A Legitimate Question
Ok, someone asked, or scolded me with the question, “So you think God loved Hitler?” Legitimate question.
Spirit
If we believe in God in the first place (if we do not, discussed below), we believe that this thing called spirit exists, what life is made up of. So in Hitler’s body was the spirit of Hitler.
If we believe in the God of the Bible, we believe that love (agapé) is the essence of all spirit. For God did not create evil spirit. He did, however, create evil as a state of mind that blinds us to the essence of our spirit, but He uses it only when we choose not to work from our essence of agapé. The proof that the essence of Hitler’s spirit was agapé is that he loved his wife and dogs, maybe others. How then could he not feel anything for the millions he had killed if he had any love at all?
Permeations
Unlike our bodies, the nature of our spirit is permeation, in other words, just as light permeates light, everyone’s spirit permeates everyone else’s. The spirit of all the people that Hitler had killed permeated his spirit, but he was unable to experience them on any level because he made himself absolutely more important than them, completely blocked them out of his feelings.
Love works in just a single permeation if that is all we allow. And if that is all we allow, it is still love even though it is blocked in all others permeating us. God permeates and loves all of us by making us more important, the nature of love. How could God love us though and put us on the earth with people like Hitler and other things like deadly weather?
You mean why didn’t God put us on a perfect earth if He loves us? Since most of us do not love people like Hitler in the way discussed here—as a blind enemy of all good conscience (suneidesis)1—and find excuses for not loving many others also, do you think we deserve any better? This seems like the perfect time and place for us to learn how to love the enemies of conscience and God in them, for things could be much worse for all of us.
But never judge suffering as due to one’s need to learn. For many choose to suffer for others hoping to learn this supreme truth. And do not think that those too young or unable to choose to suffer suffer in vain, for when they can choose to learn and do, here or there, they count their early suffering as due to the fact that we do not deserve a perfect earth. And if they choose not to learn, they will contribute to our collective failure to love the enemies of conscience a little more than others.
Think how little love Hitler was able to receive because of his choices. Are we going to block out God’s love for him permeating us because we choose to love only those he had murdered—or any others we choose to love while making ourselves more important than the countless others permeating us? When we block out one person, many, many more are blocked out until much of our own spirit is vacant of love, that is, we are blinded to its presence in our spirit. Righteous anger for what Hitler did and for what many others do presently—works from the love of our spirit.
Now if we do not believe in God, we may still believe in spirit. After all, Life does exist, and it exists with a love beyond reach of the billions of cells in our body and billions of stars over our head. Everything else remains true about denying ourselves love or choosing to receive it. If we receive it, unlike so many during Hitler’s day, we can love those who have so little themselves and resist them with the beauty of love in our righteous anger.
Temporary Corruption
If you recognize a boundary to your ability to experience greater love, felt as anger, fear, hatred or lust, resist acting it out but do not resist it in your spirit. For that would be resisting your own spirit in its wholeness, even though only a part of it is temporarily corrupted. It is still being permeated in its wholeness by a love for everyone, one that emanates within and through us from Name (God or Life depending on our beliefs). Only due to our spirit appearing to be vacant of love beyond this boundary of our awareness, we need someone else to gradually open our eyes to the light in this area of ourselves. Word (Christ or the Meaning of Life depending on our beliefs) opens the eyes of our spirit with gentleness.
Suggested articles:
The Eyes of Democracy (Introduction and Index of Articles)
Suneidesis is pronounced soon-eye-day-sis. After reading the link explaining it, you will see how central it is to this teaching. Using this foreign word regularly in discussions helps us get accustomed to experiencing something new and positive in our awareness. When the word conscience is used, it will refer to the aspect of suneidesis that involves right and wrong, but this aspect cannot be separated from our co-conscientious awareness of all things.
If I understand that my awareness of something as simple as a cup includes co-conscientiousness, I do not allow myself to get blinded by the cup alone but know it as part of all creation at the hands of the Creator or the universe, depending on one’s beliefs. Spiritual maturity does this naturally.
This is a provocative and beautifully challenging piece. I often find myself reaching a similar conclusion from a psychological angle rather than a spiritual one: that any form of criminal or deeply antisocial behavior is an expression of some kind of mental or emotional dysfunction. To me, that doesn’t mean excusing it—but it does open the door to sympathy, even for those who have done monstrous things.
It’s not sympathy that condones, but sympathy that recognizes how far someone must have fallen. How disconnected from others, from empathy, from themselves—to commit such harm. And with that recognition comes a deeper responsibility: to protect others from such danger, while also understanding that hatred and dehumanization only deepen the cycle.
In that sense, I agree: righteous anger can coexist with love. Love doesn’t mean letting evil run free, it means resisting it with clarity, without letting it consume our own spirit in the process.