Christian charity also reveals the nature of the gift: “Charity renders the gift present, presents the present as a gift. It makes a gift to the present and a gift of the present in the present.” (154). There is also no excuse with charity; I love or I do not love. Have I helped my neighbor, given from a surplus, loved he least among us? This is the only criteria, the only crisis, the only test. The Judgment singles out not the athletes of faith, nor the militants of hope, but the workers of charity.”
What is absent from our notions of love and charity? Descartes reduced the various forms of love to the same act of will, and love then becomes defined by its ignorance of the other. Other philosophers (such as Spinoza) described more our state of subjectivity than a love of the other. Kant’s notion bordered on union with the sovereign good, but is this love? None of these unite love to charity and thus help us to know the other. Husserl goes further in analogizing our experience of our own bodies (flesh) but we cannot know the other only by analogy. Charity alone can advance us further within phenomenology, for in order for the other to appear to me, I must first love her.
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