Abstract

In Upheavah of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha Nussbaum suggests understanding charity simultaneously as mildness, pitiful commiseration, and altruism on behalf of the human community. This essay argues that these elements do not put charity inthe correct perspective. Not mildness, but patience, should be taken as the core of charity. Rather than reinserting a person into the community, charity endures someone who is no longer capable of taking part. Ultimately, respect and pity are not the motivating forces of charity. By relying on the traditional Christian works of mercy — the corporeal and the spiritual — an alternative view of charity is developed. Why, for one, is burying the dead considered a (corporeal) work of mercy? Undoutably, pity is an insufficient basis for justifying this attribution. Moreover, burial can hardly be interpreted as benevolence oras a form of altruism in the usual sense. Taking burial as a paradigm for other works of mercy, the author suggests that the dead body is an in-between, being at the same time outside and inside the community of men. The dead person no longer belongs to the living, nor does he or she fall radically outside the ongoing circle of interpersonal meanings. This point of view provides an approach to the socalled spiritual works of mercy.The (corporeal or spiritual) indigent other is in need of charity at the very moment that he or she is no longer capable of reacting as a person. To be charitable does not always consist in doing something for the other, but sometimes in renouncing the prospectof improvement and even in refraining from demanding that the other should behave as a person should. Hence the title of the essay: charity means wondering how to bear the 'transcendence' of the other. By transcendence here, we mean the other's estrangement from the community of men that does not yet fall outside the circle of interpersonal meanings. Charitycannot be reduced to helpfulness or readiness to help. In some circumstances, charity reveals a deeper sense by accepting and bearing the indigence of someone who cannot be helped