V Любовь и справедливость суть одно и то же

Love Is Careful

This is a side of love that businessmen can appreciate, as when a production engineer tries to balance product quality against price in a low-income market; or a personnel manager has to choose between letting an illness-weakened supply clerk keep his job, on the one hand, and on the other, playing fair with line workers whose output and piece-rate pay are being cut down by the clerk's delays. Love as prudence helps a field commander who has to decide whether a platoon or company, or even a regiment, is expendable. And if so, which one. Prudence, careful calculation, gives love the care-fulness it needs; with proper care, love does more than take justice into account, it becomes justice.

When we see love in this way we are forced to pull back from the sentimental and irrational idea that love isn't "intellectual". Luther was speaking of faith when he said, "Whoever wants to be a Christian should gouge out the eyes of reason"¹¹⁹ because reason is "the devil's bride, ... a lovely whore".¹²⁰ Too many Christians think this nonrationality applies to love too. It does not.

Here is precisely the serious difficulty of love. How are its favors to be distributed among so many beneficiaries? We never have one neighbor at a time. How are we to love justice, how are we to be just about love, how are love and justice related? If to love is to seek the neighbor's welfare, and justice is being fair as between neighbors, then how do we put these two things together in our acts, in the situation? The answer is that in the Christian ethic the twain become one. Even if we define justice as giving to others what is their due, we must redefine it Christianly. For what is it that is due to our neighbors? It is love that is due—only love ("Owe no man anything except to love"). Love is justice, justice is love.

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who."

Even "social gospel" moralists have been pietistic about love. Rauschenbusch, speaking of a man's concern for his neighbor, said, "If he loves him, let him love him enough to be just to him".¹²³ How can you love him if you are not just to him? Even if we accept the separation of the two, which we don't, surely "love" would start by being just— as the very least it could do.

A few years ago Sammy Davis, Jr., a popular American entertainer, repudiated his Christian identity and became a Jew. "As I see it", he said, "the difference is that the Christian religion preaches love thy neighbor and the Jewish religion preaches justice, and I think justice is the big thing we need".¹²⁴ Here is the cry of a man who has suffered discrimination, and seen millions of other Negroes suffer, because people separate love and justice.

On this basis they can "love" Negroes while they refuse them simple justice! To paraphrase the classic cry of protest, we can say, "To hell with your love'; we want justice." To understand such a battle cry is to see how pietism and sentimentality have twisted and shortchanged agape.

What untold foolishness and moral purblindness have been caused by the individualizing error of pietism! Tolstoy was one of its staunchest exponents. In the first place, he tried to hold that love is a one-to-one affair, that it wears blinders like a shy horse and has only one neighbor at a time. (The fear that calculation may thin down love's intensity is a "calculated risk" built into its open-range, wide-scope task.) In the second place, he made love a matter of immediate, present neighbor concern with no thought of the morrow, no calculation of future needs. He literalized the Sermon's admonition: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow. . . . Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!" "Future love does not exist," he said. "Love is a present activity only".¹²⁵ A love that casts aside breadth of vision and imaginative foresight in this fashion is ethically crippled. Sad to say, it is not at all rare: the name for it is sentimentality.
A Proposed Reunion
However, the main thing to emphasize is that only a misdirected conscience has to wrestle with the "justice versus love" problem. It is seen to be a pseudoproblem at once when we drop the traditional systematic habit of separating them as "virtues." There is an interesting parallel between the love-justice and faith-works syndromes. Some theologies treat faith-works as faith versus works, some as faith or works, some as faith and works. Christian situation ethics says faith is works, i.e., simply put, that faith works. In the same way various systems of Christian ethics have related love and justice: love versus justice (opposites),¹²⁶ love or justice (alternatives),¹²⁷ love and justice (complements).¹²⁸ We say, however, very positively, that love is justice or that justice loves. They are one and the same. To be loving is to be just, to be just is to be loving.

The tendency to reify, to imagine that predicates are actually properties, is as potent in the case of justice as of love. Psychologically, it becomes easier to separate them into different entities when they are supposed to he something. Nygren with his motif research separated and opposed them, putting justice in eros or self-interest and love in agape or disinterestedness.¹²⁹ So did Denis de Rougemont.¹³⁰ Reinhold Niebuhr separated and made them alternatives, love transcendent and impossible, justice relative and possible.¹³¹ (Rather than saying with Niebuhr that love is ideal and justice is actual, we should be saying that love is maximum justice and justice is optimum love.) Emil Brunner and William Temple have separated them, assigning love to interpersonal relations and justice to intergroup relations. All Catholic moralists separate them, making love a "supernatural" virtue and justice a "natural" one, holding that we must be just in our actions but only may be loving! (The very absurdity of this for a Christian ethic shows that something is seriously wrong here at the outset, for Catholic theologians are the very model of logical system builders.)

Tillich links them in a coalition, a mutual reinforcement. He says that love "is the ground, the power, and the aim of justice," so that "love without justice is a body without a backbone".¹³² He comes fairly close to coalescing them, to making them the same thing. He agrees that love is "the ultimate principle of justice".¹³³ But this is not close enough. He does not say, as we must say, that justice is the "ultimate" principle of love. In like fashion, G. Ernest Wright and Canon Quick say that justice is an aspect of love, inseparable from it, but they are really including one in the other—they are not equating them.¹³⁴ Ramsey once said that "justice may be defined as what Christian love does when confronted by two or more neighbors".¹³⁵ The trouble with this is that love always confronts many neighbors.
Предполагаемое объединение
«Тиллих объединяет их в некую коалицию, взаимно подкрепляющее объединение. Он говорит, что любовь есть «почва, сила и цель справедливости», так что «любовь без справедливости подобна телу без позвоночника».15 Он весьма близок тому, чтобы слить, отождествить их. Он согласен с тем, что любовь есть «конечный (ultimate) принцип справедливости».16 Но этого недостаточно. Он не говорит, как должны сказать мы, что справедливость есть «окончательный» (ultimate) принцип любви. Подобным же образом, Г. Эрнест Райт (G. Ernest Wright) и каноник Куик (Quick) говорят, что справедливость есть один из аспектов любви, неотделимый от нее, но они по сути включают одно в другое – а не приравнивают одно к другому.17 Рамсей (Ramsey) однажды сказал, что «справедливость может быть определена как то, чем занимается христианская любовь, когда имеет дело с двумя или более ближними».18 Беда здесь в том, что любовь всегда имеет дело с многими ближними».
15 The Theology of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 133-145.

16 Love, Power and Justice (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 79.

17 Wright, The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1954), p. 168; O. C. Quick, Christianity and Justice (London: Sheldon Press, 1940), p. 25.

18 Basic Christian Ethics, p. 243.

We need not try to assert some supposed mutual exclusion as between agape and the "happiness" that utilitarians want. All depends upon what we find our happiness in: all ethics are happiness ethics. With hedonists it is one's own pleasure (physical or mental); with neo-Aristotelians it is self-realization; with naturalists it is adjustment, gratification, and survival. Happiness is the pragmatist's satisfaction.¹³⁷ It is "how you get your kicks". The Christian situationist's happiness is in doing God's will as it is expressed in Jesus' Summary. And his utility method sets him to seeking his happiness (pleasure, too, and self-realization!) by seeking his neighbors' good on the widest possible scale.

(Words such as "happiness" and "pleasure" are not definitive. Attempts to systematize ethics always break down at this level. Hedonism, naturalism, utilitarianism— these are really hardly more than epithets. The same holds true of class terms such as "deontological" for formal or duty ethics, said to be concerned with doing the right rather than seeking the good; and "teleological" for goal or aspiration ethics, said to be concerned with realizing the good more and more, not merely obeying a law or rules.¹³⁸ In these conventional terms situation ethics is closer to teleology, no doubt. Yet one's "duty" is to seek the goal of the most love possible in every situation, and one's "goal" is to obey the command to do just that! Our goal is to obey the Summary; our obedience is to serve love's aim and aspiration. Here is double-talk; there is no difference in practice. Calm scrutiny breaks down many of these neat and artificial categories.)

Take the story of the anointing at Bethany.¹³⁹ (John's Gospel uses the episode to attack Judas, but Mark and Matthew let the real issue appear.) The issue is between impetuous, uncalculating, unenlightened sentimental love, in the woman's use of the costly ointment, and a calculating, enlightened love. The disciples say that love must work in coalition with utilitarian distribution, spreading the benefits as much as possible. Jesus is cast into the role of defending Leo Tolstoy's doctrine that love wears blinders, sees only the neighbor there. If we take the story as it stands, Jesus was wrong and the disciples were right. Attempts have been made to excuse Jesus, saying he was trying to comfort the thoughtless but sincere woman, softening the criticism of the bystanders while he actually agreed with them. We do not have to conclude that he ever said anything at all like, "You always have the poor with you".

When Ivar Kreuger's suicide showed that investments in his operations were worthless, in 1932, one American brokerage firm used its privy knowledge of the fact to sell its shares and those of its clients on the exchange to the ignorant trading public. This showed a proper concern for its own and its clients' welfare, but it was a clear betrayal of agapeic (all-loving) care. Love does not permit us to solve our problems or soothe our wounds at the expense of innocent third parties. Our neighbors include all our neighbors.

A resident physician on emergency, deciding whether to give the hospital's last unit of blood plasma to a young mother of three or to an old skid row drunk, may suppose that he is being forced to make a tragic choice between disinterested" love and justice. He may have been sentimentalized into thinking that to choose the mother and her children means ignoring love's "impartial" concern for all neighbors alike. But this falsifies reality. There is no partiality, no "respecting of persons," in preferring to serve more rather than fewer, many rather than few. Love must make estimates; it is preferential. That is to say, it is responsible, thoughtful, careful. To prefer the mother in that situation is the most loving decision. And therefore it is the most just decision too.

When T. E. Lawrence led his Arab forces against the Turks, he had to make moral choices, being a responsible decision maker. Hamed the Moor killed Salem in a personal quarrel while they were camped in the Wadi Kitan, even though Lawrence tried to stop it. He knew that Salem's people would exact "justice" by revenge, starting an endless feud and bloodletting. How should he calculate? He himself killed Hamed, to end it. Here is a real problem love faced. Bonhoeffer made the same kind of choice when he became a partner in the plot to kill Hitler. On a vast scale of "agapeic calculus" President Truman made his decision about the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Since legalistic casuistry says we are not always bound to be "loving," it might comfort Dr. Arrowsmith in Sinclair Lewis' novel. The scientist decided to give his new serum to only half the people on an island of the Caribbean, letting the others die of a plague, in order to convince skeptical authorities and so save many more lives in other epidemics. But legalistic casuistry could not comfort the British intelligence staff in World War II, when they let a number of women agents return to Germany to certain arrest and death in order to keep secret the fact that they had broken the German code. Situational casuistry could easily approve their decision.

If love does not calculate both the immediate and the remote consequence of its decisions, it turns selfish, childish, soft, subverting its own limitless, all-embracing work. To imagine that conscience may sometimes deny love but never justice, as the "natural law" theologians do, is confusion worse confounded. Such a demotion of love is perhaps the best they can do, given their initial mistake of separating love and justice as "virtues"—as properties to be "infused" rather than predicates of action. Actually, our only choice is between sentimentality and discernment, not between love and justice. Love and justice are the same, for justice is love distributed, nothing else.
«Если любовь не берет в расчет одновременно непосредственные и отдаленные следствия своих решений, она становится эгоистичной, инфантильной, слабой, губящей свое собственное безмерное и всеохватное дело. Представлять дело так, что совесть может иногда отрицать требования любви, но никогда – справедливости, как это делает «естественный закон» теологов, есть самая отъявленная путаница. Такое снижение роли любви есть, возможно, лучшее, что им остается, если учесть их исходное заблуждение разделения любви и справедливости как разных «добродетелей» – как качеств, которые должны быть скорее «привнесены» в действие, чем быть его предикатами. Фактически, наш единственный выбор – выбор между сентиментальностью и пониманием, но не между любовью и справедливостью. Любовь и справедливость суть одно и то же, ибо справедливость есть любовь распределяемая, ничего кроме того.»
19 Leonard Hatch, Dilemmas (Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1931).
Addendum
We have been speaking of justice as a moral principle, not as something settled and static, transfixed in laws. The root jus means many things: law, both written and unwritten; rights; and standards or ideals. But the basic distinction to be grasped is between moral justice and legal justice. The two, of course, are not antithetical, but it must be fully recognized that legal justice (law) always threatens to suffocate and cheat moral justice. Statutory laws, both civil and criminal, and the common law or custom, as in the Anglo-American tradition and most cultures, are in the situationist's view a necessary danger —but not, note, necessarily evil.

It is the task of jurisprudence, the philosophy and ethics of law and legislation, to keep legal justice as close as possible to moral justice. Most judicial systems even include, as a court of last resort, a procedure called equity in which it is sometimes admitted that although "the law was broken," the wrongdoer in the situation could not have acted otherwise without betraying moral justice too grossly to let even legalists close their eyes to it. This task of equity and jurisprudence is all bound up in, when it is not tied down by, the conflicting attitudes and tempers of jurists who are agapeic about justice and those who are legalists. The latter say with unction and every appearance of righteousness, "Rules are rules, laws are laws; don't blame me, you can't satisfy everybody."

To some, justice means merely penal justice, "giving them what they deserve" according to an established code of rewards and punishments. To some, it means an impartial, evenhanded administration of law, and to others, a fair adjudication between rival claims. Aristotle long ago distinguished between arithmetical justice, under which laws assume an identity between persons and cases, judging them according to the book, and geometrical justice, under which laws assume variety between persons and situations, judging cases more on their own merits and aiming at proportion between real people—although within the abstractions of "public order."

The old cracker-barrel phrase is: "We can't legislate morals." Experience with sex laws, as with the "noble experiment" of prohibition in the twenties, seems to support that idea. But sometimes law can encourage and inculcate higher standards of behavior, not reflecting present mores but nurturing and pioneering better ones. Situationists acknowledge that law and order are not only necessary but actually good, wherever and whenever they promote the best interests of love.

Christian ethics is concerned not only with a remedy for sin (moral evil), as in discrimination against Negroes, but also with the restraint of it. It needs both love-justice and law-order. Indeed, each presupposes the other. Situation ethics welcomes law for love's sake sometimes, all depending. This is why anarchism is a fallacious social idealism, and why Tolstoy was wrong. It recognizes the need for love but fails to see the need for order. It sees the importance of voluntary order but is too myopic toward the reality of sin to see the need for a loving use of force to protect the innocent and to make "rights" practicable.

But desegregation laws and adequate civil rights legislation are essential to justice understood agapeically. Whenever or if ever any civil rights law ceases to serve love according to an enlightened grasp of love's outreach, it should be thrown aside. We have a moral obligation to obey civil law, for order's sake; and we have a moral obligation to be situational (even disobeying the law) for love's sake. This statement is beamed to both segregationists and integrationists. Law and freedom from law can be duties, but love is the basic principle.

In this connection we should note that the strategy of civil disobedience poses the problem neatly. We ought not to hesitate to break a law that is in all conscience unjust, that is to say, unloving. Perhaps also we should before or pari passu do what we can to get it reinterpreted in the courts or thrown out on some ground such as constitutionality, using legislative machinery to correct it. But neither the state nor its laws is boss for the situationist; when there is a conflict, he decides for the higher law of love.¹⁴⁰ He has to weigh immediate and remote consequences as well as local and broader interests, but if the scales go against law, so does he.

If his disobedience is ethical, not sheer outlawry, he will be open and aboveboard about it. His disobedience will be a witness to love-justice, and doing it in plain view will be his acknowledgment of order's reasonable claims.¹⁴¹ The serious subversive is never clandestine. Yet we should note that there is always the more radical possibility that the conscientious revolt is not against any particular law so much as against the state itself, presumably on the ground that omnific and optimific love has decided finally that the state behind the law is beyond love's pale. Love then requires revolution. In this case, obviously, conspiracy rather than open witness is the right way.

In the American Revolution, the Boston "tea party," which threw casks of tea into the harbor in protest against unjust revenues, was an instance of civil disobedience, whereas the patriots' subsequent secret raising of citizen armies to fight the Redcoats was revolution. The one can escalate into the other, but need not and ought not so to escalate until serious analysis combines with loyalty to freedom to make it a demand of enlightened love-justice.

But the basic point is that moral justice is not legal justice. In Melville's symbolic tragedy Billy Budd, Clag-gart's lies accusing Billy of taking part in the mutiny plans drove the tongue-tied and shocked Billy into hitting him. The blow accidentally killed him. Everybody knew that Billy was innocent, and of the stress he was under. The ship's officers would have found him innocent in a court-martial. But Captain Vere convinced them that their duty was to apply the articles of war, with their law that a sailor who strikes a superior officer (here a foretopman hitting a master-at-arms) is to be hanged. Vere was afraid of the mutinous British crew, many of whom, like Billy, had been forcibly impressed. So they hanged Billy. Vere was loyal to the law, not to love. But in scorning love he scorned justice too. Only law won.¹⁴²

This story vividly portrays how law, not freedom, can be used to rationalize and disguise selfish motives and personal prejudices. To say that situation ethics could do any worse is either naive or perverse. It happens all the time.
VI
Love Is Not Liking
The Fourth Proposition: "Love wills the neighbor's good whether we like him or not".
To love christianly is a matter of attitude, not of feeling. Love is discerning and critical; it is not sentimental. Many students of Christian ethics have quarreled with one thing or another in Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros since its appearance in 1932, coincidentally with Brunner's basic ethical work and Niebuhr's. But as to its core thesis, that Christian love is definitely agapeic, not erotic nor philic (not a question of romance or friendship), there has been no serious debate. That is, it is neighbor-concerned, outgoing, not self-concerned or selective.

(Even when Plato in the Symposium or the Phaedrus used eros with a spiritualized meaning, it was still primarily in the lover's own interest and for his own sake. And when Father Martin D'Arcy protests, rightly, that the two loves, agape and eros, are not mutually exclusive, he is not actually questioning the distinction or its importance.¹⁴³)

Never Sentimentalize Love
In Canon Quick's sensitive expression, "Whereas in eros desire is the cause of love, in agape love is the cause of desire".¹⁴⁴ Agape s desire is to satisfy the neighbor's need, not one's own, but the main thing about it is that agape love precedes all desire, of any kind. It is not at all an emotional norm or motive. It is volitional, conative. The ethic of agape is a Gesinnungs-eihik, an attitudinal ethic. This is why Rudolf Bultmann is so positive in his statement: "In reality, the love which is based on emotions of sympathy, or affection, is self-love; for it is a love of preference, of choice, and the standard of the preference and choice is the self".¹⁴⁵

A young unmarried couple might decide, if they make their decisions Christianly, to have intercourse (e.g., by getting pregnant to force a selfish parent to relent his overbearing resistance to their marriage). But as Christians they would never merely say, "It's all right if we like each other!" Loving concern can make it all right, but mere liking cannot.

Richardson's Theological Word Book explains that the predominant New Testament verb for love, agapao, "has neither the warmth of phileo nor the intensity of erao", and refers to "the will rather than to emotion".¹⁴⁶ Bishop Stephen Neill calls it "the steady directing of the human will towards the eternal well-being of another".¹⁴⁷ According to Søren Kierkegaard, to say that love is a feeling or anything of that kind is an unchristian conception of love.¹⁴⁸ H. R. Niebuhr and Waldo Beach have asserted flatly that "Christ's love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not; it was the work of love, which was his life".¹⁴⁹ C. H. Dodd said of agape that "it is not primarily an emotion or affection; it is primarily an active determination of the will. That is why it can be commanded, as feelings cannot".¹⁵⁰ Those for whom true love is an emotion will naturally take hate to be its opposite; those who follow the Biblical understanding will readily see that its opposite is indifference, simply not caring.

(We appreciate the pitfalls of oversimplified word studies. We cannot really construct a conceptual apparatus or Biblical theology on words alone; it requires whole statements.¹⁵¹ Yet on any approach to the problem, linguistic or not, the same nonemotional understanding of the key terms agape in the New Testament, and aheh and hesed in the Old, results.)

Pinned down to its precise meaning, Christian love is benevolence, literally. Goodwill. Unfortunately for us in our age, if we have any wish to stick with the New Testament's glossary of terms, the words "benevolence" and "goodwill" have by common usage taken on a tepid, almost merely polite meaning. Nevertheless, this is what Christian love is. It does not seek the deserving, nor is it judgmental when it makes its decisions—judgmental, that is, about the people it wants to serve. Agape goes out to our neighbors not for our own sakes nor for theirs, really, but for God's. We can say quite plainly and colloquially that Christian love is the business of loving the unlovable, i.e., the unlikable.

This love is as radical as it is because of its non-reciprocal, noncongenial outreach. It is for the deserving and the undeserving alike. God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. To suppose that we are required by any Christian imperative to like everybody is a cheap hypocrisy ethically and an impossibility psychologically. People often point out, quite reasonably and properly, that "it is impossible to love in obedience to a command" and that to ask it of us only encourages hypocrisy, "since all men are not lovable".¹⁵² Both objections are correct. But only if we sentimentalize love, taking it to be a matter of feeling or emotion, could they be true objections to agape. Loving and liking are not the same thing.

Kant observed that love cannot be commanded, and discussed the question at some length.¹⁵³ In his own way and in his own language he recognized that romantic love (and, for that matter, friendship love) cannot be ordered at all. But agape can. He concluded that in Jesus' Summary, in the second part, "it is only practical love that is meant in that pith of all laws". There is nothing sentimental about Christian love or Christian ethics.