Which Face Are You Becoming?

The terrifying connection between Augustine, Hitler, and the mystery of discipleship

The worst is not the negation of the best

Preview post: In February 1934, a Prussian bureaucrat named Werner Willikens told a room of Nazi functionaries how to get ahead. Don’t wait for orders. Don’t ask permission. Work towards the Führer. Read his mind. Anticipate his wishes. Deliver what he wants before he has to say it out loud.

The historian Ian Kershaw built his life’s work on that sentence. Because it explained the Holocaust without requiring a single written order from Hitler. The machine ran on anticipation. On men racing to imagine what the beloved leader would love.

This is not, in the end, an essay about the Third Reich. It is an essay about Augustine. And about a sentence that has scandalized the cautious for 1,600 years: Dilige, et quod vis fac. “Love, and do what you will.”

Full post drops Friday. We’re going to talk about saints, fanatics, and why the worst evil isn’t the opposite of the good. It’s the good, impersonated.

Love, and Do What You Will

The gravest evil does not hate the good. It wears its face.

The devil never invents. He impersonates.

In February 1934, in a cold lecture hall, Prussian agriculture official Werner Willikens let a room of functionaries in on the secret of advancement in the new Germany. Don’t wait for orders, he told them. Don’t ask permission. The man who waits to be told has already lost. It is the duty of every one of you, he said, to work towards the Führer. Read his mind. Anticipate his wishes. Deliver what he wants before he has had to want it out loud.

Ian Kershaw built two volumes and the better part of a scholarly lifetime on that sentence. Its horror, he saw, was that it explained everything without requiring what everyone assumed it required — a tyrant at a desk, signing orders. There were almost no orders. To this day, no written command from Hitler for the Final Solution has ever surfaced. None was needed. The machine did not run on commands. It ran on anticipation. Each underling outbid the next to guess the dream and realize it first, each act of murder a kind of courtship. Kershaw called it cumulative radicalization. Remove the directive, and you did not get restraint. You got men racing to imagine what the beloved leader would love.

The deepest explanation of Nazism was written fifteen centuries before Hitler was born.

Somewhere around 407, in a basilica in the North African port of Hippo, the bishop was preaching his way through the First Letter of John — that strange, looping epistle that says God is love and then refuses to let you out of the room until you have felt the weight of it. Reaching for the shortest possible rule for the Christian life, a precept you could carry in one hand, Augustine gave his people a sentence that has scandalized the cautious ever since: Dilige, et quod vis fac. Love, and do what you will.

It sounds like the end of all law. It sounds like license with a halo on. Whether you hold your peace, he went on, hold it in love; whether you cry out, cry out in love; whether you correct, correct in love; whether you spare, spare in love. Let the root be love, and from that root nothing can grow but the good.

There it is — the whole argument, eleven centuries before Kershaw. Augustine isn’t abolishing the moral law. He’s telling you where it has gone. It has gone inward, down into the root, so far down that it no longer arrives as a manual to be consulted but as a love to be obeyed by being expressed. The Christian does not look up the answer. The Christian, rightly rooted, anticipates it. The Christian works towards the Christ.

The Nazi “works toward the Führer.”

The Christian “works toward the Face.”

This isn’t a metaphor I’m importing from Germany. It’s the native grammar of the New Testament. Jesus left no operations manual. He wrote no constitution, founded no bureau, drafted no flowchart of permitted and forbidden acts.

Jesus left a face, a story, a Spirit, and a kitchen-table command — love one another — and then had the apparent recklessness to ascend and trust it to a fishing crew. Paul doesn’t hand his churches a code. He hands them a mind: we have the mind of Christ. The form of Christian formation isn’t legislation. It’s mimesis — beholding a face until you are changed into it.

You do not obey a face. You come to resemble one.

A law commands.

A face transfigures.

A rule tells you what to do.

A face teaches you what to love.

Everything turns on that word “face.” A face is an icon, and an icon does not signify the way a code does. A code — a law, a program, an ideology — signifies by convention. It points to its meaning across a gap, the way a red light means stop. An icon signifies by likeness, by participation. It works on you by resemblance, changing the beholder into more of itself. You do not obey a face. You come to resemble one.

This is why Christian life cannot be proceduralized. You cannot reduce a face to a flowchart. You can only love it, let the loving remake you, and then — Augustine’s terrifying permission — do what you will, because by then, what you will is what Love wills.

It is the same form.

Here is the terrifying symmetry. Formally speaking, the saint and the Nazi are running the same operating system. Charismatic authority, in Max Weber’s exact sense — authority that lives not in law or tradition but in a person and an image. The deepest human faculty is mimetic before it is rational.

Anticipation rather than command. Devotion rather than compliance. The structure that radicalized a continent into genocide is the structure that turns a coward into a martyr. No blueprint. No brake. No clerk at the gate checking your paperwork against the rule. Just a beholding heart, racing ahead of orders, to give the beloved what the beloved would love.

The corruption of the best is the worst.

Which brings us to the line the medievals carried like a lit match: corruptio optimi pessima. Or “the perversion of the best yields the worst.” It is the aphorism that has kept me in the church.

We say it too easily now, as a shrug — the higher they climb, the harder they fall. But Kershaw and Augustine together prove it’s not a proverb. It’s a law as exact as gravity. The features that make the good maximal are the precise features that make its corruption maximal. Strip away the manual and you get the saint — or the fanatic, and nothing in the form alone will tell you which. The absence of a procedural brake is precisely what frees love to its glory, and precisely what frees its counterfeit to its atrocity.

And here is the correction I would carve over the lintel of this whole subject, because getting it wrong gets people killed:

The worst is not the negation of the best. It is its impersonation.

We picture evil as the photographic negative of the good — Christ here, anti-Christ there, light and its plain darkness. We imagine that if real evil came we would know it by its horns.

The New Testament promises no such luxury. It delivers, flatly, the most frightening sentence in moral theology: Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. The biblical name for the corruption of the best is not anti. It is pseudo. The pseudo-prophet. The pseudo-christ. The counterfeit does not deface the icon. The counterfeit wears it. It keeps the radiance. It keeps the warmth. It keeps the very heat of fidelity that the true thing kindles — and points that heat at a death’s head.

Nazism did not construct an alternative religion. It parasitized Christianity. Every parasite lives because it steals the life of another organism. Counterfeits survive only because originals exist.

Read the liturgies of Nuremberg, the relics and sacred texts, the eschatology of blood, the secular Pentecost of the floodlit night — you are reading a counterfeit church, a stolen sacrament, the whole machinery of transfiguration wrenched off its axis and aimed at an idol. It could only run because it hijacked the form built for beholding Christ.

And the vertigo — the real vertigo — is subjective indistinguishability. The Crusader with the cross on his shoulder. The inquisitor certain he was saving the soul he burned. The white-hooded man who held a Bible in one hand at the foot of a lynching tree. Each of them, in the moment, felt the identical heat the martyr feels. From the inside, fidelity to the true Christ and fidelity to the Christ you have remade in the image of your fear feel like the same warmth.

Same devotion. Same tears. Same certainty. Same fire. Different face.

The whole moral universe hangs on which face you are actually beholding — and no internal feeling, however hot, can adjudicate it for you. The question is never “Will I imitate?” The question is “Whom will I worship until I resemble him?”

So which love is the root?

We need to hear Augustine’s sentence again, and notice it has changed in our hands while we weren’t looking.

“Love, and do what you will.”

It sounds like the most permissive sentence ever preached. Actually, it is the most demanding. Because everything — everything — now rides on a single question the sentence does not and cannot answer for you: which love is the root?

Get the root right, and nothing but good can grow.

Get the root wrong — plant the counterfeit love that wears Christ’s face but serves your tribe, your fear, your hunger to be proven right — and from that root, with the same freedom, the same heat, the same glad anticipation, nothing but the worst will grow. And it will feel, the whole way down, exactly like grace.

This is why the saints never spoke of love without speaking, in the same breath, of discernment. Test the spirits, John writes — the same John, in the same letter where Augustine found his reckless little rule.

Testing is not the opposite of loving. Testing is what keeps loving from being counterfeited. It is the one labor the engine will not do for you, the one place the manual cannot be dispensed with, because it is the manual for telling the true face from the mask that wears its light.

Love, and do what you will.

But first, and forever, and on your knees: be sure whose face it is you love. For eventually we all become what we behold.

That is heaven. That is hell.

Or as Paul put it in his second letter to the church at Corinth: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image...”

Notes for the curious:

Kershaw’s line is from The “Hitler Myth” (1987). Augustine’s sermon is In Epistolam Joannis ad Parthos, Tract VII, 8. Max Weber’s “charismatic authority” is in Economy and Society.