Pieper: On Justice

On Justice
Josef Pieper
(Notre Dame, 1966) [1955]
74 p.

This small book belongs to a series which Josef Pieper wrote on each of the cardinal and theological virtues. In it, as in the others, his purpose was not to make an original contribution to the subject, but rather to summarize  central claims of the Western tradition of moral philosophy. As always, Pieper’s lodestone is St. Thomas Aquinas (himself so often a superb reference for classical and medieval sources), but he does not neglect the modern period.

Stated briefly, justice is “the notion that each man is to be given what is his due”. As such, justice is dependent on a prior determination of what is or is not due to a person, and, even more basically, on the notion that something can be due to a person, that a person can have a “right” to something which another is obligated to respect. The tradition states that a thing can be due to a person either by convention (due to legal agreements, promises, and so on) or naturally (that is, independent of any particular legal body or political system). The idea of a “natural right” underlies the contemporary discussion about human rights in international affairs.

One to whom something is due must be the sort of thing that can claim a right. It makes little sense, for instance, to speak of a moral obligation to a stone or a flower. This implies that we cannot fruitfully speak about justice without a concept of human nature. Our tradition’s principal concept of the human person Pieper summarizes as “a spiritual being, a whole unto itself, a being that exists for itself and of itself, that wills its own perfection” and it is “created a person by the act of God, that is, an act beyond all human discussion.” There is perhaps some ambiguity here as to whether personhood derives principally from our origin (as creatures) or our nature. Pieper seems to argue that our nature makes us capable of claiming rights and of thereby entering the orbit of justice, but our origin, deriving ultimately from a source outside the human community, places limits on the scope of rights derived from convention or authority and provides an opening for natural rights. He quotes Kant: “We have a divine Sovereign, and his divine gift to man is man’s right.”

If justice is to give what is due, then to be just means “to owe something and to pay the debt”. The stress on action here — pay the debt — is appropriate, for justice resides in an external act, not in an intention or disposition. In this, it differs from several other classical virtues, notably temperance and prudence. One may intend to be just, but unless one follows through with the act of justice, one cannot actually be said to be just. Justice is, in this sense, a “public virtue”. Pieper remarks that in the sphere of justice, people rightly regard one another objectively, almost as strangers. And there is a reverse side to the public character of justice: “every external act belongs to the field of justice”.

According to our moral tradition justice is a virtue of higher rank than fortitude or temperance, and this for two principal reasons: first, because it has a wider scope, ordering not only individual lives but also the life of communities, and, second, because while fortitude and temperance are virtues related to the body, having to do with mastering appetites and desires and so forth, justice is spiritual in nature. Moreover, it is quite possible to imagine being very “moral”, in the sense of being self-controlled and courageous, while nonetheless being unjust. (Such, Pieper notes, is the traditional character of the Anti-Christ.) So justice is an essential element in the conduct of a truly moral life.

Pieper identifies three basic forms of justice: reciprocal (the justice one person owes another), distributive (the justice a community owes to individual persons), and legal (the justice individual persons owe to the community). Perhaps because of the post-war context in which he was writing, with the threat of totalitarian governments a matter of constant concern, he focuses most of his discussion on distibutive justice, which is concerned with what the social whole (not specifically the government, note) owes the individual.

We might be tempted to suppose that distributive justice is more or less served in society today by a government-supported welfare system, but Pieper makes a few pointed remarks that call this identification into question. First, he anticipates some comments which Pope Benedict XVI made in Spe Salvi when he states that the nature of distributive justice is endangered when one’s relationship to the community is conceived in impersonal terms, when we think of a “welfare system” operated by bureaucrats rather than a network of personal relationships with a human face. And a second doubt is raised by consideration of the nature of the “communal goods” with which distributive justice is concerned; we are apt to think this means money and other tangible goods, and it does (“food, clothing, shelter, means of communication, care of the sick, education”), but is means more too: “the bonum commune extends far beyond the range of material goods produced by mechanical means” to include the full measure of the human good, spiritual as well as material. It includes knowledge of truth and moral guidance, for instance. If we are looking for a model of what Pieper means I believe that we might advantageously look to the Church rather than to civil society; there, at least, one sees the attempt to minister to the full dignity and capacity of the human person.

An oddity about distributive justice is that it cannot be enforced, for the obligated party is ultimately the authority itself:

Since institutional precautions and controls could entirely prevent the abuse of power only by precluding any form of effective authority, there is nothing and no one that can restrain the man of power from doing injustice — if not his own sense of justice. In the affairs of this world, everything depends on the rulers’ being just.

This provides a good reason to hold those in authority to high moral standards, and the greater the authority the higher the standard.

The closing sections of the book take up a rich theme: the limits of justice. There are, of course, some debts which are not paid, some obligations which are not met in this life. A secular account of justice must concede that the reign of justice is only partial and incomplete, for sometimes injustice carries the day. A religious account — or at least a Christian account — extends the reign of justice so that it is ultimately triumphant: those injustices which appear to triumph in this life are themselves judged by the ultimate justice of God.

Yet in addition to debts which, for one reason or another, are not paid, there are some debts which cannot be paid, some obligations which, by their very nature, cannot be met, and these mark out additional limits on the domain of justice. Such limits are especially evident in a person’s relationship to God, for each person receives his or her very being from God, and no repayment can ever be adequate to this gift.

Now the work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy; and is founded thereon.” This must not be taken to be merely an edifying thought. It is a very precise description of man’s condition in the face of God. Before any subsequent claim is made by men, indeed even before the mere possibility of a human claim arises, comes the fact that man has been made a gift by God (of his being) such that his nature cannot ever “make it good,” discharge it, “deserve” it, or return it again. Man can never say to God: “We are even.”

And divine justice must be understood in another way as well, for if justice means “to owe something and to pay the debt”, then God cannot, in this sense, be called just, for he owes nothing. Unfortunately Pieper does not elaborate on this question of what it means to say that God is just — only, as above, that his justice is allied to mercy.

Pieper argues that the practice of religious sacrifice is rooted in this same basic inability to give adequate thanks for the gift of being. No human effort can ever overcome the debt. When Hector pours his wine on the ground to honour the gods, or when a priest offers an unblemished lamb to the altar, or when a pilgrim sets out in a spirit of humble trust in God, the very extravagance of the act highlights its inadequacy:

Helplessness and impotency prompt this extravagance; because it is impossible to do what “properly” ought to be done, an effort beyond the bounds of reason, as it were, tries to compensate for the insufficiency.

Religious sacrifice is thus seen, from this perspective, to be rooted in justice. (I am aware of other accounts of the nature and significance of religious sacrifice, but this is one which I have not considered before.) The same is true of piety, and for much the same reason: St. Thomas says that “It is not possible to make to one’s parents an equal return of what one owes to them; and thus piety is annexed to justice.”

*

This is a very good book. It is potent and concentrated, as Pieper’s books usually are.

I close with a few aphorisms lifted from the text, several of which are paraphrases or quotations from St. Thomas:

*

Thomas, via Seneca: “A person who wants to repay a gift too quickly with a gift in return is an unwilling debtor and an ungrateful person.” (ST, II, II, 106, 4)

Thomas: “Creation itself is not an act of justice; creation is not anyone’s due.”

“The common good requires every individual to be good.”

St. Thomas: “The purpose of power is to realize justice.”

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2013

I like to do something to honour the feast of St. Thomas every year (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009). This year the day has snuck up on me, so I’ll simply use what I have at hand. I have been reading — or trying to read, really — Etienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers, in which St. Thomas’ metaphysics of being has a starring role. Here is a passage I highlighted:

This is a cardinal point in the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. To posit substance as the proper receiver of existence (proprium susceptivum ejus quod est esse) is not to posit it as a “container” into which existence has but to flow in order to make it be. So long as there is no existence, there is no receptacle to receive it. Existence is here fulfilling an entirely different function. As we have already described it, the substance is “that which” exists, and it is quod est in virtue of its form. Form then is ultimate act in the order of substantiality. In other words, there is no form of the form. Consequently, should we have to ascribe “to be” or “is” to a form, it could not be considered as a form of that form. No point could be more clearly stated than is this one in the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas.

My emphases. Maybe I am just not getting enough sleep these days, but I’ll give a special prize to anyone who can state this a little more clearly.

In the meantime, here is something edifying: my friend Adam Hincks, S.J. has posted a short reflection on the principal lessons he learned from a recent course he took on Thomistic metaphysics: What I Learned from St. Thomas Aquinas.

Saward: The Beauty of Holiness

The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty
Art, Sanctity, and the Truth of Catholicism
John Saward
(Ignatius, 1997)
200 p.

The inability of so much modern thought to deal adequately with aesthetics has long served me as a motive for skepticism about its adequacy in general. When the early modern philosophers stripped the world of beauty, stuffing whatever glory and splendour we might encounter into our skulls, rendering it (according to taste) a private judgment or chemical frisson, they entered upon a metaphysical landscape from which, unless I am mistaken, few of the leading modern thinkers have returned. Speaking for myself, I have not been able to follow with any confidence; my efforts to think ‘rightly’ about such matters have all ended in failure. Beauty is real, it seems to me, and it is important to a life well-lived, much as goodness and truth are. A famous passage from von Balthasar resonates with me:

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

Encouraged by such statements, I have tried, in my typically middling way, to be open and attentive to beauty. Since modernity has not been able to provide a theoretical ground for this practice, I have naturally sought intellectual foundations elsewhere. Beauty was taken more seriously by ancient and medieval thinkers. John Saward, in the process of developing a theological understanding of aesthetics, nicely illustrates the contrast by comparing the views of pre-eminent representatives of the medieval and modern traditions:

St. Thomas regards beauty as a property of being, a feature of reality, whereas the Enlightenment makes it a colourful subjective ‘value’ pasted over the penny-plain objective ‘fact’. For Kant, to say that the San Marco altarpiece is beautiful is merely to voice one’s feeling of pleasure at seeing the San Marco altarpiece; nothing in the painting corresponds to the judgement. By contrast, for Thomas, a thing is not beautiful because it is loved; it is loved because it is beautiful. Our minds through our senses perceive the beauty of Angelico’s altarpiece; they do not produce it. Beauty is not read into works of art, God’s and men’s; it radiates out of them. As Gerard Manley Hopkins says, it ‘keeps warm / Men’s wits to the things that are’.

That, I think, sums up the difference rather nicely, and also (I trust) conveys the attractiveness of the Thomist view. It is evident that Thomas’ understanding of beauty requires a vastly different, and far richer, metaphysics than modernity has typically been willing, or able, to sustain.

The purpose of John Saward’s book is, in part, to present the pre-modern (and, more specifically, Thomist) philosophy of beauty, and to unfold its many intimate connections to theology. Understood theologically, beauty — like everything else that is good — ultimately has its source in God, and Saward’s special theme, as the title of his book indicates, is to explore how the beauty of God shines forth in two particular ways: through holy lives and through sacred art. In doing so he picks up on something which Pope Benedict, then still a Cardinal, once said:

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with the beauty in her liturgies, the beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty — and hence truth — is at home.

(This quotation actually serves as epigraph to Saward’s book, suggesting that it may have been the seed from which the book itself has grown.)

In developing this theme of beauty in Christian lives and art, Saward turns, naturally enough, to one of those in whom both aspects were manifest: Beato Angelico. A significant part of the book is devoted to a close study of his San Marco altarpiece, not from an art historical perspective, but in order to unpack the many ways in which the painting illustrates the Catholic tradition’s theological understanding of beauty and holiness.

Holiness and beauty are united in an exemplary, if not quite preeminent, way in the Blessed Virgin Mary. She has greater moral beauty than any other created being, and, in agreement with Saward’s motivating concept, Christian tradition has piously put her at the center of its artistic tradition, portraying her as lovely to behold, ‘the most beautiful lady’. Her beauty illuminates all that it touches. Saward devotes a good deal of attention to this fact, tracing Our Lady’s influence upon our music, architecture, and literature, and exploring the theological reasons for it.

In the final section of the book Saward turns to the special class of saints who lost their lives for the faith. He argues that persecution and martyrdom in the Church have frequently called forth beautiful art, citing, for instance, the cases of Robert Southwell and William Byrd in the wake of Edmund Campion’s martyrdom, or Bernanos’ Dialogues of the Carmelites after the French Revolution. Conversely, Saward observes that very often persecution and heresy are combined with iconoclasm, an assault on the faithful and on Church teaching being paired with an assault on her art. This was so during the English Reformation, in Calvin’s Geneva, in the French Revolution, and, more recently, in Communist nations. That such things occur together is not surprising, for Christian art is an expression of Christian thought and devotion, and it is an arguable point whether such iconclasm constitutes an assault on beauty per se. Yet the spectacle of someone defacing art of such great beauty is unseemly, at the very least, and, contends Saward, is fruitfully suggestive of a deeper conflict.

The Holiness of Beauty is a rewarding read, with considerably more in it than I, at any rate, was able to glean on one reading. It comes bedecked with laudatory blurbs from the likes of Aidan Nichols, Stratford Caldecott, Thomas Howard, and even Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. If you like those authors, you will probably like this as well. The writing is quite dense, but not overly scholarly, and is frequently beautiful. On numerous occasions I paused, at length, over an arresting thought or elegant turn of phrase, and it occurred to me that certain sections of the book might well serve as fodder for lectio divina. The theology is, as far as I could detect, thoroughly orthodox. Part of me wishes that the theological material was not couched so thoroughly in Thomist language — surely a theme as foundational as this could be expressed in other ways — and all of me wishes that I had understood the theological basics more clearly than I did, but these are minor complaints. It is a good book.

***

Some quotations:

‘When sundered from beauty, truth becomes a correctness without splendour and goodness a value of no delight.’

‘Christ is beautiful, and he comes to restore us to beauty.’

‘The creature intent on glorifying itself resents the Creator who humbled himself.’

‘The man who would venerate the holy icons must gaze with the loving attention of a child, not the peering curiosity of the connoisseur.’

‘Positivism, materialism, atheism — these are the great deadly enemies of art, for they blind a man to the wealth and wonder of being. It was from all such rude reductions of reality that William Blake asked to be delivered when he prayed, ‘May God us keep / From single vision and Newton’s sleep’.’

‘Every true love has the inner form of a vow.’ (Balthasar)

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2011

To mark St. Thomas’ feast, here are a few aphorisms drawn from his writings.

• Every being naturally loves God more than itself. (ST I, 60, 5 ad 1)
• Sin is nothing other than falling away from the good which is fitting to one’s nature. (ST I-II, 109, 2 ad 2)
• Evil is never loved except under the aspect of good; that is to say, in so far as it is truly a good in some particular respect, but is conceived as absolutely good. (ST I-II, 27, 1 ad 1)
• God is one in reality but multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him. (ST I, 13, 4 ad 3)
• To know God in a created likeness is not to know the essence of God. (ST I, 12, 4 ad 1)

More from the same fount, from 2010 and 2009.

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2010

Here are several brief thoughts from St. Thomas, culled from Josef Pieper’s The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas: A Breviary of Philosophy:

• Since the soul is only a part of human nature, it does not possess its natural perfection except in union with the body. (Spir. creat. 2 ad 5.)
• A devil knows the nature of human thought better than a man does. (Mal. 16, 8 ad 7.)
• Wherever there is intellectual knowledge, there is also free will. (ST I, 59, 3.)
• Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do. (Praec.car. (princ.))
• The nature of virtue lies in good more than in difficulty. (ST II-II, 123, 12 ad 2.)

Last year’s batch.