We are going through Luke in adult Sunday School and last week we were in Chapter 6. We had some fruitful discussion on the interplay of justice and mercy. Sometimes being merciful to one means being unjust to another. Yet we are commanded to exceed justice by being merciful. I mentioned that CS Lewis had discussed this distinction between giving up our personal rights and the rights of the community, which are not ours to give. A woman in the class who is familiar with much of Lewis asked where she might best find that. I thought for a bit and was going to suggest Mere Christianity, and I would get back to her on the section, and some of the essays in God In The Dock.
I decided it would be better to contemplate the various episodes in the Chronicles of Narnia where these two approaches are illustrated, rather than relying on absorbing the abstract principle. I think the conflict between the two comes up in every book. Someone should write a book about it, or at least a long essay. Justice and Mercy in Narnia.
7 comments:
And the sci-fi trilogy?
My first thought is that those are much more about justice. It's worth thinking about, isn't it? I should think about the other fiction - GD, SL, TWHF - one at a time because Lewis will often address paradox, but those also seem to be First Justice, Then Mercy. It may be why I have absorbed that abstract so thoroughly.
It certainly rhymes with the essay "“Dangers of National Repentance” which ended up in the book "God in the Dock"
What comes to mind is the scene in Perelandra where the unman is using Weston's ghost to try to get mercy from Ransom
Which, now that I think of it, may echo Saul/Agag and Ahab/Benhadad interactions.
I don't know enough to discuss Justice and Mercy in Narnia; but Aquinas mangles Aristotle a bit on the point. Mercy is appropriate for pitying undeserved evils in Aristotle, but not ones that are deserved via evils of one's own. Too, almost all of the quotes Aquinas musters from Aristotle are from the Rhetoric, which as I was just today discussing are about enthymemes rather than strictly logical arguments.
For Aquinas, however, mercy is sometimes but not always a real virtue. He writes: "I answer that, Mercy signifies grief for another's distress. Now this grief may denote, in one way, a movement of the sensitive appetite, in which case mercy is not a virtue but a passion; whereas, in another way, it may denote a movement of the intellective appetite, in as much as one person's evil is displeasing to another. This movement may be ruled in accordance with reason, and in accordance with this movement regulated by reason, the movement of the lower appetite may be regulated. Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei ix, 5) that "this movement of the mind" (viz. mercy) "obeys the reason, when mercy is vouchsafed in such a way that justice is safeguarded, whether we give to the needy or forgive the repentant." And since it is essential to human virtue that the movements of the soul should be regulated by reason, as was shown above (I-II:59:4 and I-II:59:5), it follows that mercy is a virtue."
Emphasis added. So it depends on what is motivating the mercy; do you just feel sorry for them, or did you have a good reason?
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3030.htm
I think that is a good distinction both individually and collectively. Is it puppies and kitties, or is there some larger good hoped for?
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