This week's selection from the City of God comes again from Book XIX, this time from Chapter 6. The
context is the broad theme elaborated in Chapter 4--that though the virtues of this life are "its best and most useful possessions," they are in the end only constant reminders of the miseries of this life and cannot be the final good: "Salvation, such as it shall be in the world to come, shall itself be our final happiness." The immediate chapters that follow Chapter 4 represent particular ruminations on and applications of the theme. Chapter 6 considers "the error of human judgments when the truth is hidden."
The problem for judges in the earthly city is that they are required to pass judgment but that they "cannot discern the consciences of those at their bar." Their judgments are therefore "melancholy and lamentable." All the more so because judges are driven to use coercive methods to compensate for their ignorance of the truth, which in turn drives the innocent to confess falsely, "[a]nd when he has been condemned and put to death the judge is still in ignorance whether he has put to death an innocent or a guilty person....[C]onsequently he has both tortured an innocent man to discover his innocence, and has put him to death without discovering it." Augustine paints a dark picture of justice in the earthly city in this chapter.
The problem, moreover, is not one of the specific coercive methods used by the judicial systems in particular earthly cities (though several sources note Augustine's opposition in several letters to torture and capital punishment). As Oliver O'Donovan puts it: "We shall miss the point of this if we confine ourselves to observations about the barbarous laws of evidence which obtained in the late empire....For [Augustine] it is a universal problem about judicial process everywhere. It is a guess as to which party is lying and which telling the truth, and any inquisitorial process adopted to reduce the element of hazard may backfire and defeat its own ends." Oliver O'Donovan, "The Political Thought of City of God 19," in Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present 70 (2003). An interesting feature of Augustine's discussion about torture in this context is that it emphasizes consequentialist considerations--the trouble with torture that Augustine targets here is that it does not assist, and in fact may be counterproductive, in ascertaining the truth. See Henry Chadwick, Augustine of Hippo: A Life 140 (2009). And yet, the problem of the elusiveness of truth is not resolved by a refusal to give judgment. Thus arises the dilemma: the necessity to give judgement in the earthly city together with the knowledge that ignorance of the truth will infect the judgment.
I was especially struck by Augustine's focus in the very last part of this selection not on the substance of the judgment, or on the methods to be used in judging, but on the mood or cast of mind that the dilemmas of the judge ought to inspire in him ("wise" is not an honorific here). Augustine is interested in what the miseries of judgment do for the character of the judge--and what they ought to do--as he contemplates the fulfillment of his duties (his "necessities") in the earthly city:
If such darkness shrouds social life, will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty. And he thinks it no wickedness that innocent witnesses are tortured regarding the crimes of which other men are accused; or that the accused are put to the torture, so that they are often overcome with anguish, and, though innocent, make false confessions regarding themselves, and are punished; or that, though they be not condemned to die, they often die during, or in consequence of, the torture; or that sometimes the accusers, who perhaps have been prompted by a desire to benefit society by bringing criminals to justice, are themselves condemned through the ignorance of the judge, because they are unable to prove the truth of their accusations though they are true, and because the witnesses lie, and the accused endures the torture without being moved to confession. These numerous and important evils he does not consider sins; for the wise judge does these things, not with any intention of doing harm, but because his ignorance compels him, and because human society claims him as a judge. But though we therefore acquit the judge of malice, we must nonetheless condemn human life as miserable. And if he is compelled to torture and punish the innocent because his office and his ignorance constrain him, is he a happy as well as a guiltless man? Surely it were proof of more profound considerateness and finer feeling were he to recognize the misery of these necessities, and shrink from his own implication in that misery; and had he any piety about him, he would cry to God: "From my necessities deliver Thou me."
I've noted some of Professor Robert Delahunty's superb posts on Tocqueville before, but now that he has completed his series, I thought to aggregate them all in one place. For those with an interest in Tocqueville's thought, they are well worth exploring:
Vladimir Putin, in his New York Times op ed yesterday, warned against the idea of American "exceptionalism." Let me repost a lecture I gave at Grove City College a few years ago explaining the idea and defending it:
http://vimeo.com/29409149
Thursday, September 12, 2013
This essay, "Crimes Against Humanities", is long, but well worth reading -- especially, I think, if one is a high-level administrator of, or generous benefactor of, an institution of higher education.
That's the (ponderous, I admit) title of this essay of mine, over at Public Discourse, on the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain. A bit:
Law is “of, by, and for” the people—for real human persons. The project of promoting persons’ flourishing—their real goods—will, necessarily, proceed on the basis of some “anthropological” assumptions about what it means to be human, about who and what people are, and about what they are made for. The project can only succeed if these assumptions are true. . . .
In this essay, "The End of American Protestantism," Stanley Hauerwas has some characteristically provocative things to say about America, Americans, liberalism, and Christianity. Here's a taste:
. . . Protestantism came to the land we now call American to make America Protestant. It was assumed that what it meant to be American and Protestant was equivalent to a faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic. But in the process the church in America became American - or, as Noll puts it, "because the churches had done so much to make America, they could not escape living with what they had made."
As a result Americans continue to maintain a stubborn belief in a god, but the god they believe in turns out to be the American god. To know or worship that god does not require that a church exist because that god is known through the providential establishment of a free people. This is a presumption shared by the religious right as well as the religious left in America. Both assume that America is the church.
Noll ends his account of these developments with the end of the Civil War, but the fundamental habits he identifies as decisive in the formation of the American religious and political consciousness continues to shape the way Christians - in particular, Protestant Christians - understand their place in America.
Yet I think we are beginning to see the loss of confidence by Protestants in their ability to sustain themselves in America, just to the extent that the inevitable conflict between the church, republicanism, and common sense morality has now worked its way out. America is the great experiment in Protestant social thought but the world Protestants created now threatens to make Protestantism unintelligible to itself. That is an obscure remark I must now try to make clear. . . .
This from my wife's blog, Day by Day with Maria:
When the moments of crisis and violence around the world and in our country feels too overwhelming for me... when I start to feel helpless before the power of evil that I see, hear, smell, touch, seemingly everywhere I go... when my own heart begins to wonder, what difference does it make?...
I remember an ordinary, unwed woman living in a run of the mill, inconsequential village who, with her “yes,” gave birth to the Son of God.
I remember a mother whose prayers and petitions for her son’s conversion, brought about a priest, an illustrious bishop, who is also a renowned Doctor of the Church.
I remember a simple, honest man from Okarche, Oklahoma, who after failing his second year of seminary Theology, became a missionary for the faith—and eventually, a martyr—ministering the people of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala.
I remember the miracles in my own life, the abundant moments of grace that come about when I humbly and faithfully get on my knees in prayer and examine, “am I doing my part?”
Yes, let there be peace on earth—and let it begin with me.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
I have heard from several people that the link I used earlier is to a version that is difficult to navigate and print. Here (I hope) is a PDF version:
Download Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Law--The Lord of Heaven and Earth.
