Christian Gift and Gift Exchange between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

The issue of the gift in ancient Christianity needs to be addressed with regard to the subject of a Christian economy. In structural and genealogical terms the gift in Christian theology is concerned with a system of exchange between God and man. Following the creation of the world, and thanks to the pact between God and his chosen people (Old and New Testament), the divine economy – namely the governing rules for the ‘house’ inhabited by divine Persons – became the paradigm of historical evolution (the history of salvation) and therefore, in principle, the model of exchange relations within Christian society. Since the apostolic age every Christian community has claimed to be founded on the charisma – spiritual gift of grace – that God bestowed through his incarnation and resurrection and which he continues to lavish on his believers through the sacraments and signs of his power, miracles. The relations of gift and exchange between God and believers are not only concerned with the ethical-anthropological field (the Christological model of gratuitousness, which counters pagan sacrifice, based on the reciprocity of do ut des) but also the economic sector of the exchange of material goods. Indeed, from the beginning believers formed a religious community within the broader Roman-Imperial society and were therefore subject to twofold conditioning. On one hand, the Christological apparatus powered by pastoral activity fuelled the concept of the gift as gratuitousness so that it became associated with alms and the pardoning of sins. On the other hand, Christians were also subject to the political-social ties of a civilization in which the system of the archaic gift (euergetism, munificence, sacrifice, vengeance) was one of the cornerstones (if not the main foundation) which supported and explained the political-social order and the pivotal system of mythical-ritual representations (religion) which reflected and established it. Ancient and traditional cultures based their identity and oriented their social dynamics and system of exchange towards an ideal of stability, preserving a form of organization whose reference model lay in a mythical past. Through ritual, image and word, cultural memory once again focuses on this past as an interpretive key to the present. Instead, Christianity is based on a mythodynamic principle of the transformation of the world founded on an economic apparatus. As the heir and continuation of Hellenistic Judaism, this new religion develops a theology, a rational discourse on the divine, in which the dynamics of the exchange of goods and the circulation of gifts play an essential role. In this way, Christianity purports to establish an economy of gratuitousness, at the same time justifying it through material expediency and spiritual benefit. The evangelical economy and its successive rereadings by the Fathers of the Church, provide multiple reworkings of the paradox according to which one can only become rich by becoming poor, divesting oneself of the superfluous and donating it gratuitously to those who need it, in keeping with the model of the poor Christ – poor not so much in the sense of being devoid of material goods as in the sense of being incarnated in our flesh with the human condition of need and suffering, from which we are redeemed thanks to the divine gift of his perfection. Because of this, he is seen as the only one who can pardon our sins. The spiritual and material life of the Christian is reflected and explained in this complex interplay of economic metaphors, which are concerned with the semantic fields of commerce, money, market, treasure, gift, pledge and redemption. The words and gestures of the theological economy represent and establish the tie that binds this world to the future kingdom of salvation thanks to an ambiguous system of pledges, gifts and counter-gifts (sacraments, relics, deeds of charity). It is a veritable metonymic chain woven into history, whose fundamental first link is the body of God incarnated. In light of recent sociological thinking, it could be claimed that Christianity purports to test and make explicit all the implicit paradoxes in the system of the gift, or the interest of disinterest. Naturally, in the concrete nature of historical life the interference of the Christological apparatus in the ancient paradigm of reciprocity (archaic gift) led to many different formations of compromise. I intend to examine some examples of this ambiguity both with reference to the conceptual and discursive field (credo, charisma, caritas) and the field of ritual and devotional practices (alms, ecclesiastical euergetism, offerings to saints, miracles and relics, votive offerings) and see how they developed in the centuries of transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.