# Charity

Explore charity as the pure love of Christ and its profound implications for technology, civilization, and superhuman power in Mormon transhumanist thought.

[Image: In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul ranks charity as the most preeminent virtue. Latter-day Saint scripture expresses that same idea with uncommon explicitness, linking charity to the pure love of Christ.]

Charity translates the Latin *caritas*, which renders the Greek *agapē*, the word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 13 to describe the greatest of all virtues, the absence of which eloquence, prophecy, knowledge, and even martyrdom amount to nothing. Latter-day Saint scripture preserves the wider sense with unusual explicitness. Mormon defines charity as “the pure love of Christ” and adds that it “endureth forever” (Moroni 7:47). Nephi similarly records a commandment that all should have charity, “which charity is love” (2 Nephi 26:30).

Charity suffers long, is kind, envies not, seeks not her own, is not easily provoked, bears all things, endures all things. These are dispositions visible in conduct, testable against what a person does when patience wears thin.

## Charity never faileth

Paul ranks charity above every other attainment. Prophecies shall fail, tongues shall cease, knowledge shall vanish away, but charity never faileth (1 Corinthians 13:8). Applied to technology, that ranking forecasts obsolescence for nearly everything a civilization builds. Instruments and methods lapse, and hard-won knowledge slips into obscurity, while the compassion or cruelty of those who built them persists in the institutions, habits, and inequalities they leave behind.

## The compassion argument

Charity also operates inside disagreement. The Compassion Argument of the New God Argument, formerly the Charity Argument, holds that a civilization surviving its own escalating capabilities must decentralize power, and that decentralized power raises mutual risk in ways that force cooperation to a degree practically indistinguishable from compassion. What makes this functional equivalence so useful is its strict focus on behavior over sentiment. Networks, markets, and governance structures can be designed so that participants depend on each other’s welfare. Mormon transhumanist thought makes this the standard for judging superhuman power: capability that concentrates advantage fails the test, and capability that distributes it passes.

## Charity as a divine endowment

[Image: Moroni presents charity as a divine gift sought through earnest prayer rather than a virtue attained by sheer will.]

Moroni directs believers to “pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers” (Moroni 7:48). Charity arrives as a gift, which blocks any reading of it as an achievement of will or a byproduct of intelligence. Enhanced memory, extended lifespan, and expanded cognition do not of themselves promote charity, and a person who gains them without seeking charity first only widens the reach for harm. For that reason, those who hope to raise the dead, heal bodies, and organize worlds have reason to ask for the disposition that renders such power safe.

*See also*: [Accountability](/topical-guide/accountability), [Compassion](/topical-guide/compassion), [Generosity](/topical-guide/generosity), [Mercy](/topical-guide/mercy), [Poverty](/topical-guide/poverty), [Relief](/topical-guide/relief), [United Order](/topical-guide/united-order), [Universal Basic Income](/topical-guide/universal-basic-income), [Welfare](/topical-guide/welfare)