Hart on the cultural contingency of charity

"Compassion, pity, and charity, as we understand and cherish them, are not objects found in nature, like trees or butterflies or academic philosophers, but are historically contingent conventions of belief and practice, formed by cultural convictions that need never have arisen at all."

     David Bentley Hart, Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 16. On p. 169 he makes the same comment about conscience, and on p. 180, about our "solicitude for human equality". But this is also, of course, the point of the entire book.  See, for example, pp. 32-33:

modernity is not simply a 'postreligious' condition; it is the state of society that has been specifically a Christian society but has 'lost the faith.'  The ethical presuppositions intrinsic to modernity . . . are palliated fragments and haunting echoes of Christian moral theology.  Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible.  It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things—they would never have occurred to us—had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.