The Crisis of Empathy

Spoilers: It can't be averted by limiting empathy with goodness

In his letter to Rome, the Apostle Paul instructs Roman Christians to “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” (12:15)

This is a wild command. Paul seems to be suggesting that we take on the affections of our fellow Christians, whether those affections are positive or negative, good or bad, enjoyable or not. He is calling us to a dramatic form of empathetic engagement with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

John Calvin agrees. Commenting on this verse, Calvin says,

A general truth is…laid down, — that the faithful, regarding each other with mutual affection, are to consider the condition of others as their own. He [Paul] first specifies two particular things, — That they were to “rejoice with the joyful, and to weep with the weeping.” For such is the nature of true love, that one prefers to weep with his brother, rather than to look at a distance on his grief, and to live in pleasure or ease. What is meant then is, — that we, as much as possible, ought to sympathize with one another, and that, whatever our lot may be, each should transfer to himself the feeling of another, whether of grief in adversity, or of joy in prosperity. And, doubtless, not to regard with joy the happiness of a brother is envy; and not to grieve for his misfortunes is inhumanity. Let there be such a sympathy among us as may at the same time adapt us to all kinds of feelings.

Calvin seems to have got the wildness memo.¹

In light of Paul’s and Calvin’s encouragement—and with, you know, experiencing human relationships develop and deepen through empathy—one might take empathy to be a crucial ingredient in a Christian account of love of neighbor, and therefore of the good life.

Not so fast. An ever-expanding chorus of voices is chanting against empathy.

A central concern of the chorus is that empathy is actually destructive where it might seem to be beneficial. Speaking into a specifically Christian context, Patricia Snow, in a masterful article in First Things (which you should definitely read!), says this:

Solidarity in suffering is a keynote of the Body of Christ, but it is a solidarity constituted by singular individuals, whose unity derives from each one’s primary allegiance to Christ. Empathy solidarity, on the other hand, is Christian solidarity’s demonic counterfeit, one that carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. If the Holy Spirit strengthens both individuals and the ties that bind them, empathy weakens them.

Notice that last bit: empathy weakens both individuals and the ties that bind them. She goes on:

For many years now, we have been living in what Frans de Waal called an age of empathy, an age not of reason but of overflowing emotion, as if the sea, that great universal symbol of ungoverned passion and seething affective life, had burst the bounds God laid down for it in the beginning (“so far and no further”) and covered the whole earth with its waves.

And on:

In the spiritual economy of modernity, the place that remains vacant is the place that belongs by right to Christ alone: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Our culturally sanctioned practice of empathy is an attempt to fill Christ’s shoes; it is a reiteration of the sin of Eden in a fresh guise. In place of Christ’s fearless, definitive Passion, we offer others our problematic, uneasy pity, a passion from which no one rises incorrupt.

I confess that I’m not entirely sure how Snow thinks empathy ought to function in the life of the Christian. (More on that in a bit.) One worry I have is that she doesn’t deal with Paul’s admonition to the Romans. (That she doesn’t mention Calvin is unsurprising. He doesn’t tend to make it onto Catholics’ Christmas card list.) Aren’t we, after all, meant to “imitate Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1) in being empathetic? Isn’t this one way to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”, as Paul says in Romans 13:14? Is empathy really meant for “Christ alone”, as Snow contends? Perhaps she goes a bit too far there.

While Snow’s overall picture of empathy’s role in the life of the Christian isn’t clear to me, it’s very clear that she thinks something has gone terribly wrong. What’s wrong has to do with “our culturally sanctioned practice of empathy”, “the age of empathy”, “empathy solidarity”.

Surely she, and the rest of the chorus, is right. Empathy is in crisis.

The crisis is just not rooted where the chorus thinks.

A core concern of the chorus, it seems to me, is something like this: empathy has run roughshod over goodness. Empathy in itself isn’t the problem. Rather, it’s empathy unmoored from a conception of the good. The problem is empathy run amok.

It’s worth noticing that therapeutic clinical practice tends to demand the decoupling of empathy and goodness. Therapists are of course to be empathetic. But introducing into “the room” notions of right and wrong or (objective) good and bad? That borders on and might venture deep into the unethical. (The exception is if the client brings in those ideas himself.) The therapist’s job is to create an environment in which the client can exist without fear of judgment, to allow the client to reveal himself fully, completely, totally. Therapists must show clients “unconditional positive regard”, to use the language of Carl Rogers, the father of person-centered psychotherapy. Creating an empathetic environment, this model suggests, comes close to requiring that the therapist leave goodness out of it.² In the end, I have no objections to this view of clinical therapeutic practice. It’s an important type of relationship with an important group of people who have lots of important insights and helps to offer. It’s a practice we should be glad is available to us.

However, our modern therapeutic world conceives of the love that a friend shows to a friend, a mother to a son, a brother to a sister, a teacher to a student, in a Rogerian way: love means mere empathetic embrace. Good and bad and right and wrong are anyway culturally contingent, and so can’t form the core of culture-transcending love. This reconceptualization of love as empathy is detrimental to both individuals and society and, as Snow argues, to the Church.

The solution offered from the chorus is that empathy must be limited. A little empathy is good. Too much empathy is very, very bad. So we should empathize, but only so far. The “so far” is bounded something more rational, usually something to do with goodness. Snow puts it this way:

The saint is not empathetic; he is charitable, which means he always wills the ultimate good of his neighbor.

Snow’s point seems to be that we must limit empathy, constrain it, restrain it, by the good of our neighbor. It is “excessive, unmediated intimacy” that gets us in trouble.³ At bottom, this is what love demands. And it would be very strange to put bounds on love. Love, therefore, does not demand intimacy. Love is not empathic embrace. Rather, love is fundamentally concerned with the good of the other. So one can love another—can care about and seek another’s good—without feeling what they feel. Perhaps, properly speaking, love doesn’t involve empathy at all:

The saint’s emotions are ordered to faith and to reason,

as Snow says, not to the feelings of those whom they love.

This is not meant to deny the importance of empathy, but to place it in its proper context. Perhaps empathy facilitates love without constituting it. That is, perhaps empathy helps us to care about the good of another, and in that sense can amplify love. But it’s not part of love. Therefore, where empathy conflicts with goodness, goodness must win. Because love must win. Where empathy prevents us from seeking the good, we must put off empathy so that we might love.

In these senses, goodness must put the reins on empathy.

This idea is on the right track, but actually gets things the wrong way round. The symptom—empathy is causing a crisis—is rightly identified, and the missing element—goodness—is also correct. But the trouble isn’t that empathy needs limiting. The trouble is that the thing empathy seeks isn’t fully possible where people are not fully good.

Bear with me for a minute. We have to take a couple huge steps back, and get a little theoretical. At least we’ll be theorizing about love!⁴

Even in our empathy culture, empathy itself isn’t the end. Empathy is seeking something else. That something else is union. The instinct behind our drive for empathy is, I think, the desire to be lovingly united to others. The desire for, and indeed the achieving of, union with another is deeply human, profoundly good, and absolutely essential in a life well lived. Interpersonal intimacy matters.

What we desire when we desire union, according to Eleonore Stump, is to know and be known as people. This is not mere knowledge about another, nor another’s knowledge about us. It is a distinctive sort of knowing, knowing that is irreducibly personal. In her magisterial Wandering in Darkness, Stump calls the general type of knowledge of which this personal knowing is a species Franciscan knowledge. She describes Franciscan knowledge of persons this way:

Like the perception of color, for example, the knowledge of persons at issue here is direct, intuitive, and hard to translate without remainder into knowledge that, but very useful as a basis for knowledge that of one sort or another. John knows that Mary is going to give him a flower because he first knows Mary, her action, her emotion, and her intention—but these are things which he knows by, as it were, seeing them, and not by cognizing them in the knowledge that way. (p. 71)

This type of knowledge is, according to Stump, central to love in it’s agapic form, what Christians have often called caritas, that is, “charity”. This is because love of a person requires desiring to be in union with them. Loving union demands interpersonal closeness. And closeness is only possible through mutual knowing in this 2nd-personal, Franciscan sense.⁵

And so we return to empathy. The ability to mirror another, to “mind-read”, or more generally what is sometimes called “social cognition”, is an essential ingredient in Franciscan knowledge of persons. Empathy is a key driver of this ability. To be united to another requires “inhabiting” them, as it were. And so empathy is a crucial ingredient in interpersonal closeness, which is in turn an ingredient in union, which is in turn an ingredient in love.

Therefore, to love, and to grow in love, requires empathetic embrace.

To be fair, if Stump’s story ended with union alone, her views would face the worries of the anti-empathy chorus. Stump’s story does not, in fact, end there.

Indeed, Stump argues persuasively that love involves more than just a desire for union with the beloved. Love involves two desires, not one. The second is a desire for the beloved’s good. There’s a lot to say about this, but I want to focus on an aspect especially relevant to the empathy crisis: your beloved’s good is vitally important if you want your empathy to eventuate in union.

That may sound bizarre, but hear me (and by ‘me’ I mean Stump) out! The crucial bit is that sinful human beings inevitably fail, by their own broken will, in revealing themselves. As Stump puts it,

The post-Fall human condition carries with it a kind of willed loneliness. (Wandering in Darkness, p. 128)

A malformed person, a person whose heart is not singularly directed toward the good, cannot be fully united with anything. Malformed people—bad people, which includes…well…all of us to some degree—are divided against themselves. And in order for you to draw near to someone in loving union, they must open themselves to you. This is a problem for broken people, because broken people are divided against themselves. So when a broken person attempts to reveal what she believes is her self to you, she is bound to fail.

Stump again, longer this time:

It is, therefore, a remarkable consequence of Aquinas’s views [which Stump shares] that the ability of one person Paula to be close to another person Jerome is a function of Jerome’s own integration in goodness. A person who is not integrated in goodness will hide one or another part of his mind from himself. To this extent, he will not be able or willing to reveal his mind to someone else. He will also have first-order desires that conflict with some of his other first-order desires or with his second-order desires or both. Consequently, he will be alienated from some of his own desires, whichever desires are operative in him. Insofar as Jerome is in such a condition, Paula cannot be close to him, no matter what she does. Paula’s becoming close to Jerome, or growing in closeness to Jerome, therefore requires that Jerome grow in single-mindedness and whole-heartedness. And, on Aquinas’s views, this growth can occur only to the extent to which Jerome becomes integrated around the good. Without this sort of integration, closeness, personal presence, and therefore also union in love are all undermined or obviated.

I do not mean to say that anything about a human person could keep God from loving that person, since it is possible to love someone unilaterally. … The point here has to do only with that closeness that is an ingredient in union. As regards the closeness constituent of union, on the account of closeness I have argued for here, even God cannot be close to a person and united with a person who is not close to himself. (Wandering Darkness, p. 126-7)

A vital ingredient in the solution to this problem of willed loneliness is growth in goodness. Becoming whole-hearted in goodness allows us to have an integrated self. An integrated self is needed in order to be situated to reveal oneself to others. Of course, whole-heartedness in goodness just is our good. So willing someone to be whole-hearted in goodness is willing their good.

Here’s the kicker, the application:

Empathetic union doesn’t need to be limited. It needs to be facilitated.

If empathy culture is seeking to increase union with others, it will fail unless it also seeks others’ good. We must seek the good for those with whom we desire union, because their good is their whole-heartedness in goodness, and this whole-heartedness is a precondition of the union that empathy seeks.

What we long for is an empathetic embrace of our whole selves. But we don’t have whole selves to embrace, and so we unwittingly block others from empathetically, lovingly embracing us. The loneliness that comes in a culture that mistakes empathy for love is not caused by “excessive” empathy. It’s caused by too little success at empathetic embrace. And the reason why our empathy fails, despite our desire for more and more of it, is in part because we simply aren’t good.

In other words, empathetic union is inherently limited by goodness. Goodness need put no reins in place.

The message to empathy culture suggested here is very different from the chorus’s. Rather than saying, “Empathize less, care more about the good,” we instead say, “Empathize all the more, but know that your empathy is in vain without your beloved’s good!”

For what it’s worth—thought about leaving this out—I toy with the idea that the deeper problem is that our empathy isn’t full-blooded. Perhaps true empathy feels the suffering and joys of another even when those sufferings and joys are not felt by another as suffering or joy. (Don’t confuse suffering and joy with, for example, pain and elation.) To empathize with someone whose body is traumatically injured is itself painful, and this is no less true if the injured party is in bodily shock. Likewise, empathy with someone who does not recognize their own brokenness involves suffering that brokenness, as it were, on their behalf. Parents perhaps most easily understand this dynamic. The point is: perhaps full-blooded empathy involves not feeling what others feel, but feeling what they ought to feel. And this requires an understanding of how they ought to be, that is, of their good.

Anyway, Christians have a story to tell about the solution to the crisis of empathy. The good of another is reconciliation with God and presence with Him through union with Christ by the indwelling of the Spirit, and thereby the restoration of her relationships to herself and other creatures. The initiation of relationship with God makes possible the long-term healing of a person’s will, and thereby makes possible becoming a whole, self-united person. In orienting our whole selves, including our wills, around God, we are orienting ourselves around The Good. This just is whole-heartedness in goodness. In this space, we can actually open ourselves to others because we have a whole self to know.

Of course, our union with God—who is our Good—will not be perfected in this present life. Loving union with ourselves and with other fallen creatures cannot, therefore, be perfected either. But as we grow in whole-heartedness around the Good, around the Triune God of heaven and earth, around our Lord Jesus Christ—that is, as we grow in Goodness—we can grow in loving union with ourselves and with others. In this loving union we share in one another, we hold each other in common, in the empathic, Good-desiring way Paul calls us to in his letter to Rome.

We Christians even have a name for this: we call it fellowship.

By the by: The empathy crisis is one of the tragic byproducts of the Accidental War on Humanity. By decimating our self-understanding and our understanding of God, we further lost full-blooded knowledge of ourselves and misunderstood what our good involves. So we are unable to open ourselves to union with others. We cannot love, and we cannot be loved.

1. If you’re thinking, “But that says sympathy not empathy!”, well, I’ve got bad news for you. This translation of Calvin’s commentary on Romans is from 1849, prior to the advent of ‘empathy’. Anyway, Calvin is clearly suggesting that Paul meant for Christians to take on, to transfer, others’ feelings. That, in the parlance of our times, is empathy.

2. As my psychologist friends would be quick to point out, there is considerable nuance that’s needed here. Agreed! But I do think it’s fair to say that this picture is the both prominent-bordering-on-dominant in clinical practice, and dominant in Western culture’s imagination.

3. Some of the most striking insights of Snow’s piece concern the role of the Spirit in combatting the “unmediated” aspect of “excessive, unmediated empathy”. I’m concerned here with the “excessive” aspect, which I think is wrongheaded. Interestingly, the reason I think it’s wrongheaded are related to Snow’s own solution to the “unmediated” problem.

4. In what follows, I am going to occasionally slide between the telos of love and love itself. This makes a difference, but not one that’s particularly relevant to the point I’m on about. That is to say: nothing of substance slips with my slide.

5. In Knowledge for the Love of God, I talk about this as acquaintance with another. While I don’t regret that choice, Stump’s telling is better because it is more specific. Second-person knowing is more than acquaintance with persons, but not less. In the book, I was concerned with knowledge that is more (but not less!) than propositional knowing, knowledge that. Acquaintance gets that.