Fear No One: How a Shift in the Center of Gravity Changes Everything

The command that stops you cold

'Fear no one.' Bishop Robert Barron calls it one of the strangest and most challenging commands Jesus ever issued — ranking with 'Love your enemies' in the sheer difficulty of taking it seriously. The command appears in Matthew 10, where Jesus is commissioning his disciples for mission in a hostile world. He is telling people who will be handed over to councils, flogged in synagogues, and dragged before governors to be afraid of no one. Not reduced anxiety. Not managed fear. No one.

The natural reaction is to ask whether Jesus is simply ignoring reality. He is not. But the path from that command to genuine interior freedom runs through a reorientation so complete that Barron calls it a metanoia — a going-beyond the mind one currently has.

Why fear is not a moral failure

The theologian Paul Tillich offers a starting point worth taking seriously before the spiritual solution is proposed. Barron paraphrases him: 'Finitude in awareness is anxiety.' To be a limited creature who knows it is limited is to live with a permanent undercurrent of unease. The Latin word Barron references — angustiae — means the narrows, the straits. Anxiety is what it feels like to be a ship that has sailed into a passage too tight for it.

Thomas Aquinas understood the passions as morally neutral responses of the sensitive appetite to real or apparent goods and evils. Fear (timor) in the Thomistic account is the passion that moves away from a future evil that appears difficult to resist — a built-in feature of embodied rational life. What matters morally is where fear is anchored and whether reason governs its expression.

The problem Barron identifies is not that people feel fear, but that fear becomes the primary lever of control. 'Find out what people are afraid of and threaten them with that,' he observes, is the reliable method of political coercion across history. Comfort, health, reputation, freedom, life itself — all are bodily goods, and all are, in principle, destroyable by a sufficiently ruthless opponent. The person whose deepest center of gravity is located at that level is manipulable by definition.

The metanoia: moving the center

Barron's prescription is not a psychological technique. It is a change of ontological address. He describes it as a transition from 'a preoccupation with the body to a preoccupation with the soul' — where the soul is, in his phrase, 'that dimension of you that connects you to God, that eternal dimension of you.'

Teresa of Avila's architecture of the Interior Castle maps the same movement spatially: from the dangerous, superficial outer rooms of the self toward the innermost chamber where the soul lives in union with God. The surface of a person is exposed to every threat the world can produce. The center, anchored in God, is not.

This is not escapism. Thomas More lost his money, his home, his freedom, and finally his life — one by one, at the order of Henry VIII. Barron presents More not as someone who stopped caring about those losses but as someone who had located his identity at a depth those losses could not reach. Standing on the scaffold, More said: 'I die the king's good servant, but God's first.' That sentence is only coherent from the interior castle.

Martin Luther King offers a second witness. The night before his assassination in Memphis, King said: 'I've been to the mountaintop. I'm not fearing any man.' Barron reads this as something more than rhetorical courage. King was being threatened at the most literal level, and his statement was not bravado but testimony. Gandhi articulates the same logic: 'They may torture my body. They may break my bones. They may even kill me. Then they will have my dead body but not my obedience.'

What tyrants cannot touch

Jesus' own framing in Matthew 10 is precise: 'Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.' Barron notes that no tyrant in history has ever killed a soul. Every instrument of coercion — imprisonment, torture, execution — operates exclusively on the body. If the worst a ruthless person can do is kill the body, and the soul's life is preserved in God, then the threatened person's ultimate good is not under threat. The lever has no purchase.

Bonhoeffer captures the paradox from within his own biography. Trained as a theologian, active in the resistance against National Socialism, and executed at Flossenbürg weeks before the war's end, he wrote from inside the very machinery of coercion that Jesus' disciples were warned about. The follower of Christ, he observed, is 'always utterly alone, always the individual, who in the last resort can only decide and act for himself.' [^3] That aloneness, which can appear as vulnerability, is also a kind of inviolability. No external authority can reach the place where the person stands before God.

Fear of the Lord as freedom's engine

Barron's closing movement reframes the Gift of the Holy Spirit called fear of the Lord. He explains it as being 'more afraid of not doing God's will than anything in the world.' It is not terror before an arbitrary divine power. It is the proper ordering of the appetite for the good.

Aquinas treats timor Dei in the Summa Theologiae as a gift of the Holy Spirit that perfects the virtue of hope by rightly ordering the will toward God. It is the structural inversion of worldly fear: instead of the body's vulnerability driving behavior, the soul's orientation toward God does. The person who has fear of the Lord is, paradoxically, free from the fear that keeps everyone else trapped.

John Paul II's opening words at the start of his pontificate — 'Be not afraid' — carried this logic in lived form. He had grown up under Nazi occupation and spent his priesthood under communist repression. His 'Be not afraid' was not naive. It was the statement of someone who had located his center where no regime could reach it. [^2] As Barron's final sentence puts it: 'You make that transition, everybody, your whole life changes.'

References

[^2]: Brandenburg, D. Leader Like No Other. 'Beatitude not only is possible under pressure...it is required.'

[^3]: Bonhoeffer, D. The Cost of Discipleship. 'always utterly alone, always the individual, who in the last resort can only decide and act for himself.'