@Unveiled Artist
CHURCH FATHERS: Divine Institutes, Book VI (Lactantius)
"Therefore kindness is the greatest bond of human society; and he who has broken this is to be deemed impious, and a parricide. For if we all derive our origin from one man, whom God created, we are plainly of one blood; and therefore it must be considered the greatest wickedness to hate a man, even though guilty.
On which account God has enjoined that enmities are never to be contracted by us, but that they are always to be removed, so that we soothe those who are our enemies, by reminding them of their relationship. Likewise, if we are all inspired and animated by one God, what else are we than brothers?"
(Lactantius (c. 250 – c. 325), Early Church Father)
I definitely believe it is possible for someone to love their enemies, in spite of this being one of the hardest things to do and requiring a lot of moral courage. Even the worst human beings are still human beings - "
A Man's a Man for a' That" as the Scottish bard Robert Burns, the man who wrote the lyrics for
Auld Lang Syne, in 1795.
The word chosen by the Buddha for this teaching is
metta from
mitta, a friend. In the verse of the Dhammpada in question he uses averena: "
na hi verena verāni sammantīdha kudācanaṃ averena ca sammanti esa dhammo sanantano" (DhP 5) This literally means "non-hatred":
Dhammapada - Sayings of Buddha - Translated by S. Wannapok
"He abused me, he beat me,
He defeated me, he robbed me",
In those who harbour such thoughts
Hatred never ceases.
"He abused me, he beat me,
He defeated me, he robbed me",
In those who harbour not such thoughts
Hatred finds its end.
At any time in this world,
Hatred never ceases by hatred,
But through non-hatred it ceases
This is an eternal law.
Gatha 5
Again, a very simple truth, that most of the religions in the history have stressed again and again. The only cure for hatred is the abstention from it. Never can we stop people from hating us by hating them. In this way, mutual hatred will rise -- often to the point when hatred gives way to violence.
We have all had to contend with hostile forces at some stage during our lives - persons or people who have wronged us individually or other people we love or entire groups of people we hold dear.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the peace settlement that brought an end to decades of terrorist / paramilitary brutality and internecine ethno-sectarian civil war in Northern Ireland, is probably a paradigmatic example on the "macro-scale" (in terms of entire communities that deemed their neighbours, collectively, to be 'enemies').
The cycle of violence could have continued, as it had for decades before, unabated. So many, on both sides of the Loyalist - Nationalist divide, had every reason to pursue vengeance for the extrajudicial killings, reprisals, maimings and massacres that had been perpetrated against their families and respective communities.
But Northern Ireland chose a different path in 1998, one that saw former enemies of the highest order - hitherto IRA men like Martin McGuinness and Loyalist-paramilitary inciters such as Ian Paisley - eventually coming together for the common good and even forging friendships, in the context of a power-sharing administration that brought the representatives of both communities into one government.
How Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley forged an unlikely friendship
From sworn enemies to the "Chuckle Brothers", Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley became Northern Ireland's most unlikely double act.
One was a former IRA commander, the other once stood up in the European Parliament to denounce the Pope as the Antichrist.
But remarkably, against all the odds, a deep friendship developed between these clashing figures that enabled the Northern Ireland peace process.
So, yes, you can learn to love an enemy - to see the person beyond the 'label', beyond the partisanship, and even to differentiate the human being, with inalienable rights just like yourself, from their harmful conduct.
If I may quote the scholar Udo Schnelle in relation to Jesus's teaching on this: "
In its unqualified form, [Jesus's] command to love one's enemies is without analogy. To be sure, there are close parallels in Judaism and elsewhere in the Hellenistic world, but they always include various motives as their basis and thus are not really the same as Jesus's unqualified demand [...] Because the Creator himself demolishes the friend-foe schema by his loving-kindness towards good and bad people alike (Matthew 5:45), human beings too can violate the conventional boundaries between friend and enemy, and the category "enemy" becomes meaningless"
(Theology of the New Testament, p.116).
This is actually stated as the intent behind Jesus's famous motto in the first century Christian catechism
The Didache:
Didache. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (translation Roberts-Donaldson).
"But love those who hate you, and you shall not have an enemy"
Sometimes, that attempt to reach out, forgive and return good for the evil received can result in reconciliation, in enemies becoming friends. In some cases, this will sadly not happen but the strength to abandon the hate can still enable a victim to move on and rebuild their life.
If a person has lost a loved one to a murderer, say in a terror attack, yet still maintains that capital punishment is a moral wrong and sees justice for the victim served through the court process with a prison sentence, I regard this as being akin to an implicit love of enemies. It is a recognition that, for all the heinous evil this person has done you, he or she remains a human being and there is no point in compounding the tragedy of your loved one's loss with yet more shedding of blood or death.
In Europe, state executions of incarcerated citizens are viewed as human rights abuses. Even Russia operates a moratorium on the practice at the federal level (despite assassinating people extra-judicially) to remain a member of the Council of Europe and a party to the European Convention on Human Rights (1953), which prohibits capital punishment. The only European country that continues to execute criminals is the last dictatorial regime on the continent, Belarus.
The early church father Lactantius was prescient far ahead of his time back in the third century CE when he wrote:
"For he who reckons it a pleasure, that a man, though justly condemned, should be slain in his sight, pollutes his conscience as much as if he should become a spectator and a sharer of a homicide which is secretly committed. Being imbued with this practice, they have lost their humanity.
For when God forbids us to kill, He not only prohibits us from open violence, which is not even allowed by the public laws, but He warns us against the commission of those things which are esteemed lawful among men.
Thus it will be neither lawful for a just man to engage in warfare, since his warfare is justice itself, nor to accuse any one of a capital charge, because it makes no difference whether you put a man to death by word, or rather by the sword, since it is the act of putting to death itself which is prohibited. Therefore, with regard to this precept of God, there ought to be no exception at all; but that it is always unlawful to put to death a man, whom God willed to be a sacred animal" (Div. inst., VI.20)
According to some polling data, almost half of Americans regard the justice of ''
an eye for an eye'' and endorse execution as social vengeance. That view is anathema among many Europeans. I view moral endorsement of the death penalty as barely more advanced than the ancient Mesopotamian
Law of Hammurabi or the days of human and animal sacrifice. Sections 191-282 of Hammurabi layout appropriate punishments for crimes. Several follow the strict “
eye for an eye” formula. Capital punishment and draconian sentencing are a vestige of this.
If you believe that crimes mean a person forfeits their rights or becomes sub-human, then you don't believe that rights are inalienable and inviolable as we do here in Europe. As was stated back in the 19th century:
“opponents [of the death penalty] stand on the admitted general rule that human life is sacred; or, as it is stated in our national declaration, that the right to life is among the ‘inalienable rights’.” [Burleigh, Thoughts on the Death Penalty, 1847]
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