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A disturbing effect may also issue, thirdly, from responses which in themselves are not only justifiable but even necessary, and also retain their legitimacy if confronted with Revelation and Redemption, but which need correction or modification, for they contain a kind of sting and are, until that sting be removed, apt to upset our inward peace. Distrust, indignation, and sorrow, as well as the consideration of fighting for a good cause, enter into this category.

Inner peace may be overthrown by reprehensible attitudes such as jealousy

Let us take these three groups of peace-destroying factors in turn.

First, those emotional reactions which are open to moral criticism. The most important case, here, is that of jealousy. We do not mean jealousy in that broader sense of the term in which it is not deserving of reproach at all—the pain one necessarily feels when a beloved person ceases to reciprocate one’s love; a pain that is likely to be increased by the fact of that person’s transferring his or her affection to another—but jealousy in the stricter sense.

What we mean is a bitter, irritated, malignant attitude linked to the situation of personal rivalry. In all its manifold forms—whether it refers to a rival’s success or fame, the preference accorded him by a third party, or the fact that a person whose love we covet leans towards him instead of responding to us—jealousy constitutes an egocentric attitude.

The jealous man measures himself with another, begrudging his rival—in rebellion against the dispensation of God—what he would fain have himself. Rivalry as such is what specifies jealousy—the fact that, apart from being displeased with our lack of a certain good, we feel irritated by another’s possessing it.

Jealousy includes, then, both the simple distress over being deprived of the good one desires—or, more exactly, a peevish and sullen kind of reaction to this evil—and a specific interest in having no one else possess that good either: the aspect of competition and rivalry. Thus, in the case of infidelity on the part of a beloved person, our jealousy never fastens upon the unfaithful person alone; it also attacks the successful rival. We seek to humiliate, to depreciate, to confound our rival in some fashion. We view him with unfriendly eyes and delight in any self-exposure into which he may blunder.

Now jealousy, whether groundless or “justified,” always connotes a specific unrest. Aimlessly and endlessly, the jealous one revolves round one theme. He keeps a constant watch over the behavior of the object of his jealousy, prying into his movements with insatiable curiosity; he is astir with irritation, and his life is poisoned by a distinct kind of unrest.

To sum up, jealousy is opposed to peace in a twofold sense. On the one hand, it reveals a poisonous tinge of disharmony, qualitatively inconsistent with peace. On the other, it reveals the typical alteration which we have called a formal opposition to peace: the state of swinging to and fro and of circling round one point, the loss of contact with the universe of objects, and so forth.

Envy differs from jealousy in that it is opposed to peace because of its aspect of poisonous disharmony only; it does not imply the specific marks of a structural disintegration of psychic life. It is the same with hatred, schadenfreude (“malicious joy”), and similar attitudes. Against this must be said, however, that hatred, envy, and malicious pleasure display the note of poisonous disharmony to a much higher degree than does jealousy, as they involve a greater moral fault than jealousy does, and separate us more sharply from God, Only from the specific point of view of actual or psychic derangement of peace does jealousy present a particularly typical case.

Now, jealousy is one of the things that cannot subsist before the face of Jesus. Whenever it raises its head within us, we must take care immediately to disavow and to uproot it. It must be “shattered against Christ,” as it were, dissolved by the glance of His love. Thus will the