"Charity is an invented virtue; it was a new and specifically Christian virtue, and it organized behaviors that were not specifically Christian—fasting, prayer and alms—into uniquely Christian relations. Charity, SanPietro argues, is not like the virtues it replaced, but a second order concept—a concept essentially empty of content—which the church fathers populated and repopulated with sets of normative behaviors and states of mind. Their goal, in theological and administrative terms, was for virtue to be self-verifying and for right action to infallibly register correct belief. The process through which charity was defined therefore marks an extremely important moment in the history of Christian ethics because charity becomes the premier marker of orthodoxy, leading to its elevation over the traditional ideals of philanthropy and knowledge, and ultimately, to the status of cardinal virtue."This lecture is supported by the Howerton Fund of the Religion Department, the Department of Classics, and the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics.