The Collegian

Issue date: 10/17/06 Section: Opinion

Charity most nearly means the possession of natural kindness and beneficence toward one's fellow man-without forgetting that there is indeed truth. In the virtue of charity man is allowed his greatest freedoms; for he can at once love his neighbor as himself and with the utmost humility show his neighbor where and how that neighbor errs. The charitable man is unbiased in the truest sense of the word; he submits to the fact that there is a measure by which things may be judged; if he does not, then there is nothing that can be accurately called "bias," at least not in any meaningful sense.

Tolerance, for all the positive attention it has garnered, is decidedly negative in its definition. For tolerance merely "suffers" or "endures" beliefs that are contrary to the individual. Amidst the definition is also contained the "forbearance of rigorous judgment." In other words, tolerance is bias accompanied with impotence and would seem the ideal recipe for unhappiness. Unless ambivalence is considered a virtue we had better relegate tolerance to the realm of vice or even apostasy; as G.K. Chesterton once observed, "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions."

Being rigorous is not the same as being severe; in fact rigor is a more thorough and precise tool for finding truth than, say, a more lackadaisical inquiry. There can exist, for example, a rigorous pursuit of justice, but in that pursuit there must be the conviction that justice exists for every one and is not decided by each individual alone. The candor inherent in charity does not allow for the compromise of truth. For many, truth can be quite a surprising affront to their sensibilities and the charitable man will often be the one to point to those truths.

A merely tolerant man cannot point out the errors of another without becoming intolerant; so his tendency is to "live and let live." Unfortunately, this attitude only goes as far as one individual is not affected by another individual's point of view and, in the end, does nothing for the common good. So it is clear that we must be intolerant of certain things, such as murder, theft, hate etc. But there is simply no reason to be uncharitable about any of those. One can brim with charity as they explain to the murderer that he must not do such things and with sadness and proper leniency (according to the circumstance) deal out his punishment.

Tolerance is, then, slavery to indecision while charity is boundless and free to embrace the sinner without enduring the sin.

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