When Compassion becomes a vice...

Drawn Out of the Water

Compassion as a Virtue, a Feeling, and a Political Career

An essay in the company of Emmet Fox and the Sermon on the Mount

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has ever watched the news with a pulse, when the face on the screen does its work. A child. A flood. A neighborhood that looks like a war zone without the courtesy of a declared war. Something in the chest tightens. The eyes do that warm, inconvenient thing. You feel for them. Then, if you have been well trained by the culture, a second feeling arrives on the heels of the first, like a waiter bringing the check before you have finished the soup: You are a good person. You felt the correct thing. The transaction is complete.

That second feeling is the whole problem. Not the first one. The first one is just being a mammal with a working heart. The second one is theology gone freelance.

This is an essay about how a healthy human reflex got promoted to a cosmic virtue, then to a political operating system, and then, with the confidence of a man who has never balanced a checkbook, to the organizing principle of government. It is also an essay about a basket on a river, a man walking on water, a narrow gate that will not admit a slogan, and a pair of parents you are commanded to honor even when one of them is a mood and the other is a spreadsheet.

How Compassion Got the Corner Office

If you ask a reasonably church-formed Westerner where compassion became the boss of the moral life, you will get some version of Jesus. Fair enough. The Sermon on the Mount is the charter document of Christian ethics, and it is not a manual for efficient conquest. Blessed are the merciful. Love your enemies. Give to him that asketh thee. Do not lay up treasure where moth and rust corrupt, which, if you have ever owned a car in the Northeast, you already knew.

People then staple onto the Sermon a line that is not in the Sermon at all. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says that faith, hope, and love abide, and the greatest of these is love. The bumper sticker printers preferred Paul. He is shorter. The Sermon is three chapters of Matthew and refuses to fit on a coffee mug. So the culture did what cultures do: it took the longest, hardest teaching in the New Testament, boiled it down to be nice, and then promoted niceness to the rank of sacrament.

God’s love, in this popular telling, is compassion. He looks at the human arrangement—the hard work, the learning curve, the cheap pleasures that mortgage the future, the neighbor who never quite got around to the commandments against lying, stealing, and killing—and He is moved. That reading is not crazy. It is incomplete. A Father who only pities you is not a Father. He is a social worker with better lighting.

Emmet Fox, who spent the 1930s packing auditoriums with people who wanted the Bible to do something besides sit there looking holy, insisted that Jesus was not a sentimental dreamer and not a dealer in empty platitudes. Fox called him an unflinching realist, the only kind of realist a genuine mystic can be. The Sermon, for Fox, is not a mood board. It is a description of how consciousness works. The Beatitudes are not participation trophies for the emotionally available. They are states of mind that produce results.

That last word is the one that keeps getting lost in the couch cushions. Results.

The Feel-Good Loop, and the Ordinary Kindness It Crowds Out

Watch the sequence once it has been baptized as Virtue with a capital V.

You observe someone in difficulty. The mind, which is an excellent spotting scope and a terrible philosopher, flags the scene. Emotion arrives. Compassion, if we are being precise, is not yet a policy. It is a sensation. Then comes the extra step our culture trained into us: you notice that you noticed. You feel good that you felt bad. You have acted consistently with the virtue. You did a good thing. The good thing, in this accounting, was the feeling.

Often the sequence stops there. You have achieved the goal. You do not, strictly speaking, need the other person to be less miserable. You need to have been the sort of person who cared. If you make an effort and the effort fails, well, the intention was intact. The universe, which in this theology grades on affect, stamps the paper and files it. You move on to the next scene. Observe. Feel. Congratulate. Repeat.

This is a very efficient way to feel moral while remaining, in the practical sense, a tourist.

None of this is an argument against the ordinary compassionate response. If your neighbor’s basement is full of water and you have a pump, you take the pump over. If a kid falls off a bike, you do not hold a seminar on incentives. You pick the kid up. Casual compassion—the kind that shows up, does the next useful thing, and then goes home without issuing a press release—is one of the better features of the species. It is local. It has a face. It can be embarrassed by failure. It notices whether the basement is still wet.

The trouble starts when compassion is no longer a response and becomes a worldview. When it is primary, pervasive, all-encompassing. When it is not one color in the painting but the light by which every other color is judged. Then the feeling stops being information and starts being the product. Outcomes become optional. Intention becomes the whole harvest.

Fox’s Key: The Bible as a Map of the Interior

Fox’s useful heresy, if you want to call it that, is that the Bible is written in symbol and allegory. Names mean faculties. Geography means states of mind. Water, again and again, is not just wet. Water is the human mind as personality: the emotional nature, the feeling life, the weather system inside the skull.

Egypt, in that same dictionary, is limitation and a lack of faith. You do not need a degree in hieroglyphics to recognize the neighborhood.

Moses means “drawn out of the water.” The baby is set adrift on the river of the emotional nature. If he stays there, he drowns, or he becomes a charming current with no destination. Pharaoh’s daughter finds him. In Fox’s reading we become that daughter when we recognize a spiritual idea—a true thing—and then, because babies do not raise themselves, we have to nurse it. Daily. The idea has to be drawn out of emotion and raised into a life that can walk.

Leave the baby in the river and you get a very moving documentary about rivers. Pull him out and you get the law, the wilderness, and eventually a people who can leave Egypt. That is a less photogenic process. It involves staff meetings.

Fox is not anti-feeling. He is almost suspiciously pro-feeling, provided feeling is not driving the car. In his reading of the fifth commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother” is not only advice about Sunday dinner. Father is the knowing nature. Mother is the feeling nature. Polarity, he says, is the motive power of the universe. Knowledge without feeling does not demonstrate anything; it just sits there being correct and lonely. Feeling without knowledge is a flood. You honor both or your days are not long upon the land, which is a poetic way of saying the project fails.

A morality of compassion-as-everything is, in that symbolism, a household that has fired the father and given the mother the checkbook, the car keys, and the foreign policy. She is a wonderful woman. She should not be left unsupervised with a treasury.

Does the Sermon Know About This?

The Sermon on the Mount is not a treatise on public finance. It is more embarrassing than that. It is about the interior, which is harder to outsource. But it is full of tests that refuse to let a feeling be the last word.

Enter ye in at the strait gate. Strait means narrow, not a psychiatric diagnosis, though the confusion is understandable. Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Fox read the strait gate as a change of consciousness so thorough it actually alters the life. Not a new slogan. Not a better intention. A different operating system. Harmony, health, prosperity, peace of mind—salvation in the plain sense—come only that way. The wide gate is crowded because it asks so little. Feeling the right feeling is wide-gate religion. It admits everybody who can produce a tear on cue.

Then the fruit test, which is the most unsentimental paragraph in the whole mountain lecture. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

This is not a vibe. This is agronomy. A tree is what it produces. A program is what it produces. A government is what it produces. The wool is not evidence. The wool is a costume. Fox liked to put the same idea in street clothes: the test is, does it work?

If you wanted a biblical symbol for refusing to drown in the emotional nature, you would not have to raid the Sermon alone. Matthew, a few chapters later, puts Jesus on the lake in a storm. Water, in Fox’s dictionary and in a good deal of older Christian symbolism, is the feeling life and the world of appearances that tosses you around when you live inside it. Walking on the water is not a magic trick for people who forgot their boat. It is a picture of consciousness that stands above the weather instead of becoming the weather. Peter manages a few steps and then remembers he is supposed to sink, which is the most relatable miracle in the book.

Is walking on water “in” the Sermon? No. Same teacher, same Gospel, same stubborn insistence that the inner state is not a passenger. The Sermon gives you the gate and the fruit. The lake gives you the posture. Together they are a warning against a religion that paddles happily in the river and calls the paddling holiness.

Even the mercy in the Beatitudes, if you let Fox anywhere near it, is not a license to stop thinking. “Blessed are the merciful” is bound up with the old law that what you traffic in, you receive. Mercy as a mental practice, as a refusal to keep a museum of resentments, is not the same thing as writing a blank check to whoever shows up wearing the word Help. One of those makes you less poisonous. The other can make you a mark.

When the Loop Gets a Budget

Politics is where the feel-good loop stops being a private hobby and starts spending other people’s lives.

The compassionate person, once compassion has been installed as the master virtue, can generally support any government program that is said to be helping those in need. Said to be. The phrase is doing a lot of work, like an intern carrying twelve coffees. The support is almost invariant. Outcomes are a footnote. If the program fails, the moral conclusion is not that the program was wrong. The conclusion is that someone was not compassionate enough, which is an argument that can be repeated until the sun burns out and still feel fresh at dinner parties.

You can watch the pattern without needing a conspiracy board and a basement. American inner cities were not invented by a shortage of speeches about poverty. They have been the object of a half-century of programs whose stated motive was help. Some of the help arrived. A great deal of the social wreckage arrived with it: family collapse, schools that cannot teach, streets that train children in the wrong curriculum. The compassionate stance does not require you to look at that ledger. Looking at the ledger feels cold. Cold is the opposite of virtue. Therefore the ledger is rude.

Medicare, which began as a promise to keep old age from becoming a financial cliff, also became a banquet for fraud. Billions do not leak. They are siphoned, billed, coded, and vanished by people who have learned that a system built on pity is slow to suspect a thief. The motive remains photogenic. The plumbing is a crime scene. The compassionate voter is invited to treat those as unrelated facts, like weather in two different towns.

Foreign aid processed through agencies that could not keep their own wallets closed is the same play performed on a bigger stage. Money leaves with a press conference about the poor. A satisfying percentage of it takes a detour through palaces, parties, and the sort of local leadership that could steal a hot stove and then apply for a grant to study burns. USAID became, for a stretch, a case study in how a moral brand can launder an operational mess. To the person whose virtue is the feeling, the theft is tragic but not decisive. The intention was good. The poster was good. What more do you want, a result?

What more do you want is the tell. Yes. A result. That is what the narrow way keeps asking for, like a waiter who will not go away until you actually eat the food you ordered.

Meanwhile the state that was hired, in the older American story, to protect life, liberty, and property discovers a more exciting job: moving as much as possible from those who have to those who have not, on the theory that possession is a bit unseemly. The commandments against stealing and coveting look, from this angle, like they were written by people who lacked vision. The new vision is simple. Need is title. Feeling is title search. Government is the moving company.

Call it a morality of emotionalism and you will not be far off. Facts about outcomes are not refuted. They are unwelcome. They interfere with the second feeling, the one that says you are good. A fact that makes you less proud of your compassion is not a fact. It is an attack.

Wolves, Sheep, and the Problem of Lending Them the Keys

The ravening wolves in the Sermon are not, first of all, a civics lesson. They are a warning about teachers who look holy and eat the flock. Apply it to politics anyway. The text can take it.

A wolf in this register is anyone who has learned that your goodwill is a resource, like timber or oil, and that compassion is the easiest drill bit ever invented. You want to help. He wants a budget, an agency, a moral monopoly, and the right to call you cruel when you ask where the money went. Sheep’s clothing, in a democracy, is a speech about the vulnerable. Inwardly, the appetite is for power, because power is what lets you keep giving the speech.

This does not mean every public program is a wolf. It means you are not released from the fruit test because the costume is soft. If you hand the sword of the state to people whose talent is the extraction of your property in the name of your kindness, you should not be shocked when life, liberty, and property start looking a little thin. The Ten Commandments are not a libertarian pamphlet, but they are not a blank check either. Do not steal is hard to reconcile with a politics that treats productive people as an orchard and the treasury as a picking crew. Do not covet is even ruder. It suggests the ache itself can be a sin, which is not a popular slide at the conference.

Limiting government to the protection of those three stubborn nouns—life, liberty, property—is not a failure of compassion. It is compassion that still has a father in the house. It refuses to set the river on fire and call the glow warmth.

What Balance Looks Like When It Is Not a Slogan

Honor both parents.

The mother is the feeling that rises when a real person is in a real hole. Keep her. She is how you stay human. She is why you bring the casserole, hire the neighbor’s kid, sit in the hospital hallway, and write the check you can actually trace to a result. She is why a decent country does not shrug at preventable misery.

The father is the question that follows the feeling and ruins the mood: Did it work? Who got paid? What did this do to the next generation? What happens if we do it for fifty years? Are we pulling a baby out of the river, or are we throwing more baskets in and congratulating ourselves for the weaving?

Fox said you have to make what you know control what you feel, and then spiritualize both. That is not icy. That is adult. He also said a person who cannot control his feelings is still a child, even at a hundred, which is a sentence that explains a surprising amount of cable news.

Walking on the water, if we are going to keep the picture, is not a ban on swimming. It is a refusal to let the water be the boss. The strait gate is not cruelty. It is the admission that life is a particular destination, not a sentiment, and that the wide road is paved with people who meant well and built housing projects that taught despair as a second language.

You can love the poor and still notice that some forms of help are a slow insult. You can feel the tug in the chest and still decline to nationalize the tug. You can take the Sermon seriously without turning the Beatitudes into an appropriations bill.

The baby in the basket is not saved by your opinion of baskets. He is saved when somebody reaches into the current, lifts him out, and then does the unphotogenic work of raising a mind that can tell a river from a road. That is compassion with a spine. That is mercy that intends to last upon the land.

The rest is a lovely feeling, and we have had quite enough of those to last until the next flood.

Note

Emmet Fox’s symbolic readings drawn primarily from his treatments of the Sermon on the Mount, the Ten Commandments, and related essays: water as the emotional nature; Moses as “drawn out of the water”; Egypt as limitation; father as the knowing nature and mother as the feeling nature; the strait gate as a real change of consciousness; fruit as the test of truth. The line “the greatest of these is love” is 1 Corinthians 13:13, not the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). Walking on the water is Matthew 14, read here in Fox’s elemental vocabulary rather than as a verse inside the Sermon itself.