Empathy is human.
I remember Fidel Castro. To the best of my knowledge, his critics are right. Yet what brings him to my mind has little to do with the disapprobation he earned during his 59 years as an enemy of western democracy and scourge to his nation’s people and economy. I remember him because as I watch a Thursday evening newscast in 2004 there is footage of him stumbling from a rostrum where he had given a speech the day before. As I see his knee crash hard into the cement floor, my teeth ache and my mind assigns the pain to my own knee. It hurts to see the 76-year-old despot in such acute agony. In my 2004 mind, Castro is the moral equivalent to Hitler and Stalin, despite his more limited domain. Yet in that moment, my emotional response is empathy. In his fall, I see mine.
We are designed and instructed to see ourselves in others, and them in us. Design: our brains are wired to react personally and viscerally to what we see happening to another. Instruction: the highest expression of the law’s second table is to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our personal experience and history’s record teach us how to callous ourselves to the former and except ourselves from the latter. Seeing pain often enough, we stop seeing it—or more precisely, stop seeing the person experiencing it. Sensing an obligation (rightly or wrongly) to ignore or inflict another’s pain, we convert them to automata or beasts. Every account of war or atrocity testifies so.
Empathy does not speak of the moral condition of the one suffering, but the one empathizing. We know nothing about the moral condition of the man downed on the road to Jericho, only that the lauded Samaritan who helps him has compassion. More emphatically, we know explicitly that the prodigal son deserves no compassion; yet compassion is exactly what his father has for him. “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?” (Ezekiel 18:23).
The kernel of Christianity is that God becomes human and carries our pain—not just emotionally and experientially, which we would think to be enough, but literally. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…” (Isaiah 53:4a).
Empathy is divine.