7. Am I
Really Guilty?
From What Happened to Sin?, by Seán Fagan. S.M.
The Columba Press, 2008.
Conscience, sin, guilt ‑ these three terms are inevitably linked in any discussion of morality. The simple catechism presentation of them made their meaning quite clear. Conscience judges when an action is right or wrong, in accordance with God’s law or not. To act against this judgement knowingly and deliberately, is sin. The awareness of having sinned is the voice of conscience telling us we are guilty, and this spills over into the emotions to create the feeling of guilt, though of course guilt itself is simply the other side of moral consciousness. This, in fact, is the experience of the normal person trying to live a good life. But for many people today, the terms are no longer as clear and simple as they used to be.
Brainwashing?
There are those who claim that there would be no experience of sin and guilt were it not for the indoctrination and brainwashing of children by the conventions and taboos of society. It is said that conscience is no more than Freud’s super‑ego, with its litany of do’s and don’ts to tyrannise over us and make us feel guilty. It is simply the finger‑wagging parent, no longer supervising potty training, but now internalised to hound us even in our secret thoughts and hidden desires. The all‑seeing eye of an avenging God is simply the religious extension of this.
Psychiatrists can tell of the high percentage of their patients who are crippled by a burden of neurotic guilt that has little to do with real sin and moral conscience. On the other hand, so much is now known of the limitations of human freedom that come from our physical make‑up, psychological blocks, subtle social pressures and even the material environment in which we live, that people ask if we are really free in any meaningful sense of the word. If we are not free, we cannot be held responsible, so there is little room for sin or guilt. If sin is to be made meaningful in today’s world, some of the confusion must be removed from the related areas of conscience, guilt, freedom and responsibility.
Real guilt and feelings
The word ‘guilt’ is used in a variety of senses. In general, it means the state of having committed a specified or implied offence. A distinction is sometimes made between subjective and objective guilt, depending on whether the person concerned subjectively feels guilty, or it is imputed to him by others. If a law has been broken, we speak of legal guilt, admitted or proved. When the wrongdoing is considered a moral evil or sin, we speak of moral guilt. But in the strict sense moral guilt can never be merely objective, or imputed by others, since the moral meaning and evaluation of a particular action necessarily involves the acting person’s intention and freedom. Society can say that murder, adultery, lying, etc. are wrong, and condemn them as such, but it cannot point to an individual and say that he or she is in sin. Only God, or the individual, can make this judgement. Subjective guilt, on the other hand, is the personal awareness of having done wrong, or the belief (possibly mistaken) that one has done wrong. This awareness is not simply a cold, clinical knowledge, but usually involves feelings of uneasiness and remorse. Subjective guilt may be normal, rational, based on the knowledge of real wrongdoing for which one was responsible, or that morbid, neurotic state of emotional disturbance unrelated to any wrongdoing, or out of all proportion to the wrong done.
Another way of looking at the distinction between subjective and objective is to consider the inner element and the social element in guilt. The social element is to be found in legal or juridical guilt, and involves paying compensation or being subject to a penalty for the wrong done. If the moral guilt has been repented and forgiven, for example in confession, the legal guilt remains until compensation or a fine has been paid. The inner element is the psychological state of the person experiencing guilt, and this may be real moral guilt, as explained above, or simply neurotic feelings of guilt.
The distinction between healthy and morbid, normal and abnormal, is clear enough in principle, but can be confusing in practice. One of the reasons for this may be that not many people reach a high degree of moral maturity, and even when they do, they still carry within themselves the infant and adolescent they once were, and can be troubled by ghosts from the past. Guilt feelings thus become a prominent feature of the moral life. Another reason may be a certain imbalance in the Church’s teaching and preaching, relying too much on fear and threat of punishment. This causes anxiety, which is fertile soil for guilt feelings. The emphasis on law and the concern with precise measurement aggravates the tendency to scrupulosity, which is also a great source of exaggerated guilt feelings. Furthermore, the sexual dimension of life is already a difficult area to navigate in, but when it becomes the central concern of morality, as it is for many people, and as it is often preached, it adds its own turbulent and mysterious force to the experience of guilt. All of these can reinforce the notion of a taskmaster God easily vexed and quick to punish, and so we get a spiralling vicious circle of fear and guilt.
Super-ego and conscience
It would be wrong to assume, however, that the morally mature person is above all this, that conscience is simply a matter of intellectual judgement above and apart from the rest of the person. This latter notion is more akin to Freud’s super-ego. The discoverer of psychoanalysis arrived at the concept of the superego by noticing that psychotic patients often had the delusion of being watched. They believed that people were waiting for them to do something forbidden so that they could be punished. From this, Freud formed the idea of a self above the normal self, a super-ego judging the self as an object. In early life this superego is formed by internalising the attitudes and rules of parents, and as time goes on the young person accepts these personally, along with the conventions of society, and gradually the super-ego takes on all the functions of early authority figures: observing, accusing, punishing or rewarding.
There is enough truth in this for some psychiatrists to identify super-ego and conscience. Indeed the childish, immature conscience of many people has all the characteristics of Freud’s super-ego, but the notion of conscience outlined in the previous chapter is different. The super-ego contains unconscious as well as conscious elements, but though mature conscience may feel the influence of unconscious factors, it is not determined by them. It makes its judgement in the light of consciously recognised and rationally evaluated circumstances. When it judges that wrong has been done, sin committed, the person feels guilt and remorse, realises that it needn’t have been so, and accepts responsibility for the sin. People in this situation experience inner alienation, lack of one-ness and general disharmony within themselves. But such people do not punish themselves inordinately or torment themselves with irrational fears. They know they can repent, be forgiven, repair the damage, recover their peace of mind, and continue to grow. As Christians they know that they are still loved by God, that they don’t have to earn that love, but simply respond to it, and that the appropriate response in sin is repentance and the acceptance of God’s gift of forgiveness.
Normal and abnormal
The super‑ego is quite normal and natural in the child. Indeed, it is the basis on which conscience will later develop. The mature conscience outgrows it, but many people never fully leave it behind. It begins with the child’s first experience of itself and its relation to its parents. This first experience is of the human being’s most basic need, the need to be loved, to be accepted, to get approval. Side by side with this, there is the fear of rejection. This can cause such terror that it is felt as a threat to life itself. So powerful is this fear that it conditions the child’s learning process. The child quickly learns what behaviour brings approval, acceptance and love, and which actions earn disapproval and cause feelings of rejection. This ‘learning’ extends all the way from toilet training to table manners and the moral principles of right and wrong. The latter are accepted without being fully understood, simply in order to retain the approval and love of the parents. When the child disobeys, it experiences guilt feelings, not because of any appreciation of the wrongness of the action, but because of the fear of rejection.
This conditioning is so successful that the child gradually internalises the rules laid down by parents, so that even when the parents are no longer present, disobedience brings on the feeling of not being loved or loveable, a feeling of badness. This feeling is hard to bear, so the individual resorts to a variety of ways to earn approval, to win back the lost love or at least escape from the bad feeling. We can confess and look for reconciliation, or simply punish ourselves internally with guilt feelings. The guilt is often compounded by feelings of anger, at ourselves for our failure, at others in general, or at authorities for burdening us with the super-ego. Another escape from the pain of guilt is to project onto others the fault or evil we discover in ourselves. Hatred of self quickly leads to hatred of others.
Psychiatrists are familiar with even more extreme forms and manifestations of guilt feelings. But from all of this it does not follow that conscience is simply a matter of conditioning. Neurotic guilt feelings can be traced to a variety of factors. They are more likely to be found in certain types of people, among introverts more than extroverts, and especially in people who experienced an insecure childhood, who lacked a sense of basic trust, whose parents were themselves insecure, rigid, overbearing, or perfectionist. Such people are predisposed to inordinate and often neurotic guilt feelings, and the guilt is further compounded when their experience of religion is one of rigid conformity to rules, and God is pictured in terms of threat and punishment. It can be said that such suffering is the result of conditioning. But not all conditioning is bad.
Healthy conditioning
Education involves a certain amount of conditioning, and the formation of conscience is no exception. The young child learns patterns of behaviour on the basis of reward and punishment. ‘Good’ behaviour brings approval and love; ‘bad’ behaviour brings feelings of badness, guilt, rejection. Children conform on the basis of fear or pleasure. This is the pre-moral level of conscience. But gradually we move beyond this to the stage of conventional role-conformity, where we try to please others and be accepted by them. Here we are considering others, but our motive is still self-centred, in order to win their approval.
A further stage is reached when we act out of respect for authority. At this stage moral obligation is equated with duty to social and religious authorities. Psychologists claim that most people operate at this level of conscience all through life, which explains their preoccupation with law and obedience. A higher level is reached by those who act on the basis of self‑accepted moral principles, people who can be obedient to law and respect authority, but who are more concerned with the values behind the law.
This sequence of stages in the development of conscience is now generally accepted. But it would be a mistake to imagine them as watertight compartments with a sharp transition from one to the next. In fact, the earlier ones are integrated into the later ones, and in a sense provide the underpinning for them. The felt emotional states inculcated in childhood and early adolescence are quite healthy in themselves and prevent us from doing many anti‑social acts. It is because of this kind of healthy psychological conditioning that we are freed from all kinds of irrational impulses. Because we don’t have to battle with them and wonder on each occasion whether they are morally good or bad, we obey them naturally, almost spontaneously, so that we are free to devote our attention to more serious matters. Likewise, our conditioning in the area of conformity to law is a help insofar as we realise that there is simply not enough time in one lifetime to puzzle everything out for ourselves, so we take a lot of answers on the authority of others whom we trust. But in the case of the morally mature person, this conditioning is not uncritically accepted. The conditioning which limits us in some areas of freedom is accepted for the sake of the greater freedom it provides in the more important matters of life. It frees us from irrational impulses, endless discussion and worry, and so frees us for the ordinary business of living.
The whole person
That morally good people do not go around deceiving, assaulting or murdering people, however, is not simply the result of conditioning from without. Up to a point, the conditioning is a help, but the real reason is that such people have grown into a certain pattern of behaviour, and have become a certain kind of people. It is because they have adopted a certain basic attitude of life, that their lives have an overall pattern or orientation because they have accepted certain principles and a set of values like respect for others, for truth, for sincerity, for love of God. When such people consciously and freely act against these values and principles, they experiences guilt, sin. Guilt for such people is the consciousness of having acted against their conscience, and in religious terms, of having sinned. The inconsistency between knowing and doing is felt as a break in their inner harmony. Since it is not just an abstract ‘conscience’ that makes this judgement, but the whole person of mind, will, body and emotions, the consciousness includes feelings of shame, remorse, guilt. Though this feeling may be heightened by echoes from the past, it is still normal and healthy, part of our human nature. It is morbid, unhealthy, irrational only when it is out of all proportion to the wrong done, or is unrelated to any real wrongdoing.
But, of course, few things in life are simply black or white, all or nothing, particularly in human affairs. Few people are at the top of the scale of moral maturity, whatever about the number who may be at the other end. Most people are at various points in between, and even within the same individual there can be varying mixtures of healthy and morbid, mature and childish. But it is important to be aware of the difference between the two, not to confuse neurotic guilt feelings with real moral guilt, or to confuse the super‑ego with moral conscience.
Mature and immature
The super-ego is at work in people who see morality largely in terms of obedience to law or authority, who feel that they constantly need ‘permission’ for things, and cannot act on their own initiative and responsibility. Such people analyse their moral behaviour in isolated acts, with particular reference to the physical component, the quantifiable and easily measurable part. They are also very much concerned with the past, continually worrying about where they stand before God, afraid that God will tax them with some forgotten sin. They are particularly anxious in the area of sexuality, and are frequently plagued by scruples. They often feel the need to be punished for their sins, and they punish themselves even if only with their neurotic guilt feelings. The punishment can often come out in disguised form. For example, a circus performer used to end his nightly act by putting his head into the gaping jaws of a lion. The audience saw it as an act of daring, but he confessed to a friend that it terrified him to do it, but he did it each time as a punishment for a sin of his youth. The burden of guilt, imaginary and yet very real, can have almost cosmic proportions. A particularly sad case was that of the poor lady who was convinced that she was the cause of the Second World War because she concealed a minor sin in her confession prior to confirmation. People whose lives are dominated by the super‑ego are often governed by rigid rules to which they feel bound. They seldom experience a sense of freedom and they show little evidence of moral growth. Such people have moments of elation after confession, but quite easily slip into deep depression.
The super-ego may also be felt by morally mature people, but they are not dominated by it. Mature people recognise its presence, but they have it under control. Such people can respect law and authority, but their lives are governed more by freely chosen values than specific commands. Theirs is a morality of responsibility rather than of permissions. They see God as a loving Father and Mother interested in their growth and happiness, rather than as a hard taskmaster chasing after every last ounce of guilt. They are more concerned about their basic attitudes and the overall pattern of their life than about isolated bits of behaviour, though they are not careless about individual actions. They can accept responsibility for their failures and sins, but they do not torment themselves about them. They can forgive themselves and feel loved and worthwhile, because they know that God forgives them. They believe that God loves them in spite of their sin, loves them for their own sake and not simply because they have earned such love by their good behaviour. In repentance and trust, they can leave the past to God, live fully in the present and look confidently to the future.
Knowing their own limitations and weakness, they are constantly open to new information, new insights, and they want to grow in sensitivity and willingness to do good. They are ready to dialogue with others and be corrected by them. Their life is not tied to a rigid set of laws, but they are flexible, aware that growth is a slow process, that things take time. Though conscious of the danger of mediocrity and complacency, they do not get into a panic over the occasional lapse as long as they are doing their best. They know that God listens to sentences rather than to isolated syllables.
From our discussion of the influence of the super-ego as distinct from mature conscience it would seem to follow that some things considered as sins belong more in the category of moral disease, that many of the evil actions of everyday life, obsessive thoughts, aggressiveness, etc. come more from psychological complexes than from basic moral stance. The mature conscience will not be complacent about or indifferent to occasional lapses, but at the same time it will not react with the panic of the super-ego. Morally mature people have a calm approach to the problems of life, and whatever the storms that trouble the surface of mind or emotion, they can experience in the depth of their conscience the peace that only God can give.
Felt-experience needed
The fact that the super‑ego can wreak havoc in people’s consciousness, that it can cripple them with its burden of neurotic guilt, should make it clear that there can be no instant cure. Merely telling people new facts may produce the illusion of an informed conscience, but it will not develop a healthily formed conscience. The formation of conscience is a lifelong process involving the whole person, the feelings and emotions and not merely the mind. People operating with a childish, immature conscience, still under the influence of the super‑ego, certainly need knowledge. They need to be told of God’s love and never-ending forgiveness. They need to be shaken free of the rigidity of their views about obedience, law and authority. They could be enlightened about the less than healthy influence of authority figures in their early life, etc. But none of this will do much good, no matter how loudly preached or how often repeated, unless such people also have the experience of feeling worthwhile, of feeling that they are loved for their own sake and not for what they can do or contribute. They need to experience the gospel as liberating Good News, setting them free personally, and not just as another message in words. They need to experience a community of people who really care about them individually as persons, people who can mediate God’s love to them in a way that can be really felt, people who can truly become incarnations of God’s love for them.
Are we free?
If super-ego people need so much in order to be freed from the shackles of their neurotic guilt, it might well be asked, how many people in the world are really free? If they are not free, there can be no talk of sin. There is, in fact, a great deal of unfreedom in the world. There are limitations that come from our physical make-up. For example, a connection has been found between the presence of an extra Y-chromosome in men or an extra X-chromosome in women and an exceptionally high incidence of delinquency, schizophrenia and homicidal behaviour. There are internal pressures operating on the psyche, from mental retardation to severe emotional disturbances. There are people so blinded by racial or religious prejudice from their infancy and childhood that they are incapable of recognising the human rights of the people they judge inferior. People who are socially and culturally deprived are less free than their more privileged neighbours. The vast majority of prisoners and mental patients come from the crowded ghettos of our cities, from broken homes and inadequate parents. It would be a mistake, however, to judge that the majority of people in our prisons are sinners. Certainly, they are people paying a penalty for legal guilt, but only God can measure the degree, if any, of their moral guilt. It could be concluded from these facts that people are not really free, that all their actions are in fact predetermined by character, environment, upbringing and a host of physical and psychological factors. But against this, there is the firm conviction from the beginning of human history that we are accountable for our actions, that we are responsible for the choices we make. By nature, we resist any kind of compulsion, and we insist on our right to free action. Our awareness of freedom is also shown in the experience of conscience resisting temptation, going against the tide, saying No to convention and authority.
Taking these two sets of facts together, we conclude that human freedom is not absolute, but relative. Our actions are conditioned by the various forces mentioned above, but they are not forced by them. If an action is performed without any motive whatsoever, it is not deemed a human action, even though performed by a human being. It is the act of a person, but not acting as person. Human action, responsible action, however, is always done for a motive, and the person decides which motives will determine the action. This is the experience of freedom. In the normal person this experience is accompanied by an awareness of responsibility. If one acts for a reason, one can be asked to give a response, explaining the reasons for one’s decision and action, and one can be called to account for the consequences that flow from them. Children arrive at the use of reason when they begin to use the word ‘because’ in a meaningful way, when they begin to give a reason for their behaviour, and when they do this they can be challenged about the reason.
Degrees of freedom
It is clear that among human beings there is a whole scale of different degrees of freedom, from the lowest to the highest. But it would be a mistake to picture the different degrees applying to different people and fail to realise that in each one of us there are large areas of unfreedom. Just as the divisions between saint and sinner, believer and unbeliever are not simply between groups of people, but cut through each one of us, in the same way, the line between free and unfree passes through each person. Each one of us is a mixture of saint and sinner, free and unfree. These pairs of terms are not put together simply for the sake of literary apposition. There is a deep truth hidden in the connection, namely that few human beings are as free as the saint, and that few people are as unfree as the sinner. Sin is not only an abuse of freedom, but is itself a danger to freedom and a limitation of freedom. In what sense is this so?
Love and sin
The mature conscience can understand St Augustine’s words: ‘Love God and do what you will.’ Theologian Bernard Lonergan was echoing this thought when he said that the continual formation of conscience is as simple and as complex as falling in love. If you really love somebody, you do not have to be constantly referring to laws and rules written somewhere outside of you to guide you in your behaviour towards your beloved. Of course we can be, and often need to be, helped by the experience of the wider community of family, friends and Church, in order to discover what counts as truly loving behaviour, especially in serious and complex matters. Conscience is always personal, but it cannot be isolated from community, and for Christians it can never be cut off from our love of God. If I really love God with my whole heart, mind, soul and strength, he becomes the centre of my life, gives meaning to it and to the whole of creation. My hope is in him, my future is safe in his hands. He who cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field will see that I do not want. This gives me enormous freedom of mind, will and action. All my powers and energies become available for others, for love, for growth. By committing myself totally to God I seem to lose myself, but this is the Christian paradox. Dying to the sinful, self-centred self, I come alive to a better, fuller, freer Self. Losing my life in service and love, I grow into a greater life of freedom and God’s own love.
But when I sin, the meaning goes out of my life, and I have to search for a meaning of my own. When I put God aside and self occupies the centre, I become aware of my needs, become preoccupied about meeting them, worry about the future and spend all my energy building up security for myself, whether in terms of wealth, power or reputation. In choosing to put self first I narrow the range of my freedom. Since I have decided to serve self, and the self has such voracious needs, I am no longer free for others. Since one of my most basic needs is to be loved, and I have cut myself off from the love which gives me life and meaning, I am no longer free to decide how I am going to spend my life. The decision is already made for me by the need of my sinful nature. There is a never-ending compulsion to pursue my own interests and desires, and so more and more I concentrate on self. The narrowing horizon lessens my options, so in a very real sense my freedom is diminished, and I am really enslaved.
Freedom of the children of God
When I choose God instead of self as the determining factor in my life, I experience true freedom as a gift from the source of all freedom. Paul speaks of ‘the glorious freedom of the children of God’ (Rom 8:21), and pictures the whole of creation being set free from its slavery to decay, groaning in its expectation of fulfilment. ‘But it is not just creation alone which groans; we who have the Spirit as the first of God’s gifts also groan within ourselves, as we wait for God to make us his sons and daughters and to set our whole being free’ (Rom 8:23). We wait to receive the gift, but it has already been given to us in Christ, so we really possess it, though we do not possess it fully, so the battle between grace and sin, freedom and un-freedom is fought out in the course of our lives. We respond to God’s gracious invitation, but it is not a single Yes, an isolated decision. Rather it is a lifelong process of growing in his love and service, a history of generosity and failure, of repentance and repeated conversion.
All that has been said of the mature and immature conscience, the various degrees of freedom and un-freedom, the multiplicity of influences at work in us, and the continuing battle between grace and sin that is the pattern of our lives, should warn us against the false clarity and lust for certainty that constantly tempt us. Life is a messy business. There are many grey areas and there are mysteries we cannot fully understand. But it is in the bits and pieces of everyday life that God comes to us, and he comes to each one of us where we are and as we are. He does not answer all our questions or solve our problems, but he gives us the ultimate meaning of it all and his grace provides us with the power to cope. By committing ourselves to him we gain a new freedom, but that freedom includes the possibility of saying No. We can sin, and we must accept our burden of guilt.
Guilt is real
Psychiatrists have much to tell us of neurotic guilt, so much in fact that there is a popular tendency to think that guilt itself is not a reality, but something purely subjective and imaginary. When we can point to authoritarian parents and the rigid conventions of society in the building up of the super-ego, there is a temptation to think that our guilt feelings are nothing but an over‑active super-ego. A psychoanalyst, after hours of interviews, may dig up mountains of psychic garbage to probe the roots of the problem. As we have seen above, there is much we can learn from a study of the super-ego and the immature conscience. But it would be a pity if, whatever about the flaws in our early training and the psychic and social influences at work on our subconscious, we overlooked the definite and obvious possibility that we feel guilty because we are guilty. If our guilt feelings are a symptom of a personality disorder we may get help from a counsellor or psychiatrist. There is no need for repentance. But if our guilt is real sin, no amount of counselling or psychiatry is of any help. What is needed in this case is repentance, conversion, atonement. The remedy is simple and easily available. God has given us the means to cope with sin. His forgiveness is there for the asking.
Sin is real
But even in the case of guilt as symptom of illness, there may be need for repentance and atonement. When the gospels quote Jesus associating illness and sin, perhaps they were not simply reflecting the simple, unsophisticated culture of the time. There can be a connection between the two insofar as human personality is all of a piece, and sin can have its effects on physical and mental health. I can nurse feelings of bitterness, resentment, anger or revenge until they come to possess my whole being. They literally take possession of me and dominate my life. Given the psycho-somatic unity of the human person, this experience can spill over and show up in one or other of the well-known psycho-somatic illnesses. People in such a situation may benefit from the insights of a counsellor or psychiatrist, but they will not get to the root of their problem until they are reconciled with their brother or sister. More than one psychiatrist has admitted: ‘I envy priests their power to say: I absolve you from your sins’.
While it is not the business of therapists to take the place of a patient’s conscience and make moral judgements for the individual, they ought to realise that it is good therapy to restore a person’s sense of responsibility, insofar as possible. While it may interest patients to be told that their present suffering and erratic behaviour can be traced to faulty potty training or inadequate identification with the appropriate parent, this information may only aggravate their problem insofar as they then feel that they are no longer responsible for their actions and there is nothing they can do. Such a conviction may totally undermine people’s morale.
One of the deepest needs in human nature, apart from the need to love and be loved, is the need for respect. To tell people, even by implication if not in so many words, that they are not really responsible, may give them momentary relief, but in the long run it is a failure to respect their personhood. It is much better to help them to accept their responsibility to whatever degree is possible, and to support them in their efforts to make amends. When real guilt has been discovered, even under a mountain of super‑ego‑produced fear and anxiety, it should be dealt with rationally when the patient is ready. Repentance and atonement can be real therapy, even though the neurotic guilt may still have to be dealt with by the professional therapist.
Love casts out fear
But some psychiatrists are coming to see that they are very limited in what they can do, that perhaps they would be better employed as researchers, theorists, or resource-people for counsellors. For one thing, they are far too few for the vast numbers of people needing help. Many of those few simply cannot afford the time that each patient would require, so they settle for a quick diagnosis and chemical prescription. They are not in a position to provide the affirming, supportive therapy that, in many cases, must continue for several years. Ordinary people with some skill and training in counselling who are prepared to really love the sufferer can provide more lasting help than the high-powered psychiatrist who is only partly available. What the mentally and emotionally crippled people in our society need most of all is someone who really cares, in a personal and committed way, as Jean Vanier has so brilliantly proved, someone who can really touch them, physically, emotionally, intellectually and even spiritually. This is the great challenge to our Christian community. Christ promised the gift of healing to his Church, so it ought to be a place of healing. Looking at people weighed down by such burdens of anxiety, fear and guilt, we might ask where is the love that Jesus said would be the hallmark of his followers? St. John tells us: ‘There is no fear in love; perfect love drives out all fear. So then, love has not been made perfect in anyone who is afraid, because fear has to do with punishment’ (I Jn 4:18).