Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: Knowledge vs. Hate
“Faith, then, signifies a personal relationship with God; a relationship as yet incomplete and faltering, yet none the less real. It is to know God not as a theory or an abstract principle, but as a person. To know a person is far more than to know facts about that person. To know a person is essentially to love him or her; there can be no true awareness of other persons without mutual love. We do not have any genuine knowledge of those whom we hate. Here, then, are the two least misleading ways of speaking about the God who surpasses our understanding: he is personal, and he is love. And these are basically two ways of saying the same thing. Our way of entry into the mystery of God is through personal love. As The Cloud of Unknowing says, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love can he be caught and held, but by thinking never.”
— Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way (Kindle Locations 200-207). St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.
These words have stuck hard with me these past few weeks. Kallistos Ware is, of course, discussing Man’s relation with God here, but this also applies to our relationships with other people. It is easy to hate people, and certainly, some seem more deserving of our ire than others, and yet even in the most irksome of people we can find, if we look for it, commonality sometimes, and we should always find empathy or at least sympathy. And this is not to say that we cannot be angry with someone, or be hurt by them — these are normal reactions when others do hurtful, spiteful, or foolish things to us or to our friends and family, and even to themselves. But hatred is a complete negation of others, and we should be very wary of it. Knowing someone, even in some small but genuine way, should give us pause, and pull us back.
This is part of the November 2017 Quote of the Day series, for November 17.
Published in Group Writing
For those of us who believe in an afterlife, there is a difference between wanting, for instance, to end Islamic terrorism by killing Islamic terrorists and wanting all Islamic terrorists to burn in hell for all of eternity. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to kill those who put us in danger, but if we dream of seeing them punished for all of eternity, that is a problem. That isn’t our call to make.
Well said. Thanks.
Well to be fair nobody is claiming that they are making that call, we can hope they burn in hell, we can even think they will, but in the end where they spend eternity is up to God.
As for @omegapaladin and the question of taking action, I think that was very well put. What if we had simply sat back and not defeated Hitler (everyone’s go-to bad guy!)? What if we had taken the position of it not being our place to judge? And to follow up on that Hitler theme, what about the monsters put on trial at Nuremberg after the full scale of the barbarity was discovered. Was that not a case of it being our place to judge others? 12 defendants there were put to death after being judged by their fellow mortal men, was this not at least some level of justice for the victims?
Please quote the comment I made which led you to believe that I think we should just sit back and not defeat our enemies. Was it the comment where I said that I wanted Islamic extremists dead? Or was it the one where I said that there is absolutely nothing wrong with killing those who endanger us? You are reading things that I never wrote.
No no, you gave full throated support to the idea of killing the bad guys and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Easy there…
My comment was about your thoughts on not judging others. Depends on what you mean, if you mean in an eternal way, then obviously no, that’s above our pay grade. But to judge here and now on one’s actions, that’s not only within our right, it’s our obligation to the defenseless to judge and sentence the bad guys, hence my comment about the Nazi’s. I was merely looking to clarify, no slight was intended.
I was having a discussion like this with my eldest daughter yesterday. She was asking about the difference between revenge, retribution, and punishment, after what had been an unclear message that morning in church on not returning evil for evil.
I tried to explain it this way:
We do not return evil for evil. Period. However, there are times when we must take arms and exercise force to stop evil, whether it is directed at us or at others, and that can be a dirty business – whether it be a fist fight or a war. We do what we must to stop what needs to be stopped.
At a lower level there is justice, and there we must look not merely to the letter of the law, but to the intent. “An eye for an eye” is not about half-blinding the man who half-blinded you – it is about restoration and recompense for the harm done, not getting even.
Whether stopping evil with force, or making up for damages to life and limb in justice, it must never be about revenge or spite. The Nazis needed killin’ because that was the only way to stop them. We did not go to war just because we hated them, though they certainly went to war because they hated everyone else.
Well said. I still fear I would find myself falling short and picking the the human/earthly path – IE: killing the murderer of my family member. Here’s a question, if I sought out and killed the person who murdered my daughter, would I be guilty of murder, would I have violated one of the 10 Commandments, would I be consigned to eternity in hell, where I would never see said family member again?
This is why I believe in the death penalty, or at the very least, a life sentence that really is a life sentence: without it, we will have vigilantism.
As for what your ultimate fate would be, that isn’t for us to say. If it were clear that the person you thought was the murderer really was the murderer, most juries would probably go pretty easy on you, but that begs the question: if it’s clear who the murderer was, why wasn’t he in jail? Why was he walking the streets?
As for whether you would go to hell, that is way above my pay grade. Only God can answer that question.
That’s the sort of question that’s between you and God.
Bishop Ware’s book The Orthodox Church was my introduction. :) Thanks for sharing this! ~L
I’m reading that one too, along with a couple of others either recommended or gifted to me by other Ricoteers.
You’re absolutely correct that you’re more likely to get a legendary epic by engaging in vendettas and destruction than by making peace and building something worthile. To put it mildly, the Nietschean ethic and the Christian ethic are not the same. Christ in no way commands us to a Conan the Barbarian- like life. Nor do the founding fathers, not Burke nor Hayek, nor any other respectable conservative thinker (I will admit to some True Scotsman in my claim here).
Once in a while, hatred drives people to make good decisions, but that it is not impossible for good things to come from hatred doesn’t make it a sound heuristic. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have won money, net, through the lottery, but it’s not wise to play as an investment.
Oh. Great. Now you tell me.