(Here is the Introduction to this series.)
I have already noted that the world, which shows itself an enemy through the middle part of the soul, especially afflicts the will. This is our ability to choose goods based not on immediate desire, but on an apprehension of a future benefit or danger. The will is also the faculty that loves—love being a choice rather than a rational thought or a base desire.
And indeed, in his short work The Precautions, Saint John of the Cross immediately identifies love as the arena of the combat with the world. His first question to those who would do battle with the world is, “Whom shall we love?”
John recommends loving no one person more than another, and forgetfulness of all particular affections or hatreds. Do not think about others, neither good things nor bad.
This is sound monastic doctrine, though difficult in practice. Let’s begin with the very challenging teaching that we should not love one person more than another. This derives directly from the gospel. Jesus says that if we do not approach Him without hating father and mother, we cannot be His disciples. So John is channeling one of Jesus’s most difficult teachings.
Part of the difficulty is that there are relationships whose very nature incurs a certain debt, often mutual, but sometimes in one direction. For example, children are commanded to honor their fathers and mothers. This must be done whether one loves one’s parents or not. We show honor not because we love our parents more than others (though that may be the case), but because honor is the correct disposition toward a parent. This discipline of honor allows us to follow the teaching of Saint Peter, who says in his First Letter that we should honor all. By practicing honor toward certain persons, we can learn to transfer that honor to all persons.
This opens a way to understand what it might mean to love everyone with the same intensity. Loving a specific person is not necessarily the obstacle that it at first appears to be. The question is: will this love I feel and then exercise toward this person, who is God’s gift to me, will this love instruct me on how to treat everyone else? When I have discovered what it means to love one person, can I discipline myself to treat others as if I loved them? When I interact with someone whom I find disagreeable, I can ask, “How would I treat this person if I loved him or her the way I love my best friend?”
I believe that parenthood has a built in pedagogy here. Parents know that it is impossible to love every child the same way. But one must love each child in some sense equally. This requires a deep interest in knowing their nascent personhood, the specific needs of each child. In other words, parents must learn how to love the correct way for each child.
When we begin to open up this love toward others, I want to offer one of my own precautions. We are not talking about letting other persons determine us, and certainly not toxic persons. Love for someone making very poor choices can take the form of “tough love,” letting the person experience the pain that comes from poor choices. Even the incarceration of a criminal can be seen, if done properly, as an act of love, for it prevents the criminal from committing further acts that damage the soul. In any case, I am advocating for a clear-eyed love, not enmeshment with everyone else’s failings. This is why John also says that we must have equal forgetfulness of all persons. We must know where our feelings end and theirs begin, where we can reasonably be expected to help, and where our help means getting drawn into responsibility for unhealthy behavior.
It is interesting that we are commanded to honor our parents rather than to love them. On the other hand, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus famously reinterprets the idea of a neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor is a person who incurs a certain type of debt, actually a kind of “reverse debt,” something owed to another who is the one in need, and who happens to be near me. In such a circumstance, I am invited to become the tangible mercy and compassion of God toward the poor, the sick, and the abandoned, simply because God put me there.
Let’s note in completing this meditation that every person we meet each day has experienced hurt, disappointment, injury—the list could go on and on. We can’t really know the extent to which that person needs compassion, a kind word, maybe just forbearance. And so he is my neighbor, the one to whom I owe love.
In what sense is the world the enemy in these expressions of honor and love? The world has fallen under the domination of the devil, the diabolos, the one who divides. Particular love and honor, as I have hinted, is given to us by God as a part of His pedagogy. It is when we want to hold onto that love and use it for our own purposes of comfort, pleasure, safety, or whatever, that it causes us to become possessive and to separate. We can attempt to build up a world centered on ourselves, based on our preferences. This is the hostile face of “the world”: when we seek division based on our own judgments and not God’s.
The second part of John’s exhortation tells us not to think about others. Do we not again need to do this sometimes? Doesn’t a novice master or a teacher need to think about the character of the novice or student in order best to love him and serve his needs for conversion and growth? Do we not need to think about others any time we engage in a cooperative action?
Here is where John’s exhortation to think neither good nor bad comes in. He is exhorting us to evaluate the person not in a moral sense. Any such judgment will be ill-informed and biased. Rather, there are situations where love indeed requires us to make prudential judgments about the best way to interact with specific persons. Here’s the rub: it is extremely difficult to parse the difference between the moral judgment and the practical judgment.
I believe that the distinction arises from how the thought affects me. Does the thought of the other person’s character and assumed motivations move me to change my own approach and dispositions to adapt myself to that person? Or is my first thought to demand that the other person change?
Saint Benedict confirms this approach when he teaches that the abbot must adapt himself to each monk’s character and intelligence. An abbot is someone who really must think about others, as any father must think about his children. But the result of this thought, in the case of an abbot, is not first of all a demand that the monk change, but rather is a discovery of inadequacy in oneself. Or if we put this positively, it is an opportunity to grow in self-knowledge and wisdom.