Rogue Charity Destroys the Soul
ROGUE CHARITY DESTROYS THE SOUL
“In the twilight of life, we shall be judged on love.” -St. John of the Cross (1591+)
Rogue conceptions of charity (“love”) destroy the soul because they undermine it. The life of the soul is divine charity. Without divine charity, you have no life in you.
Charity is a love that springs from friendship with God. To love your neighbor with charity is to desire communion with them united to communion with God. The object of charity is God, and so when we love our neighbor it must be referred to God if it is to be a love of charity.*
False conceptions of charity are ones that sever the inextricable link between God and charity—they imagine that you can love others for something other than their sharing in the divine life with God and still be fulfilling the command toward charity. Worse, it leads to a fear of being “uncharitable” that is inverted and drives one to relate to others in ways that undermine actual charity. This is why you see people endorsing, permitting, and accompanying any number of sins in the name of being “charitable”—they fear they would be “uncharitable” if they didn’t. But of course such a conception of charity & uncharity can only arise from a charity that has nothing to do with sharing in the divine life with God.
If I were to attempt to identify what I think the most prevalent source of error and distortion in our faith today is, it would be just that: a fear of being (falsely) uncharitable is moving people to permit and endorse sins that are contrary to sharing in the divine life with God.
The Basics
In order for the soul to receive God at death our will must be directed toward God when we pass away. If the soul is not pointed at God when we die, but is pointed at creation rather than the creator, we do not receive God at death. We call that “hell”—everlasting separation from God.
Grace moves the will toward God. Sin moves the will away from God. Mortal sin directly undermines grace and so they cannot coexist together. Note: When Saint Paul says that anything cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, that means it’s a mortal sin. Those things that exclude the kingdom of God do so because they automatically expel divine charity from the soul—they “kill” charity and are thus termed “mortal”. No one that is sexually immoral, no thieves, no greedy, no drunkards, no etc., etc., will inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Cor 6: 9-10).
If someone does any of these things, charity, being the desire for one to have communion with God, demands that you want to see them change from these ways and rectify their will toward God. Affirming them, or endorsing them, or wishing them to be blessed—as Pope Francis et al. are proclaiming—in such a state is nothing short of a demonic inversion of charity. How is it that such a response is so prevalent today, then?
I suggest that the key lies in the confusion surrounding appropriate, “charitable”, responses to different goods and evils that befall people in their day-to-day lives. The virtue of “mercy” has been distorted and confusion reigns in its wake. There are a few nodes in this landscape that are either poorly defined, or have been robustly slandered, leading to confusion in what virtue and vice looks like relative to these responses.
Mercy, Pity, Nemesis, and Envy Confounded
Mercy, pity, “nemesis”, and envy are all varying responses to the good and bad things that happen to a person. Mercy, pity, and “nemesis” are virtuous, healthy, well-adjusted responses. Envy, “flattery”, and “false compassion” are vicious and wicked responses. Here’s a chart of how these different responses play out:
The virtue of mercy arises from a pity—a grief—for the undeserved evils that have befallen another. It’s a desire to lessen their suffering. Envy, it’s contrary vice, rejoices at the undeserved evils that have befallen another. But envy also grieves at the deserved good that another receives. The corresponding virtue would be simple “joy”.
A little known term but one that is solidly founded in the Bible and the Christian faith is the emotion of “Nemesis”. Nemesis is the virtuous emotional response to deserved evils (rejoice) and undeserved goods (grieved). It is celebrating deserved evils that befall another and sorrowing at undeserved goods that one receives. It’s what the Germans slandered in their now well-known term “schadenfreude”. Schadenfreude is a pejorative. Nemesis is a healthy, virtuous, well-adjusted emotional response. As evidence that it is virtuous for one to rejoice at deserved evils, and grieve at undeserved goods, read the Psalms. (Just about any of them will suffice). The number of “vengeful” psalms is astounding—and a real wake-up call for Christians today. How many modern Christians would be scandalized reading the psalms on a regular basis? My guess: most of them—Pope Francis et al. certainly.
What has developed around “mercy” is an affront to Christian faith. When the passion of pity undermines justice in a person, that is a vice contrary to mercy (See Thomas Aquinas on Mercy, ST II-II.30.3 if interested). How much error would be avoided if we just got this straightened out.
“False-Compassion”
The real problem we face today is that we don’t have colloquial terms for these phenomena in our modern culture that accurately assess the danger of their errors. Note that I left the chart blank for the vice of feeling grieved at another’s deserved evil. We know that a person rejoicing at another’s deserved evil is the virtuous emotion of nemesis. But there’s not an adequate term for its vicious counterpart. The closest we get for that today would be something like “false-compassion”, but a hyphenated compound word doesn’t suffice to correctly instill its viciousness in the minds of the general populace. Most people do not worry about being “falsely-compassionate” at all. What it needs is a term tantamount to envy, so that one could see the danger lurking behind its easy error.
The inversion of being grieved at another’s deserved evil is one that is particularly demonic. First, it encourages one to remain in a state of defection from God in their will. It’s a form of gaslighting. The pity shown them, and any merciful behaviors done to relieve their sorrow, incites them to fix their will in objective evils. It tells them that their sorrow is unjust and that they shouldn’t be feeling it. It tells them that what they’re experiencing is false when it actually isn’t. Their eternal fate becomes significantly grimmer as a consequence. Second, because it’s so easily conflated with actual pity, it’s hard for people to discern that they’ve fallen into this dangerous error.
The mercy of Christ, which *does* pity even the evils one receives deservingly, and seemingly contradicts all that I’m saying, is much more profound than we often conceive. God is moved to mercy toward the sinner not because they are not actually guilty of sin, but because God realizes that they, being blind of the eternal sphere they’ve entered into in their sin, are often confused as to what they are bringing upon themselves. There is no comparable notion of mercy that God feels toward the Demons—those angels that fell, incapable of ignorance or weakness in their being angels. God extends mercy to us human sinners that we might be drawn back up toward him and correct our erroneous ways. There is no comparable mercy for evil universally considered. (Confusion on this point is why it is also not uncommon for erroneous Christians like Pope Francis et al. to muse at the redemption of demons)…
To be clear: God’s mercy is never without correction and satisfaction. Christ dies on the cross to redeem human nature. The saved must first repent. The penitent must offer themselves up, and all their worldly fixations, as a sacrifice to God. 11 out of the 12 apostles were murdered to end their lives—a profound satisfaction for having defected from Christ at his time of trial & murder. The one apostle that didn’t die by murder, the beloved Apostle John the Evangelist, the “disciple whom Jesus loved” (Jn 20:2), was the one there at his feet for his crucifixion.
“Flattery”
The other vicious emotion that is so rampant today is that of rejoicing at undeserved goods of another. It’s become an almost default phrase amongst millennial women when one of their peers get a raise or a new job or something good in their life, “you deserve that.” They instinctively know that rejoicing at things undeserved is wrong. They also, however, don’t subject their “deserved” attribution to the dictates of reason—the actual standard for whether something is deserved or not. The result is the rampant vicious emotion of something like flattery, or amping. They wind each other up into a state of ecstasy and adrenaline, often accompanied with wine and drugs, en route to false celebration. The result here, as is the case for all the vicious emotions on the right side of the above table, is also the fixing of the will away from God. What is holy and virtuous to celebrate are goods that come with virtue and goodness—a friend resolves a drug addiction, or attains a new level of discipline with ease, or receives a spiritual consolation amidst struggles, or receives the gift of a child, or receives recognition for virtuous toils done in obscurity that have come to light. To indiscriminately celebrate a promotion may be shackling chains around a sinners neck or heaping coals upon a sinners back. It’s prudent to at least be wary of what might be a premature, and ultimately evil, celebration.
Vice in the Church
We’re seeing so many grave errors in the pontificating on certain ideas throughout our Church. The confounding of the relationship between justice and mercy; the butchering of the concept of charity; the abject rejection of sins as being capable of being mortal. A while back Pope Francis said that we must “always remember the primacy of mercy over justice” in justifying his condemnation of the death penalty. There is no primacy of mercy over justice in God. God is one, simple, eternal act. His eternal act is perfectly merciful and perfectly just. There’s no separation between the two and so there’s certainly no separation of one from the other. We only fail to see its unity because the principle that unites them both is obscure and indistinguishable to our rational minds. That doesn’t mean that some people don’t get closer to seeing their unity than others (i.e. Saint Thomas Aquinas)—or that we shouldn’t strive in faith to grasp at their unity more closely—or that we shouldn’t trust that their unity really and substantially exists.
Pope Francis et al. insist that accompaniment is at the center of their push to degrade the doctrines of the faith. There is no accompaniment of sinners if they don’t turn from their ways and rectify their will toward God. Accompaniment is a positive term. You can’t accompany someone into fixing their will away from God. There is no accompaniment in Hell. If a person needs to reform, piece by piece, to get right with God—well that’s just the case for all of us. If you tell them that they should start by focusing on some small step on the way toward their total rectification, that can be both prudent and insightful. But if you obscure the end point you’re now just either bad at whatever it is you claim you’re trying to do, or deceptive and trying to do the exact opposite (don’t preclude the demonic—which is trying to accomplish the opposite—in all of this!). When a student is trying to learn a new concept, giving them a view of the end goal is the best thing you can do to help them along their way in learning the small steps. The end is the cause of all other causes.
What’s really lost in our world today is the belief that the grace of God can actually transform us. People don’t think that their wayward desires can be rectified. People don’t believe that God desires to work in us to rectify us. They don’t believe that their lust can be actually transformed; they don’t believe their craving for drugs can actually go away; they don’t believe that their craving for candy and sweets can actually desist—peacefully and to a place of ease. People don’t believe that any of that can actually happen. In light of that wounded and despairing faith, their response is one of arrogance. They consign everyone else to helplessness and doom. As Matthew McConaughey or Jessica Chastain’s character (I don’t remember which one, specifically) in Interstellar observed of Michael Caine’s character, when it came to light that Michael Caine’s Professor Brand screwed them, withholding the fact that he sent all of the Earth’s remaining humanity down a false and diversionary rabbit hole to keep them from “despairing”,…, roughly: “you didn’t do something sacrificial, in your arrogance you deemed our case hopeless [and screwed us].” These “compassionate”, “accompanying” Christians are doing just that—lacking conviction that God both can, and desires, to transform us and rectify us all the way down to what we desire, they deem our case hopeless and resign the world to the fate of death with an unrectified will. Worst of all they claim that mercy motivates them—a mercy contributing to sinners eventually dying with their wills fixed away from God… Their lack of faith, under the auspices of “charity”, destroys them.
If they had actual charity, it would animate and strengthen their faith.
The best we can say is they know not what they do. Most likely they don’t care what they do. They want the approval of unrepentant sinners. But regardless of their motives, let us call on God to bring their errors to light—which may be exactly what is providentially happening—that more may be convicted of sin and desirous of union with God.
It’s all about loving God. +