By DONALD DeMARCO
Virtue is the moral strength to do the right thing under a variety of circumstances. Because it is admirable, it is also enviable. Thus, we have mercy killing, frontier justice, blind faith, and gracious living. The wise guy and the woman of easy virtue do not personify virtue. Vice pays tribute to virtue by wearing its name. Hence, virtue can be radically misunderstood and easily misused.
Compassion seems to be on everyone’s lips these days. It is a beautiful sounding word and has an even more beautiful meaning. However, its proper meaning is stretched to the point where it includes what it does not mean. Compassion is the virtue that feels the pain and suffering of others. It should not be regarded as a badge of honor, as it often is, for the person who has compassion. More important, it is focused on the good of the other. It does not imply harm.
The person who boasts of having compassion should really have humility in the presence of a person who is suffering. On the other hand, compassion for the other should be protected by hope and justice since it hopes for improvement and refrains from any actions that are unjust. When compassion is called upon to justify abortion or euthanasia, all hope is defeated, and justice is violated when death is chosen. Compassion does not have within itself a directive for killing. Nor does it cancel hope and put an end to care. Compassion, as is the case with all other virtues, is solidly on the side of life.
Virtues often need to be protected by other virtues. Simone Weil became famous for the extraordinary lengths to which she would go to express her compassion for others. It was said that her heart would skip a beat for something that happened at the other end of the world. Her compassion for her French compatriots who were fighting in World War II led her to refuse to eat any more food than was allotted to them during the German occupation.
As a result she died of malnutrition combined with tuberculosis at the age of 34. She could have drawn on the virtue of prudence.
Compassion offers positive effects for the suffering person. It is not simply a sympathetic or empathic feeling. St. Thomas Aquinas raises the question in his Summa Theologiae about whether the compassion of friends can assuage the pain and sorrow of a person (“Utrum tristita et dolor mitigentur per compassionem amicorum, ST, I-II, 38.3).
He presents two positive effects. In the first case, the friends are sharing and therefore lightening another’s burden. Pain and sorrow have a depressing effect, not unlike a weight from which we want to be freed. When we are greeted by compassionate friends, we sense they are bearing our burden with us, striving, as it were, to lessen its weight. As a result, our burden becomes easier to bear.
Aquinas believes that the second reason is better than the first since it is more positive. He reasons that since the virtue of compassion is rooted in love, when a person who is suffering witnesses the love his friends have for him, he experiences a pleasure that assuages his sorrow and mitigates his pain.
For Aquinas, love is the basis not only for compassion but for all virtues. Therefore, true compassion is rooted in love and certainly not in expediency. And since it is rooted in love, it cannot approve killing either in the case of the distressed mother who is seeking a reason to abort or the extremely ill person who is seeking an escape from life.
It is interesting to note that the one philosopher who wrote most extensively on compassion was Arthur Schopenhauer, who is also known as the most pessimistic of all philosophers. His notion of compassion, however, is heavily tinged with pity.
Man is, in Schopenhauer’s estimation, a “grotesque caricature” and death is the only redemption for the crime of being born. Schopenhauer’s compassion is inclined toward death.
Compassion in the present world is the most misunderstood of all moral virtues. It resembles the notion of compassion described by Schopenhauer rather than that expounded by St. Thomas Aquinas. It is grounded in expedience rather than love. Compassion does not seek to remove the suffering by removing the sufferer. It is, as Shakespeare said of mercy, “twice blessed,” blessing both the giver and the receiver.
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