171. Motive and deed
171. MOTIVE AND DEED
What is the relation between love (charity) and the works of love (almsgiving)?
It is written (1 Jn 3:17): He that hath the substance of this world and shall see his brother in need, and shall put up his bowels (shut up his compassion) from him, how doth the charity of God abide in him?
External acts belong to that virtue (charity) which regards the motive for doing those acts. Now the motive for giving alms is to relieve one who is in need. Wherefore some have defined alms as being a deed whereby something is given to the needy out of compassion and for God’s sake. . . .
Almsgiving can be materially without charity (material things can be given for non-loving motives) but to give alms formally (essentially), i.e., for God’s sake, with delight and readiness, and altogether as one ought, is not possible without charity (II-II,32,1).
The first and most practical answer to the question is that love is not just an inner feeling; love always shows its presence by external, visible deeds; love works. Indeed, Kierkegaard says that in the Bible love is “the works of love” (in his book by that title). Love works; and if we do not see the works of love (in places where they obviously ought to be) then we can be sure that love is not present. Love is the invisible but real cause of visible works of love. The visible reveals the invisible, and the absence of the visible reveals the absence of the invisible.
St. Thomas means by “alms” not merely money but “to relieve one who is in need”. There has never been a human being in the history of the world without needs—and that includes even Jesus Christ, God incarnate. St. Thomas defines love as both motive and deed when he says that “external acts belong to that virtue (charity) which regards the motive for doing those acts.”
The motive is double: human and divine, natural and supernatural, horizontal and vertical, “out of compassion (for the needy) and for God’s sake”. St. Thomas habitually avoids false and harmful either / ors by gravitating toward both / ands, toward an inclusive “big picture”.
In the last paragraph St. Thomas observes that although love (as inner motive) cannot exist without its external works (which is the point of the first paragraph), nevertheless its works can exist without it. St. Paul, in the most loved chapter in the Bible (1 Cor 13), even says that one could even give up his body, his bodily life, without love. We see this in terrorist suicide bombers.
Two inner properties of charity, two marks of its presence, are (1) “for God’s sake” and (2) “with delight and (therefore) readiness” (since we are always ready for delight).
Charity is not confined to Christians. Since all men have an innate, natural knowledge of God (as St. Paul says in Romans 1), all men are capable of charity, i.e., “something is given to the needy with (human) compassion and for God’s sake”.
Since (1) charity is supernatural, and comes only from the real presence of God in the soul (St. Thomas’ paragraph 3), and since (2) all men, and not only Christians, are capable of charity (as has been proved in the paragraph above), it follows that (3) all men are capable of accepting the real presence of God in their souls, even if they have defective or mistaken concepts of God. (Do you really think you don’t have any?) Karl Rahner calls these men “anonymous Christians”.