You, who just opened your phone and read a headline, a comment, a post that made you angry — stop for a moment before you press the letters. I am not asking what you think about the subject. I am asking something else, a question centuries old, one the desert fathers carried like a silent weapon against their own fall: who am I? Abba Pimen gave it as the remedy for anyone seeking rest „both here and in the age to come” — say to yourself at every task, who am I, and judge no one — because he knew something we have forgotten: judgment never stays a mere thought. It grows. It begins as an opinion about another, and left unwatched, it quickly becomes insult, then harshness, then open aggression — a staircase we descend step by step without feeling it, because each step seems only slightly lower than the one before.
Look, with open eyes, without the self-flattery haste allows you, at what you do: you comment, you reply, you mock, you fight — politically, ideologically, culturally, even theologically — and you call all of it „opinion,” „truth,” „justice.” But St. James speaks not of the thought that stays closed within you, but of the word that goes out: „the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity… and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell” (James 3:6). Your keyboard is your tongue extended through glass and metal — and every line typed in haste, with the secret satisfaction of a well-placed blow, is a coal thrown onto a forest you cannot see, because the screen hides it from you. Research on moral contagion on social networks (Brady et al.) has shown exactly what Scripture has said for two thousand years: words of moral outrage spread faster and farther than any other words, because every share, every like on your anger, gives you a small payment of recognition — you are seen fighting on the right side. Evagrius named this passion vainglory long before any screen existed: the passion that needs not to be great, only to be watched.
But judgment rarely stops at itself — and this must be named directly, without softening: from an opinion about another to an insult spoken against him is a single step, and from insult to aggression, often, just one more. Your anger, once loosed from the leash of thought, searches for words that strike rather than merely express; and Christ Himself joined the two directly: „whosoever shall say to his brother, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire” (Matt. 5:22). Not the murderous deed, but the word that reduces another to nothing — that alone is enough for condemnation, says the Lord, because from the word that makes the other „nothing” it is only a step further to the deed that treats him as such. The psychology of aggression (Dollard and Miller’s frustration-aggression theory, developed by Berkowitz) shows the same chain: unexpressed frustration seeks a target, and the target found online — a stranger, a name, a photo — costs far less than one found face to face, because it never looks back at you.
And here is where you must stop and not flee the question any longer: what happens to you when you no longer see the face of the one you are judging? Levinas said that the face of the other — his living face before you — is itself a command: „thou shalt not kill.” Not because the face speaks words, but because its mere presence stops you, makes you responsible before you think. Online, that face is erased. What remains is a name, a small photo, an avatar — and what psychology calls the online disinhibition effect (Suler) is nothing other than the disappearance of that silent command. Zimbardo and Le Bon showed the same thing for crowds: the individual dissolved into the mass, with no face of his own in others’ eyes, does what he alone, face to face, would never do. Kierkegaard wrote plainly, a century before the internet: „the crowd is untruth” — because in the crowd no one answers as a person any longer; each hides behind the number of others who think the same.
But there is a deeper stair still to this fall, one that must be named directly: what we today call bullying or online harassment is nothing other than this judgment-turned-insult, repeated, stubbornly aimed at the same soul, until a single stone thrown becomes a hail of stones. Research on bullying (Olweus and those who followed him) shows something Scripture has long known: the one struck is rarely the strongest but the weakest — and the repeated blow does not fall on empty ground, but on an old wound, reopened by every new word. The one you judge in chorus with others, the one a thousand fingers press at once, may carry a pain you cannot see — a loss, an illness, a loneliness already heavy — and your word, added to the thousand others, is no longer a stone but an avalanche. Christ said: „whoso shall offend one of these little ones… it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt. 18:6) — and „these little ones” are not children by age alone, but all the weak, the defenseless, those the world tramples precisely because they cannot defend themselves. St. Paul asks us to bear the infirmities of the weak, not to crush them (Rom. 15:1), and warns plainly: whoever causes a weak brother to stumble by what he says or does sins against Christ Himself (1 Cor. 8:12).
None of this — insult, aggression, harassment — would take root if Pimen’s question stayed alive: who am I? Not who is right in the political dispute, not who errs theologically, not who is to blame ideologically — but who are you, the one pressing the keys right now. St. Dorotheos of Gaza said that self-justification is the root of condemnation — and rarely is it clearer than online, where each side believes itself wholly right and the other wholly wrong, where no one asks any longer who am I to speak this way, only who is the other to deserve what I say to him. Romans 14:4 asks it directly: „Who art thou that judgest another’s servant?” James 4:12 adds: „There is one lawgiver… but who art thou that judgest another?”
And because you belong to a world no longer afraid of the spoken word, remember its true weight: „As fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire; so persecute them with thy tempest” (Ps. 83:14-15) — the image of fire consuming a forest is not foreign to what we call today, cynically, „setting fire to” an online discussion. St. Isaac the Syrian says that silence surpasses all the deeds of this present age — not the cowardly silence of one who flees the truth, but the silence of one who refuses to turn truth into a weapon against a living soul, especially one already carrying a wound you cannot see. And Christ Himself, before Pilate and before Herod, had all the truth of the world on His side and spoke not a word in His own defense (Matt. 27:14; Luke 23:9) — because He knew that not every moment is the moment for a word, even a just one.
The rest Pimen promises, „both here and in the age to come,” does not come from winning the dispute, but from letting it go because of a single question kept alive: who am I, to cast at a living soul, through a screen, a stone I would not have the courage to throw face to face — a stone that may not fall on a whole man, but on one already broken? The next time your finger nears the keys with that bittersweet taste of the winning reply, stop and ask yourself — not what you have to say, but who you are, wanting to say it. Perhaps the most honest answer to that question is the best reason not to press at all.
