The Virtue of Empathy

When I entered a Buddhist monastery in early 2007, with designs to become a monk, it was an extremely reactive move. For several years prior, in my capacity as a wartime soldier, I had been what I had come to perceive as “an emissary of war and death.” I witnessed the depths of the evil, pain and suffering that human beings are capable of unleashing upon each other, and, on occasion, contributed to it myself. In my understanding of karmic retribution, I had created a great debt that I needed to repay, and the only way to do that was to become the inverse, an emissary of peace and life. I believed that the extreme praxis of the Buddhist monastic life was the pathway towards that end, but what I found in the monastery were people stuck, in one form or another, in the exact same desperate rut as me, no matter how long they had been there. There was no genuine, inner peace to be found in the performative, man-made practice of outward peace. I lasted about a month, and went back to civilian life, with my tail between my legs.

No matter how theologically misguided my effort was, I believe what motivated me was the Law of God written on my heart. I can look at every evil act I’ve either witnessed or participated in and see human beings failing to see other human beings as equally valuable, valid and capable of honest error as them. Every interpersonal sin is a violation of the second greatest commandment to love others as we love ourselves, from which we really do create a sort of karmic debt. The only thing is, that debt is to our Creator, not a pantheistic universe, and, because we can never completely stop digging that hole, we could never hope to pay the debt back. This is what makes God’s redemptive plan, through the self-sacrificial work of His Son, an act of unfathomable beauty. In and of myself, I could never be an emissary of peace and life, but, though the work of the Holy Spirit within me, I can be an emissary of the Man who performed the only wholly pure act of peace and life in the history of the world.

The New Testament repeatedly describes Jesus’ motivation for His self-sacrificial act on the cross, by which those of us who were His enemies (Romans 5:10), but who now believe in Him, are saved from our debt, as ἔλεος (eleos), which in English means pity, mercy, or compassion (1 Peter 1:3). The book of Hebrews says that, as God who became Man for this task, Jesus has συμπαθέω (sumpatheó, sympathy/empathy) for our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). When believers daily decide to let our old self remain buried in death, and to live our lives guided by the Spirit in new life, we consciously decide to have our interactions with other human beings governed by God’s ἔλεος and συμπαθέω. This is what makes the recent movement within reactionary Christian circles to label empathy for perceived enemies a sin utterly blasphemous in its spirit. Jesus’ act of self-sacrifice on the cross, in which He asked the Father to not hold His murderers’ sin against them, was the ultimate act of ἔλεος and συμπαθέω, and He explicitly commands us to seek similar lives of self-sacrifice for the sake of others (Luke 9:23).

When I went into the monastery, I was exactly who the anti-empathy movement perceives its enemies to be—a bleeding-heart liberal and an emotional wreck. I’d have to be a total sociopath to still have a visceral remembrance of that time and yet not have συμπαθέω for people currently in that state, even as I now disagree with their practical conclusions. Thank goodness that social media was in its infancy then, because it wouldn’t have been beyond me to do something performative into a camera. In essence, the anti-empathy movement is a politically-obsessed overreaction to that type of social media trend, for Christians who get their worldview primarily via social media. It’s not a Christian imperative for the social media age, it’s the extreme polarization of the social media age being syncretized into the faith, allowing people to rationalize that they’re being good Christians, even as they strip the mind of Christ from their lives.