166. Loving enemies vs. loving friends
166. LOVING ENEMIES VS. LOVING FRIENDS
Failing to love friends is more blameworthy than failing to love enemies; does that mean that loving enemies is more meritorious than loving friends? Or is it less?
Whether it is more meritorious to love an enemy than to love a friend?
These two loves may be compared in two ways: first, on the part of our neighbor whom we love; secondly, on the part of the reason for which we love him.
In the first way, love of one’s friend surpasses love of one’s enemy because a friend is both better and more closely united to us, so that he is a more suitable matter for love, and consequently the act of love that passes over this matter is better, and therefore its opposite is worse, for it is worse to hate a friend than an enemy.
In the second way, however, it is better to love one’s enemy than one’s friend, and this for two reasons. First, because it is possible to love one’s friend for another reason than God, whereas God is the only reason for loving one’s enemy. Secondly, because if we suppose that both are loved for God, our love for God is proved to be all the stronger through carrying a man’s affections to things which are furthest from him, namely to the love of his enemies, even as the power of a furnace is proved to be the stronger according as it throws its heat to more distant objects. . . .
Yet just as the same fire acts with greater force on what is near than on what is distant, so too charity loves with greater fervor those who are united to us than those who are far removed; and in this respect the love of friends, considered in itself, is more ardent and better than the love of one’s enemy (II-II,27,7).
You will have noticed by this time, of course, that St. Thomas almost always solves a dilemma by making a distinction. That is not a quirk of his personality or even of his method, but a reflection of the nature of reality. Reality is complex: it has many dimensions, “there are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your [always-simplistic and abstracted] philosophy” (Hamlet). This is the source of nearly all dilemmas and apparent contradictions, and therefore the key to their resolution.
Assuming that you are a good and moral person, and that you select good people as your friends and bad ones as your enemies, friends are better persons than enemies and therefore to be loved more.
Also, self-love is natural and proper and the starting point of love, and friends are closer to ourselves than enemies, therefore they are to be loved first. This is also proved by the universally admitted truism that hating your good, close friends is more wicked than hating your enemies.
That is so on the one hand; but on the other hand (that typical Greek expression “men . . . de” is as natural to St. Thomas as it was to Aristotle) loving enemies is better in that it is harder, more heroic, and more Godlike. Also, the only possible motive for loving enemies must be the highest one: love of God.
St. Thomas’ analogy of fire being stronger in one way insofar as it reaches out farther from its source (thus only the greatest love can reach out to enemies) yet stronger in another way insofar as it burns most intensely when it is closest to its source (thus we love friends more ardently than enemies) shows how fruitful analogies can be—not in proving points but in illustrating them, showing spiritual truths by means of material images. Indeed, that is the reason God created matter in the first place, according to that great Thomist philosopher John Paul II.
The practical “payoff” for the drive toward sanctity is to choose both of two opposite good things, if possible (in this case loving friends and loving enemies) rather than dismissing one because it has in one respect less good in it than the other. For there is another respect in which it has more good in it. This is almost always the case, and the Devil loves to seduce us into comparing two goods (or two evils) and choosing only one of them because it is better, forgetting that this is so only in one aspect. Reality is like a work of art rather than a mathematical formula: its aspects are gloriously many.