Mercy presupposes misery in its object

Mercy obviously connotes love; it means, however, not love pure and simple, but one particular variety of love. We may best grasp the specific quality of merciful love by considering that mercy presupposes in its object some misery, some wretchedness. This is by no means generally true of love. The love uniting the Persons of the Holy Trinity does not possess the quality of mercy at all; nor does, except accidentally, conjugal love or the love of friendship.

Mercy, then, responds to misery in the one received or succored in love; moreover, it implies an attention to which its beneficiary has no claim proper—in other words, a gesture of condescension. It might be surmised, therefore, that mercy is the same thing as compassion; but that would be a grossly erroneous conclusion.

There is, in fact, a fivefold difference between compassion and mercy.

Mercy responds to our metaphysical situation; compassion responds to particular sufferings

First, compassion always refers to some concrete suffering in a definite person. We pity, in the sense of compassion, a person who is grievously ill or poor, or a prey to some other grave affliction. Mercy, to be sure, equally connotes an attitude of pity; but here our commiseration refers to the misery of the human creature as a whole, although represented or manifested by a given concrete case.

The true object of mercy is not this or that misfortune as such but the general helplessness and frailty of man under the sway of original sin. The particular suffering in question is not here relevant except as an expression of the universal misery inherent in the metaphysical situation of fallen man. The glance of the merciful penetrates into the abysses of man’s situation in this “valley of tears”; against this background it also perceives in peculiar clearness the nobility of man qua a spiritual person created in the likeness of God.

With a vision much deeper than that of the compassionate, the merciful one always sees the creature in the light of its metaphysical situation and considers the special circumstances of its case, too, in conspectu Dei. Hence, there is a certain trait of spiritual gravity and heroism proper to mercy, but not to pity as such.

Compassion suffers with the sufferer; mercy does not

Secondly, genuine compassion implies a state of suffering in the subject himself; con-passio, indeed, means suffering with someone. He who evinces compassion is in some sense implicated in the situation of the one he pities. Mercy, on the other hand, is not itself associated with suffering, or else God—in His infinite beatitude, to which no shade of suffering attaches—could not be merciful. The subject of mercy in no way becomes a sharer in the situation of its object; he (in a very specific sense, to be sure) controls that situation from above.

Compassion is between equals; mercy is toward an inferior

By this we have already hinted at the third point of difference. Compassion presupposes a fundamental situation embracing its subject and object alike: it constitutes a relationship inter pares (“between equals”).