The crisis of traditional charity.

The medieval image of the pauper as Christ's representative, his earthly surrogate, the quasi-divine instrument of the charity – and thus the salvation – of the rich man, had long encouraged bountifulness towards the poor. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory, with its emphasis on good works on earth piling up spiritual credit in the after life, contributed towards the continuing vitality of this image even as, from the late Middle Ages onwards, a counter-view developed in which the pauper became a source of moral, social and political danger. The Catholic Reformation in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affirmed the virtues of almsgiving. The halo of holy poverty was still sufficiently intact in the eighteenth century for churchmen to utilise the instrumental view of the pauper inherited from the Middle Ages as a means of invoking the charity of their congregations. For Abbé Cambacérès, for example, one of Montpellier's foremost ecclesiastics in the last decades of the Ancien Régime and the uncle of Napoleon's archichancelier, the pauper remained, in God's providential plan, en quelque sorte le plus intéressant de ses ouvrages et le secret de sa sagesse, qui a rendu le pauvre précieux et nécessaire au riche; qui a voulu que le riche fût le protecteur du pauvre et le pauvre le sauveur des riches, qui les délivre du danger des richesses sur la terre en leur offrant les moyens de les convertir en charité qui leur servent à acheter le ciel. If the mainspring of almsgiving was religious, its forms and contexts were limitless. Besides the more formalised execution of religious foundations, almsgiving was an unthinking reflex among the orthodox Catholic laity and clergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]