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Alvaro Barrientos/AP
Workers from Red Cross carry an injured reveller on a stretcher at the end of the seventh day of the running of the bulls during the San Fermín fiestas in Pamplona, Spain, on Thursday.
The worst disasters can often bring out the best in people.
Earlier this year, when parts of the North Island were devastated by storms and floods, the Red Cross Disaster Fund charity received a staggering $24 million in donations, to help rebuild shattered lives, homes, and communities.
The Good Samaritan impulse is deeply rooted in our shared human nature. But the actual word “charity” derives from classical Latin, and specifically from the subtle and varied Roman language of love.
While Latin amor refers to sexual desire, cāritās (the Latin root of “charity”) expresses a very different, less selfish kind of love.
Cāritās is a concept based on the Latin word cārus. This can be translated as either “beloved, cherished” or “expensive”, like the dual use of “dear” in British English. We can translate cāritās as “dearness”, to cover both senses.
How are these two definitions connected? If some object is expensive, it means that potential buyers set a high market value on it and will pay a high price for it.
Similarly, when you value people highly, you are prepared to help and support them, even at a steep cost to yourself. You can expend your time, labour, or money, like those Red Cross donors.
In extreme cases, you may even be willing to sacrifice your own life – to pay the highest price of all – in order to save your loved ones.
Cāritās can therefore describe any relationship based on true, deep affection and esteem, especially between parents and children or other close kin, but potentially embracing the whole human race.
The Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius used it as a term of endearment towards an admired tutor, in gushing language that lecturers too seldom get to hear nowadays: “My sweetest teacher, most honoured and unique of men, my joy, my dearness [cāritās mea], my delight.”
Cāritās can even cross the species barrier. The Roman science writer Pliny the Elder celebrated the maternal cāritās of she-asses, who will literally “go through fire to reach their foals”. And animals today are the object of much human “charity”, e.g. the SPCA.
Finally, Christian writers in the western, Latin-speaking half of the Roman Empire used cāritās as an equivalent for the key term agapē from the Greek New Testament. Agapē is brotherly love, the spirit of Christian self-sacrifice.
In St. Jerome’s hugely influential Latin (Vulgate) Bible translation, Paul thus speaks of “faith, hope, and love…but the greatest of these is love [cāritās].”
So, while cynics may dismiss charitable donation as a mere business and tax write-off, the beating heart of charity is pure, unselfish love. And through its ancient roots and modern application, this word teaches us that love is not just a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Rather, we should remember the famous maxim of Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables (the great epic novel of Christian charity): “To love is to act.”
Jonathan Tracy is a lecturer in the classical studies programme at Massey University.
The Odyssey of English is a regular series looking at the Greek and Latin origin of words, and is part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of Massey University’s Classical Studies programme.
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