Robert Ingersoll on non-retaliation

A few days ago I came across the interesting-looking site infidels.org, which has online the complete works of the 19th-century American agnostic, Robert Ingersoll. Ingersoll undertakes a morally serious (though perhaps not sufficiently profound) effort to discredit Christianity as unique revelation, or indeed, as far as large parts of both Old and New Testaments are concerned, as any revelation at all. As part of this project, in part I of "The Ingersoll–Black debate", Ingersoll presents an illuminating collection of positions taken on the question of nonretaliation for evil by different religions and philosophers. Here is a summary: . . . . CONTINUE

Burke on vengeance

The Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to quarrel with the Divine Wisdom and Goodness, which has moulded up revenge into the frame and constitution of man. He that has made us what we are has made us at once resentful and reasonable. Instinct tells a man that he ought to revenge an injury; reason tells him that he ought not to be a judge in his own cause. From that moment revenge passes from the private to the public hand; but in being transferred it is far from being extinguished. My Lords, it is transferred as a sacred trust to be exercised for the injured, in measure and proportion, by persons, who feeling as he feels, are in a temper to reason better than he can reason . . . . CONTINUE

Henry Taylor on popularity and humility

Taylor (Statesman, Chapter 7) seems to achieve a synthesis of classical and Christian concepts of humility.

Popularity . . . . is most commonly obtained by an abuse of humility . . . . I say an abuse of humility, because humility well used consists in a constant reference to a high standard and a prostration of pride and self-love before that standard, whether it be merely ideal, or whether we see it embodied in men of virtue and understanding superior to our own: and it does not consist in any undue and untrue self-depreciation, leading a man to postpone himself to what is worse than himself, and thereby to desert his moral station . . . . CONTINUE

Response to "The Proper Response"

Here's a comment I posted in reply to this article by Rebecca Bynum at The New English Review, which asks, "How do we do as Jesus commanded and love our enemies while at the same time preventing our culture and civilization from being destroyed" by those enemies?

There is a rather important difference, it seems to me, between individual non-resistance to evil and collective non-resistance. When a family member is being attacked, do you refuse to fight her attacker on the grounds that she ought to be behaving like a good little Christian and submitting? No, this is her decision, not yours; to turn it into your decision is a moral monstrosity (if it isn't merely cowardice masquerading as high-mindedness). The situation is quite different from when you are personally being attacked, in which case the decision whether to resist is yours. [Similarly,] as members of a political community we have no right to require our fellow-members to submit to aggression. More generally, I will go out on a limb and suggest that the decisions of the community should be based on justice, not charity. Charity is for individuals.

Christianity does not make this very explicit, probably because nobody until recently ever thought that political communities would be crazy enough to attempt to run their affairs on the basis of nonresistance to evil. My impression is that traditionally, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity arrived at ways of keeping nonresistance out of the public sphere; and that the recent tendency to apply it to political questions represents a dangerous innovation. Perhaps it also represents a return to pure, primitive Christianity. But then it has never been demonstrated that such Christianity is a viable basis for a civilization. For one thing, it was based on the idea that the world was about to end.

Forgiveness (4)

Pope John Paul II on forgiveness and capital punishment

From a comment at Carrie Tomko's blog:

"If you want to know where [John Paul II] was coming from on this issue, see his thoughts on mercy in the encyclical Dives in Misericordia.

"The church has always placed capital punishment in the category of 'justice.' JPII remained within that tradition (Evangelium Vitae recognized its legitimacy, even while exhorting its limited use), while offering these thoughts in Dives in Misericordia, which certainly must have colored his understanding of the capital punishment issue:

Christ emphasizes so insistently the need to forgive others that when Peter asked Him how many times he should forgive his neighbor He answered with the symbolic number of "seventy times seven," meaning that he must be able to forgive everyone every time. It is obvious that such a generous requirement of forgiveness does not cancel out the objective requirements of justice. . . . CONTINUE Properly understood, justice constitutes, so to speak, the goal of forgiveness. In no passage of the Gospel message does forgiveness, or mercy as its source, mean indulgence towards evil, towards scandals, towards injury or insult. In any case, reparation for evil and scandal, compensation for injury, and satisfaction for insult are conditions for forgiveness.

Thus the fundamental structure of justice always enters into the sphere of mercy. Mercy, however, has the power to confer on justice a new content, which is expressed most simply and fully in forgiveness. Forgiveness, in fact, shows that, over and above the process of "compensation" and "truce" which is specific to justice, love is necessary, so that man may affirm himself as man. Fulfillment of the conditions of justice is especially indispensable in order that love may reveal its own nature. In analyzing the parable of the prodigal son, we have already called attention to the fact that he who forgives and he who is forgiven encounter one another at an essential point, namely the dignity or essential value of the person, a point which cannot be lost and the affirmation of which, or its rediscovery, is a source of the greatest joy. -DM, 14 (emphasis [commenter's])

"The entire encyclical is full of insight, and definitely worth a read. It puts into perspective the rationale why he would say in Evangeilum Vitae that capital punishment is legit, but that choosing to use it as little as possible would 'better correspond with the dignity of the human person.'"

Remarks: Broadly speaking this seems compatible with William Temple's concept of Christian forgiveness. Forgiveness does not abolish the need for restitution (at least in those cases where restitution is possible). One must ask, however, on what grounds the state can claim the right to forgive someone for an offence committed against some private person, as John Paul II seems to be suggesting it can, judging from these short excerpts. (Also, how does submitting to capital punishment amount to restitution, except in some purely symbolic way?)

See also Forgiveness (III).

William Temple on good deeds

"Only a perfect Christian can follow the purely Christian way of life; and so far as an imperfect Christian—i.e. any Christian who actually exists—forces himself to a line of conduct which his own character does not support, it will have bad effects on both him and his neighbours: . . . CONTINUE on him, because it will be an assertion of self-will and must root him more firmly than ever in his own self as centre of his life, that is in his Original Sin; and on others, because he will appear as a Pharisee and a prig, and will alienate people from the standard by which he is self-righteously guiding this part of his conduct."

    —Christianity and Social Order, SCM Press, 1950

(It seems strange, then, that Temple spends much of the rest of this book advocating a far-reaching welfare state as the Christian mode of social organization. He is apparently oblivious of the fact that this must rest on massive taxation, paying which is not merely a self-imposed "line of conduct which [the taxpayer's] character does not support", but which is actually externally enforced with the threat of jail sentences. At the beginning of the book he strongly opposes involuntary community of property, while seeing freely chosen communism, practiced within voluntary associations, as the Christian ideal. Yet what is a fully-developed welfare state but a coerced, bureaucratically controlled type of community of property? Reading a book such as this, one wonders whether the present Western cultural crisis is not due to modern Christianity as much as to left-wing atheism.

Another possible interpretation of Temple's position is that externally coerced good behaviour, for example giving up most of one's income for the community's benefit, is preferable to internally imposed discipline, because it does not foster "self-will" but rather resigned humility. But is it likely that anyone in the Anglican tradition of personal freedom would hold such a view?)

See also:

• C.S. Lewis on good deeds

Forgiveness (III)

William Temple's idea of forgiveness includes the point that that there is no duty to forgive those who have not repented of their offense. (He also rejects the opinion that forgiveness writes off the debt of the offender. Its purpose is not to write off debts, Temple says, but to restore the offender and the victim to fellowship. In restored fellowship, the offender will be more anxious to make amends than before he was restored.) The belief that forgiveness is owed only to the repentant dervies from the sayings of Jesus, such as the following:

"If thy brother sin, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him."

"If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." (Matt. 18:15–17.)

At first sight, this kind of advice seems inconsistent with the ideal of unlimited forgiveness espoused in, for example, the Catholic Catechism quoted in the preceding post. It seems to me that the two concepts of forgiveness can be reconciled, however, by thinking in terms of the communities within which forgiveness is supposed to apply. . . . CONTINUE

In Matthew 18, forgiveness is clearly being viewed as a means for preserving intimacy within a limited community, the "church" of Jesus's followers, or, possibly, of Jews as a whole, envisioned as following Jesus's interpretation of Judaism: the fate of the unforgiven is not to be hated, but merely to be lumped with all the other unfortunates outside the Christian community (or at least, with non-Jews and those Jews who behave disgracefully, the tax-collectors. One would, incidentally, like to know what word is being translated as "church" here, considering that there was no such thing as a church in the usual sense at the time Jesus said this.) The "church" will maintain its own procedures, described here in embryonic form, for restoring fellowship among its members whenever division arises. Both the offenders and the victims are subject to the church's authority, and if the offenders refuse to acknowledge their fault as judged by the church, they will be cut off from the community. There will be no such thing as a member of the community who is unrepentant for an offense felt as such by another member. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, in the earliest period of the Church, it was assumed that after baptism, Christians would simply not sin any further.

Under such circumstances "unlimited" forgiveness becomes a practical possibility. The problem of forgiving some subhuman thug for casually erasing one's child from the face of the earth, for example, would not arise, because the thug would first have to become human in order to repent. For the sake of one's own soul, one would have to deal with one's hatred in such cases; but it seems to me that the best chance of doing this would be by adopting a detached attitude towards the offender, not by trying to love him and lift him into the ranks of humanity. There might be exceptions to this, but they would be extraordinary, not the basis for a general rule of conduct.

With the growth of the church, there is a risk that the idea of a restricted community of fellowship will be lost sight of, with the result that it may be assumed that forgiveness is commanded on behalf of unrepentant sinners who would never have been admitted into the early Christian community. If whole nations are nominally part of Christendom, the Christian will ordinarily live his entire life within the nominally Christian community, within which forgiveness is (again, nominally) unlimited. He may then well forget about the different moral status of those on the outside, the "Gentiles". (Though in the Middle Ages, I think that it was widely believed that one had no obligation even to keep one's promises to non-Christians, for example.) The fact that the community is only nominally Christian will also tend to make this distinction less important by making the whole idea of Christian forgiveness rather academic in many cases. Both Christianity and the distinction between Christians and non-Christians are diluted as the Church expands and grows old. In the modern Catholic Catechism quoted in the preceding post, we may be seeing a late stage of this dilution: the Catechism still refers to the Catholic community, but it is no longer clear that rules of conduct towards fellow-Catholics should be any different from those towards human beings in general. And why should they be, when there is often little distinction evident between the moral behaviour of Catholics and non-Catholics?

Modern liberalism takes the final step in this spiritual dilution and recognizes only the "community" of all human beings, every other group being seen merely as the private recreation of its members. Liberalism, the last stage in the decay of Christian orthodoxy, has nevertheless preserved the Christian ideal of universal love and forgiveness. But a truly universal love would mean loving evil as well as good; it is not only impossible to achieve, it is destructive to attempt it.

Forgiveness (II)

In the discussion which the previous post linked to, I observed that Archbishop William Temple, an authoritative writer of the Anglican Church in the mid-twentieth-century, held that there is no commandment to forgive those who have not repented of their actions; but that even Anglican priests now seem frequently to believe that forgiveness, even forgiveness of the unrepentant murderer of one's child, is compulsory. I now realise that my comment was somewhat misleading in that there are various schools of thought on this subject within Christianity (and for that matter Anglicanism: Charles Williams, for one, has a much more "liberal" view of forgiveness—liberal, that is, from the point of view of the person seeking forgiveness from another).

Interested in what the official Catholic view on this subject might be, I have been surfing in search of authoritative documents. The Catholic church gives the impression of placing more emphasis on the matter of obtaining forgiveness for oneself, from God (via the Church), than on the question of when or how one should forgive another person. . . . CONTINUE The official Catechism of the Catholic Church does however contain a commentary on the Lord's Prayer which goes to the heart of the matter. Here are the relevant sections (articles 2838–2845) (emphases added):

V. "And Forgive Us Our Trespasses, as We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us"

This petition is astonishing. If it consisted only of the first phrase, "And forgive us our trespasses," it might have been included, implicitly, in the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer, since Christ's sacrifice is "that sins may be forgiven." But, according to the second phrase, our petition will not be heard unless we have first met a strict requirement. Our petition looks to the future, but our response must come first, for the two parts are joined by the single word "as." And forgive us our trespasses . . .

With bold confidence, we began praying to our Father. In begging him that his name be hallowed, we were in fact asking him that we ourselves might be always made more holy. But though we are clothed with the baptismal garment, we do not cease to sin, to turn away from God. Now, in this new petition, we return to him like the prodigal son and, like the tax collector, recognize that we are sinners before him.Our petition begins with a "confession" of our wretchedness and his mercy. Our hope is firm because, in his Son, "we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." We find the efficacious and undoubted sign of his forgiveness in the sacraments of his Church.

Now—and this is daunting—this outpouring of mercy cannot penetrate our hearts as long as we have not forgiven those who have trespassed against us. Love, like the Body of Christ, is indivisible; we cannot love the God we cannot see if we do not love the brother or sister we do see. In refusing to forgive our brothers and sisters, our hearts are closed and their hardness makes them impervious to the Father's merciful love; but in confessing our sins, our hearts are opened to his grace.

This petition is so important that it is the only one to which the Lord returns and which he develops explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount. This crucial requirement of the covenant mystery is impossible for man. But "with God all things are possible."

. . . as we forgive those who trespass against us

This "as" is not unique in Jesus' teaching: "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect"; "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful"; "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another." It is impossible to keep the Lord's commandment by imitating the divine model from outside; there has to be a vital participation, coming from the depths of the heart, in the holiness and the mercy and the love of our God. Only the Spirit by whom we live can make "ours" the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. Then the unity of forgiveness becomes possible and we find ourselves "forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave" us.

Thus the Lord's words on forgiveness, the love that loves to the end, become a living reality. The parable of the merciless servant, which crowns the Lord's teaching on ecclesial communion, ends with these words: "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." It is there, in fact, "in the depths of the heart," that everything is bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession.

Christian prayer extends to the forgiveness of enemies, transfiguring the disciple by configuring him to his Master. Forgiveness is a high-point of Christian prayer; only hearts attuned to God's compassion can receive the gift of prayer. Forgiveness also bears witness that, in our world, love is stronger than sin. The martyrs of yesterday and today bear this witness to Jesus. Forgiveness is the fundamental condition of the reconciliation of the children of God with their Father and of men with one another.

There is no limit or measure to this essentially divine forgiveness, whether one speaks of "sins" as in Luke (11:4), or "debts" as in Matthew (6:12). We are always debtors: "Owe no one anything, except to love one another." The communion of the Holy Trinity is the source and criterion of truth in every relationship. It is lived out in prayer, above all in the Eucharist.

God does not accept the sacrifice of a sower of disunion, but commands that he depart from the altar so that he may first be reconciled with his brother. For God can be appeased only by prayers that make peace. To God, the better offering is peace, brotherly concord, and a people made one in the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

See the comment section for my observations on this.

When must we forgive?

There is a morally engaged discussion of this question going on at Gates of Vienna, with reference to an Anglican woman priest who cannot forgive the unrepentant murderers of her child, and seems to be under the false impression that she is required to by Christianity.

C.S. Lewis on good deeds

"The mere suspicion that what seemed an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty subtly poisons it . . . . Morality is healthy only when it is trying to abolish itself."

      —English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 187

Aristotle vs. Christianity?

From C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love:

"For us moderns the essense of the moral life seems to lie in the antithesis between duty and inclination . . . . [This] remains . . . the experience from which we all start. All our serious imaginative work, when it touches morals, paints a conflict: all practical moralists sing to battle or give hints about the appropriate strategy. Take away the concept of 'temptation' and nearly all that we say or think about good and evil would vanish into thin air. But when we first opened our Aristotle, we found to our astonishment that this inner conflict was for him so little of the essence of the moral life, that he tended to thrust it into a corner and treat it almost as a special case—that of the ακρατης. The really good man, in Aristotle's view, is not tempted. Where we incline to think that 'good thews inforced with pains' are more praiseworthy than mere goodness of disposition, Aristotle coolly remarks that the man who is temperate at a cost is profligate: the really temperate man abstains because he likes abstaining. The ease and pleasure with which good acts are done, the absence of moral 'effort' is for him the symptom of virtue."

Herbert Spencer on intuitive knowledge

"So profound an ignorance is there of the laws of life, that men do not even know that their sensations are their natural guides, and (when not rendered morbid by long continued disobedience) their trustworthy guides."           ——Essays on Education (c. 1861)

Christianity and collectivism

To a great extent, Christianity, somewhat like Buddhism, has traditionally evaded the issue of just political behaviour by simply counselling obedience to government under almost all circumstances. (Luther advised that Christians should not even revolt against an Islamic ruler.) Unfortunately, this tradition leaves a gaping hole in Christian doctrine under the present circumstances, where we have democratic governments which tend to regulate life ever more closely. This means that the scope for the exercise of personal morality tends to shrink to a sphere of unimportant matters, somewhat as in a Jane Austen novel, in which the women characters intensively focus their moral attention on the rather impoverished field of action left to them by the men. Instead, the important questions come to be decided collectively. Our most important moral decisions thus tend to shift from personal to political life.

Yet there is much confusion over what Christian political ethics is, or whether such a thing exists at all. For Luther, if I remember correctly, politics should simply be governed by "reason", which seems to amount to utilitarianism. On the Catholic side, the Scholastics would, I think, recommend that political rulers adopt a minimal level of morality without attempting to impose supererogatory virtues on their subjects (I hasten to add that I am not an expert on this subject). In both cases one probably ends up with a government that, at best, follows basic pre-Christian ethics, the "natural law". Such Christianity claims to bring no more than any other traditional ethical system to political decisionmaking. Collectivization then implies that specifically Christian ethics become irrelevant.

In recent times, many people have held that our collective decisions should be made on a more elevated, specifically Christian plane. But this is, in my opinion, a disastrous mistake, since it amounts to forcing individual citizens to adopt an outward show of "supererogatory" ethical standards (at least with regard to some limited set of decisions; even collectives cannot implement these superlative standards systematically). There may be no more effective way of abolishing genuine, freely chosen virtue than this denial of free will by a pseudo-ethical collective. Those who have reacted against oppressive "Christian" family environments will recognize how this works.