Almsgiving, however, was more than a way to support the poor and to show the financial muscle of the church in competition with the urban elites and their ideal of civic euergetism. It had a supernatural dimension. Augustine emphasized this supernatural dimension ever more strongly over time. He insisted that almsgiving was an obligatory pious practice because it had an expiatory function. Alms atoned for sins. Like Jesus’s great image of the transfer of treasure from earth to heaven, the idea of the redemption of sins through the giving of alms was calculated to startle the average person.
There is little need to linger on Augustine’s notion of sin. He had long been convinced that the life of a Christian was a life of continual penance. The pious Christian was a human hedgehog. He or she was covered from head to foot with the tiny, sharp spines of daily, barely conscious peccata minutissima—with “tiny little sins.” It was to expunge these tiny sins that the Christian should pray every day Dimitte nobis debita nostra: “Forgive us our sins.” One should note how, in the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer, “sins” were usually termed debita—“debts.” They were debts that could be canceled.
There was a concrete, financial corollary to this insistence on daily penance for daily sin. Like all other Christian preachers of his generation, Augustine never doubted that prayer for forgiveness should be accompanied by almsgiving. Alms provided the “wings” that brought the Lord’s Prayer up to heaven. Without such wings no prayer could fly.
This meant, in effect, that perpetual giving was the counterpart of perpetual sin. Augustine expanded the traditional idea of almsgiving as a payment for sin to include the more daring notion of the need for the daily expiation of sins. It seemed to Augustine that the human condition demanded this. The soul was a leaking vessel on the high seas. Little trickles of daily sins constantly seeped through the timbers, silently filling the bilge with water that might yet sink the ship if it were not pumped out. And to man the bilge pump was both to pray and to give alms: “We should not only pray, but also give alms,” he wrote. “Those who work the bilge pump lest the boat go down…do so [chanting sea chanteys] with their voices and working with their hands. Let the hands go round and round. Let them give, let them do good works.”
Furthermore, daily sin, wealth, and almsgiving were drawn together by a half-hidden homology. Augustine always stressed the way in which daily sin piled up, in and around the human person in a largely unconscious manner—like sand, like drops of water, like fleas. But, for the good Christian, wealth did much the same. Surplus wealth also seemed to pile up almost insensibly in the form of small sums that could be disposed of with little difficulty or regret in the form of alms or contributions to the church. The good Christian could learn to dispose of these small sums in a manner that was as painless and as much to be taken for granted as the regular trimming of one’s hair. The “daily sins” that could be expiated by alms alone were not the big, cold crimes of violence, fraud, avarice, and adultery. They were the humdrum sins of everyday life.
Augustine did not linger on these small sins of excess because he was unnaturally scrupulous. He did so because he was optimistic. He regarded them as precisely the sort of sins that could be dealt with by giving alms. Everyday sins and their remedy—everyday almsgiving—slid together in his mind. Wealth—the almost insensible buildup of a surplus—could be used on a day-to-day basis to counter sins that were, themselves, the result of a daily bubbling up of surplus energy. Such metaphors would only have carried weight with his audience if the sums of money involved in almsgiving had been modest. He did not expect heroic renunciations of wealth. Rather, “small change” sins were met by “small change” outlays to the poor.
The congregations of Africa—rich and poor alike—heard Augustine’s message with a certain relief. Augustine’s preaching fitted in well with the realities of their social condition. Even if they were good Christians and wealthy, none of them suffered from the overabundance of wealth that characterized super-rich Roman Christian families. They had no wish to be told to renounce their wealth in its entirety. The rich and poor alike were encouraged to save their souls, on a regular basis, by forms of giving that were as regular as the daily repetition of the Lord’s Prayer.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/philanthropy/treasure-heaven