The False Commandment

Loving your enemies is difficult. Forgiving those who have wronged you is difficult. Almost everything worthwhile is also difficult. But the beautiful thing about high standards and difficult demands is that people often rise to the challenge when they understand what’s being asked of them and why. Clarity is a blessing.

And confusion is a curse. So it makes sense that bad actors want to sow it. As the infamous poaster William Wheelwright noted, our enemies “militate against definition itself, whether it be […] a man’s musculature, a country’s borders, or the meaning of words.” They’ve been particularly successful in making nonsense of the Lord’s commands to love and forgive—both bending his words and conflating the teachings with daycare moralisms about being nice, getting along, and not fighting. Charles Haywood calls this the False Commandment, a jumbling of the Lord’s words with things he didn’t actually say, and an attempt to remake God in their own image and likeness.

A ghastly expression of the False Commandment comes from the appropriately named ex-nun-turned-pop-historian Karen Armstrong, whose passage about the Crusades forces the reader to ask whether it’s parody. It’s not. “Today,” she writes, “most of us would unhesitantly condemn the Crusades as unchristian. After all, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. He was a pacifist and had more in common with Gandhi, perhaps, than with Pope Urban.”

This passage hints at the real purpose of the False Commandment. Spirited men rightly think it’s excellent when heroes sell everything they have and undertake an armed pilgrimage to battle an enemy with a long record of conquering Christian lands, looting and burning Christian churches, raping and enslaving and killing Christian people. But Karen wags her finger at such misguidedness. You ought to be more like Gandhi, she implies, than Urban II or Godfrey of Bouillon—because Jesus talks about “loving your enemies” and stuff. Unless you’re a well-schooled theologian and student of scripture, her vague references to the Gospels will likely carry the day (and surely she has more at the ready). Deep in your gut you know she can’t be right, but you’ve heard similar tunes since Sunday School and after a while the repetition has worked its magic. So the debate never really happens. Karen just wins.

The man who admires Urban and Godfrey more than Gandhi starts to suspect that the Church isn’t quite the place for him; he hates pacifistic platitudes which condemn the heroic spirit, and he has no time for those who lecture him about his “Christian” obligation to sit his ass down while bad men do their thing. The False Commandment is not just a series of random errors—but political and spiritual ops designed to remake the Church, and to neuter it. You lose the Godfreys—the men you really need—to Islam or Nordic paganism or whatever because Karen’s vision of the Christian life repulses them.

These are the wages of strategic confusion.

And it’s all so unnecessary because just a little research into what the Lord really commands shows that the Christian life is supremely reasonable.

Love Your Enemies

One has to wonder if humans ever talked about a word as much as modern man talks about L-O-V-E, without quite knowing what it means. If anything, we refuse to know what it means—preferring instead the mystical intimations about how love is the answer, how that love will find a way. But we prefer not to cramp our style with an actual definition.

To love someone in the Christian sense is refreshingly simple and doable: it means, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, “willing the good of the other.” (St Paul offers a more expansive description in 1 Corinthians 13:4-13). For a Christian who believes that all men are made in the image of God but also estranged from him, this is a straightforward matter. You want others to be reconciled to their Creator and you’re willing to help make this happen. But nowhere is it said that you must invite shadowy characters into your home and/or give them the money in your pocket and/or introduce them to your daughter.

Christian love has little to do with warm feelings, general fondness, or support for others in their bad choices. Love instead requires us to grieve for bad choices and attempt to correct them. Depending on your station in life, you might be called to discipline and punish the wayward, as loving parents discipline their children. Love even permits you to fight your enemies! Doctor Aquinas says so:

It is lawful to attack one’s enemies, that they may be restrained from sin: and this is for their own good and for the good of others. Consequently it is even lawful in praying to ask that temporal evils be inflicted on our enemies in order that they may mend their ways.

Passages like these are why Josef Pieper calls Aquinas’ writing “bracing”—a far cry from the numbing pieties of the Karen Armstrong-types we’ve grown accustomed to. Aquinas’ words show that Christian love does not tie our hands behind our backs, nor does it join us in a suicide pact, nor does it privilege evil by demanding that we accommodate the whims of those with mental illnesses. Love allows a wide range for vigorous movement and action.

Though it might be a less important point, the Lord’s command requires another clarification: what exactly does enemy mean? The German political theorist Carl Schmitt notes that Greek and Latin offer distinct terms for personal and public enemies, while English uses one word to mean both. When the Lord commands us to love our enemies, pray for them, and seek to make peace (Luke 6:27-31, Matthew 5:43-44), he uses the word for personal enemies. In other words, you are called to love and make peace with the ones who insulted or betrayed you, the ones with whom you have a private feud. It is not clear that you must do the same to those who want to destroy your way of life and inflict evil upon your people—much less allow them to be successful in their aims.¹

Forgive Others

Just as the Christian sense of love is limited and reasonable, the command to forgive is also more sane than it often sounds. For the longest time it struck me that I must be missing something because the whole thing seemed to present a lot of personal advantage. To refuse forgiveness is to stew in resentment, which probably hurts the resenter far more than the resented. At a certain point, forgiving is simply good for us and our sanity.

And that’s really what the Lord asks. Jimmy Aitkin writes that forgiveness means “a willingness to let go of the anger someone has prompted in us”—hopefully for the sake of being reconciled. Reconciliation is a great thing. To be reconciled to an estranged friend or a feuding brother is a gift—sometimes even elevating the relationship to new levels. We should want this.

But the call to forgive requires something of the other as well. Luke 17:3-4: “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” Notice that the sinner must ask for forgiveness. If God doesn’t forgive those who don’t ask, neither do we have to seek reconciliation with those who aren’t sorry (though we should ultimately try to let the anger and ill-will fade).

This means you are under no obligation to participate in the obnoxious trend of forgiving people preemptively, firing off “I forgive you” as soon as humanly possible, as though it’s a competition. More and more often we see the parents of murdered children immediately issue a press release about forgiving the murderers. Such eagerness might even encourage future evil, if the evil-doers think they can get away with crimes against Christian eager to flaunt their forgiveness. In that case, you falter in love—willing the good of others—because your conduct has brought out their worst.

The command to forgive is linked to the Lord’s praise of the virtue of meekness—and the confusion over both terms is similarly linked. Meekness, contrary to the common understanding, is a prerequisite for manly achievement and strength. It does not mean weakness or lameness but rather it is the virtue that, in the words of Aquinas, “restrains the onslaught of anger” so that good judgment can prevail rather than reflexive rage. The meek, according to Msgr Pope “are those who have authority over their anger, who can command and control its power, moderating and directing its energy to good rather than destructive ends.” It’s worth noting that the Church does not condemn anger; Jesus Christ himself got angry. But of course anger cannot be allowed to run wild. The easily angered man is also easily manipulated and thrown off of his mission—so it’s simply a statement of fact that meekness is a virtue worth cultivating. Again, the demands of the Christian life are deeply reasonable.

Prudence and the Duty to Know

I remember being disappointed years ago upon hearing the claim that the Faith emphasizes orthodoxy (right thinking) whereas a creed like Islam stresses orthopraxy (right practice). Orthodoxy struck me as a thing for nerds and sticklers. Isn’t practice, action, living more important? But now I see the point. If you don’t first insist on clarity and correctness, right action is not possible. If you let vagueness and sloppiness intrude into core teachings, wayward living will follow—as is made painfully clear by the consequences of the False Commandment.

It’s another way of saying prudence is preeminent among the cardinal virtues. To make good things happen, we must have knowledge of the good and how to realize it in our lives. Josef Pieper writes that “None but the prudent man can be just, brave, and temperate, and the good man is good in so far as he is prudent.” Truth precedes goodness. He continues: “The whole ordered structure of the Occidental Christian view of man rests upon the preeminence of prudence over the other virtues.”

Orthodoxy and prudence require us to understand what the Lord asks, just like the archer must see and know what he’s shooting at. Clarity is a blessing.

1. Highly recommend Haywood’s meditations at the end of his essay on Schmitt.