A little intellectual help for loving your enemies—and your friends, and your family, and your coworkers, and your political parties (plural), and your national forebears, etc.—because you should.
From the always worthwhile and ever-Augustinian Gilbert Meilaender, in his fantastic essay on the “paradoxes of virtue”—i.e., life.
We are likely to think—I myself often tend to think—that an air of the tragic permeates this discussion. A great man like Regulus serving a false god. An honorable man like Rommel caught up in the wrong cause. The noblest Roman of them all a garden-variety assassin. A man as honorable as Robert E. Lee putting his skill in service of an evil regime. Ulysses’s brave search to see and know what no human being has ever seen stained by a willingness to leave behind those who love and depend on him. Judas’s necessary participation in God’s redemptive handing over of his Son to those intent on destroying him.
There would be something wrong with us if we were entirely unmoved by such examples, but we should not merely wring our hands and bewail our fate. We pay a price for savoring the tragic too much. And the price we pay is that we lose the sense that we are always “on the way” in life—and that to seek virtue is to embark on a journey that requires more than just the piecemeal acquisition of certain character traits. It requires a transformation of who we are. To put the matter more theologically, we might say that the unity of the virtues is an eschatological possibility—the end of the journey, not a rest stop along the way. And it should be no surprise that when we forget this, our public life becomes increasingly shrill, driven by a desire for purity here and now.