Cooperation in evil and Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of justice

AdobeStock_144823529.jpeg

We’re presenting a short series of abstracts of the work-in-progress our scholars presented and discussed at their June 2017 Working Group Meeting.

Kevin Flannery, S.J., is Professor of the History of Ancient Philosophy, Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

As the participants in our seminar may recall, I am writing a book on the ethics of cooperation in evil. At an earlier meeting of the seminar, I discussed some of the problems contained in the treatment of such cooperation as found in the manuals of Catholic moral theology of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. On that occasion, I expressed agreement with Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism of that tradition as vitiated by what she calls “Cartesian psychology,” according to which “an intention was an interior act of the mind which could be produced at will.” I also expressed then a preference for an analysis in terms rather of Thomas’s Aquinas’s understanding of the moral virtue of justice. In my presentation, I would like describe how I understand this virtue and how it helps us to determine when a person’s—or indeed an institution’s or a government’s—cooperation is immoral. This will involve an explanation of how justice, according to Thomas, stands in relation to the other virtues, especially prudence. It will also involve an account of how justice, which is a virtue of the will, bears upon the consciences of individuals.

“Justice is quickly eroded if one is too cowardly to hold firmly to the ideals that are central to a just society” | Interview with Jean Porter

WGM_151215_0827
Jean Porter is a scholar with the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life, pictured here at our first working group meeting in December 2015.

Moral theologian Jean Porter (University of Notre Dame) will give the talk “What should we fear? Courage and cowardice in public life” on Monday, June 5, 2017 at 7pm in the Swift Hall 3rd Floor Lecture Hall at the University of Chicago. An audience Q & A will be followed by a reception in the Swift Hall Common Room. This talk is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

The talk and Q&A will be live-streamed at 7pm central time. For more information and to RSVP, go to https://virtue.uchicago.edu/porter

Amichai Amit is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Chicago and a graduate assistant for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.



Amichai Amit: Courage is often considered a virtue most pertinent to times of crises and especially to actual battle. What is the importance of courage in day-to-day public life? 
Jean Porter: You are quite right, and Aquinas would in fact agree with this, with some qualifications.  Courage is the virtue through which someone firmly holds onto rational and spiritual values in the face of danger, especially the danger of death. As such, it is clearly exemplified by the willingness to face death on the battlefield in defense of the common good. It might seem that courage has little relevance to our day to day lives, which are so safe and secure. And yet, on reflection, how safe are we, and even more to the point, how safe do we feel? In my talk, I focus especially on public attitudes towards the threat of terrorism, and I argue that we are challenged to hold onto certain ideals — equality, tolerance, respect for rule of law — even in the face of potentially lethal attacks. You might say that in certain ways, we are a society in crisis, although it is hard to say whether at this point this crisis reflects actual dangers, or stems from our perceptions of the world.
AA: Is there any difference between courage in the private realm and courage in public life?
JP: The differences would be circumstantial.  Actually, in my talk I will focus on the courage of the community as such, acknowledging that courage at this level is dependent on the courage of many individuals, but assuming nonetheless that it makes sense to speak of a community or a nation as courageous. the parade example would be the courage of the British people during the Blitz, and I claim that the American people displayed courage in the immediate retractions to the 9/11 attacks.
AA: One may think that in a well-ordered society, one in which law and bureaucracy are in good order, courage is required only in times of crises and when the social and legal systems falter. What do you think about this view? 
JP: I think it is critically important for any large-scale, complex society to have a legal system and bureaucratic structures in good working order. These are not only requirements for efficient functioning, they are also the institutional embodiments of ideals of equality and freedom. To put this in medieval terms, they are the preconditions for political rule, in contrast to a kind of dominion that reduces subjects to a servile statues.  that being said, however, formal structures are not enough — they must also be defended and interpreted by individuals who are committed to the rules precisely as embodiments of  moral ideals, and are committed to interpreting them accordingly. Recent experience clearly indicates that formal structures, to say nothing of tacit norms of civility and discourse, are no match for malice and stupidity.
AA: (In relation to the previous question): What are the relation between justice and courage?
JP:  Like all good Thomists, I affirm the connection of the virtues, and therefore believe that true courage presupposes a disposition towards justice. Perhaps more to the point, justice is quickly eroded if one is too cowardly to hold firmly to the ideals that are central to a just society. Again, I think our experience confirms this.
AA: Do you think courage is a virtue especially needed in contemporary public life? Are there any characteristics of our times that render courage more crucial than in past times? 

JP:  I don’t know that I would say it is more necessary, but we are perhaps faced with a distinctive set of challenges. The dangers that we face are in one sense ongoing, but they tend to be expressed in episodic bursts of violence, rather than through continued onslaughts.  This situation encourages either paranoia or complacency, and we see both in public life.
Adobe Spark(1)
AA: Aristotle defined courage as the mean between rashness and cowardice. Your talk focuses on courage and cowardice, but not rashness. Do you think rashness is less crucial when it comes to the public sphere? 

JP:  Actually, I do talk about recklessness, which I argue only makes fear worse in the long run.

For more information and to RSVP for “What should we fear? Courage and cowardice in public life,” go to https://virtue.uchicago.edu/porter

The Job of Saints: Joan of Arc, 604 Years On

 

Joan of Arc in Wellington church, New Zealand
Joan of Arc in Wellington church, New Zealand

This week marks the birthday of St. Joan of Arc, a devout farm girl born more than 600 years ago whose virtues of faith, chastity, and courage helped make her one of the patron saints of France, and of soldiers in the trenches of World War One. We know her birthday—January 6—more accurately than we do the exact year of her birth, which was somewhere around 1412. (Joan testified at her trial that she believed herself to be 19 years old.) People from her village who knew her remembered her being born on Epiphany, the holiday that celebrates the moment when the Magi finally find the Christ Child they have been seeking.

 

Joan would have been an extraordinary person in any era, but in 15th century France, she was nothing short of mythic. Three years after she was born, Henry V achieved his decisive victory at Agincourt, and from then on England occupied France in earnest. The effect on the country was devastating, with some sources saying that this occupation reduced France’s population by as much as half. A story foretold that France would be lost by a woman and saved by a woman, or in other versions, that France would be lost by a fallen woman and saved by a virgin from the forests of Lorraine. Many of Joan’s contemporaries thought the Dauphin’s mother, reputed to have gotten her son from her husband the King’s brother, was the fallen woman who had lost France by signing away her son’s kingdom. Sometime in her teens, Joan came to believe that she was the Maid who would get it back.

 

Joan began hearing the voices of three particular saints when she was 13. They belonged to Michael the Archangel, Catharine of Alexandria, and Margaret of Antioch, and according to Marina Warner’s Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (UC Press 1981), they express her mission perfectly. St. Michael, leader of the armies of heaven, was the emblem of French resistance to English rule, whose image was painted on the standards of the Dauphin’s soldiers. St. Catharine confounded the scholars of the Emperor Maximus with her wisdom, spurned his marriage proposal, and was beheaded for her faith, becoming the protector of unmarried women and philosophers, as well as the patron saint of Maxey, the village nearest Joan’s own Domremy. St. Margaret, the patron saint of mothers and childbirth, also refused to marry, entered a monastery disguised in men’s clothes, and once leapt off a high building to preserve her chastity. She was later eaten by a dragon and disgorged miraculously unharmed (though she was eventually beheaded). All three saints carry swords; all three also prefigure things Joan would do before her death (though the dragon story ends differently for her, alas).

Statue of Joan of Arc. Domremy is her born town.
Statue of Joan of Arc in Domremy, her birth town.

By the time Joan turned 16, she was badgering the local garrison commander for an escort to take her to the court of the disinherited Dauphin of France, the future Charles VII, whose claim to the throne had been invalidated by his mother’s treaty with the English. At the garrison and later at court, Joan’s persistence, prophetic abilities, and courage convinced everyone she met that she was sent by God. Charles believed her–reportedly because she told him the contents of a prayer he had once made in private–and granted her an army. Joan dressed as a man for the remaining years of her short life, and never married or took a lover. The soldiers who fought and slept by her side considered her a holy being, beyond earthly forms of love or sexual attraction, and claimed to lose all desire around her. They respected her devotion and insistence that they confess and hear Mass daily, and her piety helped further convince them of the justness of their holy cause.

 

As proof of this, and although she had no prior military experience, Joan defeated the English at Orleans and crowned Charles King. At one point she was even shot in the chest with an arrow, yet bravely fought on. Charles became more interested in treaties than battles, however, and when an impatient Joan led troops into Compiegne without his support, she was captured by the Burgundians. Like her beloved St. Margaret, Joan is said to have leapt from a tower in an attempt to escape her captors, in this case the 70-foot tower of Beaurevoir Castle, but she was recaptured. Unwilling to pay her ransom, Charles allowed her to be sold to the English, who desired her execution and thus immediately put her on trial for heresy.

 

The record of Joan’s trial is one of the most detailed trial records of the Middle Ages, providing a rare example of a genuine voice from the era. While most trials exist in one copy, if at all, there are dozens of copies of Joan’s (The Trial of Joan of Arc, Trans. Daniel Hobbins, Harvard UP 2005). Joan was already a celebrity by the time she was captured, and it is thought that the many copies of the transcripts were intended for widespread distribution after the trial in order to justify its unjust outcome. These efforts indicate a great deal of anxiety, stemming no doubt from certain knowledge that these proceedings were largely political rather than spiritual in nature.

 

As a result, we have a record in multiple copies of a brave, belligerent, and surprisingly canny voice. At one point, when asked for information about the voices of her saints, Joan blatantly refuses to answer her inquisitors: “I’ll answer you no further about that. I’ll gladly answer where I have leave to speak.” Another time, plainly impatient at being asked the same questions over and over about how she knows her voices are from God, she answers: “I’ve told you often enough that they are Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret; believe me if you wish.”

 

Imagine a 19 year-old young woman, captured in battle, exhausted from the hardships of prison and going days without food, standing before military and church authorities, all men, who question her relentlessly over and over, day after day. Marvel at her poised and self-contained answers. She doesn’t care what they think. She feels no urgency to defend herself, or explain her motivations. In one famous instance, she startles her Inquisitors when they demand to know whether she is in God’s grace, a trick question meant to have her fall into heresy: “If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God so keep me.” It was a brilliant answer, since Church doctrine held that no one could be sure of God’s grace, and Joan neatly sidesteps it, convincing many then and later that her inspiration was Divine. Its tone is sure of itself, unrattled, almost nonchalant. This is a person possessed of great faith in herself and her cause, and well as in the guiding forces that brought her to this place.

 

Although the Church had approved her crossdressing while she fought for Charles in battle, after her capture the English settled on Joan’s masculine dress as the crime they would use to execute her. At one point she signed a confession and was spared the stake, but in a final act of courage, she recanted, unwilling to repudiate her voices and spend her life in prison, where she feared sexual assault. Burned alive in 1431, she was celebrated publicly in France within two years of her death, and the religious plays that sprung up in her honor quickly became official sites of pilgrimage. 22 years after her martyrdom the English were expelled from most of France, and in 25, she was completely exonerated, well within what might have been her lifetime.

Antwerp - Saint Joan of Arc judgment in the cathedral
Antwerp – Saint Joan of Arc’s judgment in the cathedral

Joan had become a popular romantic figure by the nineteenth century, and a symbol of French nationalism by the twentieth. Her beatification in 1909, on the eve of the Great War, made her even more accessible as a personification of French courage when that war began, and by 1916, she had become a symbol of both the French and English soldiers fighting together in the trenches against Germany. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1916 film Joan the Woman, she is a knight whose self-transcendence makes her a great warrior, a figure of both sacrifice and brave aggression. In 1920 she was canonized a saint, and 100,000 British subjects celebrated at Westminster Cathedral. In his 1924 play Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw sees her as very like the young soldiers treated as cannon fodder by the military commanders of the Great War, a figure of forthright goodness crushed by the corrupt institutional and political machinations of old men.

 

In her speculative biography Saint Joan of Arc (Doubleday 1991 [1936]), Vita Sackville-West writes of Joan’s mother, “It was by no fault of Isabelle Romee, if, instead of a chicken, she had hatched an eagle.” Sackville-West seems pleased that unlike some other saints, Joan never used expressions like “my heavenly Spouse,” or “my Betrothed.” She writes: “I think that possibly she had no need thus to sublimate her earthly desires in this pseudo-sexual fashion, since she found her outlet in her ardent devotion to the Dauphin and to the cause of France. She is the least sentimental of saints, and the most practical . . .She is too heroic and bracing to appeal intimately to the average mind. She makes the mistake of being always something over life-size; something which, however much she may command admiration and respect, can never be loved in quite the same personal way as the more human saints.”

 

Here Sackville-West humorously inverts virtue to change our perspective on the nature of saints. Instead of beginning with Joan’s superhuman qualities, Sackville-West accuses her of missing the mark, of “making a mistake” in being too heroic and not small and human enough to love in a “personal way.” But of course, as this makes us realize, saints are not about the personal at all, but about magnificently impersonal things like justice and the greater good. Saints are little girls who strive to be more than human, who cultivate the will to defy convention, the courage to accost powerful men, and the vision to oppose crushing political orders. In the end Joan fascinates us because she decides to be something more than merely human, choosing to be burnt alive rather than spend her life in prison, or betray her faith and go against her moral principles. It may be that the job of saints is to model something greater than human frailty. It may be that the job of saints is to make us marvel at, and emulate, the courage of eagles.

 


 

Jaime Hovey is Associate Program Director for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.