Justice: a premium virtue

In the third of his series on virtue, Andrew Davison weighs what justice says today, particularly on impartiality.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A statue of Justice holds a sword aloft in one hand, and set of scales in the other.

The statue of Justice on London's Old Bailey court.

Sang Hyun Cho, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Next after prudence comes justice. Our guide in this series on the virtues is Thomas Aquinas and, for him, virtue is about justice. Indeed, it is in justice (quoting Cicero) that

‘the lustre of virtue appears above all.’

Placing such a premium on justice might seem a little deflationary. Yes, we might think, by all means be just, but is that enough? Later in this series, we will see that Aquinas does, indeed, think that all human virtues – including justice – need to be set aflame with faith, hope, and love. But that doesn’t stop him from also thinking about the virtues from a human point of view, at least as a first pass. And within that frame – one in which he might also talk to a non-believer, for instance – he insists that to be virtuous is to be just. Indeed, we could make that comment even more deflationary, and say that the gold standard of justice is simply to be fair. Justice, again drawing on Cicero, is simply to give to each person what is due.

‘However true it might be that our communal life cannot attain its fullest realization through just exchange alone',

wrote the German writer Josef Pieper,

‘it is no less true that it is in the exemplary form of just this sort of justice that the irreducible core of social relations finds expression’.

We can wish for something that outstrips justice. Nonetheless, there is a steely realism in Thomas’s insistence that the foundation for virtue is acting justly, even simply being fair. Fortunate is the country at the moment where day-by-day newspaper coverage need not draw attention to people in positions of public trust failing to live even by that standard.

I once attended a lecture course as an visitor in Rome on ‘Justice and Allied Virtues in Thomas Aquinas’ that lasted for an entire semester, so there’s a lot that can be said on this front. I will limit myself to three angles: impartiality, dues, and the role of a useful minimum.

On impartiality

On the first, Aquinas offers an extended discussion of justice in terms of being no ‘respecter of persons’: which is to say, in terms of showing impartiality. His example strikes home for anyone, such as myself, who works in a university:

if you promote someone to a professorship on account of his having sufficient knowledge, you consider the due cause, not the person; but if, in conferring something on someone, you consider in him not the fact that what you give him is proportionate or due to him, but the fact that he is this particular person (e.g. Peter or Martin), then there is ‘respect of the person’, since you give him something not for some cause that renders him worthy of it, but simply because he is this person… for instance if a man promote someone… because he is rich or because he is a relative of his.

As I write this, the newspapers are full of a story about an ex-Prime Minister promoting someone to a position of public honour and trust in a torturous story that involves both wealth and a relative.

On dues

Justice is the lodestone of virtue, according to Aquinas. Above all things, ‘do justice’. Justice is not quite the foundation, however. Justice looks beyond itself to ‘right’, or ‘what is due’. Justice is secondary, because it recognises and responds to ‘right’ or ‘due’ (today, we might say to ‘rights’ or ‘dues’); it does not create them. Those comments would mean a great deal to a group of Spaniards in the sixteenth century, all followers of Aquinas, who rose above the rapacious expansion of the West, and fought for the rights of indigenous people. They left the foundations of international law as part of that legacy. Among them were Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) and Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483–1546), both Dominican friars. They offer, to my mind, perhaps the most glorious moment in the whole history of the river of writing and thinking that has sprung from the life and works of Aquinas.

Opposing, at various time, pretty much the entire establishment of the Spanish Empire, they argued that the indigenous people of the ‘New World’ had inviolable rights, such that justice required Europeans to recognise their right to their lands, and to self-government. This rested on the idea that justice deals with what is due, or right. We do not make this up; we are confronted by it. It is attached to, it springs from, human nature simply as such. And, ultimately, it springs from the fact that to be faced by a human being is to be faced with a creature, which is to say, by the handiwork of God.

When he was still in his twenties, and earning his spurs as a teacher, Aquinas had tackled this subject:

something is said to be just not only because it is willed by God, but because it is due to a certain created thing according to the order of creature to creature. For nothing can be due to anything except by reason of its own nature or condition. However, the cause of a thing’s nature and properties is the divine will; and therefore the whole order of justice can be traced back to the divine will as to its origin.

Justice is secondary to right, is responsive to right, and justice is the backstop of the virtues precisely for that reason. If it set its own terms, if it ruled its own roost, it might determine, for instance, that dispossession is just. Who would be to say otherwise? But justice does not set its own terms; it bows before what is right or due. That is why, in the estimation of those Spanish Thomists, it inclines its head in reverence before the dignity and rights of native South Americans, rather than to the Spanish Crown: or at least, it should.

The useful minimum

Approached another way, we might say that justice is a sort of minimum, but also that minima are important because they mark out the limits of human relationships. The twentieth century Dominican Herbert McCabe wrote compellingly about this. The Ten Commandments are all about justice, and while they don’t lay out the beating heart of a good and cohesive social life, they do mark its limits. McCabe (again following Aquinas) thought that the best emphasis in thinking about ethics ought to be on friendship, since that is characteristic of human life at its fullest. It’s clearly not enough, for friendship, simply not to steal, bear false witness, or commit adultery. Nonetheless, those precepts are of enduring worth, because we can be sure that to transgress those bounds is to bring friendship to an end. It’s because of that emphasis on friendship, and guarding against whatever endangers it, that ‘bearing false witness’ was such a major concern for Aquinas. In his long treatment of justice, the subject of theft or murder each receives only a single section. On the other hand, misrepresentation of others – sins of the tongue (and, today, of the keyboard) – receive four (on ‘reviling’, ‘backbiting’, ‘tale-bearing’, and ‘derision’). As the Book of Proverbs has it, which Aquinas quotes at this point, ‘A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches’. The weakness of so much writing on ethics in the past century has been a tendency to make it about difficult problems that are so rare that it’s usually other people who face them. The niggling, awkward glory of the virtue tradition is that it lands squarely in the middle of life, for instance in being just – simply fair – in what we next type on Twitter.

Article

Christmas culture

Creed

Middle East

Royalty

13 December 2024

6 min read

Magi: where did the wise men come from?

The origin story of the Middle East's ancient king makers.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

An arts and crafts image of the three kings adoring the new born Christ.

The Adoration of the Magi.

Edward Burne-Jones, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

You’ve probably heard they weren’t really kings, but the wise men or magi had some impressive royal connections. Far from being one-off royal visitors to the infant Jesus, the magi had a long history of involvement with monarchy, crossing paths with illustrious kings including Cyrus the Great of Persia, Alexander the Great and the Roman Emperor Nero.

Originally a tribe of the Medes who lived in Northern Iran 600 years before Jesus’ birth, the Persian magi were hereditary priests. Writing around 425BCE, Greek historian Herodotus tells us how these magi became known throughout the ancient Middle East for their ability to interpret dreams and knowledge of the stars. They were followers of the Zoroastrian religion, and were responsible for the holy fires central to Zoroastrian worship.

To the Greeks, the Zoroastrians and the magi were exotic objects of fascination. Many later Greek written philosophical and occult works claimed Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) as their author. Much like some twentieth century Western conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the Greek and Roman conceptions of Persian religion often had only a passing resemblance to the original. This may have included the "mystery cult" of Mithras that would become popular throughout the Roman Empire in the first century. This also means that references to 'magi' may not refer to the Persian magi, but to other astrologers or dream interpreters who lived to the east of the Mediterranean.

A hundred years before Herodotus, we find the first mention of magi in the bible, in the Book of Daniel. This was the period of Jewish exile and captivity in Babylon. Jehoikim, King of Judea and descendent of Kings David and Solomon, was defeated in battle and killed by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed, and many Judean nobles were taken as prisoners. Daniel was one of these hostages and is taken to the Babylonian court, where God gives him the ability to interpret the king’s dreams. Impressed by his abilities, Nebuchadnezzar puts Daniel in charge over all his wise men. It’s unclear what relationship these Babylonian ‘magi’ had with the Medean ones, but strong Medean influence on the Babylonian court suggests that the Babylonian wise men could well have included Zoroastrian magi.

Daniel remained in the Babylonian court, until the Babylonians were invaded by Cyrus the Great, who allowed the Jews to return from exile and to begin restoring Jerusalem.

Cyrus' Persian Empire lasted for two hundred years, until it was invaded by Alexander the Great and his army in 331BCE. Alexander sought the advice of magi, but had many of them violently killed and extinguished their holy fires when he razed the Persian capital, Persepolis in revenge for the Persian destruction of the Acropolis by Xerxes 150 years earlier. Alexander’s Greek successors were characterised by bloody rivalries and in-fighting and were later overthrown by the Parthian empire, which would become Rome’s most formidable rival to the east. The magi consolidated their king-making reputation during the Parthian period, with a council of magi (the Megistanes) responsible for choosing Parthian kings.

The knowledge they have is broken, it’s a messy blend of wacky occultism, astronomy, maths topped up with an unhealthy obsession with royalty. The knowledge we have is broken too.

By Jesus' day, there were ‘magi’ throughout the Middle East, and it was in this context that Roman historian Pliny the Elder records the journey of Armenian magi to visit Emperor Nero in 66CE. By this time Parthia and Rome were a century into their protracted struggle and had just fought a five-year war over the Armenian succession. Despite suffering a humiliating defeat, Rome saved some face through a very one-sided treaty that had Parthia choose the next Armenian king, but with the Roman Emperor getting to place the crown on his head! Nero turned this to his advantage by having the new King Tridates I come to Rome to receive his crown. Tridates, who was a Zoroastrian priest as well as a king, came with a huge retinue including other magi and thousands of horsemen to receive his crown. The huge procession culminated in the magi king bowing before the emperor and acknowledging him as his god.

The visit of the Armenian magi has clear resonances with the familiar account of magi visiting the infant Jesus found in Matthew’s gospel. Given the many embellishments added to the magi story over the centuries, it's hardly surprising that some have suggested that the magi story was a fabrication and a remixed version of King Tridates’ visit to Emperor Nero. It’s a compelling theory, but I’m not convinced by this. If magi were stock characters in the ancient near east, and were also really interested in monarchs (who were often also treated as gods), then it wouldn’t be that surprising that there’d be more than one royal magi visit with emotionally charged religious overtones. What makes a fabricated magi story less likely to me is what the gospel writer Matthew’s Jewish audience would have thought of the magi. Although the Greeks and Romans were enthusiastic about foreign gods and exotic wisdom, first century Jews were not. To them and to early Christians, the magi would have been charlatans and followers of a false foreign god. A visit from some foreign astrologers would have been an embarrassment rather than the type of story you'd choose to make up.

So, who were the magi in Matthew's gospel? The two dominant theories have been that they were either Persian or else they were a later fiction. More fanciful theories include origins in India, China and even Mongolia. Another perhaps more realistic possibility, convincingly argued by Fr Dwight Longernecker in The Mystery of the Magi is that the magi were from the Arabian kingdom of Nabatea. The Nabateans were known for using irrigation to farm the desert and for controlling the trade routes across the Arabian desert. Two cash crops in which Nabatea dominated trade were frankincense and myrrh. The wealth generated from this lucrative trade was used to build Petra, the world-famous valley city of rock-face monuments. The Nabateans had close connections with Israel and may have been familiar with the prophecies of Daniel and Isaiah. They would also have been interested in the Judean monarchy and would have been natural visitors to the paranoid king Herod. Herod's mother was a Nabatean princess and the Nabatean king Aretas IV needed to shore up favour with Herod so the Nabateans would have had an interest in any new King of the Jews.

Barring some improbable Indiana Jones style archaeological discoveries, we’ll never know for sure who the wise men from the east were. But to me there’s something deeply fascinating about these mysterious visitors to the infant Jesus. Partly they seem to represent higher things – with their wisdom and wealth correctly put in divine service. It can seem as though their excellent learning and astronomical skills have cracked a cosmic puzzle, with the magi following the star and dodging a despot to find the baby at the end of the treasure hunt. This doesn’t hold up - the magi’s knowledge isn’t the object of wonder. The knowledge they have is broken, it’s a messy blend of wacky occultism, astronomy, maths topped up with an unhealthy obsession with royalty. The knowledge we have is broken too. But God uses the foolish things to confound the wise, and inside the crackpot mess of horoscopes and divination, God leaves the magi an invitation. To accept the invitation is to take a risk – to risk the long journey, the wrath of Herod and even to risk being wrong. But as they accept this invitation, they realise its an invitation to meet God Himself.