Taking the Gifts in ascending order, fear of the Lord is the first among them. It happens also to be the Gift about which the Scholastics had by far the most to say, probably in part because it seems a bit counterintuitive at first to denote fear as a Gift. Is not fear one of the most unpleasant of life’s experiences? Did not St. Paul promise us that we had not been given a “spirit of fear”?

Speaking in broad and generic terms, fear was traditionally classified as one of the four basic emotions (the other three being hope, joy, and grief or pain.) Fear is an aversion to, or shunning of, something that is evil. Like all the emotions, fear is in itself neither salutary nor pernicious; it can be either one depending on how it is directed. The Gift of fear enables us to feel this aversion towards those things that are appropriately feared, which is to say, towards those things that are genuinely the most evil. Obviously we don’t fear God as an evil thing, but we should fear certain things by virtue of their relationship to God. We can fear God’s punishments, most especially if they involve our own separation from Him, and we can also, out of love, fear to do what would be displeasing to God.

One of the most important principles of fear is that it is always derived from some kind of love. When we love something, we fear to lose it; thus, if the moral life is a matter of ordering our loves appropriately, our fears will likewise need to be ordered. Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, distinguished four varieties of fear: worldly fear, servile fear, initial fear and filial fear. We might begin by distinguishing the first from the other three, because this is essentially the divide between good and bad varieties of fear. Worldly fear, which the Doctors rather unambiguously classify as bad, is a natural corollary to worldly loves. A man who loves money fears circumstances that might reduce him to poverty; a man who loves comfort fears physical pain; a man who loves honor fears humiliation.

Does this signify that it is evil to fear poverty, pain or humiliation? The answer to that would depend on the way in which these things are loved. Christian charity does not demand that we utterly despise all created goods. They can be loved, provided that they are loved as gifts of God, and as ephemeral goods that are necessarily subordinated to Goodness Himself. The key distinction to be made is between fears that drive us away from God, and fears that pull us towards Him. So, a man who insures his house and car with the realization that these things are necessary in order for him to raise up a family of good, God-fearing Catholics, is not displaying worldly fear. His fears for the loss of worldly possessions spring from his desire to serve God and live a virtuous life. On the other hand, if pagans or heretics threatened to burn down the man’s house unless he and his family apostatized from the faith, they would of course be obliged to let the house burn, and if they did submit would be displaying worldly fear. Their decision would show that they valued worldly comfort as an end in itself, over and above the desire to serve God, and this is the essence of worldly fear.

Another interesting distinction to be made concerns earthly punishment. When an earthly authority assigns temporal punishments as a means of correcting sinners, is this not instilling the wrong variety of fear? Working out the details of this could be the subject of a lengthy discussion of its own, but in broad terms I think the answer is: fear certainly may be used wrongly in forming souls, but insofar as the temporal punishment is meted out by the appropriate authority, it can be properly directed towards God. When a parent punishes a child for some offense (say, taking the Lord’s name in vain), the child can be made to understand that he is being punished because his deed was sinful, and by a person who has natural authority over him (which includes, as in all forms of natural authority, a concern for his welfare and his spiritual state.) Thus he can understand the punishment as coming indirectly from God, and this can actually help him to understand which things are most to be shunned (in this case, offending God by speaking disrespectfully of Him.) Something similar might apply to other authorities. Of course, similar methods can also work out badly. When a punishment is disproportionate (for example, if the parent punished minor offenses with punishments so severe as to keep the child in perpetual terror), when poorly explained, or when meted out by the wrong authority, it might instill worldly fear. As in so many cases, the correct allotment of punishments requires prudence.

Servile fear, initial fear and filial fear are all in different ways “good” kinds of fear, which is to say they are ordered towards God. It is instructive, however, to examine the differences between these. Servile fear is a fear of divine punishment for misdeeds. Above all, it is a fear of the torments of Hell. Among the rightly ordered varieties of fear, the servile is the least noble, because it is grounded in self-love and not in charity. Nonetheless, even servile fear is a gift of grace (the Doctors are not in complete agreement whether to include purely servile fear within the Gifts per se) because it forms the soul in such a way as to make charity possible. St. Augustine explains that servile fear “makes a place for” charity by carving out a hollow place that charity can then fill. As with any mold, it is necessary to remove the template before the new substance can be poured in — thus, servile fear will have to be removed as the soul becomes charitable, and obviously the saints in Heaven could not feel this. Nonetheless, servile fear can be an important preparatory step, because it inspires the sinner to abandon his disordered attachments in order to seek a better way.

Filial fear is properly so called because it is the sort of fear that a child might most properly feel towards a parent — a fear of shaming or disappointing the parent, and a fear of separation from a person who is loved. Since filial fear grows out of love of another it should not be surprising that, as a person grows in charity, filial fear will grow and servile fear will diminish. I mentioned above that fear is always associated with love, since a person who loves will always fear to lose what he loves. It should be clear, then, that filial fear is the highest kind of love, since it is the fear of the person who loves God completely. This is the kind of fear that is felt even by the saints in Heaven. Another way to think of the superiority of filial fear is through the greater freedom that it shows. Servile fear is so named precisely because it is characterized by a kind of servility. The petrified person is reduced to a somewhat slavish state where he really isn’t able to exercise his own will to any great extent. Love, on the other hand, is a free and full expression of the person’s own will, and the fear associated with it is also more free.

Initial fear is the fear of a “beginner” in the faith. It is somewhere between servile and filial fear, and it is the kind of fear that has potential to grow into a truly great and holy fear of the Lord. Personally I think it’s a little funny to classify this as just one of the four kinds of fear — it seems like something of a category mistake, since initial fear has to do with a person’s progression along the path to holiness, while the other three are all classified according to their objects. At the same time, I have to appreciate as always the attentiveness of the Doctors to the real state of human souls. It would be an odd person who persevered in the Christian life solely because he feared damnation. Most of us presumably are drawn on by at least some love of God, albeit a very imperfect one in most of our cases. But for most of us these two things — fear of the torments of Hell and a genuine desire to please God and not to be separated from Him — are very mixed. We ourselves can’t usually sort out all of our own motivations. I find the Doctors’ discussion of fear to be reassuring in a way because it clarifies that fear, even when it is of the more self-centered variety, is a normal part of a Christian’s moral development. Even fear of the most slavish variety can leave “spaces” in our souls into which holy charity can be poured.

Fear is the Gift corresponding to the virtue of hope, and to the beatitude of poverty of spirit.