Empathy for the Devil? by Anthony Esolen

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, Feb. 7, 2024

Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture, and the Christian life, whose most recent work is In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. He and his wife Debra also produce a new web magazine, Word and Song, devoted to reintroducing people to the good, the true, and the beautiful. He is a Distinguished Professor at Thales College ….

Having consigned reason to that impoverished realm of human experience that can be subjected to controlled experiments and the quantification of their results, we are left with no basis upon which to make moral judgments except for feelings.

Empathy, I’ve long seen, is often a function of where you happen to be looking. It’s easy for people to feel sorry for someone standing in front of them, begging to be let off from some penalty for their wrongdoing, full of excuses, explanations that don’t explain anything, and suggestions that maybe the wrong they did was right after all. It’s easy, because it costs nothing. You may say your heart goes out to the sinner. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.

People are often pretty glib about what they call their hearts. When real hearts do go out, they experience real pain, and in a case like that of the shuffling and dodging sinner, it must be the pain of conflict, because you want to be merciful, yet you must not be a traitor to right and wrong. …

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