“If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be last of all and the servant of all.” -Mark 9:35
This challenging verse suggests the great distance in perspective that exists between the Kingdom of God and the work-a-day fallen world that we inhabit with in our lives as lawyers and jurists. The scripture speaks in terms of a mysterious ordering of values in the Kingdom of God whereby our earthly experiences of value are seen as chaotic and inverted.
As lawyers, we are taught early on that, in the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., law is not a mystery. His famous remarks at the ceremony commemorating the opening of the University of Boston, School of Law in 1897, later published in the Harvard Law Review under the title, the Paths of the Law, he stated:
When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession….The object of our study…is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.
As lawyers we live in two orders: one is the order of law, which as Holmes is correct in noting, deals with the power of the State to use force to compel a rough and ready order. The other order is that of the Kingdom of God, in which the love of God, Amore Dei, binds person to person in an enduring community.
I found myself thinking of these tings about two months ago, and thought still lingers with me. I was standing in the hot sun on a hillside about 30 miles outside of Seoul, in South Korea—on the hill side that holds was grave of my father who died about a year ago.
My father was born in what is now South Korea, not long before the Imperial Japanese military began the occupation of that country which lasted throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1939 to 1945. He later was briefly conscripted by the North Korean army during the Korean War. When I was a child my father told my brother and I about these totalitarian regimes.
In particular I remember his stories of various attempts by the Japanese military to extinguish Korean culture, stories that were marked by famine, brutality, and thuggishness. One of the stories that left a great impression on me was about the laws imposed on the Korean people by JirÅ Minami, the Governor General of the occupying Japanese regime. In order to break the Korean spirit, Minami went so far as to use the power of the State to ban the Korean family names. As a child I wondered, how could law, which I had been taught to respect in my grade school civics class, how could law be used to accomplish such a dastardly act? How could it be unlawful to speak or write the name that had been my grandfather’s and his grandfather’s and his? And according to my father, the Japanese military commanded the Korean people to feel honored (yes, “honored”) to replace the names of their ancestors with a foreign Japanese name. Our family took the name Yamato. When I was young, I could not imagine a greater insult than to have one’s own name taken away—one’s identity, and then to be forced to take on the name of one’s oppressor. It was only when I reached college that I learned that there were worse indignities that the Japanese military occupation had perpetrated.
Perhaps it was from being exposed at a young age to my father’s experience of laws gone shamefully wrong that I was led to study Christian political ethics. In my studies I have been particularly moved by the thought of Pope John Paul II who, like my father, had struggled with early twentieth century totalitarianism. When he was still a boy living alone with his father in a small Polish town, long before the dark years of Nazi and Soviet occupation that would come later. Like my father, he too knew brutal occupying armies, and witnessed the attempt to destroy a great culture. But, his understanding of politics and law was different from anything else I encountered because it was rooted in an appreciation of the dignity of the person—the respect for each person’s lived experience of moral truth, the human drive for community, and the unity of truth and moral meaning. It was these insights that he used as weapons against the Soviet Union, eventually contributing to its downfall.
Our role as judges and legislators and lawyers and teachers is to safeguard the law. In particular, we need to ask questions about the method of legal analysis and that pastiche of mental practices that are referred to (often in nearly sacred tones) as “thinking like a lawyer.” We need to think like lawyers, no doubt, but we also need to think for ourselves as human beings fully engaged in the moral life. And that means having an endless internal conversation through which we can strive to know the truth about ourselves and the world of which we are a part. Taking up the challenge of striving after the truth might mean leaving behind the methods of legal reasoning, at least long enough to question the limits and foundational assumptions of the law. It has been my hope to teach my students about the insights from the generation that experienced the bloodiest century in human history, the twentieth century, in the words of thinkers like John Paul II. The experience of totalitarianism, and the legacy of insights into the possibilities for politics and law, must be incorporated into legal education so that future generations may not know the extreme brutality of laws gone wildly awry. And it is with hope, then, that we turn to a few guiding images that might be reminders of the importance of our work.
The first guide is the image of the Body. The human body is with us right from the being and calls us to the end. It is present in broad-shouldered earthiness when God’s fashioning of Eve from Adam’s rib. It is present in the lashing punishment which human sins—our sins—inflicted on the Lord. It is His Body that is sacrificed anew in the liturgy. And it is the resurrection of the Body which is the promise of salvation.
As a Christian symbol, the image of the Body provokes the realization that our existence is not merely physical; the body has meaning that exceeds being a mere vessel for our soul since both the physical and the spiritual are part of our very essence. We are not simply minds for whom the body has no meaning, nor are we merely physical bodies isolated from each other by time and space. Modern legal thought makes both of these errors in different moments.
We are persons—unions of the physical and the spiritual. And so our bodies can remind us of our spiritual meaning—we bear the image of God not in isolation, but when the meaning of embodiment draws us together in communio. It is said that the Catholic concept of Person is extravagant. In pre-Christian thought, and in much of contemporary culture, the person was only a thing among other things, but in the hands of the early theologians of the Church it became a complex symbol for speaking of relation, intimacy, love, and dignity.
It is rightful horror that we feel when we witness distain for the body, for it is ultimately a distain for persons. The profound crisis of culture in our times is largely due to the forgetting of the dignity of the person, particularly when the person is found to have a weakness of the body. The culture has forgotten the lushness of relation and meaning that the Body symbolizes. In the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II observed this devaluation of the body, noting that “A person who, because of illness, handicap, or more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated.” But, “The blood of Christ, while it reveals the grandeur of the Father’s love, shows how precious man is in God’s eyes and how priceless the value of his life.”
A second guiding image is the symbol of community. A community is an organic and living thing made of love and the many details of human life. It has to do with birth and death, with celebration and mourning. It has to do with little moments—the care with which a mother wipes the tears from her child’s eyes, the warm hand of a loved one, the breaking of bread in good fellowship, the consoling a grieving friend, the civility shown in a heated argument—all of which we might call the miracle of the quotidian.
This symbol of community extends the body. It deals with the concrete particulars of giving oneself to another—individual images of dignity, compassion and kindness (what John Paul II called the "hermeneutics of gift") by which community is known and in which it subsists. And for this reason, it is deeply tied to our physical being, because we know the world primarily through concrete experiences that take place in particular settings.
We risk much in forgetting to value the concreteness of community. It was one of the features of twentieth century totalitarian regimes, both Marxist and fascists, that they placed little value on the quotidian, and allowed it to be eclipsed by grand gestures of the State. The power of State action took the place of the gentle kiss of a child on a parent’s cheek as the center of meaning. They forgot that the powerful serve rightly when they serve the mundane, rather than the reverse. Armed with a blueprint for history, the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s sought to crush the meaning out of everyday acts of kindness and virtue by flattening out the ideal of community, and it possible to view the most horrific things as necessary sacrifices for the future order.
By contrast, Catholic thought teaches us to struggle to see the beauty of God’s goodness in the concrete things that call out for attention. It is the everyday delight and wonder in our friends and colleagues, family and neighbor, even in those with whom we disagree that affirms the Goodness of Creation and makes community possible. The symbol of community guides us to make visible the dignity, fullness, and everyday miracle of Creation through which the Holy Spirit whispers God’s intentions.
The third symbol is a dark but necessary one. It is the symbol of innate human sinfulness that is present in the Fall—the journey out of the Garden, which as John Paul II puts it, delimits two “diametrically opposed situations and states: That of Original Innocence and that of Original Sin.” It is in the transition from Innocence to Sin that the human person forgets its interdependence and need for others. We cannot claim that our Catholic faith insulates us from this. The Fall infects us all and at different moments and in different ways we are all unduely prideful. We come to believe our desires should have boundless freedom to express themselves in our lives even as the fabric of life losses it cohesion.
American culture is steeped deeply in this sort of rugged individualism—the blind passion for more that lies like the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s pier in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel the Great Gatsby, and like Gatsby we believe that “if we run a little faster and stretch our arms out a little farther, then one fine day….” Or consider the restless spirit of the American West that Wallace Stegner captures so well in his novel,Big Rock Candy Mountain. Always moving on, always looking for the next gold rush.
We seek, like Justice Kennedy recommended in his opinion in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, to be the principles of our own being—defining our happiness on our own terms. We define our audacity and call it good. Again to quote John Paul, it is not wrong to want to live better. What is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed toward having rather than being, and which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself.” Yet, the harder we work to have more, the harder it becomes to find the substance and unity of a coherent existence. We lose our better selves to pleasures of moment. This symbol of the Fall is a negative compass point that steers us away from the sirens of our consumerist, throw-away culture in which not only the empty promises of advertisements are disposable, but ultimately friendships, loyalties, and even Christ himself are disposable once they are no longer useful. This compass point protects us from falling victim to this fate.
Finally, the forth guiding image. If Original Sin is the south pole of our compass, then this is the North Star. It is the Lordship of Christ, who is the “desire of the Nations.” This symbol can be found in so many moments of Catholic thought, often connect not to politics alone but in eschatological contexts. But, it symbolizes more than a chiliastic order. It is also an entry point into a distinctive perspective on political form that is rooted in the Lordship Christ, finding expression through the Holy Spirit in the consummation of divine providence.
A critical verse for thinking about this symbol can be found in St. Paul’s epistle to Romans, verse 13:4 (referring to the “higher authorities” of Roman rule, St. Paul writes: “But, if you do evil, be afraid, for it [the higher authority] does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer.”) St. Paul suggests that the authority of the government resides essentially in the act of judgment.” All government through all its branches engages in making judgments about what is just for the community. St. Paul appears to teach that the legitimate acts of those who govern are limited to judging evil. Since the competency of Government is constituted by Christ’s Lordship, the Government acts illegitimately when it claims political authority that is contrary to Christ’s reign. As St. Thomas Aquinas puts it, “An unjust law is no law at all.”
There is a substantial difference between the Christian conception of sovereignty and that of modern liberal democracy. Liberal theory holds persons to be bounded together in community by a social contract of some description. By this metaphor, liberal theory intends to understand persons as essentially bound together by interest in an atmosphere of original distrust. But, Christians will view community as owing it existence to Christ’s reign as brought into being through the Holy Spirit. A community is thus bounded together through the reality of love and not a self-made fantasy of self-becoming. St. Paul confirms this writing, “Without caritas everything else, faith, works, is nothing, absolutely nothing. 1 Cor 13: 1-3. For St. Paul, God’s judgment is love, and the earthly political authority acts legitimately when it judges in and through love.
The Lordship of Christ is thus an affirmation that guides us to recognize to embrace the fullness of the Catholic intellectual heritage. At its root, the Christian faith is not a philosophy or a theology, and it is not a moral teaching at all. It was a modern project to attempt to view it as such. Catholic thought is an orientation toward the world that holds foundational beliefs for metaphysics, epistemology, moral theory, and political thought. But even more, it is a way of life—a way of orienting ourselves to the world and to the problems of life. It is not only true in itself, but it is how we can say that our lives are truly lived.
And, this returns us to the theme of living in hope. Despite all of the pain, suffering, self-pride and excessive restlessness, hope abides. Let us be thankful and grateful for all of the blessing that have been given us. For the for the friendships, for the loves, for the families, and especially for the children that have been brought into the world among us. It is the children, with their profound sense of awe and wonder that are our greatest guides to the future because they hold the key to love and hope.
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