In the midst of the heated debate sparked in Spain by the recent extraordinary regularization process for illegal immigrants—and the episcopal statements that have accompanied it with language more political than doctrinal—it is especially valuable to hear voices capable of elevating the discussion above slogans and sentimental blackmail. The lecture by the Catholic philosopher Higinio Marín, delivered in Alcalá de Henares, offers precisely that: a deep, anthropological and Christian reflection on charity, hospitality, and borders, which returns the reader to essential questions and compels rigorous thinking where so many settle for repeating slogans.
The intervention by Higinio Marín—PhD in Philosophy and rector of the Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera—is presented under a title that already forces one to break free from moral automatism: “Charity and Borders.” The presenter herself emphasizes from the outset that Marín usually addresses difficult matters with a clarity that “orders ideas” and opens conversation, and positions the topic as an obligation to think “seriously” when those two words come together.
Marín begins by distancing himself from the comfortable role of “master of charity.” He accepts the title but clarifies that he will speak as a philosopher and anthropologist, from philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of culture, with “academic freedom” and an explicit commitment: to say “what I see, which is true.” He does not promise a technical discourse; rather, he anticipates that he will take the audience back to foundations much earlier than the contemporary political debate in order to understand what we are talking about when we speak of hospitality, limits, and duties.
His opening thesis is anthropological: the human being, precisely because it is a peculiar mammal, does not function with rigid behavioral instincts like animals. Instead of automatisms, we operate with inclinations mediated by the will and by cultural symbolic codes. In that absence of instinct as a “program,” an idea emerges that structures the entire lecture: human freedom requires limits; and in cultural terms, those limits are primarily articulated as prohibitions. In fact, he argues that socialization systems are “replete” with strategies for setting limits, not as added moralism, but as a condition of survival and human order.
From there, Marín proposes a strong reading: the origin of human civilization can be explained by great foundational prohibitions that, by prohibiting, create community. The first is the prohibition of incest, which allows the family structure and even the language of kinship (father, mother, son, brother) as coherent distinctions; without that prohibition, he says, a “logical counterfactual” would occur that would prevent even knowing what “father” or “son” means. And he underscores a decisive mechanism: by excluding someone from sexual relations, that exclusion includes them in the family society; inclusion is born, paradoxically, from exclusion.
The second great prohibition is that of cannibalism. Here he repeats the same scheme: whoever stops being “prey” (someone edible) becomes human; and that humanity is defined not only by stopping eating the other, but by the positive reverse that Marín introduces: humans are those who “feed each other.” That step opens the door to the pre-Christian institution that interests him: hospitality. Not as sentimentalism, but as a cultural translation of a basic anthropological border: the human does not devour; it welcomes, feeds, recognizes.
From there, the lecture turns to the core of the title: how that hospitality—domestic and archaic virtue—relates to Christian charity and to the political fact of borders. Marín emphasizes that in the Greek tradition the human is defined intensely by the hospitable, and in the Roman tradition by pietas, which he explains as a family virtue before a religious one: duties, affections, and obligations of the son toward the father, later extended to ancestors, territory, institutions, language, and legacy. In that extension, piety becomes a way of naming respect for what is received as inheritance and for what, therefore, one feels the duty to preserve.
Marín insists that this plurality of layers prevents a unidimensional approach. He quotes Aristotle to justify the method: whoever considers little decides quickly; whoever considers much discovers that deliberation becomes problematic. Hospitality, therefore, cannot be treated as a slogan. And here a thesis emerges that runs through the middle section of the discourse: there are different moral subjects—family father, Christian faithful, citizen, institution—and they cannot be demanded the same type of hospitality as if they were interchangeable. He warns of a possible “mismatch” between the universal duty of charity and the concrete duties linked to a house, a family, and a specific political community.
To explain it, he turns to a historical development: when domestic hospitality is subjected to “overdemand” on the great pilgrimage routes, it is “externalized” and specific institutions are created: hospitals. The hospital is born as an institution founded from hospitality, but precisely for that reason it makes clear that unrestricted hospitality needs its own place and a form different from that of the family home. In that transition, Marín introduces a practical distinction with political consequences: what can be demanded of a family is not the same as what can be demanded of welcoming institutions; and what can be asked of Christian faithful is not necessarily what can be demanded of civil society.
Marín defines the human home through an image: the fire that creates an “inside” against the inclement weather, and the door as a symbol of the constitutive openness of the house. The human house is not defined by the wall, but by the door: if it only closed, it would be a wall; the door exists to be able to open and welcome. From there he diagnoses a “crisis of hospitality” in the West that would also be a crisis of dwelling: when one cannot welcome, the house becomes a burrow and the neighbor becomes an enemy. The goal of the argument is not to deny hospitality, but to show that authentic hospitality is demanding and that its social degradation has visible anthropological effects.
At this point, Marín incorporates the third foundational prohibition: the one that allows passing from family clans to societies of neighbors. He does so with the story of Romulus and Remus in Titus Livius: the furrow that delimits the city, the door as the place through which one enters, and the mortal sanction against whoever jumps the limit. The example serves him for a central idea: civil society is born when the shared limit becomes more important than kinship. In symbolic terms, the respected boundary founds coexistence; the transgression of the limit dissolves common sense (he even plays with the etymology of “delirium” as losing the boundary). All this prepares the political conclusion: a community needs operational borders to be able to sustain an inside with ordered obligations and cares.
That order of obligations appears formulated directly: moral duties are universal, but they have “ordinality.” Marín gives a material example: one may have an obligation to feed everyone, but not by taking food away from one’s children; first one feeds one’s own, then—if possible—one opens to others. With that logic he returns to the hospital: if one wants “unrestricted and unlimited” hospitality, it is not done in the house; institutions are created. And he adds an urban nuance: even those hospitals, in the medieval scheme he evokes, are not placed just anywhere “inside” without limits, because the city itself would collapse if everything is confused. The argument does not lead to a denial of charity, but to a demand to think about how it is realized without destroying the subject that exercises it.
At this point, the lecture enters the explicit terrain of migration and immigration, but without abandoning the conceptual distinction: speaking of “hospitality” and “migration” is equivocal, he argues, because hospitality was conceived for the traveler, the passerby, not for “the one who comes to stay.” Pilgrim hospitals presuppose transit; if transit disappears, “there is no hospital in the world.” Hospitality can imply cure and temporary care, but it is not defined as permanent lodging. With that distinction, Marín introduces an axis that he considers absent from public discourse: if we do not speak of transit, then we must speak of the guest’s status and the guest’s duties.
From there derives a practical affirmation: it is not reasonable to think that “the habits of the house” will be changed by those who are welcomed; the elementary thing is that the guest adopts the host’s habits, at least in the essentials. Marín extends this logic from the house to the hospital and to the country: not demanding that disposition, he says, amounts to letting the guest impose the framework of customs. It is a passage especially aware of its polemical character; he insists that he says it with “fear and trembling” and that he has not seen that position defended publicly by philosophers, but he upholds it as a conclusion of his anthropological and political analysis.
The final part introduces two elements that frame the debate from Spain: first, a discussion on whether the “nation” is a good that the Church should preserve; Marín expresses doubts about whether it is the Church’s obligation as such, but affirms that there are moral obligations for Christians as members of a specific community with temporal goods—language, institutions, territory—that they must care for. He formulates it with deliberately mundane examples (taxes, infrastructure, risk premium) to point out that those goods have a subject, cost, and limits; they are not interchangeable universal abstractions.
Second, he posits that a significant part of charity would be lived “less problematically” by investing resources in promoting development and prosperity in the countries of origin, precisely because emigrating is traumatic, uproots, and impoverishes, although it sometimes ends up enriching. This section functions as a moral alternative: not reducing charity to the unlimited opening of borders, but thinking policies that reduce uprooting and do not turn hospitality into a mechanism of mass settlement without integration.
In the closing, Marín formulates the thesis that gives the title (and subtitle) to the file: multiculturalism would be a “failed Western enterprise” because the degree of integration and coexistence it promised has not been achieved; speaking of real welcome and turning the newcomer “into one” would imply duties of the guest. And he adds an interpretive element that shifts the issue from humanitarianism to cultural conflict: he suggests that certain state and ideological elites would have promoted migrations of a different cultural pattern to dilute the dominant cultural pattern that is hostile to them; he cites as an example the paradox that seems “anomalous” to him of the sentimental alliance between neomarxism and migration of theocratic religion, and reads there a logic of a common enemy. In that framework, he affirms that closing one’s eyes to that intentionality would be closing one’s eyes to a historical reality.
The final turn of the argument returns to the guiding thread: limits. Marín argues that the way a country assumes the universal requirements of hospitality according to charity can have limitations analogous to those of a house (“I can’t handle everything”) and that preferring more peaceful and lasting integrative solutions does not necessarily equate to racism. He ends by calling for the Church in Spain to discuss the topic by also listening to laypeople who want to live charity, but bear duties regarding temporal and secular goods; and he concludes with a claim for institutions (in particular, the university) as a historical fruit of perfected Christian charity, which allows indiscriminate teaching to those who arrive, something that—according to his argument—a family alone could not sustain without losing its own sustenance. The finale is programmatic: rethink hospitality as a virtue of the passerby, assume duties of the guest when there is rooting, and recognize that hospitality indefectibly has limits whose setting corresponds to civil society.