Justice AND Mercy

Mercy Sakes! part 3

The Count of Monte Cristo wreaks upon his wrongdoers the perfection of retribution. For the betrayer who was cowardly, "afraid to challenge Dantes for Mercedes love directly," the Count "orchestrates a public accusation of treason," exposes his "claims to honorable military service as false. His wife and son then desert the deserter." For the one who was acting from greed, the Count "turns his own scheme of trading on public secrets against him, bankrupting him and publicly humiliating him." He is then "captured by greedy bandits at [the Count’s] instigation, and suffers near starvation and extortion" because of their greed. For the one who just went along with the other two because it would let him blackmail them later, the Count "turns his own blackmail against him." For the compassionless prosecutor whose own ambition led him to prosecute the case against Dantes though he knew to be ill-founded, the Count "arranges a public exposure of the crimes he... committed to achieve his position."

The reader is drawn in, attracted by the Count’s ingenuity, and delighted at the perfection of justice that is rendered. "The plunderer is plundered, the traitor betrayed, the blackmailer blackmailed, and the ambitious deposed by ambition". The Count himself gains nothing from all this. He spends down most of his fortune on it. "He does not even bother to clear his true name in public – even in the end when his revenge is complete." Nothing sullies the purity of the retributive justice.

Notice that what we’re seeing is not the carrying out of a private vendetta. It "is the very opposite of a private vendetta discharged by discreet duel or shadowy murder." The Count "transcends the personal;" his punishments are highly public. He is not merely a vengeful victim of wrong. He "plays the part of Providence [itself] – absolute justice come to earth." And the fear his betrayers feel as their downfall unfolds is a fear "not of Dantes, but of God" – for Dantes' reappearance after many years as a wealthy Count is so improbable that they can only think it a form of divine retribution.

"Each sees his own fate, his own life as under the power of a higher order and a higher justice. Each understands his punishment as just and deserved, and each has the opportunity to repent....Chaos is abolished; cosmos is reestablished." Yet even this most perfect justice, as art and not life can render it, goes astray. Alexander Dumas is too good an artist not to notice the difficulties inherent in even the most perfect of retributions.

The Count, after all, "is not omniscient nor omnipotent." The innocent suffer along with the guilty – family members of the betrayers also fall, though they had done no wrong. The cosmic scales are left as imbalanced as before – merely differently imbalanced. "Neither rewards nor punishments can be confined to their targets." Dantes is left to wonder toward the end of the book whether "perhaps God is not on his side" after all.

Dantes' quest "for a perfectly rational, perfectly fair, perfectly meaningful universe" in the end fails – because neither we nor our world is perfect. Justice cannot be the kind of thing that Dantes thought he was accomplishing. The problem is not that we humans, in our finitude and frailty, fail to achieve the ideal. The problem is that this ideal isn’t one we should ever really want.

We are thrown into this world to be with one another. And we mess up. All the time. Some of us will mess up in ways that are criminal – even felonious -- and all of us will mess up in ways that are rude, inconsiderate, less than fully respectful. This much of the traditional Christian doctrine of sin is true: we make mistakes, including moral mistakes. I don't think those mistakes are result from an inherently sinful nature. They result from being highly social organisms that: (a) must balance competing needs, including social needs; (b) are not always skillful at effectively balancing these needs, and (c) are built to learn through experimentation and the inevitable error that goes with it.

It is community, it is being-with, that is the only context of our wrongs and our only strength and our only salvation from those wrongs. It is in re-connection that the hope of wholeness lies. There is no ultimate rationality that can explain "why bad things happen to good people." Our maturity lies in the extent to which we can embrace the uncertainty and mystery that come with being finite, rather than seeking to resolve it all into retribution for wrong.

Dantes has made himself into something inhuman in the precision and perfection of his vision of justice. He loses kindness. He loses capacity to trust. He "loses his pride and his dignity." He sought to embody Providence, and indeed became as impassive and unfeeling as fate. Retribution "does not heal, it cauterizes."

So yes, we really need significant expansion in those alternatives to retribution I mentioned. This doesn’t mean the end of punishment. It means the reconceiving of punishment, such as Linda Ross Meyer does: "punishment is the shared memory of a wrong as wrong" (87). Wrong-doing affects the whole community, and we need structures that will allow and facilitate those offenders that are able to recognize that their greatest need is reconnection and restoration not just of the victim but of the community – to enact a humble penance of restoration.

This is a view of justice in which the very limitations that make perfect retributive justice impossible – our finitude, our inability to know all the effects of a given action or even to know all the actual actions -- are not our corruption, our unfortunate weakness. They are our humanity itself. It is boon not bane that we need each other to heal together. We are in continual need of mercy, of forgiving ourselves and each other, beginning again in love. In this capacity for re-beginning is both justice AND mercy. While impassive balance and order is neither possible nor particularly healing, our capacity to forgive and begin again is both.

This grace is free -- but, as the saying goes, not cheap. "We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love" is not a performative utterance. It may be a start, but more than saying it is required to make it so. A process of truth and reconciliation is necessary -- a process that, depending on the nature of the offense and the injury, may be difficult and even harrowing. This is the path of healing. If we seek justice that heals -- rather than merely, at best, cauterizing -- we must step into the abode where mercy is not "the madwoman in the attic" (11), but rather "the lady of the house" (44).

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Quotations in this post are from Linda Ross Meyer, The Justice of Mercy. Unless otherwise indicated, they are from pp. 165-175.
This is part 3 of 3 of "Mercy Sakes!"
See also
Part 1: Mercy v. Justice
Part 2: Sin v. Disconnection

Related
What Is Mercy?
Just Mercy

Sin v. Disconnection

Mercy Sakes! part 2

I once heard my colleague, Rev. Scott Tayler, UU minister now on the UUA denominational staff in Boston ("Director of Congregational Life"), tell the story of growing up with a father who was a traditional old-line Methodist minister. His Dad, he said, saw the world through the lens of sin. When he picked up the morning paper and read about what newspapers report about – crimes, scandals, wrong-doing, things going awry – he saw this all as manifestations of a basic sinful nature. Scott saw sadness and grief as clearly as his father did, he said. But rather than seeing it through the lens of sin, he saw it in terms of disconnection.

Too many of us are not connected in loving, caring relationships of respect. There are so many of us alienated, despairing, isolated, ungrounded, that all of us are to some degree affected by this anomie. Sometimes we’re scared. Sometimes our fear makes us angry and prone to behave in ways that just worsen the disconnection. But what we aren’t is corrupted in our soul. As Unitarians and others of liberal faith, we have no use for that old language of about inherently sinful nature.

We understand that the Calvinistic "total depravity" bit was a strategy for facilitating humility – curbing the arrogance of thinking we’re powerful enough and good enough to be in control. We get that. But there are other ways to get to humility, other paths to letting go of the illusion of control. So, this is us. We of liberal faith, while also seeking humility, letting go, and letting be, prefer the road that goes through "inherent worth and dignity" rather than the one that goes through "total depravity." We see the world's wounding as failure of connection rather than as sinful human nature; as failures to sustain contexts of nurturing relationships of care and accountability rather than as manifestations of inner corruption.

Broader culture still carries the residues of a notion of justice as something in the course of which none of us should see salvation. That notion makes mercy into something that has to intervene occasionally just so some of us can get on with our lives without having to be continually punished. This mercy is, as Portia said, not strained – not constrained by any rules or even guidelines. On that view of mercy, then, mercy is random -- without rhyme or reason.

The ideal of justice is to be fair and rational and treat like cases alike by having set, fair, transparent procedures. Mercy makes a hash of that aspiration. Mercy, being unconstrained, has no rules, no fairness. Her methods are opaque, her outcomes wildly variable. Mercy is "the madwoman in the attic" of the house of justice (Linda Ross Meyer, The Justice of Mercy) .

But that’s because we’ve been thinking about justice all wrong. Our system of justice still is primarily retributive. It’s a carry-over from two thousand years of theology of sin. According to the theology of sin, the only thing to do with sin is subject it to torment. In a few random cases it can be forgiven, cleansed, and expunged; otherwise, the bearers of sin can only be tortured forever. On the retributive model of justice, the only thing to do with wrong-doing is subject it to forms of pain and sacrifice. The guilty cannot be rehabilitated, corrected; belongingness in community cannot be restored, and therefore healing and meaning can never recur.

Today, there are alternatives being tried in limited ways in a few jurisdictions: there’s community mediation, victim-offender mediation, alternative sentencing, and restorative justice. We don’t have to be stuck in a retributive model. If we see wrong-doing as a product of disconnection rather than as a product of sin, then we'd want our justice system to restore connection, restore belonging.

By setting up Mercy and Justice as opposed to each other, we get neither. By seeing Mercy as the imposition of irrationality, we blind ourselves to the irrationality of our conception of Justice. For instance, we get mandatory sentencing, in the name of removing the unfairness of judicial discretion. But all we did was shift all the discretion to the prosecutor who decides whether to prosecute at all, and what plea-bargaining to offer.

Moreover, mandatory sentencing forces meaningfully different cases to be treated alike. The ideal of justice is: Treat like cases alike. With mandatory sentencing, we forgot that treating different cases alike is just as unjust as treating like cases differently.

One way to look at the fundamental wrongness of retributive justice is to imagine it at its most ideal. The real world is always messy, always has complications. The real world is never ideal. To see an ideal, we'd have to look to art rather than life. Alexander Dumas' 1844 novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, provides us with such an ideal.

Edmond Dantes, a valiant and honest young sailor, is betrayed by people he thought were his friends. One of them fears Dantes promotion to captain would put an end to his embezzling. Another wants to stop Dantes marriage so that he can woo Dantes’ fiancée. They fabricate false charges, and Dantes is thrown in prison. In prison, he meets another prisoner, who has an escape plan, and a map to an immense treasure -- but is dying. He gives the map to Dantes, tells him how can escape, and then dies. Dantes gets out, finds the treasure, assumes a new identity as the Count of Monte Cristo, and sets about tracking down his betrayers and plotting their undoing.

The Count of Monte Cristo sees himself as an avenging angel of Providence. He is the means by which God will restore the balance of right and wrong. At one point he declares his desire “to be Providence, because the thing that I know which is finest, greatest and most sublime in the world is to reward and punish.” Expense is no object as he is in possession of a fortune. And he takes his time working out the perfect form of revenge. He goes to great lengths to bring out the “natural” consequences of the evil character of his betrayers. He makes them in effect, live by their own law. The punishments he wreaks epitomize classic retributive justice.

Yet even perfected, retribution comes with a heavy cost.

Next: Costs of retributive justice.

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The account of The Count of Monte Cristo is adapted from Linda Ross Meyer, The Justice of Mercy, pp. 162-177. This is part 2 of 3 of "Mercy Sakes!"
See also
Part 1: Mercy v. Justice
Part 3: Justice AND Mercy

Related
What Is Mercy?
Just Mercy

Mercy v. Justice

Mercy Sakes! part 1

Mercy. It seems to be a species of compassion -- especially that compassion represented in forbearing from punishment, leniency, or forgiveness. Since it is unearned, it also overlaps substantially with grace.

One thing that uniquely emerges with mercy – that isn’t indicated in compassion or forgiveness or grace -- is the challenging relationship it has with justice. If justice is treating like cases alike – following rules about what sort of crime warrants what punishment, and applying those rules fairly and equally, then mercy looks like deciding to be unjust. If the judge is merciful to one convicted defendant but not others, that’s not fair. And if the judge is merciful to all of them, then that’s not mercy – it’s just that judge’s rules of procedure.

Mercy has not been a great focus of attention among Unitarian Universalists, but justice is. In the seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations covenant to affirm and promote, justice is the only word – other than articles, conjunctions, and prepositions – that appears twice. It’s in the second principle: “Justice, equity, and compassion in human relationships.” And it’s in the sixth principle: “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” Justice is big for us. So if there’s something called mercy that is at odds with justice, we need to look at that. We need understand how this mercy-justice relationship works, and begin to integrate that into how we are in the world.

St. Anselm, the 11th-century theologian and philosopher articulated what appeared to be a problem for imagining God to be both just and merciful:

“But how canst thou spare the wicked if thou art wholly just and supremely just? For how does the wholly and supremely just do something that is not just? We can find no reason to explain why, among men who are equally evil, thou does save some, and not others, through thy supreme goodness, and does condemn the latter, and not the former, through thy supreme justice.”

The issue was dramatized in Shakespeare’s "Merchant of Venice." Antonio offers a pound of his flesh closest his heart as guarantee of a loan. When the loan is not repaid, Shylock claims his pound of flesh. Portia then tells Shylock he must be merciful. Shylock retorts, “On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.” Portia then famously explains,

“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

“Not strained” means we cannot be constrained to be merciful. Mercy can’t be compelled. If it’s compelled, it isn’t mercy. To Shylock's question, on what compulsion must I be merciful? the answer is there's no compulsion. It's not about compulsion.

Justice, on the other hand, IS about compulsion: there are principles of fairness that rightfully do constrain our behavior. On Portia's account, mercy doesn’t work that way. Mercy just happens, the way gentle rain falls on the ground. When it does, it blesses both giver and receiver.

A few lines later, Portia makes the point: “in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.”

Wait. What? None? OK, I think I see our problem here. If justice is understood as that which, strictly adhered to, condemns us all, then we need a new idea of justice. Alas, the idea that we all deserve damnation is our Western heritage. Theologians and priests for centuries emphasized what sinners we are. They gave us a picture of ourselves as fundamentally corrupt at our core. Every one of us is so profoundly, inherently sinful, that if we got what we deserved, we’d all be thrown to the worst punishment we can imagine.

So mercy enters the picture. No one is good enough to deserve going to heaven on their own merits, but some people get in just because of God’s benevolent mercy.

The Church has generally avoided stating precisely how many would receive this grace. (The Jehovah’s Witnesses are an exception. They teach that exactly 144,000 faithful Christians will go to heaven to rule with Christ in the Kingdom of God.) Mostly, only a rough sense of the proportions was indicated. In John Calvin’s theology, for instance, it seems like very few. I get the impression from Calvin that he imagines maybe something around 2 percent of all people will get to heaven. Our forebears, the Universalists, taught that God’s benevolent mercy extends to all -- every person will go to heaven. We get our name, Universalists, from this doctrine of universal salvation. But even the Universalists, for the most part, didn’t think people deserved it, or had earned it. Justice would condemn, but God’s mercy saves. On that point, the Calvinists and the Universalists agreed -- they merely disagreed on how many of us God’s mercy saves.

Through the 20th century, Unitarians and Universalists slowly shed the sense that sin – inner corruption – was humanity’s essential feature. Instead, we began to see human suffering in terms of disconnection: the deprivation (in the lower classes) and alienation (in any class) that accompanies uprootedness from healthy community of care, respect, meaning, and opportunity.

We stand, as ever, in need of justice: not justice as punishment for our wickedness, not justice in the course of which none of us should see salvation, but justice as the construction of fairness in the face of oppressions that undermine community, justice as healing the wounds of separation, justice as the restoration of belonging. We stand, as ever, in need of mercy: not mercy as respite from harsh punishment (though we could use a lot more of that, too), but mercy AS reconnecting justice.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Mercy Sakes!"
See also
Part 2: Sin v. Disconnection
Part 3: Justice AND Mercy

Related
What Is Mercy?
Just Mercy