It was C. S. Lewis who said “Prayer doesn’t change God it changes us” That concept can be extended to say “what we do, changes who we are, and as we change even those things that are constant appear to have changed around us”
Too stop long enough to reflect on ones actions, to see how one has or has not changed, is an important part of growing in life. I spent Easter in a hotel room by myself and therefore had the opportunity to take the time to reflect my on life, and my actions. We as a group have lived the life of “work hard, play hard”, but to all things there must be a balance. I realized that balance was not in order when a little more than a week ago after one of our company lunches where we all drank too much, Jesse and I walked home and ended up in the middle of the road. Long story cut short he broke his hand; I ended up on the hood of one our employees’ cars, and the rest of our crew ended up in similar states of disarray (one ending up in the ocean, one with grazed knuckles, one with a cut on his face, most being kicked out of one or more bars).
I think we all knew some line had been crossed but the finger was clearly pointed at me when a friend of mine said “but the real question David is why is that your behavior” the ensuing email thread got me thinking and lead me to write the following as a letter to myself.
Open Season on Christianity?
I found the book angles and demons interesting. It’s not that I agreed with it in its entirety its that I agree that there has almost always been a struggle between religion and science (reason and faith), and in my opinion in more recent times between science and art. This is a fracture, a difference in thinking that happened a long time ago (or has always been there in some form) and that likely will never be reconciled.
It is very important however to realize just how old this difference in thinking is and to realize it is not confined to science and Christianity but rather science and religion in all forms and cultures. It is as old as thought and philosophy itself, if you read Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius and any other pre and early post BC writer you will find their observation that even in the days of antiquity there were those who believed in the God’s those who didn’t believe in the God’s. If you have studied the Christian religions or Judaism you will realize that various sects of the Pharisees and other religious leaders of the Jews didn’t believe in an after life etc… If you watch the mini series Rome you will see a great representation of the various beliefs around the pagan God’s.
This debate or difference in thinking goes way beyond merely the “existence” of God to the level of believed or perceived involvement of the hand of God in both individual and societal destiny.
In more modern times Winston Churchill said of Faith and Reason “why can I not have both” and Andrew Jackson when president and a young atheist lawyer joined him for lunch and said to him “Mr President, surely in this time or enlightenment you don’t believe in a hell” to which the President roared back “I most certainly hope so, to send a scoundrel such as yourself.”
Which brings us to today. The recent survey which shows that 90% of American’s surveyed believe in God and yet at the same time it seems almost popular to attack and criticize a belief in God and Christianity specifically. I myself in my email discussion with my friend wrote “I cannot consider myself a Christian if the actions of Christians defines the word, rather than the word the actions.” This echo’s in some strange way (not intentionally) the words of C. S. Lewis that he was the worlds most reluctant of Christians.
In part this is because religion is an easy target. In what way does the limited view of Islam that the West has (radicals whom will commit suicide to kill infidels) benefit humanity? And in a similar vain Christianity is just as easy a target. Easy - because like all religions it has the weakness of having to recruit from the human race. Easy - because we can quickly in some way tie the incompetence and almost barbaric thinking of the current White House Administration to Christianity. Easy – because we can look at the hypocrisy of republicans in general and their claim to almost have exclusivity over “virtues” in politics http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1597666,00.html. Easy – because we can see wrapped in the cloak of religion the pride and greed of man as probably the greatest source of wars and abuse of power mankind has ever observed. Easy - because we even in modern times in this nation see Christianity as the excuse for atrocities (see the documentary from the History Channel http://www.amazon.com/Ku-Klux-Klan-History-Channel/dp/B000AABL4Y on the KKK) and many other acts that held in the light of truth can only be declared as evil.
All of this undeniable and this before I talk about sexual abuse in the Church, or thinking that tries to hold captive education to issues such as “intelligent design” and etc…
But I carefully warn people to look objectively at those that attack religion, not because their words are not true but to make it clear that they do not hold the answers to either the worlds or life problems either. I marveled at books like “weird like us” and “a heart breaking work of staggering genius” not because so clearly pointed out the emptiness of hypocrisy of religion but because the never offered a viable alternative. I smiled when I read Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged because while she did an impressive job of dismantling mystic thinking (along with many other things) she can never reach of reasonable logical conclusion to the philosophy of objectivism and ultimately ends up creating a utopian vision of a place that almost sounds like its paradise…
Don’t be fooled into thinking that Dan Brown (I like his books) and all the media companies producing programming attacking Christianity are not in it for the money in no less a way than the charlatans who sell Christianity. Neither are the scientists, and the humanist any less conceited, proud, dishonest than the “mystics” they seek debunk. Or as Jesse put it the other day “I am sure that preaching the message of Global Warming is a great money maker and source of fame for Al Gore (again not that we don’t support his mission). As I have said before my opinion of “cool” is merely the packaging/expression of this generation’s dissatisfaction and frustration of the immediately previous generations hypocrisy. What they fail to realize is that because they are not really offering a true alternative they are merely creating the new hypocrisy that the next generation will feed off.
I for one confess my difficulty understanding the role of faith in the modern world. I described it to my friend as:
“I tend to view God as some distance force of justice that out of respect I say exists but out of practicality I confess I at times have my doubts. In part I find it easier to hope for his existence when I separate God from religion. For when I think of religion I think of St Augustine’s words about men and the pagan gods ‘its is the men that protect the image not the image the men’ – and I say to myself ‘Mr Augustine the same could be said of the modern mans perception of religion and church’”
But in saying that, and being in the privileged position of having lived in more than one culture and having been exposed to many ways of thinking I find there is great hope in faith. So in the following I will draw from my recent conversations and from C. S. Lewis and Chesterton to paint a picture of faith.
Religion & Hypocrisy:
I think much of which I think is evil about religion comes from its creation of rules, the do’s and don’ts; this is what forms the basis for hypocrisy, it’s the creation of a standard which no one can live to, or should live to... The question is, is that really faith?
“If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philogical importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end itself. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is not part of the Christian faith.” C.S. Lewis
If you look objectively though you will find that once again religion and Christianity specifically does not hold an exclusive of creating an environment which forces hypocrisy. It may be simply their claim to be in the image of God (all that is good and just) that their hypocrisy is the clearest, but essentially any school of thought that seeks to control how men interact with each other is subject to such hypocrisy. The following extract is from Atlas Shrugged and NOT written about the “mystics” as Ayn Rand tries to pigeon hole Christians rather it is written of ivory tower thinkers and government bureaucrats that in her philosophy of objectivity arguably want to have exactly the same level of control over how people live their lives as do the priests of religion.
“Yes,” said Dr. Ferris, “I’m thinking of it too. I’m thinking of a certain tycoon who is in the position to blast us to pieces. Whether we’ll recover the pieces or not, is hard to tell. God knows what is liable to happen at the hysterical time like the present and in a situation as delicate as this. Anything can throw everything off balance. Blow up the whole works. And if there’s anyone who wants to do it, he does. He does and can. He knows the real issue, he knows the things which must not be said – and he is not afraid to say them. How know the one dangerous, fatally dangerous weapon. He is our deadliest adversary.”
“Who?” asked Lawson.
Dr. Ferris hesitated, shrugged and answered, “The guiltless man. I mean that there is no way to disarm any man, except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. If a man has ever stolen a dime, you can impose on him the punishment intended for a bank robber and he will take it. He’ll bear any form of misery, he’ll feel that he deserves no better. If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it – we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself. He won’t feel he’s worth it. He won’t fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He’s the man who’ll beat us.”
Hypocrisy is NOT limited to religion but essentially is woven into all life where people either believe they have an exclusive of truth and/or believe that their life they live is the clearest representation of truth. Where then is the real source of hypocrisy? Is it not anywhere where this is not the admission of our weakness and lack of understanding whether that be held in science, religion, or in political rhetoric?
“The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on: he believes in himself.” And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell.” (The location of an asylum to the west of London) I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.” He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunkard poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has “Hanwell” written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.
We all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house. Men deny hell, but not, as yet, Hanwell.
It is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive. But a moment’s thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else’s disease. A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. And similarly event he wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane.
In short oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of dullness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the center is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.
Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea: reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exultation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is the head that splits.
It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation. We have all heard people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as “Great genius is to madness near allied.” By Dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near allied. Dryden was a great genius himself, and knew better. It would have been hard to find a man more romantic than he, or more sensible. What Dryden said was this, “Great wits are oft to madness near allied”; and that is true. It is the pure promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown. Also people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking. He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical man of the world, a skeptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician. Such men are indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people’s brains is a dangerous trade. It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked why we say, “As mad as a hatter.” A more flippant person might answer that the hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.
And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners.” - Chesterton
Perhaps it is both ironic and somewhat to be expected that one of the greatest stands against hypocrisy came from Martin Luther King Jr and now so many claim him to their banner?
In the 1960’s, Mississippi’s Baptist Record published an article arguing that God meant whites to rule of blacks because ‘a race whose mentality averages on borderline idiocy’ is obviously ‘bereft of any divine blessing’. If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of miscegenation, or mixing races, which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?’ silenced all arguments about race.
You can still read such twisted theology today, on Internet sites sponsored by white supremacists. Far fewer people accept it now, though, and one of the main reasons – for me, especially – is the prophetic role of Martin Luther King Jr. It took a man of his moral force to awaken churches from what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘the sin of triviality’ to confront the broader claims of the gospel.
For him, the short-range view called for one thing above all else: non-violence. King enrolled in seminary the year that Mahatma Gandhi died, and from him, not from Christians in the United States, he gained a vision of how to change a nation. Gandhi, said King, was ‘the first person in history to live the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals’. Somehow Gandhi had found a way to mobilize a movement around Jesus’ lofty principles of hope and love and non-violence.
When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King referred yet again to the principle he had learned from the Sermon on the Mount: “When the years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live, men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization, because these humble children of God were willing to “suffer for righteousness’ sake.”
When King was questioned about marching after sitting silent, King finally spoke up, with what one onlooker described as a ‘grand and quiet and careful and calming eloquence’.
“Let me say that if you are tired of demonstrations, I am tired of demonstrating. I am tired of the threat of death. I want to live. I don’t want to be a martyr. And there are moments when I doubt if I am going to make it through. I am tired of getting hit, tired of being beaten, tired of going to jail. But the important thing is not how tired I am; the important thing is to get rid of these conditions that lead us to march.
Now, gentlemen, you know we don’t have much. We don’t have much money. We don’t really have much education, and we don’t have political power. We have only our bodies and you are asking us to give up the one thing that we have when you say, ‘Don’t March.’
The Mystery & Romance of Life:
The second failing of religion is ironically its almost devaluing of life. I don’t mean the life represented as long as a body has breath, but the enjoyment of every breath.
Why do we love adventure? Why do we love roller coasters? Why do we love experiences? Is it not as Chesterton said, “What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad into the great unknown combined with all the humane security of coming home again?” Is that not what we desire? To have all the feelings of insecurity and unknown combined with a feeling of security?
“This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers? How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honor of being our own town?
To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking. I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance. For the very word “romance” has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is the desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired. If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine the idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.” - Chesterton
Is not then religion to the degree it in any way seeks to devalue life completely miss the point of the mystery and romance of life? But does not faith absolutely enhance it? To the degree that faith gives us that courage to walk into life leaving fear behind walk into the great mystery… And so my friend, whom has a much greater faith than I do wrote to me and said
“The delight of parents seeing a toddler take its first steps; the delight of a car lover admiring the latest Mercedes, its lines and engine; the delight of a CEO when a business hits the goal; the delight of a student when they ace an exam; the delight of a thinker when he solves a problem; the delight of great food and the glass of wine that goes with it. No matter where one sits morally, spiritually, religiously, all experience in one way or another sensations of delight in the art of living; creating, thinking and being. What it is, dare I say it, is our reflection of God in whose image we are made.
We both know that contrary to much traditional belief, it doesn't make sense to simply be saved for some pie in the sky where everything is rosy. As if everything on this earth was a silly waste of time. God is saving the whole universe, redeeming families, businesses, agriculture, everything. And thank God all of our effort is not vanity. This redeeming is happening now, but it is not finished yet and we live in the midst of a groaning world that is not as it should be, and we know it! Its all through the Bible too. And what a mystery it is. But well done, blessed are you because you have met reality in the face, you have not run, nor pretended, nor sheltered yourself from the truth, but you walk in that reality and you are affected by it.
I hold to this incredible mystery that Christ is fully man and fully God at the same time. He has to be or everything would fall apart - we couldn't reach God and God couldn't reach us, if he wasn't fully man he wouldn't truly be suffering on our behalf - if he wasn't truly God he wouldn't have been the perfect sacrifice and it wouldn't have been God reaching us. I think the issue of his sovereignty has a similar vein. I have to believe that I am completely responsible for the choices that I make, the job I do, the person I may choose to marry etc. etc. But at the same time I hold that God is actively and intimately working in the world and in my life. He is very much in all the struggles I face and all the suffering that comes my way. And the only way I know I can get through it is knowing that God who suffered more than any man on earth ever will got through it and holds my hand. We are like children set free in the backyard to work/play, to test boundaries, to live and laugh, to fall and cry, to discover and build, and to perhaps destroy. But I don't think this metaphor is complete without seeing Jesus in the backyard, working, walking, talking. Sometimes directly involved in what we are doing, sometimes indirectly, but always present.” Eloise
Of Pain:
Albert Einstein once articulated the most important question of all: ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ I would be lying too if in all of this I didn’t take into account pain. One of the charges against faith is how can their be faith when so much is wrong in this world?
There are many types of pain I am sure but the three I find most common are:
The pain of emptiness: I have a good many friends whom seem happy until you talk about the universe of death then they feel great sorrow. Sorry because in their life’s vision there is life, then death and that is it. ‘The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful he has no one to thank’, wrote Chesterton.
Yet I can say I have felt the pain of emptiness. I have felt it in not being in a relationship sitting home in silence. There are those who think if I just get this I will feel happy? The girl who thinks “if I just am in a relationship, if just get married, if I just have a baby, if I just have a baby girl” and life slips on by and happiness never arrives. Jesse read a book recently that describes that for some people happiness is a “future expected good” the only problem is it never arrives. Curt (our boss) says “life is what happens while your busy planning for it.”
My friend Eloise describes it as “I too long. I long for a person I have never met, for a music I have never heard, for a place I have never been. The longing is real and it hurts. The parodox is that I hope my longing will increase. Perhaps it is strange, but I think the more I long the more alive I am; the more I mourn the more blessed I am; the more I ache for what should be the more I am filled; the more I long for a home I don't know the more room I have to discover the greatest joy I can have - a joy discovered, regardless of circumstance, simply because in desperation I am looking for joy's source.”
The pain of loss: The other feeling of pain is the feeling of loss. Loss of a loved one, loss of ability, loss of love, loss of what could have been… For me this feeling of loss came at its strongest one time sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong realizing that a great person in my life was laying in a hospital dying and I cared only for the reason it was the first time I felt that “old wise men one mountains were dying and all there was left was all of us trying to figure it all out”. I wrote the following that evening:
There are moments in life when all that was clear is gone
Vanishing like a mountain or a watch tower in the mist
When all that we know is real becomes a myth
Made all the more doubtful by voices around us
Who cry out at the shadows, as if they were real
How quickly they lose their way, their faith
The voice of a deceiver pointing the way to vanity
Enticing with riches and love unearned
Even the strongest have flickers of doubt
Questions arise in our minds, is this now what is real?
When our strength is failing, our friends falling
When we lose what should have been won
It is easy to be strong when hope is high in our hearts
It is easy to believe in justice with the sweet taste of victory
But in the bitter taste of loss or defeat, in the dark valley of death
In the intense loneliness of failure, what then do you believe?
Only one thing is more painful
To turn and see those you love in that same fog of war
To be too far away to reach out and to hold them
Too far away to slay what troubles them
One weak giving up on goodness as a lost cause
Listening to voices filled with worldly wisdom devoid of justice
Another strong but lost in the pain of confusion
Wounds inflicted by those that should protect
It is a quiet voice that whispers to me right now
And a glimpse of the thought behind your eyes
It is courage to keep on a path uncertain
To replace selfless honor with a just accountability of our talent
To leave the voice that cries out to us
Have you left your honor? You are not who you say you are!
As we walk on for one moment we pause and close our eyes
Though no one sees we tighten in our chests
If only they knew that our leaving them
Was not for selfish gratification but to do right
That which they threw at us to destroy us, in their own ignorance
Made us strong that we could in turn save them
The righteous scorn and point to our weakness
The rest to our apparent pride and stupidity
But greatness is found in such ways
True hero’s never chose such a path knowing the end
They only know that to deny the call of destiny
Is to assure the destruction of our own talent
And that price a debt we can never repay
That death too terrible to contemplate
It is fear of justice and love of love
That carries us to our personal destiny
This is the loss I have observed in others as they end a relationship. It is the loss I have observed in a young friend who threw herself on a couch after the Democrats lost the last presidential election as she was convinced that all that was good in this life in her country were lost.
It’s the questioning we have when someone close to us has a big success, a big promotion, enters a new relationship, graduates from college and we still feel stuck in the muck of the life around us. It’s a darkness that can cloud our vision beyond the reality of our true situation.
The pain of apparent powerlessness: I have not yet been able to convince myself that pain is honorable, in most likelihood it is a false honor. But I definitely believe that harshest pain I have observed is when goodness observes injustice and feels powerless to do anything about it. I say it is the most powerful feeling of pain as it goes to the core of how we live our lives. This the reason I have spent so much time studying justice, and its implications on life and faith.
This is the pain felt through the two dialogues of Plato – The Republic and Gorgias. “Justice, alone of the virtues,” says Aristotle, “is thought to be ‘another’s good,’ because it is related to our neighbor.”
Hobbes accepts, that justice is “the constant will to render to each man what is his due.”
Sometimes the statement of the first precept of the natural law is “Seek the good; avoid the evil.” Sometimes it is “Do good to others, injure no one, and render to every man his own.”
“The just,” Aristotle says, “are the lawful and the fair.” What he means by the word “lawful” in this context does not seem to be simply the law-abiding, in the sense of conforming to the actual laws of a particular society. He thinks of law as aiming “at the common advantage… We call those acts just,” he writes, “that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society.” Lawful (or just) actions thus are those which are for the common good or the good of others; unlawful (or unjust) actions, those which do injury to others or despoil the society.
It is in this sense of justice that both Plato and Aristotle lay down the primary criterion for differentiating between good and bad governments. Those, which are lawful and serve the common good are just; those which are lawless and serve the private interests of the rulers are unjust. This meaning of justice applies as readily to all citizens – to all members of a society – as it does to those who have the special duties or occupy the special offices of government.
Whether it is stated in terms of the good of other individuals or in terms of the common good of a community (domestic or political), this understanding of justice seems to consider the actions of a man as they affect the well-being, not of himself, but of others. “Justice, alone of the virtues,” says Aristotle, “is thought to be ‘another’s good,’ because it is related to our neighbor.” Concerned with what is due another, justice involves the element of duty or obligation. “To each one,” Aquinas writes, “is due what is his own,” and “it evidently pertains to justice,” he adds, “that a man give another his due.” That is why “justice alone, of all the virtues, implies the notion of duty.” Doing good to others or not injuring them, when undertaken as a matter of strict justice, goes no further than to discharge the debt which each man owes every other.
Others, like Aquinas, think justice necessary but insufficient precisely because it is a matter of duty and debt. “Peace,” he writes, “is the work of justice indirectly, in so far as justice removes the obstacles to peace; but it is the work of charity directly, since charity, according to its very nature, causes peace; for love is a unitive force.” The bonds of love and friendship unite men where justice merely governs their interaction. What men do for one another out of the generosity of love far exceeds the commands of justice. That is why mercy and charity are called upon to qualify justice or even to set it aside. “Earthly power,” Portia declares in the Merchant of Venice, “doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice.”
In the transactions of commerce, fairness seems to require the exchange of things equivalent in value. For all to share alike is not a just distribution of deserts if all do not deserve alike. “Awards should be ‘according to merit,’” Aristotle writes.
The labor theory of value, the origin of which he attributes to Adam Smith, Marx conceives as solving a problem in justice, which Aristotle stated but did not solve. He refers to the chapter in the book on justice in Aristotle’s Ethics, in which Aristotle discusses money as the medium to facilitate the exchange of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The principle even seems to be implicitly involved in Adam Smith’s distinction between real or natural price and the market price which fluctuates with variations in supply and demand.
The connection, which has become evident between justice and both liberty and equality does not imply that these three basic notions are simply coordinate with one another. On the contrary, equality seems to be the root of justice, at least insofar as it is identified with fairness in exchange or distribution; and justice in turn seems to be the foundation, not the consequence of liberty.
The condemnation of slavery confirms this observation. If slavery were not unjust, the slave would have no right to be free. The injustice of treating a man as a chattel ultimately rests on the equality between him and his master as human beings. His right to the same liberty which his master enjoys stems from that equality. The justice of equal treatment for equals recognizes that right and sets him free. Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery is based on a supposition of natural inequality which is thought to justify the enslavement of some men and the freedom of others. Whenever slavery is justified or a criminal is justly imprisoned, neither the slave nor the criminal is regarded as deprived of any liberty to which he has a right.
It would seem to follow that if a man is justly treated, he has all the liberty which he deserves. From the opposite angle, Mill argues that a man is entitled to all the liberty that he can use justly, that is, use without injuring his fellow man or the common good. More liberty than this would be license. When one man encroaches on the rights of others, or inflicts on them “any loss or damage not justified by his own rights,” he is overstepping the bounds of liberty and is, according to Mill, a fit object “of moral reprobation, and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and punishment.”
It is Mill again who insists that nothing less than universal suffrage provides a just distribution of the political status of citizenship, and that “it is a personal injustice to withhold from anyone, unless for the prevention of greater evils, the ordinary privilege of having his voice reckoned in the disposal of affairs in which he has the same interest as other people.”
The injustice of tyranny lies on a violation of equality.
One meaning of justice remains to be considered. It is related to all the foregoing considerations of economic and political justice, of just constitutions, just laws, and just acts. It is the meaning of justice in which a man is said to be just – to possess a just will, to be just in character, to have the virtue of justice. Here difference in theory reflects the difference between those moralists for whom virtue is the basic conception and whose who, like Kant, emphasize duty or who, like Mill, reduce the propensity for justice to a moral sentiment. But even among those who treat justice as a virtue, there seems to be a profound difference in analysis.
For Aristotle, the virtue of justice, like other moral virtues, is a habit of conduct. It differs from courage and temperance in that it is a habit of action, not of the passions. It is not a rationally moderated tendency of the emotions with regard to things pleasant and painful. It is that settled inclination of the will “in virtue of which the just man is said to be the doer, by choice, of that which is just, and one who will distribute either between himself and another or between two others not so as to give more of what is desirable to himself and less to his neighbor (and conversely with what is harmful), but so as to give what is equal in accordance with proportion.
“Justice,” Socrates declares, is concerned “not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others – he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and own law, and at peace with himself.” His is “one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature.”
This conception of justice bears a certain resemblance to what the Christian theologians mean by “original justice.” The perfect disposition of Adam’s soul in a state of supernatural grace consisted, according to Aquinas, in “his reason being subject to God, the lower powers to reason, and the body to the soul – the first subjection being the cause of both the second and the third, since while reason was subject to God, the lower powers remained subject to reason.” The justice of man’s obedience to God seems to be inseparable from the injustice internal to his own members.
The way in which justice is discussed in the Gorgias may similarly be inseparable from the way it is defined in the Republic, Certainly Callicles will never understand why it is always better to suffer injustice than to do it, unless Socrates succeeds in explaining to him that the man who is wronged suffers injury in body or in external things, while the man who does wrong injures his own soul by destroying what, to Socrates, is its greatest good – that equable temper from which all fitting actions flow.
I have read that pain is what keeps us alive. I have heard it said the evil of leprosy is that you feel no pain, therefore are not aware of when you have injured yourself. Perhaps then the one pain we should feel is that one we feel when we observe injustice around us, as both a reminder to ourselves to live just lives.
It’s the pain only a good person can feel, the same as the pain only a healthy body can feel to become aware of sickness.
It’s the friend of Jesse’s that said “I liked her because I saw a purity in her and it hurt to see her chasing the DJ’s and etc”
It’s the pain a friend of my feels when she talks about the hypocrisy of Republicans, the broken state of education and our lack of respect for the environment.
It’s the pain that Martin Luther King Jr felt when he saw the injustice of the way his people were treated.
It’s this pain that represents at once the sickness and the health of this world we live in. Its sickness because we are aware we don’t want it to be this way, its health because recognizing its sickness is the only healthy first step we can ever take.
When The Times asked a number of writers for essays on the topic ‘What’s wrong with the World?’ Chesterton sent in the reply shortest and most to the point:
Dear Sirs:
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G.K. Chesterton
My friend Eloise put it like this “Well done, we have entered into the groaning of creation. We walk in the reality of the suffering world. In arguably the greatest sermon ever given, on a mountain 2000 odd years ago Jesus said it how it is. (matthew 5) Blessed (in sync, spot on, you got it) are the poor in spirit (the ones that recognize the poverty of their own heart and life, their absolute need for God), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Mourn for what? It seems that the more godly men become the more they weep, the more they see and feel the pain around them. The more they see what life should be and what it isn't. Blessed are we, spot on, we got it when we walk in this world and mourn for the state of it.”
Conclusion:
I don’t go to church (even on Easter), and I still maintain my statement that “if the word Christian is defined by the actions rather than the actions by the word I am most definitely not a Christian.” Conversely, I would say that as I tell the people that work for me having an honest opinion of ourselves is critical and here we, like Chesterton, must see our weaknesses and realize that we need faith. That faith not something that creates a set of laws for us to live by, that faith not inhibiting our life, but instead enabling it – giving us a hope and a future an honest expectation and reality of seeing happiness around us. This happiness is not something for other people only; this is for you and for me…
Therefore, when I was sitting and saying what gets me excited? What gives me hope?
For me the sobering piece of it is how to ensure the right balance of drinking but getting drunk and doing something stupid that could inhibit what we can accomplish in the future. Let fear, pain and justice be those boundaries, which push me to choose wisely to maximize the life I have been given. Let faith be an appreciation to God for giving me life, and the courage to live to the greatest potential I have.
The Easter message for me this is one with agreeing that there is injustice; that things are not the best they can be. Therefore even as someone whom loves reason, science, math, logic and objectivity I am aware enough of my own weaknesses and limitations to realize the admonition of this is not a weakness but a strength. That it would be pride that would prevent me from admitting and it would be sadness as it would form a self imposed wall from where I live today to where I could live.
Our potential for happiness I believes comes from this right balance of thankfulness and pain. To that end, while I have no disrespect for any other vein of thinking the principles of faith that are supposed to make up the word Christianity (vs the behavior and thinking that currently defines it) are principles I subscribe to including the need for someone to save me from myself.
I will always stand where I am a person despises religion, who hates mystics, loves rational thinking, increase and justice. Hence you will find me (like the author of freakonomics) at odd’s with all spectrums of political, moral and religious beliefs. But you will find firmly believing in the romance and mystery of life and determined to live it at its fullest and to encourage my friends to do the same.
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Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
© Copyright 2008, Jesse Keane and David Cook
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