The scapegoat of virtue. When a man does his very best, those who mean well towards him, but are not capable of appreciating him, speedily seek a scapegoat to immolate, thinking it is the scapegoat of sin – but it is the scapegoat of virtue. Nietzsche
The Scapegoat of Virtue
Even a thinker unfamiliar with the Church perceived, by the light of natural reason, a truth the Fathers had long known: that unrecognized goodness stirs a greater unrest in the human heart than open evil. For the wicked man is easily condemned, and we move on; but the one who does good in a manner we cannot match sets before us a choice — either to rise toward him, or to drag him down to our own weakness. And the heart not yet strengthened in humility almost always chooses the latter.
From this is born what we might call, with some latitude, “the scapegoat of virtue”: the one who cannot bear to see a good deed he cannot explain by some hidden and shameful motive needs to find him guilty of something. He needs that goodness to be, in secret, a sin — pride, hypocrisy, self-interest — so that his heart is not forced to confess its own poverty.
The Holy Fathers call this by its true name: envy. And envy, being hateful even to the one who carries it, seeks a moral garment so as not to recognize itself. “I do not condemn him because I am small before him, but because he has done wrong in some way” — and that “wrong” is fabricated, or inflated beyond measure, or torn from its true meaning, only so that the accuser is not compelled to see his own weakness.
Here, however, worldly wisdom stops short: it sees the wound but does not know the cure. The one who becomes the scapegoat of his own virtue is left, in the eyes of this world, with nothing but the injustice he has suffered — no comfort, no way forward. But the Church, having seen this same path already trodden by the Lord Christ Himself, adds what was lacking: do not enter into the judgment of the one who condemns you unjustly, for you will find no justice there — only the mirror of his own weakness. Do not defend yourself with agitation, seeking to turn the mind of one who does not wish to see in the first place. But neither should you stop your good work for fear of a new condemnation, for that would mean letting another, who never understood you, decide in your place what virtue is. Endure, and go forward — not out of stubbornness, but because your good deed has lost none of its worth simply because another’s eyes could not see it.
