In the wake of his recent role in the movie Sound of Freedom, Jim Caviezel explained in several interviews what he regards as one of the fundamental problems with Christians of the current era. “Modern Christians,” he said “are more afraid of the devil than they are of God…they should be more afraid of God.”
Caviezel’s diagnosis of a significant ailment in the church raises an age-old paradox about fear of the Lord. Consider a juxtaposition between the Proverb “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and the constant refrain of St. John Paul II, “Be not afraid!” Or, consider St. Paul’s injunction to “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling” in contrast to Padre Pio’s famous formula of “Pray, hope, and don’t worry.”
There is no contradiction here between the words of the great saints and those of Scripture. On the contrary, the fearless confidence of the saints spills forth from an overflowing fear of the Lord. How can this be? Very often, we can reconcile ourselves to the idea that we must fear God by remembering that we are commanded to have a filial rather than servile fear: the fear of a son for his father rather than of a slave for his master. This human analogy begins to point us towards a grasp of the paradox. After all, when a child has a healthy fear of his father, he also has every confidence that his father can protect and provide for him.
There is, however, a small danger in this word “filial” as a descriptor of fear of the Lord. There is a danger of too immediately settling on the homely and familiar associations, and of blurring the sharper edges of filial obligation with the warm nostalgia of childhood memory. This easy attitude can cause us to overlook the awful, elemental, and incomprehensible aspects of God’s paternity, and the fact, moreover, that by right, God is master, and it is only through invitation and the infusion of charity that we dare to call ourselves His sons or friends. We can too easily overlook, for instance, that as our absolute and continuous origin, God is more intimate to us, and to our thoughts, than we ourselves can be, and that one day he will judge us on our every thought, word, action, and omission with perfect justice: a judgment that will take place in the presence of countless legions of angelic witnesses ablaze with wroth at our every sin which has offended their maker.
This is a fearful spectacle to be sure, but in a sense only half so fearful as the thought that we too in that moment will see ourselves with perfect clarity and perceive the conduct of our life as either a stumbling and imperfect response of gratitude, or as a stark and resentful ingratitude in the face of an infinite sacrifice of mercy.
Fortunately, the spiritual masters tell us that such fears, though real and proper, are only the fears of spiritual childhood and adolescence. A grown child who has followed his father’s precepts no longer primarily fears punishment, but rather experiences a growing desire to find ways of expressing gratitude. He fears primarily that through carelessness and inattention he will offend his father and thus grow more distant. As St. Thomas Aquinas points out, this kind of filial fear only grows as the virtue of charity grows, while servile fear correspondingly fades (S.T. I.II, Q19, a10).
In other words, as long as our fear of God is imperfect and uncultivated, we will instead fear the devil and all the worldly threats which he brings daily to our attention. This will be a distracting and paralyzing fear, and a seed of mistrust in our relationships and in ourselves. On the other hand, as our fear becomes ever more occupied with the distance between ourselves and our Father, as long as it is accompanied by love, it will mitigate every other fear and bring to the conduct of our life the color of true freedom.