with the congregational meals (or ἀγάπαι) and the Eucharist, and under the supervision of no single officer or bishop. Out of this was developed a system of relief controlled by The organization of the parish and endowed charities.a bishop, who was assisted chiefly by deacons or presbyters, while the ἀγάπαι, consisting of offerings laid before the altar, still remained. Subsequently the meal was separated from the sacrament, and became a dole of food, or poor people’s meal—e.g. in St Augustine’s time in western Africa—and it was not allowed to be served in churches (A.D. 391). As religious asceticism became dominant, the sacrament was taken fasting; it appeared unseemly that men and women should meet together for such purposes, and the ἀγάπαι fell out of repute. Simultaneously it would seem that the parish παροικία became from a congregational settlement a geographical area.
The organization of relief at Rome illustrates both a type of administration and a transition. St Gregory’s reforms (A.D. 590) largely developed it. The first factor in the transition was the church fund of the second period of Christianity, about A.D. 150 to after 208 (Tertullian, Apol. 39). It served as a friendly fund, was supported by voluntary gifts, and was used to succour and to bury the poor, to help destitute and orphaned children, old household slaves and those who suffered for the faith. This fund is quite different from the collegia tenuiorum or funeratica of the Romans, which were societies to which the members paid stipulated sums at stated periods, for funeral benefits or for common meals (J. P. Waltzing, Corporations professionnelles chez les Romains, i. 313). It represents the charitable centre round which the parochial system developed. That system was adopted probably about the middle of the 3rd century, but in Rome the diaconate probably remained centralized. At the end of the 4th century Pope Anastasius had founded deaconries in Rome, and endowed them largely “to meet the frequent demands of the diaconate.” Gregory two hundred years later reorganized the system. He divided the fourteen old “regions” into seven ecclesiastical districts and thirty “titles” (or parishes). The parishes were under the charge of sixty-six priests; the districts were eleemosynary divisions. Each was placed under the charge of a deacon, not (Greg. Ep. xi. and xxviii.) under the priests (presbyteri titularii). Over the deacons was an archdeacon. It was the duty of the deacons to care for the poor, widows, orphans, wards, and old people of their several districts. They inquired in regard to those who were relieved, and drew up under the guidance of the bishop the register of poor (matricula). Only these received regular relief. In each district was an hospital or office for alms, of which the deacon had charge, assisted by a steward (or oeconomus). Here food was given and meals were taken, the sick and poor were maintained, and orphan or foundling children lodged. The churches of Rome and of other large towns possessed considerable estates, “the patrimony of the patron saints,” and to Rome belonged estates in Sicily which had not been ravaged by the invaders, and they continued to pay to it their tenth of corn, as they had done since Sicily was conquered. Four times a year (Milman, Lat. Christ, ii. 117) the shares of the (1) clergy and papal officers, (2) churches and monasteries, and (3) “hospitals, deaconries and ecclesiastical wards for the poor,” were calculated in money and distributed; and the first day in every month St Gregory distributed to the poor in kind corn, wine, cheese, vegetables, bacon, meal, fish and oil. The sick and infirm were superintended by persons appointed to inspect every street. Before the pope sat down to his own meal a portion was separated and sent out to the hungry at his door. The Roman plebs had thus become the poor of Christ (pauperes Christi), and under that title were being fed by civica annona and sportula as their ancestors had been; and the deaconries had superseded the “regions” and the “steps” from which the corn had been distributed. The hospitium was now part of a common organization of relief, and the sick were visited according to Jewish and early Christian precedent. How far kindly Romans visited the sick of their day we do not know. Alms and the annona were now, it would seem, administered concurrently; and there was a system of poor relief independent of the churches and their alms (unless these, organized, as in Scottish towns, on the ancient ecclesiastical lines, were paid wholly or in part to a central diaconate fund). Much had changed, but in much Roman thought still prevailed.
On lines similar to these the organization of poor relief in the middle ages was developed. In the provinces in the later empire the senate or ordo decurionum were responsible for the public provisioning of the towns (Fustel de Coulanges, La Gaule romaine, p. 251), and no doubt the care of the poor would thus in some measure devolve on them in times of scarcity or distress. On the religious side, on the other hand, the churches would probably be constant centres of almsgiving and relief; and then, further, when the Roman municipal system had decayed, each citizen (as in Charlemagne’s time, 742–814) was required to support his own dependants—a step suggestive of much after-history.
The change in sentiment and method could hardly be more strongly marked than by a comparison of “the Teaching” with St Ambrose’s (334–397) “Duties of the Clergy” (De Officiis Ministrorum). For the old instinctive obedience to a command there is now an endeavour to find a reasoned basis for charitable action. Pauperism is recognized. “Never was the greed of beggars greater than it is now. . . . They want to empty the purses of the poor, to deprive them of the means of support. Not content with a little, they ask for more. . . . With lies about their lives they ask for further sums of money.” “A method in giving is necessary.” But in the suggestions made there is little consistency. Liberality is urged as a means of gaining the love of the people; a new and a false issue is thus raised. The relief is neither to be “too freely given to those who are unsuitable, nor too sparingly bestowed upon the needy.” Everywhere there is a doctrine of the mean reflected through Cicero’s De Officiis, the doctrine insufficiently stated, as though it were a mean of quantity, and not that rightly tempered mean which is the harmony of opposing moods. The poor are not to be sent away empty. Those rejected by the church are not to be left to the “outer darkness” of an earlier Christianity. They must be supplied if they are in want. The methodic giver is “hard towards none, but is free towards all.” Consequently none are refused, and no account is taken of the regeneration that may spring up in a man from the effort towards self-help which refusal may originate. Thus after all it appears that method means no more than this—to give sometimes more, sometimes less, to all needy people. In the small congregational church of early Christianity, each member of which was admitted on the conditions of strictest discipline, the common alms of the faithful could hardly have done much harm within the body, even though outside they created and kept alive a horde of vagrant alms-seekers and pretenders. Now in this department at least the church had become the state, and discipline and a close knowledge of one’s fellow-Christians no longer safeguarded the alms. From Cicero is borrowed the thought of “active help,” which “is often grander and more noble,” but the thought is not worked out. From the social side the problem is not understood or even stated, and hence no principle of charity or of charitable administration is brought to light in the investigation. Still there are rudiments of the economics of charity in the praise of Joseph, who made the people buy the corn, for otherwise “they would have given up cultivating the soil; for he who has the use of what is another’s often neglects his own.” Perhaps, as St Augustine inspired the theology of the middle ages, we may say that St Ambrose, in the mingled motives, indefiniteness, and kindliness of this book, stands for the charity of the middle ages, except in so far as the movement which culminated in the brotherhood of St Francis awakened the intelligence of the world to wider issues.
In Constantinople the pauperism seems to have been extreme. The corn supplies of Africa were diverted there in great part when it became the capital of the empire. This must have left to Rome a larger scope for the development of the civic-religious administration of relief. St Chrysostom’s sermons give no impression of the rise of any new administrative force, alike sagacious and dominant. The appeal to give alms is constant, but the positive counsel on charitable work is nil. The people had the annona civica, and imperial gifts, corn, allowances (salaria) from the treasury granted for the poor and needy, and an annual gift of 50 gold pounds (rather more than £1400) for funerals. Besides these there were many institutions, and the begging and the almsgiving at the church doors. “The land could not support the lazy and valiant beggars.” There were public works provided for them; if they refused to work on them they were to be driven away. The sick might visit the capital, but must be registered and sent back (A.D. 382); the sturdy beggar was condemned to slavery. So little did alms
