@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-08-10 17:08:33
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But paupers could only be moral subjects in so far as they had ceased to be the invisible representatives of God on earth. Until the end of the seventeenth century, this was still the main objection voiced by Catholic consciences. Scripture clearly stated, ‘inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’, and since the earliest times the Church Fathers had glossed that text as meaning that alms should never be refused to a poor man, for fear of refusing it to Christ himself. Naturally, Father Guevarre was aware of these objections, but his answer, which stood for the Church of the classical age, was abundantly clear. Since the creation of the General Hospital and the charitable bureaux, God no longer appeared in a poor man’s rags. The fear of refusing a crust to Jesus dying of hunger underpinned a whole Christian mythology of Charity, and had given an absolute meaning to the whole grand medieval ritual of hospitality; but that fear, it emerged, was now ill-founded.
When a Charitable bureau has been set up in a town, Christ will no longer take the appearance of a poor man who, to maintain his lazy, idle life, refuses to submit to an order established by genuinely holy means for the relief of true poverty. This time want really had lost its mystical sense. Nothing, in the suffering that it represented, now referred back to the miraculous, fugitive presence of a god. It was stripped of all power of manifestation. If it still presented Christians with an opportunity to carry out an act of charity, then that was only in so far as the gesture could be carried out in accordance with the provisions made by the state. In itself, poverty now only served to demonstrate its own shortcomings, and appears only within the sphere of guilt. Reducing poverty first implied transferring it towards the order of penance.
This was the first of the great shackles with which the classical age was to bind madness. It is commonly noted that in the Middle Ages the madman was seen as kind of holy person, because he was possessed. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the madman was sacred, then it was only in so far as, for medieval charity, he was associated with the obscure powers of poverty. More than any other, he exalted it. […]
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(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)
