Con-solatio, Compassion, and Friendship

Roger Berkowitz

I recently learned about an organization called Con-solatio. The group sends missionaries around the world to the poorest and most forlorn places on the planet. The goal is not to convert people or to educate them or to build them houses. It is simply to console them, to show them compassion, to be their friends. 

I was honored this week to have been chosen by Con-solatio to receive their annual Compassion Award at a ceremony in New York City. It was a beautiful and meaningful evening, made more so by the incredible music of David Krakaeur and Kathleen Tagg. You can watch a bootleg video of my acceptance speech here. But in essence, what I said, is the following:

The deepest roots of the mission of Con-solatio is from the story of Mary, who stands by Jesus on the Cross. The compassion of Mary is not aimed at saving the world, of finding solutions to hunger, or housing, or inflation, or ending suffering.  Mary's compassion is an abiding presence, a standing and feeling along with another who is in pain. 

When I learned about Con-solatio, I thought about the Grand Inquisitor chapter from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In that parable, Jesus comes down to Earth, not as the Messiah, but for a moment—"Out of his infinite mercy." It is the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The day before, 100 Jewish heretics were burned "for the greater glory of God."  The Grand inquisitor says to Jesus: You made man free. That led to chaos. We, the church, have vanquished freedom. With bread and circus and torture and we have made people forget their freedom. And with torture we have tamed man. We have made man docile and happy. The Grand Inquisitor says that it is he, The Church, that truly loves the people, not Jesus. It is the Grand Inquisitor who has pity for the people who suffer; it is he who will make them happy even if it means taking away their freedom and putting them under the sword and the whip. The Grand Inquisitor justifies giving them food, justifies his terror, in exchange for their obedience. And that is a trade the people make willingly. Happily. Against the Grand Inquisitor's justifications for happiness, Jesus remains silent.  There is no argument. Jesus just stands there.

There is, Dostoevsky reminds us, a fundamental compassion that reaches out not to the masses of people, those made obedient and happy, but to each and every individual. Simply by standing there and being with them. It is a compassion for the dignity in each person that is sacrificed by the drive for happiness, to better them, to improve them—the desire to give to the whole of humanity comfort and order and peace. 

Jesus' silence in Dostoevsky’s parable is a reminder that suffering amidst dignity is inherently individual; the individual sufferer will not be dignified if they are sacrificed for the happiness of the whole. Against the idea of means-ends political mentality, what Dostoevsky offers is not a call for social justice, but a call for presence, for compassion, for love. That is why suffering, dignity, and compassion are resistant to expression in political language.

I was reminded of Dostoevsky's account of the pity of the Grand Inquisitor and the compassion of Jesus when I read about Con-solatio's mission, to be present and say "YES" to each and every individual! Like Dostoevsky's Jesus in his abiding silence, Con-solatio sends people out into the world of sufferers to be present alongside those who suffer.  To say “Yes, I want you to be.” 

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt addresses those people who are alone, superfluous, alien, the refugees, the stateless, the concentration camp inmates—the frightening symbols of the fact of difference. People thrown outside the civilized world are in danger of being turned into animals--a mere human, without a profession, without citizenship, without an opinion, without deeds, and thus without a meaning or purpose. 

In the face of such a threat to turn men into barbarians, Arendt holds up St. Augustine's demand of friendship and love: Volu ut sis (I want you to be) without being able to give any reason for such an affirmation. Not I want you to be better. Not I want you to be like me. Just I want you to be. 

I am struck by the way that the people of Con-solatio bring life to Dostoevsky, Arendt, and St. Augustine's insistence that compassion means friendship and affirmation and joy and love without conditions, without an agenda, without a politics. 

What the people of Con-solatio do is unspeakably hard. Not because they themselves must live in poverty and live in simplicity. It is hard because they accept people as they are and not try to make them as they want them to be. And love them as they are. We live in a time when almost everyone thinks that everyone else has to be like them. They think they know the right and true way to live. And they seek to improve other people by making them do what they know is right.  It is hard because they must abandon their self-certainty, their confidence that they know what is right, that they have a solution, that they can improve the lives of those they touch. 

But friendship, as Arendt taught us, is fundamentally about respect for the other in their otherness. In the boundaries of the other person. And the political nature of friendship is that in talking with a friend about what matters, in talking about piety and justice, not saying what it should be, just talking, we make the world more pious and more just. In talking about piety and justice, we come to find there are things we share amidst our differences. Being open to finding the common amidst our differences is one of the hardest things to do today at a time of self-certainty and confidence.