Empathy

[Lilllabettt]

I think I picked this up from somewhere, although I can't remember where. I am suspicious because, I might have picked it up from an "iffy" source, or it might be from my own brain, which gives even greater cause for alarm. :

[i]Einfühlung, Empathy, or "being with" or "feeling one with," is what the human soul longs for: to be known and understood totally, and being known and understood totally, to be loved totally. There are two truths surrounding this need:

1. After the Fall, Human beings can only know and understand each other this way with great difficulty, and thus typically experience a deep sense of aloneness and loneliness.

2. Human beings identify empathy with shared experience. I.E., The human person carries the conviction in their heart that the other is best able to empathize with them if the other has "been through" what they themselves are "going through."

God, wishing to show us the strength of His love, and accommodate this human conviction, became "Emmanuel," God-with-us, so that He might share totally in the human experience.

--Hence forth, Christians may share in a unique empathetic communion with one another, because they are "one in Christ." On earth this communion is imperfect, in Heaven it will be perfect.

--Only in Jesus may we find empathy that carries us even to the point of death, for He alone can be "with us" there, He alone can share the experience of death with us.

-- God, wishing to enable our ability to empathize with Him, divinizes us, making us like Him, making it possible for us to be "with Him" in the shared experience of the resurrection and the Beatific vision.

Thus God and human creatures are able to empathize with one another, in shared experience, as much as that is possible (although God cannot share the experience of sin, and human creatures cannot experience what it means to be perfectly innocent and yet condemned on the Cross.) Thus united, " being with" one another, the human heart's longing is fulfilled.[/i]

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So, there you have it. I was wondering if anyone's heard of this sort of thing before, and if you have, whence it came, and if any of y'all hear any "heterodox" alarm bells going off. I'm not trained in theology by any stretch of imagination, so I can't pick up on these thing so well. I am extremely suspicious of the word empathy. As far as I know, that is a new-fangled term that has creepy German philosophic origins.

[Justified Saint]

"Empathy" seems to have a very complex philosophical history that I certainly couldn't untangle. Edith Stein, the future nun and martyr, actually wrote a famous essay called "The Problem of Empathy" (or something like that -- suffice it to say I haven't read it).

I see nothing wrong with what is written here, although the prose is rather tasteless: "God, wishing to enable our ability to empathize"...God wishing to...accommodate this human conviction"..."Only in Jesus may we find empathy."

That to me just seems like sloppy writing.

[Lilllabettt]

Thank you very much! The sloppy writing is my fault, I'm afraid. I so rarely know how to properly express myself. It is only through God's help that I am ever lucid at all.