁ καιρὸς, οὐκ ἀκριβοῦς ἐξετάσεως· ἐλέους, οὐ λογισμοῦ).28 And Augustine, deferring to the Beatitude on mercy (Matt 5.7), which he situates in a scheme of ascending steps toward true wisdom, speaks of the “counsel of mercy” (consilium misericordiae) that attends the love of neighbor, the “justice” of which lies in the fact that we show mercy to those weaker than ourselves precisely as we have been shown mercy by our spiritual superiors, all within the shadow of the universal divine pity that relativ-izes all human mercy.29 The moral intelligence of compassion is thereby


30. Nietzsche’s classic condemnation of Christian pity as a contaminant and depres-sant appears in his The Antichrist (1888), ch. 7, ed. and trans. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2005), 6–7.

31. Clem. 2.6 (LCL 214:442).32. On this point, see Richard Sorabji, Emotions and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agi-

tation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 174–75. 33. Cicero, De officiis 2.52–55, 2.61–63, 2.69 (LCL 30:222–26, 234–36, 242–44);

Seneca, Clem. 4.10.4–4.11.6 (LCL 310:222–26). For an illuminating analysis, see Anneliese Parkin, “‘You Do Him No Service’: An Exploration of Pagan Almsgiving,” in Poverty in the Roman World, ed. Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61–63.

34. Parkin, “‘You Do Him No Service,’” 64–65.35. Cf. Clement of Alexandria, strom. 2.17 (SC 38:91–93); 4.22.138 (SC 463:

286); 7.11.62 (SC 428: 198).

bound up with the cultivation of the spiritual life in an ecclesial context. It is a habituated resolve (consilium) to convey divine love and mercy rather than a pure calculation of the merits of those to whom that love and mercy are offered.

Holding court on the “utility” (χρῆσις; usus) of pity in the moral life had been a forte of Stoics. As a passion or disease of the soul, pity was intrinsi-cally suspect, since typically people pity others with respect to losses that are outside their control (οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν) and that have no intrinsic moral consequence. Already in some Stoic accounts are the seeds of Nietzsche’s later condemnation of Christian pity as an emotional “infection” that merely depresses the pitier’s will, degrading its resolve by contaminating it with another’s suffering.30 Seneca, for one, defines misericordia as a dis-abling “weakness (vitium) of the mind overly distressed by misery.”31 But Stoics generally endorsed measured fellow-feeling for another who was suffering while pursuing appropriate ends.32 For Cicero and Seneca, even though a general benevolence toward fellow humans might be in order, and pitching a penny to a beggar might be quite natural, the norm was to reserve alms or benefices for those who were respectable fellow citizens who had fallen on hard times, and who were more likely to reciprocate with gratitude and thus dignify both the gift and the giver.33 The key for Stoics, as Anneliese Parkin has emphasized in a recent study of pagan almsgiving, was not to “feel” pity, or the fear for oneself that goes with it, but to “take” pity,34 to command the psychological conditions of its expression, thus removing the misery from misericordia.

Augustine showed critical appreciation of the Stoic account, as had Clement of Alexandria before him.35 A mercy secured by tranquility of mind and driven by imitation of divine beneficence rather than by modulation


36. Cf. Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeo-rum 1.27.52–54 (CSEL 90:55–57); Doct. chr. 1.30.33 (ed. Green 42); Civ. 9.5 (CCL 47:254–55).

37. Mor. eccl. 1.27.54 (CSEL 90:57); cf. Ep. 104.16 (CSEL 34.2:593). 38. Ambrose, De penitentia 1.15.81–83 (SC 179: 118–22), indicating that compas-

sion shares the burden of the penitent’s suffering without contamination from their guilt itself; cf. Caesarius of Arles, Serm. 67.2 (CCL 103:286–87).

39. On the social construction theories of emotion in a historical perspective, see Barbara Rosenwein, “Histoire de l’émotion: méthodes et approches,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 29 (2006): 41–45; also her Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 14–17. Nussbaum offers a revised social constructionism anxious to avoid moral relativism with respect to emotions in different cultures through history (Upheavals of Thought, 6, 141–44, 151–69).

of emotional pain was akin to angelic pity and more likely to foster mer-ciful action.36 But Augustine was also wary of christianizing Stoic pity too readily. Redefining compassion in terms of detachment, stripped of a built-in pathos, could easily sour the unlearned against it, hardening rather than softening their hearts for charitable action.37 To frame compassion in terms of the imitation of divine incarnational grace precluded a seren-ity of goodness impervious to emotional pain and “contamination” by another’s suffering. As Ambrose and Caesarius of Arles make clear, for example, there would be little serenity for those in the church who with empathy and emotional solidarity watched other Christians undergoing the humiliating process of public penitence.38 We will take up this issue of the emotional grip of mercy later on in conjunction with the Christian appropriation of tragic pity.

“SCRIPTING” CHRISTIAN PITY IN A LATE ANCIENT CULTURE OF RIVALRY

Emotions are events. Though physiologically the actual duration of any emotion is remarkably brief, emotions have histories as well as teleological trajectories. And whether or not one accepts “social construction” theo-ries of human emotions,39 cross-disciplinary analysis strongly suggests that they are registers of the shaping effects of a culture over time; moreover, emotions demand thick description because in concrete experience they are both complex and mutable performances. Classicist Robert Kaster describes emotions as “narrative scripts” enacting a culture’s moral values, each one representing a unique configuration of beliefs, desires, aversions, staged in a concrete social setting. Kaster has in particular mapped the scripts of invidious emotions (envy, jealousy, indignation, etc.) and their


40. On the idea of “narrative scripts” of emotion as opposed to mere lexical definitions, see Kaster’s Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8–9, 85, 132–33. On the scripts of invidious emotions, see Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community, 84–103; and his “Invidia, νέμεσις, φθόνος, and the Roman Emotional Economy,” in Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, ed. David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 253–76.

41. Aristotle, Rhet. 2.8–10 (1385B–1388A). See also Edward Stevens, “Envy and Pity in Greek Philosophy,” American Journal of Philology 69 (1948): 171–89. On pity among the rivalrous emotions in certain patristic writers, see Paul Blowers, “Envy’s Narrative Scripts: Cyprian, Basil, and the Monastic Sages on the Anatomy and Cure of the Invidious Emotions,” Modern Theology 25 (2009): 22–23, 26–27, 30–31, 32.

42. The comparisons are analytically detailed by Aaron Ben Ze’ev, “Envy and Pity,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1993): 3–19.

43. Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), esp. 46–51. Cf. also Jaclyn Maxwell, Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity: John Chrysostom and His Congregation in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67–87; and Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313–450) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 18–26. For critical evaluation of Brown’s “middling class” thesis, see the review by Claire Sotinel in Antiquité Tardive: Revue internationale d’histoire et d’archéologie (IVe–VIIIe siècles) 11 (2003): 359–63; also Pauline Allen, Bronwen Neil, and Wendy Mayer, Preaching Poverty in Late Antiquity:

moral function in a Roman culture that knew far-reaching competition for wealth, prestige, and honor in all its forms.40

Here I want to apply Kaster’s analytical model to Christian pity and related sympathetic emotions that were themselves being “scripted” and shaped amid the social rivalries that impacted the early church. As numer-ous classical thinkers and some contemporary philosophical ethicists have recognized, pity and envy are emotional opposites that nonetheless attract. If pity is pain at the undeserved misfortune of relative equals, envy is pain at their good fortune (φθόνος), or more specifically spite (νέμεσις) if that good fortune is undeserved.41 And yet both pity and envy are species of emotional distress (λύπη; dolor), both involve judgments about merited fortune, both require a measure of psychological substitution, and both include projections about one’s own moral or material status in relation to another.42 More importantly, the narrative scripts of pity and envy coincide and “collide” most dramatically in societies where persons of relatively equal status jockey for (even modest) material goods, honor, or power.

Such an emotional chemistry was in play in the episcopal ministries of the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, Augustine, and other bishops urgent to promote euergetism and almsgiving. Peter Brown has rightly been criticized for his ostensibly anachronistic and geographically generalizing thesis of a “middling class” in this period,43 but undeniably


Perceptions and Realities (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlaganstalt, forthcoming), 17–20, 25, 210–11. (My thanks to Prof. Pauline Allen for generously providing me with a pre-publication draft of this book.)

44. “Social Life in Late Antiquity: A Bibliographic Essay,” in Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity, ed. William Bowden et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 46.

45. Preaching Poverty, 92–94. This profile recalls the definition of “the poor” already in the early empire as those of an utterly “mediocre” socio-economic con-dition, as Paul Veyne attests in “La ‘plèbe moyenne’ sous le haut-empire romain,” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 55 (2000): 1170.

46. Tusculanae Disputationes 3.9, 4.7–8 (ed. Max Pohlenz, Bibliotheca scripto-rum graecorum et romanorum teubneriana [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1982], 327, 368–70). Invidentia (as distinct from invidia) was a neologism of Cicero, reinforcing his sense that invidia (with the verb invidere) elicited people’s visual over-preoccupation with the fortunes of others.

there was, between the very rich and the very poor in late ancient Medi-terranean societies, a broad “middle” comprising everyone from the not-securely-rich to the poor-but-not-destitute. These would include, as Lukas Schachner observes, “craftsmen, merchants, shopkeepers, minor clergy, and others who had achieved a comparable degree of relative prosperity.”44 But in the foreground of Chrysostom’s preaching in Antioch and Constan-tinople, that middle could include what Wendy Mayer calls the “relative poor,” citizens who might have means but no land, and those struggling day to day to make ends meet, and whose perception, at least, was that they were already living in poverty.45 Though the very rich were certainly liable to the invidious passions, these persons in the broad middle were constantly comparing lots and especially prone to jealousy and envy, the kind of envy that Cicero called invidentia, a distress at another’s prosper-ity even when that prosperity in no way harmed or affected the envier.46 Perceived discrepancies of status, after all, could be as powerful as real ones in inflaming envy. Such persons were naturally ill-disposed to pity and needed persistent instruction in the asceticism of compassion and the virtues of attitudinal poverty.

Basil of Caesarea, in his Homily on Envy, gives us a good sense of what bishops were up against. Here in a sermon eliciting the narrative scripts of envy in the Bible and in the foreground of the church, he sketches a scenario in which Christian pity could itself be disastrously re-contextualized by envy. A man eaten up with the pain of envy of a more privileged neighbor, after the neighbor’s son dies, shows up for the funeral with all manner of public display of mercy. While the relative pleasure in mercy could be, on the one hand, simply an emotional antidote to the pain of envy, a more sinister reading of this emotional script, as Basil would have it, is that pity


47. Basil of Caesarea, hom. 11.1–2 (de invidia) (PG 31:373A–376A); further ana-lyzed in Blowers, “Envy’s Narrative Scripts,” 27–32. Also on envy masked in friend-ship, see Gregory of Nyssa, beat. 7 (GNO 7.2:157–59).

48. Such condescending pity could nonetheless also in some contexts be morally useful, as in the service of righteous indignation: e.g., Gregory of Nyssa quotes the martyr Theodore the Recruit before a Roman tribunal expressing his “pity” toward morally bankrupt pagan cults and emperors (hom. de sancto Theodoro [GNO 10.1:67–68]).

49. hom. in Rom. 22.1 (PG 60:609–10).50. See Wendy Mayer, “John Chrysostom: Extraordinary Preacher, Ordinary Audi-

ence,” in Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics, ed. Mary Cunningham and Pauline Allen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 123, with citations. Basil of Caesarea appears to address the same type of “relative poor” in his hom. 8.5–6 (dicta tempore famis et siccitatis) (PG 31:317C–321A), as does Gregory of Nyssa in De beneficentia (=De pauperibus amandis 1) (GNO 9.1:98, lines 13–14).

51. In hom. in 1 Cor. 30.5 (PG 61:255–56), Chrysostom urges special pity for those of material means who dwell in utter fear of a sudden and dramatic shift (μεταβολή) into poverty, in the manner of Cain, who feared for what he had in excess and—being a model of envy—grieved over what he did not possess.

52. hom. in Phil. 2.3–4 (PG 62:194), noting that the rich are to be pitied rather than envied; cf. hom. in 1 Cor. 11.5–6 (PG 61:94–96); hom. in 1 Cor. 29.5–6 (PG 61:247–49); hom. in 1 Cor. 39.7–8 (PG 61:342–44); hom. in 2 Cor. 24.4 (PG 61:568); hom. in Laz. 1.12 (PG 48:980); Asterius of Amasea, hom. 3.7.1 (ed. Cornelius Datema [Leiden: Brill, 1970], 31).

is functioning here to punctuate the man’s now superior lot in comparison with his bereaved neighbor.47 Such proves that ancients knew something of what today we call condescending pity, a pity that puts on a good moral face but secretly delights in the pitied other’s inferior situation.48

This was, of course, a worst case scenario of the perversion of pity by envy. The more edifying scenario, or script, advanced frequently in John Chrysostom’s preaching, was one in which envy and rivalry would be pre-cisely the refiner’s fire through which mercy was forged and trained. In con-trast with Basil’s grim scenario above, John insists that the peculiar mercy of “rejoicing with those who rejoice” in their prosperity (Rom 12.15) is exactly the means of purging envy and grudging.49 As noted above, John was addressing many in his audiences who believed they themselves were poor after observing (even slightly) wealthier fellow Christians.50 John tried to preempt their incipient envy by insisting that wealthier Chris-tians deserved pity, not envy, in view of the unique miseries associated with wealth,51 and that envious, covetous, or greedy persons themselves, whether rich or poor, should be supreme objects of compassion because of their self-inflicted emotional pain.52

Homiletically it was a hard sell indeed. John and other bishops recurred frequently to the Bible’s own classic narrative scripts of a mercy seized from


53. See John Chrysostom, hom. in Gen. 61.1–5 (PG 54:526–32) on the brothers’ bitter envy; hom. in Gen. 64.3 (PG 54:550–51) on Joseph’s compassion (συμπάθεια) for them.

54. John Chrysostom, hom. de Davide et Saule 3.5 (PG 49:702).55. hom. in Col. 1.3–6 (PG 62:303–10). On the larger cultural dynamics behind

this text, see Aideen Hartney, John Chrysostom and the Transformation of the City (London: Duckworth, 2004), 165–67.

56. hom. in Matt. 48.2–7 (PG 58:490–96).57. Hom. 10 (PL 52:722D–725A).58. Declam. 28 and 29 (ed. Richard Foerster, Libanii Opera 6 [Leipzig: Teubner,

1911], 573–610). Libanius targeted the “parasite” as a recognizable ludicrous char-

the jaws of envy, such as Joseph’s pity of his brothers,53 and David’s com-passion toward the pathologically rivalrous Saul, which converted Saul’s envious rage into συμπάθεια (cf. 1 Sam 24.17, LXX).54 But Chrysostom also warned of the coming eschatological leveling of humanity when all things would be made equal, projecting detailed scenarios of a model of ecclesial life in which envy would be gradually defused by compassion in advance of divine judgment. In one especially evocative image (and there are many more), he juxtaposes two tables of feasting, one at which the Christian is a guest with the desperately poor and infirm (cf. Luke 14.12), with Christ himself prominently seated—a table of true honor, mercy, and freedom from the “evil eye” of envy; the other in which the Christian is in the company of the rich and powerful, who are in fact merely social para-sites (παράσιτοι) simulating loyalty and friendship while enslaved to envy, and catching up the host in this rivalry as well.55 Elsewhere Chrysostom depicts this second table in the image of a full-scale Herodian banquet (Matt 14.6–11), a θέατρον σατανικόν replete with ingratiating social climb-ers, hangers-on, freeloaders, entertainers, fools, flatterers—parasites all—jockeying for attention and endearment.56 The image is not far-fetched. A half-century later in the West, the Gallican bishop Valerian of Cimiez in one of his homilies still remonstrates against Christians who, in the name of friendship, were inviting parasites to banquets precisely to make an entertaining mockery of them.57

Clearly Chrysostom’s first table, with its radical hospitality to the truly destitute poor, previews the scripts of compassion and justice in their escha-tological perfection. What is striking, however, is the dialectical nature of John’s depiction of the second table. It is, on the one hand, a table of envy, a table of demons (cf. 1 Cor 10.21), a table set in the company of social parasites who could conceivably have come from among the rich or the “relative poor.” Perhaps recalling his teacher Libanius’s ridicule of parasites in his Declamations,58 Chrysostom recommends shunning table


acter from ancient comedy, made famous as well in Lucian of Samosata’s satire De parasito. David Konstan reviews the problem of parasites and flatterers in Greco-Roman thinking on the nature of friendship in his Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98–103.

59. hom. in Col. 1.4–6 (PG 62:304–10).60. In encouraging the “examination” of the parasite’s conscience (hom. in Matt.

48.7 [PG 58:495]: συνειδὸς ἐξέτασον), John ironically uses the same terminology he employed in discouraging “investigation” (ἐξέτασις) of the merits of those in need of pity (as discussed earlier).

61. hom. in Matt. 48.7 (PG 58:496). 62. hom. in Matt. 48.7 (PG 58:496). 63. Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, 184–87. For Chrysostom,

in particular, see hom. in Matt 5.5 (PG 57:60), referencing Luke 16.9; also hom. in 1 Cor. 32.5 (PG 61:271), noting the divinely authorized “bond of friendship” (σύνδεσμον φιλίας) between almsgivers and their impoverished beneficiaries.

fellowship with them because of their egregious duplicity, envy, and sham affection.59 But in at least one of his homilies, John scripts a type of com-passion that stretches mercy exactly to the likes of these, finding a way to dignify them not only by feeding them, but by looking deep into their desperate consciences,60 by engaging them in useful activity in management of the household, even as aids in the parenting of children, by liberating them from shame and investing them with new honor, and by commending to them the study of holy Scripture.61 This is a narrative script of mercy demanding thick description, insofar as it not only presupposed the kind of judgment of merit intrinsic to pity but also was interwoven with varied emotional strands of empathy, philanthropia, forgiveness—and even the deeper affection of friendship. “Set them free as well as your own self,” John writes, “and remove the name of parasite, and call them companions at your meals; and take away the label of flatterers, and apply to them the title of friends.”62

It was one thing to call the destitute poor “friends.” They were not, after all, true rivals of most, even if they too were thoroughly capable of envy and jealousy. As Richard Finn has recently demonstrated, several patris-tic writers from late antiquity—Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Paulinus of Nola, as well as Chrysostom—redescribed the poor as prospective friends who, in the context of almsgiving, could reciprocate either with earthly gratitude or eternal blessings.63 But it was another thing to embrace friend-ship with social parasites whose response to compassion might well be an increase of envy. Not all these people, after all, were necessarily spiraling downward into poverty. They could easily be relative equals merely seek-ing some security by attaching themselves to better-off acquaintances. But


64. hom. in Matt. 48.7 (PG 58:496).65. This point is emphasized by Konstan, Pity Transformed, 57–60.66. See the insightful commentary on Augustine and tragic pity by Terry Eagle-

ton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 153–77, and esp. 159–61, 175–76; also Donnalee Dox, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Chris-tian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 14–19.

they sensationally epitomized a culture of rivalry. Virtually in the same breath, John encourages friendship with parasites and warns that such friendship will carry tremendous peril or even social disgrace.64 It is a pro-posal all the more provocative when we consider that ancient friendship evoked a level of parity, intimacy, and sharing of emotion that excluded normal pity by closing the distance between subject and object.65 John, however, cajoles his audiences to imagine an emotional frontier beyond the carefully measured expression of pity and the traditional conventions of friendship in ancient society, and projects scenarios of emotional inti-macy that he hoped would preempt envy and rivalry from within their own social matrix.

THE CHRISTIAN RE-SCRIPTING OF TRAGIC PITY

A common and crucial thread in my analysis thus far of the emotional cul-ture of compassion is the attempt by Christian writers to negotiate the dia-lectic of likeness and otherness, proximity and distance, which controlled the expression of mercy in the Greco-Roman world. Having dealt largely with the cognitive dimension and the moral “intelligence” of pity in this process, we turn to the properly affective dimension, the passion within compassion, and the transition from pity to deeper levels of empathy and identification. Augustine’s dilemma, with which I opened this essay, was that in the theater, of all places, he had learned much about pity. Even if it was a bogus mercy toward suffering players on a stage, it rehearsed the fact that in real life pity can become a spectator sport—lapsing at worst into a satisfaction (Schadenfreude) at the suffering of others because it is not happening to oneself, or at best into a function of catharsis, purging the fear of such things happening to oneself, such that mercy becomes just another self-indulgent pleasure.66

Augustine ostensibly echoes Plato’s indictment of the tragic poets for indulging pity at the expense of reason (Rep. 10, 606–7). And yet the real gist of Plato’s criticism was that the poets were contesting the philoso-


67. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, 98–117, 207; cf. Patrick Downey, Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 25–53.

68. Laws 7 (817B), trans. R. G. Bury (LCL 192:99).69. E.g. Isocrates, Panegyric 168. See also Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis,

213–14, citing Andocides as well as Isocrates.70. Cf. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 388–91; C. Fred Alford,

“Greek Tragedy and the Cultivation of Pity,” Political Research Quarterly 46 (1993): 259–80. For criticism of this view, however, see Yun Lee Too, The Idea of Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 109–10; A. D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8–15.

71. Alford, “Greek Tragedy and the Cultivation of Pity,” 269. Cf. James Johnson and Douglas Clapp, “Athenian Tragedy: An Education in Pity,” in Pity and Power in Ancient Athens, ed. Sternberg, 123–64.

phers on their own turf, tackling larger cosmic and metaphysical prob-lems (evil, death, the injustices of life) and their ethical implications.67 In the Laws Plato even quotes the philosophical lawgivers against their tragedian rivals: “We ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the authors of a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as a representation (μίμησις) of the fairest and best life, which is in reality, as we assert, the truest tragedy. Thus we are composers of the same things as yourselves, rivals of yours as artists and actors of the fair-est drama. . . .”68 Exploitative or not, tragic pity was gripping, engrossing spectators in exaggerated displays of the rise and fall of lofty (σπουδαίοι) characters, forcing them to come to terms with their own vulnerability in the dramas of life and death. And even if some classical writers complained that tragedy coaxed powerful emotional responses that did not necessar-ily pay off in real-life commitments to aid the suffering,69 they knew, as would patristic moralists, that cultivating robust emotions of compassion was half the battle. One reading of Greek tragic catharsis sees it not just as a means for spectators to drain off unhealthy emotions so as to make them ultimately more balanced and reasonable citizens, but as educating pity and fear in ways that helped Athenian society face the experience of suffering collectively and compassionately.70 As one commentator puts it, “Tragedy is paideia in pity.”71

In their own ways Christian writers agreed. Despite their outrage at the pervasive abuses of the theater, late ancient Christian preachers reworked tragic pity as a powerful inducement to benevolence and almsgiving. It was to their advantage that well before the rise of Christianity poetic tragedy had stormed philosophy’s gate and invaded the analysis of real-life suf-fering. The category of the “tragic” was open to reinvention well into the


72. See Pat Easterling and Richard Miles, “Dramatic Identities: Tragedy in Late Antiquity,” in Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, ed. Richard Miles (London: Routledge, 1999), 95–111, esp. 103–7; and Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–35.

73. Expositio in Job (SC 346:128–54, 170–96, 218, 344–46; SC 348:10, 28, 32, 38–42); also hom. de statuis 1.10 (PG 49.29–30); hom. in 1 Cor. 28.3–5 (PG 61:236–38); hom. de Laz. 1.10 (PG 48:977). On Job’s own tragic pity in using his fear of others’ bad fortune befalling himself (cf. Job 3.25) as grounds for his compassion for the suffering, see hom. in Matt. 33.6–7 (PG 57:395–97). On the τραγῳδία of Job’s loss of children, see also ep. 17 (ad Olympiadem 4) (SC 13bis: 372–74).

74. Expos. in Job (SC 346:218; SC 348:32). Chrysostom absolves Elihu, however, of ambition and envy in his response to Job (SC 348:154, 160).

75. Moralia 5.11.23 (CCL 143:233–34).76. Ad Stagirium a daemone vexatum 2.10 (PG 47:464): Τὰ δὲ ἐντεῦθεν τῆς

σκηνῆς ἐδείκνυ τραγῳδίαν, καὶ τὸ δρᾶμα τῶν θηβαίων ἀνετύπου μειρακίων. Chrysostom is doubtless referring to Eteocles and Polynices in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.

77. Off. 3.12.78 (Davidson 1:402).78. John Thompson provides a comprehensive analysis of the various and com-

plex patristic exegetical approaches to Jephthah’s daughter in his Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111–33.

Middle Ages,72 and patristic writers opportunistically exploited it for their own purposes, beginning—however tentatively—with the tragic interpre-tation of select biblical narratives. Chrysostom in his Commentary on Job renders Job the hero of a veritable cosmic spectacle (θέατρον) and tragedy (τραγῳδία)—Job the exemplary almsgiver now turned object of pity—and he profiles Job’s wife and spectator-comforters as classic failures of tragic pity,73 the latter precisely because their underlying envy (βασκανία) and ambition (φιλοτιμία) got in the way.74 Gregory the Great follows suit in his Moralia, arguing that Job’s comforters failed not only by making distant and condescending remarks about the justice of his afflictions but by not fearing such horrors for themselves, such as would have enabled them to grieve intimately with the anguished saint.75 Other candidates for tragic rendering included Isaac and Jacob, whose sibling rivalry Chrysos-tom compared with Oedipus’s sons vying for their father’s throne in the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles;76 the flawed Israelite hero Jephthah (Judg 11.1–12.7), whom Ambrose describes as bound by a “tragic neces-sity” (miserabilis necessitas);77 and, for very different reasons, Jephthah’s daughter, whose death-by-sacrifice, as the outcome of her virginal piety, cried out for pathetic as well as theological response.78 Still other biblical figures ripe for tragic interpretation were Saul in his bitter struggle with


79. Cf. John Chrysostom, hom. in Davide et Saule 1.2–3 (PG 49:679–80); hom. in 2 Cor. 24.4 (PG 61:568); hom. de stat. 14.3–5 (PG 49:147–51).

80. Cf. John Chrysostom, hom in Matt. 9.1–2 (PG 57:175–78); Eusebius of Cae-sarea, h. e. 1.8.1–16 (GCS 9.1:62–70). Eusebius asserts (1.8.4) that Herod’s miserable story “overshadows every tragic drama.”

81. Chrysostom notes the tragedy, or δρᾶμα, of John’s beheading because of Salome’s vice in hom. 48.4 (PG 58:492) and hom. in Matt. 49.1 (PG 58:497). Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 127.9 (CCL 24B:786) calls John’s execution “a tragedy for the ages” (tragoediam saeculorum), and in Serm. 173.7 (CCL 24B:1057) he laments the foul comoedia whereby the daughter of Herodias, in choosing the head of the Baptist (Matt 14.3–11), resounded a “heinous tragedy” (tragoediam nefandam).

82. Asterius of Amasea, hom. 3.3.7 (ed. Datera, 29).83. Cf. John Chrysostom, ep. 7.3 (ad Olympiadem 1) (SC 13bis:142–44); Boethius,

Liber contra Eutychen et Nestorium 5 (LCL 74:106). Arguing for the notion of a “tragic Logos” in patristic thought is Dirk Westerkamp, “Laughter, Catharsis, and the Patristic Conception of the Embodied Logos,” in Embodiment in Cognition and Cul-ture, ed. John Michael Krois et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 235–38.

84. Peristephanon 10 (ed. H. J. Thomson, LCL 398:302, lines 1111–15). 85. See his Quod regulares feminae viris cohabitare non debeant (PG 47:513–31).

For analysis of its tragic perspective, see Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 143–82.

86. ep. 7.1 (ad Olympiadem 1) (SC 13bis:132). 87. De virginitate 3 (GNO 8.1:257–66).

envy (βασκανία) and jealous suspicion (ὑποψία),79 King Herod and the Holy Innocents he victimized,80 John the Baptist,81 the covetous Ananias and Sapphira,82 even Jesus Christ himself facing the challenges of his incarna-tion and passion.83

But now in the church’s more immediate foreground were new casts of tragic characters. Some were the martyrs of the immediate past, like Romanus of Antioch in the Diocletianic persecution, whose saga Pruden-tius poetically enshrined as “great tragedy” (tanta tragoedia).84 Some were ascetics, like the virgins whom John Chrysostom saw as disastrously locked in the tragedy of spiritual marriages,85 or, in a very different circumstance, the devout deaconess Olympias, whom John addressed as a fellow vic-tim in the tempestuous tragedy of his banishment from Constantinople.86 Gregory of Nyssa instead bewails the tragic spectacle of those human actors caught up in the perils of married life and devoid of the ascetic virtues of virginity.87 Some of the church’s new tragic characters were, not surprisingly, Christians fallen from great wealth and prestige. Theodoret of Cyrus, for example, recommending refuge for a certain Carthaginian senator, Celestiacus, who had moved his family east in the wake of the Vandal invasions, writes to one imperial official:


88. Theodoret of Cyrus, ep. 33 (SC 98:94); cf. also the heavily tragic language concerning Celestiacus in ep. 29–32 (SC 98:86–92), 34–36 (SC 98:96–100).

89. E.g. Gregory of Nyssa, paup. 1 (GNO 9.1:99). See also Michael De Vinne, “The Advocacy of Empty Bellies: Episcopal Representation of the Poor in the Late Roman Empire” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1995), 99, 104–5, 109–10; Susan Holman, The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Late Roman Cappadocia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19–20; Finn, Almsgiv-ing in the Later Roman Empire, 179–88.

90. De Vinne, “The Advocacy of Empty Bellies,” 8–9, 15, 18–19, 52, 58–62; Francine Cardman, “Poverty and Wealth as Theater: John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Lazarus and the Rich Man,” in Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society, ed. Susan Holman (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 159–75.

91. Chrysostom in fact testifies to cases of the destitute being recruited as fools and comics in makeshift street theater staged by more prosperous citizens (hom. in 1 Thess. 11.3, PG 62:465). On such visual spectacle, see also Wendy Mayer, “Poverty and Society in the World of John Chrysostom,” in Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity, ed. Bowden et al., 475–78.

92. For insightful investigation of the finely exploited line between comedy and trag-edy in patristic treatment of human suffering, see Westerkamp, “Laughter, Catharsis, and the Patristic Conception of the Embodied Logos,” 229–40; and Leyerle, Theatri-cal Shows and Ascetic Lives, 143–51.

To recount the sufferings of the most honorable and illustrious Celestiacus would require tragic eloquence. For those poets fully elicit the tragedies of humanity, but I can only briefly inform your Excellency that his homeland is Libya, long celebrated far and wide, his city the far-famed Carthage, his hereditary rank a seat in her illustrious senate, his circumstances affluent. But all this is now a tale, mere words stripped naked of reality. For the barbarian war has now deprived him of all this. But such is human fortune (εὐκληρία), which refuses to remain always with the same persons and hastens to move on to dwell with others.88

More striking, however, were Christianity’s newest tragic heroes: the destitute poor and diseased whom late ancient bishops were redefining paradoxically as heroes and even as potential spiritual patrons or advo-cates for their almsgiving benefactors.89 Some fine recent studies have assessed how the Cappadocian Fathers and John Chrysostom deployed theatrical imagery in their poverty sermons to set in dramatic relief the plight of the wretched and to narrow the distance between spectators and spectacle.90 Especially significant here, however, is the ratcheting up of tragic pity in Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen. From a literary-historical standpoint it is an adventurous move, since in their lowly estate the destitute (just like the social parasites discussed earlier) qualified far more easily for comedy,91 and in effect what we behold here, as a whole new spiritual prestige was being accorded the dregs of society, is comedy so deadly serious that it must be tragedy.92 For the two Gregories, and


93. Gregory of Nyssa, paup. 2 (GNO 9.1:117–18); cf. Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.10 (PG 35:869A); or. 14.12–13 (873A–C); or. 43.63 (PG 36:580A); John Chry-sostom, eleem. 1 (PG 51:261).

94. Gregory of Nyssa, De beneficentia (=De pauperibus amandis 2) (GNO 9.1:116–17).

95. John Chrysostom, hom. in Matt. 20.2 (PG 57:289); hom. in 1 Thess. 11.4 (PG 62:466); also De Vinne, “The Advocacy of Empty Bellies,” 64–71; Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives, 50–51.

96. Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.10 (PG 35:869A; trans. Martha Vinson, FC 107:45).

97. “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 69–96.

98. hom. in Matt. 52.1–2 (PG 58:519–21).

for Chrysostom as well, the impoverished and diseased literally make a spectacle (θέαμα) of themselves;93 they are, says Nyssen, “poets of that new, ill-fated tragedy (δυστυχοῦς τραγῳδίας), not using others’ tragic cir-cumstances to induce emotions but filling the stage with their own misfor-tunes.”94 Society’s most passive and vulnerable victims, they now actively insinuate themselves into the public’s gaze and become the enactors and artisans of a whole new kind of emotional response to human suffering.95 As Nazianzen puts it, being the “pitiful wreckage of what had once been human beings . . . [they are] the only people in the world who hate and feel pity for themselves at the same time.”96

Both the Cappadocian Gregories play a fine line here. The visible hor-ror of the lot of such abject persons could conceivably repulse spectators, amplifying their fear to the point of undermining tragic pity, thus widen-ing rather than closing the emotional distance. On the other hand, as we have already seen, distance and otherness were exactly what enabled the morality of compassion. Karl Morrison, in his history of the interpreta-tion of empathy in Western theology and art, observes that revulsion has actually proven a vital condition for empathy. In the classical tragic poets, in Augustine, and in patristic mystical theology alike estrangement and bonding can be simultaneous, and Morrison showcases Augustine’s expo-sition of the stormy relation of Jacob and Esau as a classic case in point.97 Another prime example is Chrysostom’s exegesis of Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman (Matt 15.22–28), where the interplay of the Sav-ior’s rebuff and the woman’s persistent faith merely accentuates his deeper identification with her.98 We have already seen how the alienation evoked by envy and social rivalry was precisely the matrix for refining Christian mercy; so too the conviction of Cappadocian preaching is that empathetic identification with the grievously afflicted cannot happen apart from an


99. Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, De beneficentia (=De pauperibus amandis 2) (GNO 9.1:117–18, 122); Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.10–13 (PG 35:869A–873D); or. 14.16 (PG 35:877B).

100. See the exemplary texts from the Apophthegmata patrum identified by Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word and the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 282–83.

101. Ep. 40.4.4 (CSEL 34.2:73–74), 40.4.6 (CSEL 34.2:77 ): . . . non ut fallaciter se fingeret esse quod non erat, sed ut misericorditer eis ita subveniendum esse sen-tiret, ac si ipse in eodem errore laboraret; non scilicet mentientis astu, sed compati-entis affectu. . . . Again citing 1 Cor 9.20–22, cf. Contra mendacium 12.26 (CSEL 41:506): Fit enim quisque tamquam ille cui vult subvenire, quando tanta misericordia subvenit, quanta sibi subveniri vellet, si esset ipse in eadem miseria constitutus. Itaque fit tamquam ille, non quia fallit illum, sed quia se cogitat sicut illum.

102. hom. in Heb. 11.3 (PG 63:93). Cf. Leo the Great, Serm. 9.4 (CCL 138:36), where this same “understanding” means penetrating the real needs of those who suf-fer, which are hidden beneath shame.

103. beat. 5 (GNO 7.2:126); similarly Basil, hom. in Ps. 22.3 (on Ps 114) (PG 29:489B), defines pity in terms of being “sympathetically disposed” (συμπαθῶς διατιθεμενῶν).

upheaval of one’s sense of security in beholding the grotesque.99 If there is no competitive play of emotions of fear, pity, and love within the pity-ing subject, there is no emotional growth, no enrichment or texturing of love.

CONSTRUCTING EMPATHETIC MERCY AS A THEOLOGICAL VIRTUE

The other side of all this is the positive psychological work of empathy, which, in my judgment, was the great emotional frontier for the transfor-mation of pity in late ancient Christianity just as it is in some contempo-rary theological treatments of the dynamics of compassion. There is no pure Greek or Latin equivalent to “empathy” in its modern sense. Early monastic sages anticipate it with their notion of “carrying” (βαστάζειν) another, as in bearing others’ sin but not their guilt.100 Augustine approxi-mates empathy when he qualifies Paul’s becoming a Jew for the Jews’ sake (1 Cor 9.20) specifically as “fellow-feeling out of mercy, not simulation out of intentional deceit” (compassione misericordiae, non simulatione fallaciae).101 Chrysostom finds a precedent for empathy in the Psalmist’s instruction on “considering” (συνίων) the poor (Ps 40.2, LXX), a deep imagining of their plight.102 More satisfactory still is Gregory of Nyssa’s description of pity as “voluntary misery” (ἐκούσιος λύπη) and “loving self-identification” (ἀγαπητικὴ συνδιάθησις) with the other.103 Maximus the Confessor combines these by specifying empathetic mercy as “voluntary


104. Mystagogia 24 (PG 91:713A).105. ep. 2 (PG 91:396A).106. Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering Other (Leuven:

Peeters Press, 2001), 79, 87–94. 107. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans.

Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961]), 42–48, 293–94 (and passim); and Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1981 [1974]), 3–20, 131–36; Oli-ver Davies, A Theology of Compassion: Metaphysics of Difference and the Renewal of Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), esp. 129–37; David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34–44, 58–67, 70–71.

108. “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 72–73. On true compassion as enabled by being radically responsible, or “hostage,” to the other, see Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 117, 124, 127, 184–85; also Ford, Self and Salvation, 66–67.

self-identification” (ἐκούσιος συνδιάθησις),104 adding that through mercy we proactively acknowledge kinship (τὸ συγγενές) and a filial bond (τὸ ὁμόφυλον) with others in crisis.105

Empathy ancient and modern is an emotion aimed at closing the gap between self and suffering other; but it is no simple penetration of another’s experience, no simple merging of subjectivities. As the contemporary eth-icist Steven Tudor observes, empathy ever runs the risk of reading into the other’s suffering one’s own imagination of it, or of merely resonating or duplicating that suffering emotionally, instead of appropriating that suffering on its own terms and reinterpreting it through compassionate action on the other’s behalf.106 Still lingering in the background, moreover, is Augustine’s dilemma, where empathy in another’s tragedy ever risks becoming a kind of emotional voyeurism.

And there are other crucial risks to empathy, noted by certain postmod-ern Christian theologians interested in the moral psychology of compas-sion. Among them are Oliver Davies and David Ford, both of whom echo concerns of the distinguished Talmudist Emmanuel Levinas, who warned against deploying ontological or totalizing categories of human “being” as a kind of anesthetic for the painful existential work of empathy and compassion.107 Levinas himself also balked at the idea of a spiritualized “friendship” with the suffering other, or anything short of the radical self-dispossession and being “hostage” to the other requisite for authen-tic empathy.108 For Levinas and his Christian devotees, empathy happens only in the presence of the transcendent and infinite Other, who grounds the otherness of those who suffer, shatters the egoism of the compassion-ate subject, and introduces into the inter-subjectivity of self and suffering


109. Cf. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33–42, 48–151, 254–85, 304–5; Otherwise than Being, 61–129; Ford, Self and Salvation, 34–43, 57–70; Davies, A Theology of Compassion, 131–36.

110. On this point, see Pauline Allen and Edward Morgan, Preaching Poverty, 134, 155–56, with citations; also Boniface Ramsey, “Almsgiving in the Latin Church: The Fourth and Fifth Centuries,” TS 43 (1982): 253–54. Ramsey expresses concern for a kind of “social monophysitism” in Christian preaching, associating the poor so closely with Christ that their individual identity was collapsed.

111. As in his Totality and Infinity, 74–75, 187–219; Otherwise Than Being, 89–93.

112. Countering Ramsey’s view (see n. 110 above), Andreas Klauser argues that “Vielmehr gilt es nach Augustinus, in der jedem Menschen—auch in sich selbst als Spender von Almosen—Christus zu erkennen und sich in die Nachfolge von des-sen Erbarmen zu begeben” (“Eleemosyna,” in Augustinus-Lexikon, ed. C. P. Mayer and Erich Feldmann [Basel: Schwabe, 1986], 2:766). Similarly, cf. Allan Fitzgerald, “Almsgiving in the Works of St. Augustine,” in Signum Pietatis: Festgabe für Corne-lius Petrus Mayer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Adolar Zumkeller (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1989), 450, 457–58.

113. See, e.g., Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.6 (PG 35:864C–865B); or. 14.14 (PG 35:876A); or. 14.28 (PG 35:896B–C); Gregory of Nyssa, paup. 1 (GNO 9.1:103); paup. 2 (GNO 9.1:114, 126). On the same issue in Augustine, see Pauline Allen and Edward Morgan in Preaching Poverty, 133, 155–56, with abundant citations.

114. See e.g. Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Graecos (GNO 3.1:23, 31–32).

other the infinite desire that enables the utterly generous giving of self to O/other.109

There is no simple patristic analogue for this critical insight into the dynamics of empathy. Augustine, in identifying the poor as “Christ” for potential almsgivers (cf. Matt 24.40; 2 Cor 8.9), ran the rhetorical risk, as did other bishops, of depersonalizing them.110 The indigent could too easily lack “face”—the very thing that in Levinas’s pregnant usage gives voice to the suffering other111—although a more theologically generous construal would allow that Augustine simply meant to prioritize Christ’s own active presence in the poor and in the almsgiver,112 or that this pres-ence would intrinsically dignify the individual poor. In addition, the Cap-padocians, Augustine as well, could perhaps be accused in their preaching on mercy of qualifying the otherness of the poor and diseased by recurring to the ontological principle of our common human nature in the image of God, or to the overarching cosmic drama of postlapsarian human suffer-ing and redemption in which all creaturely bodies are implicated.113 And yet the Cappadocians do not imagine human “nature” apart from its con-crete instantiation as individual persons (ὑποστάσεις), persons-with-faces (πρόσωπα),114 whose embodied life (including the complex life of the emo-tions) is, teleologically, the theater in which that nature is transformed and deified. One compelling recent study attests how Gregory Nazianzen, in


115. Stratis Papaioannou, “Gregory and the Constraint of Sameness,” in Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, ed. Jostein Børtnes and Tomas Hägg (Copen-hagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 59–81.

116. On mercy as deifying because it is a divine attribute, see Basil of Caesarea, hom. in Hexaemeron 10.17 (SC 160:208–10); Gregory of Nyssa, beat. 5 (GNO 7.2:124); paup. 1 (GNO 9.1:103). Cf. De instituto christiano (GNO 8.1:65–68, 71), where the deifying desire for God, the infinity of which Gregory expounds in De vita Moysis and hom. in Cant., is explicitly linked with an “insatiable desire (ἐπιθυμία) for justice” in practicing virtue and with becoming a “slave to all” (Mark 9.35, 10.44).

117. hom. in Eccl. 4 (GNO 5:334–38). 118. Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, paup. 1 (GNO 9.1:123); Maximus, Ambiguum 8 (PG

91:1105B); Capita de caritate 1.25 (PG 90:965B), 1.71 (PG 90:976B–C); Ep. 2 (PG 91:400A). On this theme see also Paul Blowers, “Bodily Inequality, Material Chaos, and the Ethics of Equalization in Maximus the Confessor,” SP 42, ed. F. Young et al. (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2006), 51–56.

119. Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.5 (PG 35:864B): . . . τὴν ἀγάπην . . . ταύτης τὸ κράτιστον εὐρίσκω φιλοπτωχίαν, καὶ τὴν περὶ τὸ συγγενὲς εὐσπλαγχνίαν τε καὶ συμπάθειαν.

120. E.g. Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.14–15 (PG 35:876A–C); or. 14.37 (PG 35:908A–B); or. 14.40 (PG 35:909B–C); Gregory of Nyssa, paup. 2 (GNO 9.1:112–13). Finn documents the pervasiveness of this identification of the poor with the “incarnate” Christ in patristic writers (Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, 183–84).

particular, consistently pushes the envelope of ontological “sameness” in his Orations with forms of discourse aimed precisely at “rupturing” the self through pathos in its transformative encounter with O/otherness.115

Deification, meanwhile, is inconceivable apart from the existential work of mercy and empathy conditioned by love and self-denial within the context of a passionate (and infinite) desire for the O/other.116 Gregory of Nyssa, later Maximus the Confessor, furthermore concur that while there is definitely a protological and eschatological equality of human beings, it is meaningless apart from the historical labor of an “equalizing” ethics worked out through the evangelical virtues. Nyssen famously shows this in his vigorous opposition to slavery,117 while Maximus, even more so than Gregory, expands Paul’s admonition about supplementing another’s deficiencies with one’s own abundances (2 Cor 8.14) into a whole elee-mosynary and ascetical project to overcome inequality (ἀνισότης; ἀνωμαλία) between embodied individuals.118

Though there is no pure patristic equivalent of Levinas’s notion of self-dispossession for the sake of the other, we find in the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor, among other writers, the aspiration to render empathetic mercy a “theological” virtue, not only by extension, since it is the preeminent mode of ἀγάπη,119 but because it images Christ’s own intentional κένωσις, or self-emptying, within the bodies of the poor and the diseased.120 As Susan Holman has insightfully observed in Gregory of


121. See especially Gregory Nazianzen, or. 14.27 (PG 35:893B–C); Gregory of Nyssa, paup. 2 (GNO 9.1:124); also the discussion in Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, 27–30, 158–67, 180–81; De Vinne, “The Advocacy of Empty Bellies,” 29–30, 77–83.

122. Myst. 24 (PG 91:713B). This follows upon the passage in which Maximus defines empathetic mercy as “voluntary self-identification” (ἐκούσιος συνδιάθησις) with the suffering other.

123. For an excellent beginning, at least with Augustine, see Louis Swift, “Giving and Forgiving: Augustine on Eleemosyna and Misericordia,” AugSt 32 (2001): 25–36.

Nyssa, the communication of deifying incarnational grace through the bodies of the poor is like a sacred contagion, a sublime contamination for those agents of mercy willing to contact sick bodies and to aid the impoverished.121 But the complement to this, as Maximus the Confessor insists, must be the deifying “incarnation” of God in the Christian who cultivates empathy and mercy:

If the poor person is “God,” it is because of God’s condescension in becoming poor for our sake (cf. 2 Cor 8.9) and in taking upon himself by his own suffering the sufferings of each one “until the end of time” (cf. Matt 28.20), always suffering mystically out of goodness in proportion to each one’s suffering. So all the more will that person be “god” who, in imitation of God’s philanthropy, personally heals by his or her own initiative, but in a deiform way, the afflictions of those who suffer, and who exhibits in his or her merciful disposition the very same power of God’s sustaining providence that operates in proportion to need.122

CONCLUSION

I began this essay trying to take a step back from the standard supposition of mercy as a Christian or biblical virtue so as to reconstruct the broader formation of an emotional culture of compassion in late ancient Chris-tianity. Admittedly my treatment is far from comprehensive. I have only scratched the surface of the appropriation of biblical narrative scripts of mercy and empathy in early Christian interpretation and re-performance. Mercy in the expression of forgiveness, for example, presents a whole land-scape of its own much larger than I could consider here.123 Further work is warranted, moreover, on the specific nuances or “scripts” differentiating sympathetic emotions in early Christian moral psychology. I have opened windows on only three dimensions—crucial ones, I believe—of the shaping of that moral psychology of compassion: the critical engagement of Greco-Roman perspectives on pity; the refining of Christian mercy in the fire of socio-economic rivalry; and the reworking of tragic pity to solicit compas-sionate and empathetic response to the desperate and the diseased.


124. See e.g. Brett Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

125. See e.g. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

126. For a classic summation of this theme, see Augustine, Serm. 207.1 (PL 38:1042–43).

Epitomized in Augustine’s reflections about tragedy on and offstage but salient in a host of cited sources in this essay, the test for Christian preach-ers and moralists was to uncover the emotional “thickness” and moral complexion of mercy so as to clarify and edify the formation of authenti-cally agapeistic virtues. The dialectics of pleasure and pain in mercy, and of maintaining while negotiating the distance between self and suffering other, was decisive for these late ancient thinkers and still resounds today in philosophical, theological, and humanitarian reflection on the tragic spectacle of human suffering. Can or should one “enjoy” the art of the Holocaust?124 Can compassion “at a distance” ever morally vanquish ego-ism and emotional voyeurism?125

For the late ancient Christian thinkers discussed here, however, the overriding challenge in the moral psychology of compassion was to re-imagine and recondition pity and related sympathetic emotions teleologi-cally within the still-unfolding Christian narrative of divine condescen-sion and κένωσις.126 Recurring consistently to the exempla of biblical and contemporary saints, the higher goal was the christocentric reconstruction of pity and empathetic mercy as theologically virtuous emotions, deifying emotions, emotions which—for all their liabilities and vulnerabilities—had constantly to be re-contextualized and re-experienced as epiphanies of the eternal and incarnationally available compassion of God in Jesus Christ.

Paul M. Blowers is Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tennessee

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