Spirituality - How am I to judge?

By Fr Thomas Crean

Our Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Judge not, that you be not judged”. How should we understand these words, quoted as they often are both aptly and ineptly? As with many other passages of Scripture, they have several senses, which we are not obliged to choose between. St Hilary of Poitiers, for example, understands them to mean that when God speaks, we are not to judge whether His message seems plausible or implausible, but simply to believe it without hesitation.

More commonly, though, this verse has been understood as forbidding the sin called “rash judgement”. Often ranked under the 8th of the 10 commandments, this sin consists in condemning another even before all the facts are clear. For St Thomas Aquinas, such a judgement, even if remains hidden within our heart, is a form of violence against our neighbour. “From the very fact,” he writes, “that a man thinks ill of another without sufficient cause, he injures him. Hence, unless we have plain tokens of a man’s wickedness, we ought to deem him good, by interpreting for the best whatever is doubtful about him.”

It may well be, acknowledges the angelic doctor, that the person who acts up to this principle will be deceived more often than not, given the prevalence of wrong-doing in the world, but even so, he will suffer no harm. It is not, after all, just any random facts for which our minds were made, or else nosiness would be a virtue, and newspapers the highest form of spiritual reading. Rather, it is the truth about God, and about whatever shares in His necessity, that constitutes the mind’s perfection. Better to err more frequently, Aquinas tells us, by thinking well of wicked men, than to err less often, and think badly of good ones.

A caveat, however, is in order, here. It may be that we have to protect someone, whether ourselves or another, from a person whose behaviour is suspect. In that case, we are not to shut our eyes to warning signs. To quote St Thomas once more: “When we have to apply a remedy to some evil, then it is expedient to take the worst for granted; for if a remedy be effective against a worse evil, much more will it be so against a lesser.” In other words, better safe than sorry. Yet to judge in this manner that a person may be dangerous, he notes, is not to pass sentence against him, even in our heart, but simply to form “a kind of hypothesis”.

St Francis de Sales has a chapter on rash judgement in his timeless and incomparable Introduction to the Devout Life. Whence does it come, he wonders, that this sin is so widespread among mankind? Some people, he notes, have a naturally bitter temperament; and “everything looks yellow to a man that has the jaundice”. Some are moved by pride to belittle their neighbours, while others seek more or less consciously to console themselves for their own defects by searching out those of others. And some people, again, derive a sort of philosophic pleasure from a nice dissection of their neighbour’s faults. Whatever the cause, he tells us, there is but one remedy: “Drink freely of the sacred wine of love”. We might add: if abstinence from food and drink can be a useful practice for the body, abstinence from framing opinions about other people can be no less valuable, or challenging, an ascesis for the soul.

What makes rash judgement a sin, is not so much that our opinion may be false. It is rather that even when correct, it is a kind of usurpation. By this sin, writes Fr Garrigou-Lagrange, “a man arrogates to himself a jurisdiction which is not his to exercise”.

May we never, then, judge that our neighbour has acted badly, or even that he is a bad person? Sometimes, thinks St Thomas, the evidence may be incontrovertible, and then by definition to recognise it will not be rash. Otherwise, how could public sinners be excluded from the sacraments, as the Church says they must? St Francis does not deny this, but immediately adds: “If Love is forced to recognise the fact, she turns aside hastily, and strives to forget what she has seen.” Even where we cannot deny another’s evil, he bids us attribute it to the least blameworthy motive that we can, such as ignorance or infirmity. In this, he is the faithful follower of St Paul, who advises us that charity rejoiceth not in iniquity. Above all, of course, no one may judge another incapable of repentance, or already condemned, after death. “The Catholic Church offers Mass for all the departed,” wrote St Albert the Great, “since she cannot be sure of the final impenitence of anyone.”