Charity

Charity, caritas, occupies two places at once, and the overlap is worth stating clearly. In the popular scheme of contrary virtues it stands against avarice, and there it means generosity, the free giving of what one has; the older term for that is liberalitas, and some presentations of the scheme use it. In the theological scheme, however, charity is the third and greatest of the theological virtues named by Paul at 1 Corinthians 13, and there it means the love of God and of one's neighbour for God's sake, which Aquinas calls the form of all the virtues, the principle that gives them their order and without which they are not, properly speaking, virtues at all. The Greek behind it is agape, the Latin caritas, and the English translation has drifted so far toward almsgiving that most modern versions render it love.

The word's drift in English reflects a specific translation history: William Tyndale's earlier English New Testament rendered the term at 1 Corinthians 13 simply as love, but the translators of the 1611 King James Version reverted to charity, following the Latin Vulgate's caritas, a choice that shaped English religious vocabulary for centuries even as it narrowed the word's later everyday sense toward almsgiving specifically. C. S. Lewis's twentieth-century study The Four Loves revisited the underlying Greek vocabulary, agape, eros, philia, and storge, for a popular readership, distinguishing agape as a love given without regard to the worth or attractiveness of its object, the sense the theological virtue of charity is meant to carry.

Charity is the most consistently pictured of all the virtues, and the two objects that identify her are a flame and children. The flame, sometimes a burning heart held in the hand or a fire on the head, renders caritas as the theological virtue: love as something kindled rather than reasoned into. The children, usually two or three, one of them at the breast, render the same virtue as practical mercy, the giving of what one has to whoever needs it. Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, first printed in 1593 and the handbook every later programme worked from, gives both.

The doubling in the pictures follows the doubling in the doctrine that the atlas records elsewhere: charity stands in the list of contrary virtues against avarice, where it means generosity, and in the list of theological virtues alongside faith and hope, where it means the love of God and of the neighbour for God's sake. A painter needing one figure for both meanings needed two attributes, and got them.

The flame is the older half. It carries into Christian art the classical association of love with fire and joins it to Pentecost, and it is why charity is so often the only virtue in a cycle rendered in warm colour.

The atlas draws charity's emblem as the flame rather than the children, on the practical ground that a single flame reads at small size and a group of figures does not, and because the flame is the attribute that belongs to charity alone.