Compassion is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.
by Joseph Stoutzenberger
When I was in graduate school at Loyola University, I took a course on moral theology taught by a professor at the local seminary. He believed that it was important for us to know the traditional manualist approach to Catholic moral teaching that came out of medieval scholasticism and the classical natural-law approach to moral reasoning. From the start, I was uneasy with the approach described in the seminary textbook he had us read. It proposed that morality is a matter of identifying what it means to be human (human nature) and then listing general moral principles that could then be applied to moral questions. Taking human life is objectively wrong, as is stealing what belongs to another. Every sex act must be open to procreation, which the scholastics saw as the primary purpose of sex. (In the late 1960s Pope Paul VI clarified that sexual behavior was to be both procreative and unitive, open to procreation but also an expression of love.) Morality is a matter of identifying right and wrong actions based on what are determined to be objective moral principles such as these.
I saw a value to general principles providing guidance for moral decision making, but I also feared that this top-down approach could miss the rich variety that exists among individual persons and the complexity of situations in which they find themselves. There’s a danger when some time-honored abstract principles are used in an absolutist fashion. Catholic healthcare sites often quote the following saying: “Compassion is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” (Sometimes the word “mercy” is substituted for “compassion.”) The saying can be a helpful corrective to abstract principles based on a generalized “human nature.” Compassion balances out those axioms that can be dispassionate without it. Chaotic circumstances call for compassion. During the depression, my father spent his teen years living in a small town surrounded by farmland. I remember asking him if he was afraid at the time of not having enough to feed his young family. He replied, “Not as long as there are farms around.” Whatever he had in mind, he realized that desperate times called for actions that did not always fit into conventional morality. The depression era was a time of chaos when abstract moral principles were important, yes, but also needed to be flexible enough to respond to the circumstances in which people found themselves. If anything, people living today face an even greater array of chaotic circumstances calling for wisdom expressed in general principles as well as compassion manifest as sensitivity to the unique circumstances people find themselves in.
Irish theologian Anne Thurston wrote about her experience studying theology taught by an all-male faculty, most of whom were celibate men. In Because of Her Testimony: The Word in Female Experience, she realized that as a married woman with children she looked at many moral issues differently from the way the unmarried men who taught her did. Remember Lawrence Kohlberg and his stages of moral development? Carol Gilligan, who worked with Kohlberg, realized that he was studying moral development in boys and not girls. She concluded that in his assessment girls appeared to be generally less morally developed because they often approach moral problems from a different perspective than the way the boys Kohlberg was studying did. “Human nature” only exists in flesh and blood individuals who live in different circumstances and face unique challenges. Given the chaos and complexity that life involves, how might we temper the abstract, generalizing, objective contributions of traditional natural law morality? Through a willingness to enter into the chaos of another, bringing a spirit of compassion to a shared pursuit of goodness and truth.
Joseph Stoutzenberger 