The Answer Is Radical Kindness
A meditation on Christian humility, Greek virtue, and why choosing mercy, especially when it costs you, may be the only path to interior peace.
I: Introduction
Recently, I have thought plenty about what it means to be kind, not just polite or nice. Kindness is an ancient tradition that transcends most cultural and religious boundaries. You can display kindness and it can be understood by someone who shares no language or faith to you.
This essay discusses kindness from the perspective of Christian theology and Western philosophy, the idea of kindness in these studies can sometimes be misunderstood as weakness since they often undermine revenge or Earthly justice.
And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. Ephesians 4:32
Christianity regards kindness as a foundational concept of its theology; since the anamartetos God is kind towards the hamartia man, no man has reason to deny a fellow sinner of kindness.
Cyclically, I discover and rediscover the need for kindness throughout different stages of life. The spoiler of this matter is that by being kind, you will likely be taken advantage of or viewed as vulnerable. However, you will not care because the necessary polarity of being kind, is that you need to be detached of any outcomes of being kind. Kindness is an act to bring peace.
II: The Concept Of Kindness
The ancient Greeks did not possess a singular term for kindness as we do in modern English, instead it was regarded through the concepts of philantropia (love of humanity), chrestotes (goodness & gentleness) and eunoia (goodwill). Chrestos is the term used for the kindness in many parts of the new testament written in Greek. Gentleness is also discussed by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics through the concept of praotes, which regards kindness as a disposition cultivated through practise rather than spontaneous feeling.
This conceptualisation of kindness is loaned to the Stoic school of thought, which regards kindness in a rationalised fashion, emphasising the placement of the self within divinity and the cosmos.
In Seneca’s essay On Mercy, he discusses how kindness springs from the reason of man rather being placed in weakness. Marcus Aurelius, the founding father of Stoicism, reflects in his Meditations:
“The best way of avenging thyself is to not become like the wrong doer”
Kindness in stoicism can be seen less about the other person, rather more for the preservation of one’s own rational integrity and adherence to nature. Christianity does not completely reject a rationalised view of kindness, however it transcends ‘the self’ and so kindness is required to become an altruistic concept, while adopting the Greek notion of it being a practised disposition.
III: Humility
As I mentioned in the first chapter, when practising kindness without proper understanding of it as a virtue, sometimes there is fear you ‘could give to someone who doesn’t really need it’. Say for example a homeless man outside the train station asks you for money for a hostel but he is surrounded by empty alcohol bottles or he’s smoking cigarettes etc. it can be easy to think I won’t give them money for their own good. We ascend ourselves to a divine appointment, becoming judges against people that are no more transgressors against God than us.
Father Lazarus (California, USA) as a guest on the Voice of Reason podcast, explains that even if the person does use the money to buy drugs, alcohol or whatever vice, that is not our place to judge. He asks us to reflect on how many times God has blessed us with wealth that we waste on things we don’t need, bought alcohol or vices, and yet God blessed us with more. I highly recommend you watch the clip below to understand the spirituality of this father and the humility that should embody us as Christians.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The teachings of Egypt’s early desert fathers demonstrate that kindness is inseparable from humility, that we must practise kindness as a personal communion with God. St Athanasius of Alexandria famously said
“God became man, so that man can become God.”
This quote is not to be misunderstood as heresy but God displaying humility to present himself as man, so that we can be transfigured and participate mystically in divine nature through the Holy Spirit, a concept within the Orthodox faith known as Theosis.
Humility in kindness should also be acknowledged as humility to Christ, for he is in all places at all times and in all of humanity, as he is our heavenly father, we are his children. Saint John Chrysostom of Constantinople discusses in his homilies that worship without the kindness and humility in practise is not in servitude of God:
“Do you wish to honour the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk only then to neglect him outside where he suffers cold and nakedness.”
IV: Motivated For Kindness?
Why should we be kind? I think there are several motivations for us to be kind, some of which are intertwined with a religious world view, while others are more grounded in the rationalised stoicism and what being kind can do for the self. The first answer which I already discussed at the end of the last paragraph and won’t extend further is Theosis; to try an emulate a divine life.
However, in a rationalised perspective, can kindness ever be truly altruistic? Say you give a pregnant lady on the street an umbrella as its pouring with rain - you move on with your day and expect to never see her again or have the umbrella returned. Many would say this act as altruistic, your only motivation for that act of kindness was to feel verified that you acted kindly. However is it an altruistic act if it is done to feel the gratification of act ‘rightly’?
During the early summers I spent in Egypt with my parents, they would encourage me to approach people in need and give them money, always adding that blessings you receive from these people are the purest. Can that act ever be altruistic or is it the same as buying a ticket to heaven? How can you determine what is done as an act of ego or what is done out of the gentleness and love of humanity that the Greeks discussed? I have asked many questions regarding the nature of altruism here that I do not know the answer to nor have I seen anyone give answer to satisfactorily (partially as a result of my illiteracy in advanced philosophical text).
Lastly, I want to discuss a form of kindness divorced from the religious strain I have avidly mentioned so far; this is a kindness that is not selfish so to say but it is rooted in the self. This is the kindness based around what Seneca, Aurelius and the other Stoics wrote on, kindness that is for your own good.
For one reason or another over the last few of months, I developed resentment and envy towards several friends, family or ex-relationships. In many cases, I firmly believe I was deeply wronged and humiliated, which caused me to become bitter and rageful. Increasingly my life was occupied by anger, my thoughts, and disrupting my sleep.
This cycle of boiling rage continued to corrupt my life until I decided to pray about it one Sunday evening. As I went to sleep that night, I knew that the time for forgiveness had arrived, to detach myself from the (fictional and actual) history of what was there. My peace could only come from this act of kindness, it was a selfish kindness since I was ultimately the only benefactor. The morning after I woke up blanketed in a comforting silence of thoughtlessness, in the absence of rage’s heat and looking towards the future rather than the past.
Anyways, the purpose of my exhaustive rant is to explain that often kindness is required to free ourselves from the torment of anger, anxiety or fear. I’ve referred to it several times now as a selfish kindness but perhaps ‘self kindness’ is more akin to what I mean.
Perhaps next time you feel wronged by a friend who fell short of your expectations, try the road of kindness, it can often be much more freeing then avenging yourself or obsessing over your circumstances.