Tag Archives: Justice

Forgiving from the Heart

Mercy, , ,

When Our Lord teaches the disciples to pray the Our Father, He connects the forgiveness of sins with our capacity to forgive others.  Just to make sure that the point was understood, it follows up the prayer by making it more explicit: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Mt 6:14-15).  This commandment is shocking, especially for those of us who assume that God’s forgiveness is unconditional as long as we are sorry for our own sins.  Upon reflection however, to put such a restriction on forgiveness however, like all of Christ’s commandments, is for our good and it turns out that the necessity is more closely related to our capacity to receive forgiveness than to give it.

To grasp the meaning of the dictate then we must first reflect on forgiveness itself.  When a person purposely does real harm to us in some way, we are “spiritually” wounded by that person.  That is why we often say “I was hurt when you said/did X”.  It is important to note that this is a perfectly natural reaction to a perceived injustice; a reaction that is accompanied by sorrow and sometimes even anger.  In other words, to dismiss it as “nothing” is irrational.  It is something and it has done something both to you and the offender that needs to be addressed for the good of both of you.

The Dangers of Unforgiveness

Only forgiveness can heal this wound.  Unforgiveness allows the wound to fester meaning that the person is unable to turn away the suffering of the injury.  Demons, keenly aware of the wound, will tempt the person to focus on the wrong in order for the wound to remain open and keep them trapped in a state of sorrow and anger.  Because he dialogues with the Tempter, he slowly gains more and more control over the person especially concerning anything related to the wound.  A stronghold is developing and forgiveness becomes even more difficult because the person is now beginning to identify himself as a victim.

This “victim” status now blocks him from receiving forgiveness from God. This is the point of the parable that Our Lord tells about the Unforgiving Servant later in Matthew’s gospel (Mt 18:21-35).  The man is offered forgiveness but because he is so focused on the slights against him, he is unable to generate the sadness (or the gratitude for forgiveness) necessary for the Master forgiving him.  Unforgiveness then makes it impossible for God to forgive us because all of our sorrow and anger is directed at the slights against us rather than at the wrongs we have done.

How to Forgive

Given how important forgiveness is for us then it is worth reflecting on how we can, as Our Lord commands “forgive your brother from your heart” (Mt 18:35).  First, we make the distinction between what might be termed volitional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness.  Because we are fallen and our emotions do not always follow our will, they are often separate acts.  The easier of the two is volitional, especially because the demons cannot touch our will.  To forgive in the will is to release the person from the debt of justice and turn them over to God so that He might deliver a just punishment.  This can sound and feel like wishing for a smiting and so you should always pray that God forgives them as well. It is this latter step that provides the most healing for the one that has been offended.  It is important to remember that Christ does not merely issue commandments but promises the grace to fulfill that commandment as well.  It is important to always pray for the grace to have forgiveness in your heart.

Emotional forgiveness is often the harder of the two because we must break the association of the pain caused with the person.  This is why it is always easier to forgive someone who apologizes.  When he bears the burden of the sorrow he caused by expressing that sorrow, it lessens the burden on the offended person.  This solidarity in sorrow also acts as a unitive force strengthening the communion between them.  Love always means saying your sorry.

While it is easier when the offender expresses sorrow, it is not automatic.  Nor is it, obviously, automatic when the offender shows no remorse.  In that case, it often takes repeated acts of the will in order to bring the emotions in line with the will.  Each time the thoughts drift towards the hurt, it is necessary for the offended to make the same act of the will until the emotion subsides.  What will begin to emerge are feelings associated with mercy and compassion.  This again is extremely difficult and is at the heart of Our Lord’s admonition to Peter that he must forgive his brother seventy times seven times.  It may actually take 490 (or more) acts of the will to fully heal the emotional wound that has been inflicted.

In closing, it is important to reiterate the fact that “forgiveness is divine”.  Christ never commands without equipping.  Many times unforgiveness traps us in a web of guilt because we feel like we are powerless to forgive.  The first step in the process, like in every process, is to ask for the grace to forgive, knowing that was one of the graces He won for you on Calvary when, in the face of those who weren’t sorry, He asked “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Cancelling Anger

Culture, Freedom, Virtue, , , , , ,

Virtuous men are rarely, if ever, prone to propaganda.  That is because they can ascertain when to “fight the good fight”.  Vicious men, on the other hand, are extremely prone to it.  They have no idea which are the good fights and so they must be told.  But simply telling them is not enough.  Lacking any real control over their anger, they need someone else to stir it up for them by turning events that fit the narratives catastrophes.   Having no way to turn it off, they are absolutely unforgiving and must find offense around every corner.  Discerning ears will recognize this scenario for what it is—our modern society and its incessant need to cancel other people.

In truth then, at the heart of cancel culture, is the inability to discern the difference between wrath and anger.  These terms, even if they are often used synonymously, are not truly referring to the same thing.  Anger is, first and foremost, a passion or an emotion built into human nature to deal with the presence of evil.  More specifically, it is the emotion that provides an interior motor to fight against a specific evil that acts as an obstacle to achieving some good thing.  When a man discerns some good thing is being blocked, he wills to be angry in order energize him to fight the good fight.     

Fighting the Good Fight

The virtuous man knows the good fight when he sees it because he has the virtue of justice.  He is habitually desiring that each person receives what is due to him.  When some obstacle is placed in the way of that being achieved, he grows angry in order to move him to fight to restore justice.  This is why St. John Chrysostom thought that: “He who does not get angry, when there is just cause for being so, commits sin. In effect, irrational patience sows vices, maintains negligence, and encourages not only bad men to do wrong, but good men as well.”

Not only does the virtuous man grow angry when he should, he also directs his anger at the source of the injustice and does not just “vent”.  Likewise, he also filters it through the virtues of clemency and meekness to avoid becoming excessively angry and aim it at the injustice first and then the cause of it.  He truly knows how to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” because he is just.

Our Lord, Who referred to Himself as “meek and humble of heart” is the example par excellence.  When He cleaned the Temple, it was because His Father was not being rendered what was due to Him.  So, fueled by anger, the Just Man removed the obstacle.  With meekness He whipped the tables but with clemency avoided whipping the money changers.

The reason why anger is such a strong emotion is because it must often supply enough fuel for us to fight for justice for other people.  When that fuel turns inward and ignites a fire in us because of how we perceive we are being treated then it is truly wrath.  This is why wrath has been considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins—it turns what should be an outward-facing passion into a selfish one.  The wrathful man sees red, not because of an offense against justice, but because he has been slighted in some way.  To use modern parlance, he has been offended by the words or actions of another person.  Because anger must always be justified, he must also search for a reason why his own personal offense is really unjust.  In essence wrath turns anger off of justice onto my feelings and directs it not towards rectifying an injustice, but mercilessly punishing the offender.

A simple example might help us discern the difference.  A man is getting on to a crowded bus and he steps on your foot.  You feel anger arise, but look at him and realize he had tripped over someone else’s foot a few feet ahead of you and it was merely an accident.  In that case the just response is clemency because it was an accident.  Now suppose that same man enters the bus looks you in the eye, smiles and stomps on your foot.  Now the anger is justified, but the meek man would temper his response such that it did not include punching him in the face.  But the anger would be directed towards the action and not just the fact that it was done to you.  The way to know the difference is by imagining after stepping on your foot he goes and steps on an old lady’s foot.  If you are just as angry (or more) about that as you are about your own foot being stepped on, then you know the anger is justified.

This scenario also highlights an important point that is often a source of confusion regarding anger.  The Christian in imitation of Our Lord, when He is the sole victim of the injustice, will often suffer it in silence and not be angry.  But when there are other victims, including those who might be scandalized by you not confronting the evil, then zealous anger will confront the wrong directly.  The “others” include the offender because he needs to know that he has done evil in order to repent—and will need to be justly punished as part of that repentance.

Back to the Cancel Culture

Every passion, when not properly wedded to virtue, needs increased stimuli in order to get an equivalent response.  Related to the question at hand, wrath needs to be constantly fed, especially when it is being used to keep the vicious fighting.  It no longer becomes about justice, but about keeping them angry.  There is no need to discern whether something is actually unjust or not, because the anger will make it “feel” that way.  There is no need to make the distinction between victim and perpetrator because the object of that anger will tell which is which.  There can be no forgiveness until the perpetrator is “cancelled” and is no longer exists, either literally or figuratively. 

Thankfully, history has many examples of cancel cultures that always end with the cancellers eating their own.  When there is no one left to be angry at, when there is no one left to cancel, wrath demands that you execute the executioner.  For those who are trapped in this vicious circle the only option is for the virtuous to step up and restore justice.  Fear, masquerading as prudence, is never the solution.  Neither is the ersatz anger that we call “outrage.”  Nor is any attempt at cancelling the cancellers.  Only true zealous anger for justice can repair our decadent culture.

Hope and the Mystery of Evil

Atheism, Last Things, Mercy, Theology, , , , , , , , , , ,

Atheists, at least those who are honest, often cite the problem of suffering as their main obstacle to believing in God.  They reason that if there is a loving God, then there wouldn’t be so much suffering.  A believer may counter with the burden of free will, but that really only accounts for the moral evils in this world.  What about the natural evils, those like we see in the wake of hurricane, where suffering and death seem to be everywhere?  The problem facing the believer is how he can explain a mystery, that is the mystery of evil, to one who does not yet have faith.  And so, the unbeliever goes away with only more reasons for disbelief.  But if we are to give them reasons for belief, then we must be willing to dive into this question a little more deeply.

Evil and suffering are, as we said, a mystery.  The word mystery comes from the Greek word mysterion which literally means closed.  Mysteries, at least in the sense we are using it here, are closed to the rational mind.  The human mind, unaided by revelation, can not even conceive of the mystery.  Once it is revealed, it becomes intelligible, but the light of full understanding cannot be seen.  The mystery of evil is one such revealed truth that, absent the gift of divine faith, is completely incomprehensible.  No amount of reasoning about suffering and evil could ever bring us to the point where we could conclude that “all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Hope and the Desire for Justice

Even if we could intellectually assent to this truth, it remains elusive because it is also the foundation of the theological virtue of hope.  Like faith, hope is a gift and not something we can earn.  It resides in the will and acts like a holy fortitude that enables us to habitually cling to the truth of God’s Word even in the presence of manifold evils.    It is in “hope we are saved” (Romans 8:24).  At every corner, the believer is tempted to despair, that is, to give up on the fact that God always fulfills His promises so we should not be surprised when the unbeliever, who lives without these supernatural gifts, finds no seeds of hope in this world. 

Lacking supernatural faith and hope, it would seem that the unbeliever’s ears remain permanently closed to any possible theological explanation.  It only seems that way however when we ask an important question.  Why is it that the unbeliever expects things to be otherwise?  The answer, once it is uttered, turns the issue on its head.  What makes evil and suffering so bad in the mind of the unbeliever is that it appears to be indiscriminate; favoring, if anything the guilty more than the innocent.  Peeling back a layer of his thoughts he will find that, like all men, he has an innate desire for justice.  This desire, even if it is unacknowledged cannot be stamped out.  He finds within himself a fundamental paradox—”there is no God and yet I expect justice.”

Every true desire that we have has an object.  We experience hunger and there is food, we experience loneliness there are companions, we desire knowledge, there are things to be known.  We could go on and on listing our desires and find that each matches to some object.  Justice however remains mostly elusive.  We certainly believe there is an object, or else all the political machinations in which we try to create a utopic paradise are pointless.  But those objects have proven to be woefully inadequate.  It is reasonable then to expand our horizons. 

This line of reasoning is not unlike CS Lewis’ argument from desire, except that it points towards an event—the Last Judgment.  The Last Judgment, the moment when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead, will be first and foremost an event of justice.  Every injustice will be set right, every wrong righted, everlasting crowns given to those who suffered injustice and everlasting shame to those who doled it out.  The judgment of history will be corrected and “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”  Justice will be served. 

The Final Judgment as a Beacon of Hope

In short, the desire for justice is meant to serve as a signpost pointing towards the truth of eternal life.  Pope Benedict XVI calls this “the most important motive for believing in eternal life” in Spe Salvi, his second encyclical:

There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life. The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ’s return and for new life become fully convincing.

Spe Salvi (SS) #43

Following this line of reasoning a little further, we see that the unfulfilled desire for justice in this life becomes a beacon of hope for the next.  It is according to God’s Providential design that justice will be lacking in this world precisely to spur our desire for the next.  Revelation then becomes the venue where desire meets object.  The heart testifies and Revelation answers.

Based on this view, the Pope wants us to correct our view of the Final Judgment and see it in the light of the Good News.  “The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope” (SS, 44).  When we see it as part and parcel of the Good News as a response to man’s universal longing for justice, its evangelical power can be unleashed.

On Social Justice

Moralilty, Politics, Virtue, ,

Over the last couple of years, the protest movement has gathered so much steam that there seems to be an organized protest over nearly everything.  One California company has even gone as far as to offer their employees paid time off to participate in protests as a form of social justice.  The fact that these “social justice” protests result in destruction of property, violence and any number of offenses against justice shows that these protest movements are actually counter-productive at best.  They are based on a cart before the horse principle in which the participants and organizers (assuming at least some good will on their part) assume that once “just” social structures are in place, then the people will act justly.  Until this happens, they may need to “make a mess,” to borrow a phrase from the liberal manifesto Rules for Radicals to grab people’s attention, but that should eventually settle down.  But the cart of social justice can only be pulled by the horses of just individuals.  That the protestors are unjust while screaming for justice shows just how convoluted our thinking about justice has become and how necessary it is to develop a more complete understanding of justice.

Justice is the firm and habitual disposition to give to each person his or her rightful due.  Or, put more succinctly, justice is the habit of giving to each what is owed to them.  In short, to “owe” another person means that we are giving, or more accurately restoring, to them something that they already own.  Those more classically schooled will recognize in the “firm and habitual disposition” the definition of a virtue.  Justice is one of the four virtues (along with prudence, temperance and fortitude) on which all the other virtues depend.

The Interiority of Justice

It merits a reminder as well that because justice is a virtue, this means that it is primarily something interior to the person and not exterior.  Just as the person who habitually lies is a liar, so too the person who habitually acts justly is just.  The “environment” helps us to be more or less just, but it is the individual man who is just.  When a critical mass of individuals are just, a social justice follows.  Men without the virtue of justice, no matter how just the social structure, will always tend to destroy that structure.  That is precisely what we see in the protest movement—injustice committed in the name of justice.  While this might be a glaring example, the same can happen when the leaders are not just men either.

As the definition suggests, justice is meant to govern relationships and so to speak of “social justice” is a bit of a tautology.  This is why it remains a fuzzy concept for many of us and often just ends up being a mask for a political movement.  The Church has always viewed it as the cooperation of just men who form, maintain, or re-form social institutions that serve the common good.  Justice rules (i.e. social justice) a community when three fundamental structures of communal life are in proper order—individuals one to another (commutative), society to individuals (distributive) and individual to society (legal justice).  In his book on Justice, Josef Pieper has a helpful diagram to keep these straight.

 

The first form of justice is called commutative justice.  Commutative justice is usually what we think of when we speak of justice.  It governs the relationship between two people and assumes a certain level of equality between the two.  Being equals, they must equally bear the burden of any social exchange.  A person needs a pair of shoes from a cobbler and exchanges a just price, say $10, for the shoes.  Anything less than that then the buyer would be guilty of an offense against commutative justice.  Anything more and it would be the cobbler who violates commutative justice (As an aside, I will post on the Church’s teaching on just price, so for now just assume that $10 is a just price). It is also commutative justice governs the duty of restitution.   If a person steals from another, then they violate commutative justice and the guilty party must make some restitution to restore to the victim that which is owed.

Because many people think only in terms of commutative justice, many injustices occur because groups of men have obligations towards individuals.  In truth, while commutative justice is based on a principle of equality, men are not equal in all ways.  This is why the Church also speaks of distributive justice.  Distributive justice is not based on equality, but based on proportion, according to need, merit, circumstance, etc.  What properly belongs to man through distributive justice is a proportionate share in what is common to everyone, that is, to each man must be given a proportionate (not equal) share of the common good.

A classic example helps us to see how these first two forms of justice work.  Suppose there are two brothers, ages 2 and 16, and they approach their parents because they want candy.  There is only a single bag of M&Ms left and so the parents must divide the bag between the two.  Rather than counting the M&Ms and splitting them evenly, the parents give the 16 year old  2/3 of the bag and the 2 year old, 1/3.  They give unequal distribution because of their ages and amount of candy they should eat.  This is distributive justice.

Just as in the example the parents, who govern the good of the family, chose the allotment of M&Ms, it is the custodian of the common good in society then that determines the proper proportion.  For society as a whole this would be the State, or more properly understood, an individual that has the power to determine the allotment.  So, it is not the State that is just or unjust, but individuals holding power within the State that act justly or unjustly.  This simply reiterates the point about when the emphasis is on just structures and not just men, justice is almost never achieved.

Social Justice

Social justice is often equated with distributive justice because it is viewed mainly as a problem of distribution and the focus mainly remains on this dimension.  However, those who desire social justice ought to focus more on the relationship between the individual and society that St. Thomas calls legal justice. In short it is the individual, not focusing so much on his rights, but on his duties to society that creates social justice.  It is, to borrow from JFK’s famous speech, to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  If each man were to focus on contributing to the common good and not just his own private goods then social justice would reign.

What all of this brings to the forefront is that the protest movements as they are practiced now are truly protesting against social justice.  In attempting to raise the awareness of injustices, they do harm to the common good.  Anyone who reads Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, can’t help but be struck by his thoughtful reflection upon what is just.  It was only because he had spent time thinking about justice that he was able to envision what it would look like.  He and his fellow co-founders of the Civil Rights Movement refused to counter injustice with more injustice.  Instead they kept their eyes focused on the common good (the focal point of his I Have a Dream speech) and how a more just society could be formed.  Destroying property, trampling on the good of the free speech of others, and destroying public order all creates less social justice not more, no matter how many days of paid leave they are given to protest.