The Angel of Light

THE ANGEL OF LIGHT

Even Satan masquerades as an angel of light. So it is not strange that his ministers also masquerade as ministers of righteousness.—2 Corinthians 11:14-15

Does self-mortification develop the virtue of compassion? Interestingly, self-denial may lead the ascetic to extend the same standards of self-mortification to others, eliciting in himself sentiments that are the opposite of compassion—rigorism. I have seen it happen. “I hate these beggars—why don’t they work?” “It’s all your fault because you didn't obey me.” And so on. Compassion asks us to place ourselves in the very existential condition of those who suffer. It is the converse of projection, which is common enough. Compassion is not sympathy, even less is it pity. Compassion is empathy. Self-mortification may indeed cultivate a capacity for compassion, but it may also, paradoxically, do the opposite. Self-mortification incites the rigorist to inflict his way of life on others. “To love God, you need three hearts in one: a heart of fire for Him, a heart of flesh for your neighbor, and a heart of bronze for yourself,” said Saint Benedict Joseph Labre. Curiously, self-mortification may influence the rigorist to extend his heart of bronze to the neighbor whom he regards as lackadaisical precisely because the rigorist has failed to cultivate the Christian virtue of compassion. “Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate,” Jesus taught his disciples. The genuine Christian disciple deeply heeds these words.

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”—Dr. Gustav Gilbert (Matt Craven) to Head Prosecutor Robert Jackson (Alec Baldwin) in Nuremberg (2000)