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Virtues

3 March 2023

6 min read

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.

The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.