Posted on 10/03/2011 10:13:53 PM PDT by Jeanette Pryor
“A la tarde de la vida te examinarán en el amor. At the end of your life, you will be judged on love.” St. John of the Cross
“Love is the fundamental relation of God to the world. … In a chain of acts of love, man strives for the highest end.” St. Thomas Aquinas
Both St. John of the Cross and St. Thomas Aquinas teach that each human being is created to love; that the perfection of man’s intellect, will, and emotions is in direct proportion to the deliberate direction of these powers by the human soul to the good of ones fellow-man, for the sake of our common Father in Heaven.
Evil, for Aquinas, is the absence of good. For human beings, evil is a life devoid of love, one that feeds on hatred. Such a life, instead of shining like a flame in the cold and darkness, extinguishes the light, twisting the one who hates.
This afternoon, I posted an article written by Caroline Glick, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, concerning the pro-Israel foreign policy orientation of Gov. Sarah Palin. I opened my Comments box and found the following concerning Jerusalem Post Editor: Sarah Palin Is Israel’s Real Friend
“ She’s all yours. I’m sure she’s been paid for.”
“Does Israel need the support of an illiterate like Palin?”
“I always thought she was a slut.
“Most evil religions are Christianity and Judaism. NATO and Israel are the terrorist countries.Millions upon millions have been killed. This sick lady, pandering to the Jews will lead to more millions dead if she gets elected. Her spewing that Obama must order an attack on Iran to show his love for Israel–is a very dangerous person. Iran has not attacked or threaten any country. Most Americans are blood thirsty dumbasses.”
I wish I didn’t understand these comments and how someone can think and express these ideas. I could write of my indignation, saying something trite about how terrible these statements are. I would thus avoid talking about the fact that, twenty years ago, I would have probably been the one writing them. But then I would be missing the opportunity to explain a very important lesson I learned about the nature of Antisemitism, a lesson I learned in Vichy, France.
I grew up being taught that there were two forces in the world, that of Freedom championed by America and other democracies that allowed people to honor God, work hard for their families, and live lives of their own choosing. The competing global forces were those who, like the then Soviet Union and its satellites, imposed atheistic, materialist collectivism. In such places, the individual dreams and aspirations of men and women were crushed by the state. Loving or seeking God was a crime and people slaved for a life without joy or purpose.
When I was eighteen, I met a group of people who adhered to a very conservative practice of Catholicism. I am a Irish Roman Catholic and was profoundly attracted to a the more ancient form of the Catholic Liturgy promoted by the group. If the ideas of my friends had remained confined to the spiritual realm, I would have certainly emerged from my experience the better for it. Unfortunately, some who had great influence over the intellectual orientation of the organization were profoundly seeped in what I now understand to be the boiler-plate, early 20th Century European Far-Right world view, along with the guilty tendency of shutting their minds to the tragic consequences.
As insane as this might seem, at the age of twenty, while my friends back home in California were buying the first CD players and watching the Berlin Wall fall at Reagan’s feet, I was being taught in the school I had entered in France that the WWII Vichy Government was good, that Marshal Petain was an admirable man, that the United States was not the beacon of light I had been taught to honor, but the masonic imperialist state bent on spreading the One World Government around the globe and that, behind this Imperialist take-over was “the Jews.”
This was not necessarily an “official” position of the group, but more the understood background against which life played out, the accepted framework in which our efforts to rid the world of all manifestations of Masonic modernity had meaning.
The fact that a young American of average intelligence, raised in an ethnically diverse community in San Jose, California in the 1970′s and 80′s could become profoundly Antisemitic in spite of my extensive exposure to the truth of the Holocaust and parents who abhorred racism of any kind, should indicate that this true evil, this absence of goodness is not hard to spread. Idealistic minds are easily seduced by a simplistic view of the world.
How did I become a radical like the poor people who commented on my blog post? The global world view I was exposed to was not first presented in its essence, a doctrine rooted in hatred, one that objectifies an entire race of people and directs against it all the jealousy and anger people feel when confronted with the difficult and complex nature of real life.
The conspiracy world view is a drug intoxicating the believer with the myth of his or her status of a part of the enlightened elite who, unlike those “duped” by the government and the media, sees the real “inside workings of society.” The conspiracy endows the radical with a mission, a place of real cosmic importance, since he or she becomes a warrior fighting the enemy of mankind. The Antisemitic theory provides the hater with someone to blame for all his shortcomings. Most importantly, the unity of the fanatic with those of like mind, defines identity and ensures belonging to a social structure.
What is the cure? The realization that the conspiracy, the hatred, renders one hideous, negative, ugly, cruel, and unable to give or receive love. My own cure began in college, years after I left France, when I was obliged to read the founding documents of the Muslim Brotherhood and saw the hideous reflection of my own beliefs in those of the fathers of radical Islam.
I sincerely pray that those whose hearts are twisted by hatred for Sarah, whose ideas and patriotism I admire, and especially for the Jewish State of Israel, will find their way back to their “final cause,” as Aquinas so beautifully put it.
“At the end of your life, you will be judged on how you have loved.”
Beautifully said.
Beautiful. Bumping for tomorrow.
Jeanette, a thoughtful and beneficial vignette. Not for nothing is it said that love is the greatest gift.
Good post. Good insights.
At the end of your life, you will be judged on love... Love is the fundamental relation of God to the world.
Thanks again for posting it.
Another wonderful and enlightening post, Jeanette. Thanks for sharing it with us. You’re raising the bar around here.
““At the end of your life, you will be judged on how you have loved.”
St. Thomas Aquinas? I thought this was the last song on Abbey Road. :-)
At the end of your life, you will be judged on love.
My new morning prayer. Thank you.
Do you mean Far-Left?
Were not the Nazi's Far-LEFT! National Socialism and all.
In France, the ideas I adopted are still identified as “Far-Right,” and my designating them as “Far-Left” would not be clear. “Far Left” in France under Petain was Communist and the manifestation of Nazism in France was not so Statist as in Germany. The success of Vichy in France depended on its appeal to the hard-right children of Maurras, definitely Far Right.
Thank you so much for your insight. You would be correct if you spoke of Germany.
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