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The Angelic Doctor on the Virtue of Liberality

This Rock Volume 19, Number 3   March 2008     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   Are the Gospels Myth? By Carl E. Olson   Further Reading   Baptism Saves You By Fr. Dwight Longenecker   Is the Education of Women a Modern Idea? By Catherine Brown Tkacz   Early Christian Education   Co-Ed Religion: the Double Monastery   Visual Reminders of Feminine Wisdom   Further Reading   The Sin of Greed: When We Worship the Golden God By Christopher Kaczor   Greed Leads to Other Sins   Lottery Winners Come Down to Earth   The Angelic Doctor on the Virtue of Liberality   Further Reading   Damascus Road The Fall, Revisited By Deacon Bill Turrentine   By the Book The Divinity of the Holy Spirit By Tim Staples   Eyes to See Everyone's a Critic By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told Convent Horror Stories By Robert P. Lockwood   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

[I]t belongs to the liberal man to part with things. Hence liberality is also called open-handedness (largitas), because that which is open does not withhold things but parts of them. The term "liberality" seems also to allude to this, since when a man quits hold of a thing he frees it (liberat), so to speak, from his keeping and ownership, and shows his mind to be free of attachment thereto. Now those things which are the subject of a man’s free-handedness towards others are the goods he possesses, which are denoted by the term "money." Therefore the proper matter of liberality is money.

Liberality depends not on the quantity given, but on the heart of the giver. Now the heart of the giver is disposed according to the passions of love and desire, and consequently those of pleasure and sorrow, towards the things given. Hence the interior passions are the immediate matter of liberality, while exterior money is the object of those same passions. . . .

Now the use of money consists in parting with it. For the acquisition of money is like generation rather than use: while the keeping of money, in so far as it is directed to facilitate the use of money, is like a habit. Now in parting with a thing—for instance, when we throw something—the farther we put it away the greater the force (virtus) employed. Hence parting with money by giving it to others proceeds from a greater virtue than when we spend it on ourselves. But it is proper to a virtue as such to tend to what is more perfect, since "virtue is a kind of perfection." Therefore a liberal man is praised chiefly for giving.

—St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II:2:117