This weekend a new Abraham Lincoln movie was released, and as a fan (and scholar) of Abraham Lincoln’s life and career, and political philosophy, I thought it a worthwhile time to ponder the sorts of issues that result from dealing with life in a fallen world. In his first inaugural, speaking to disaffected Southerners who had seceded from the Union but had not yet started the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln appealed to the better angels of our natures (mixed as they are between good and evil) in the hope that the unmerited hostility of rebel hotheads toward him could be calmed down through reason and moderation. Being a person of genuine goodwill and charity and moderation, which was as rare in his times as it would be in our own times, he nonetheless had to deal with radicals to his left as well as reactionaries who could not accept his victory, both parties of whom considered themselves people of such moral purity that to sully their pretended honor by prudence and moderation was unacceptable, even if all that required as obedience of the laws and a respect for authority (including the authority of God).

What are the better angels of our natures? Since the two greatest obligations of any believer are to love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our being, and to love others as ourselves, the better angels of our natures must be those aspects of our mixed natures that spur us and lead us to do those things. Often we attempt to pit those two demands against each other, to believe that to honor God requires (or licenses) us to hate and disrespect others. For example, we might think that the hostility of others or their clear moral frailties absolve us of the requirement to love them in their fallen and depraved state. We might think that God has ordained such differences between groups of people that it is not proper to love and respect others as our equals in the eyes of God, confusing inequalities in the talents that God has given us or in the offices open to us due to custom and tradition with an inequality of worth and dignity as beings equally created in the image and likeness of God with we ourselves. We might be unable to distinguish between hating the sin, which we are commanded to do with ourselves and everyone else, and hating the sinner, which we are strictly forbidden from doing, whether that is in our own hearts or in the hearts of others directed at us. In order to follow God’s ways and the better angels of our nature, we must avoid these pitfalls.

For the demons of our natures are many and powerful. It is easy to disrespect and feel (and show) contempt for others because of their flaws and failings, being blinded to our own but a harsh judge of others. It is easy to hate our enemies and revile those who curse us, rather than blessing them and wishing for their repentance and restoration to God’s good graces and our own. It is easy to pit aspects of our obligations to God and others against each other, to assume it is in keeping with God’s plans and designs to hate and show contempt and disrespect for others. It is easy to consider that our obligations to others are conditional on them first meeting their obligations to us, rather than seeing our own obligations as absolute, whether others do their share or not. Given that we can all go wrong, and that by nature we are all possessed of some good and some evil that we follow if we simply follow our own native inclinations, we ought to be more humble about ourselves and more merciful and forgiving to others.

Does love and respect for others, even our enemies, require prudence in our dealings with them? To what extent does present wisdom and discernment constrain our behavior to avoid causing deliberate offense in our desire to encourage others gradually to conform themselves to principles of divine justice rather than to offend others and jeopardize any improvement by demanding everything at once? After all, if our native ideals will tend to be a mixture of good and evil, or may fail to reflect the perfection and balance of God’s ways, what license do we have to be dogmatic about our flawed and unbalanced ideologies and worldviews, or to believe that our adherence to them allows us to neglect the legitimate concerns and similarly biased perspectives of others? And if prudence is a necessary virtue in our dealings with others, we are placed in the tricky position of tempering our idealism with a knowledge of what can be achieved under the sun in our corrupt and wicked societies and in ourselves without letting our pragmatism license our evil conduct or that of others in pursuit of our ideals.

It is a considerably tricky matter to follow the better angels of our nature, prompted by the still small voice of God speaking to us and within us. It is tricky because we ourselves often confuse what is good and evil, thinking we are doing good by hating and disrespecting others, or doing good by thumbing our nose at the ways of God in pursuit of our ungodly desires. It is tricky because we are impatient. Learning from the example of Abraham Lincoln is instructive. He pursued the noble aims of unity and freedom through highly indirect means, while remaining humble about his own place before God and charitable and merciful toward his enemies. For this forbearance and the power he took to fulfill his oath of office, he was labeled as a dictator in his own time (and even now) without having become a tyrant and dictator, suffering the blame and condemnation of such wickedness without enjoying the pleasures of the vice of tyranny as so many do in our own time. By showing the sort of prudence and perhaps even corruption that was necessary to rid the United States of the scourge of slavery, we therefore might have our own expectations of government tempered thereby, by remembering the evil that lurks in the hearts of those who consider themselves to be leaders of men. And that lesson will both prevent us from having unrealistic expectations of others, as well as being so disappointed by their frailties.