Consider, if you will, Moses Maimonides' categorization of acts of charity. There are a couple of interesting features about the list. First, it's not clear whether the "giving willingly" in seven means "before being asked" or, for that matter, how it interacts with the other items on the list—for instance, is giving willingly but inadequately, but also anonymously to unknown persons, higher or lower than giving adequately after being asked? One is tempted to assume that the good features of each lower rung are present in each higher rung, thus that "willingly" means "not in sadness", that everything above six is adequate, etc. (This awesomely-URL'd page is clearer on that.) A sufficiently clever mind might be able to reconcile three and four according to this requirement, saying that the good thing in four is anonymity, and it is preserved, though attached to a different (better) figure, in three—and that might work well enough. But clearly that won't suffice for one, since it will be hard to hire someone, or make a partnership with him, in a way that doesn't basically come down to giving a grant, or undignified make-work (and the importance of having some amount of dignity in the process, if it were not already obvious, should be apparent from the fact that giving a loan is higher than giving a grant—the loan is something that requires work to pay off, and having work is generally important to people), if you don't know who the person is, or without making yourself known to him.
But, of course, once you start thinking that way, you're going to start questioning the inclusion of the first item on the list anyway, as written; after all, while you might from charitable motives decide to make an effort to include poorer people in the pool when you're hiring, or forming a partnership, no one of them will likely be pleased to think that he was chosen specifically as an act of charity. Interest-free loans and grants, though, do seem to be reconcilable with the preceding item—they're just anonymous acts of charity of particular magnitude. So we keep them.
It is not hard to imagine why the anonymity of the giver is ranked higher than the unknownness of the recipient, or why it should be yet better when neither party knows the other: it is a mortification, not of the flesh, of course, but of the pride. The person who gives publicly to unknown recipients still is able to drink in the esteem of his fellows for his charitable act—indeed, he might receive all the more esteem for having had the consideration not to make public who it was who received his charity (this person may, after all, not want it to be known that he needed it). The person who gives anonymously to a known recipient may take pleasure in seeing his gift put to good uses, and puff himself up thereby (if the gift is put to bad uses there are obvious parallel perils). But when a person gives anonymously via some mechanism or other to persons unknown to him, then only he, and perhaps his accountant, know that he gave anything at all, and nor does he form any opinions about himself as a result of the recipient's behavior, nor does he potentially strain any personal relationships. This, then, is all to the good, innit?
Not quite. Because of course there are many kinds of pride one can take in one's behavior, and a subtle, but correspondingly pernicious, form is just this: taking pride in doing good, despite the lack of worldly esteem that comes to one as a result. The pride one has, one might put it, in having a good will, or supposing one does. (Analogous to Johnson's remark, quoted to not entirely clear effect by Moran, that "all censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to shew how much he can spare.".) It leads to smugness, to self-satisfaction, to the thought, perhaps, that despite the criticism one (justly!) draws for various acts for which one is known, one is, unknown to the critics, in fact a magnanimous man, a great philanthropist, and therefore one need not worry excessively much about the criticisms. For one can set as great store by them as one likes, they being known only to oneself (and, perhaps, one's accountant, but he is presumably not among the critics anyway). (A sort of beauty of soul, entrenched.)
We tend, these days, to look down our noses at those whose love of mankind is joined by their love of seeing their own names in large letters, adorning halls, stadia, or institutions, or reproduced at the bottom of the first, or the last, pages of research articles, or in the acknowledgements of books, stating that the preceding or succeeding could not have been brought off but for the generous support of X—; in this, we echo Rambam, nor is that anything we ought to be ashamed of. (Would that we could echo him in more!) But we may condemn them too hastily. For perhaps they are deeper moral psychologists than we, and choose to make public their acts of largesse as penance for some unknown sins, or as mortification, not of pride, but of the will: they act as they do so as not to be in a position to fool themselves with regard to their own motives, thinking them ever unmixed.
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