God's Justice Is His Mercy
A reflection
The notion of justice is one that receives ample lip service within Christian discourse, either in speaking of God’s justice or of the justice we are called to enact in the world on God’s behest. Yet for all the attention paid to the topic, it is too often the case that justice is regarded as merely the meting out of punishment commensurable to a given deed. It is conceived of as the distribution of deserts, as the legalistic determination and distribution of tallies appropriate to one’s actions. Yet this view reduces justice to mere retribution, even to vengeance. Moreover, it makes justice and mercy opposites, for the latter becomes the lightening of a sentence, the compassionate remission of an earned punishment. Yet this view is ultimately reprehensible, especially as regards the divine—for God’s justice is his mercy.
God is not, after all, subject to quantity. He is transcendent and, as such, exists beyond division or numerical difference. When speaking of God in numerical terms, we speak, at best, analogically, and the vast number of terms predicated of him cataphatically must be balanced by an apophatic understanding that, in divine simplicity, all terms are united in the infinite Being that God is. The predicate Being, for instance, in no way indicates that God, as Being, is somehow different than God as love as if these two terms referred to different qualities or aspects within the divine, who is wholly one, who is unity as such. The so-called names of God are signs that analogously point to a single reality, a single truth that transcends all of them and yet may be called by different names due to the finitude of creaturely categories, which cannot perfectly encapsulate that which is without boundary. This being the case, two conclusions necessarily follow: the attributes of God cannot be divided, and the creaturely equivalent of those attributes ultimately share an inner essence. Thus, God’s justice is his mercy, and thus the justice of human beings must also be at one with mercy.
Justice can be considered both as a state and an act, with the latter flowing naturally from the former. Let us begin, then, with the state. As I have attempted to articulate in a previous essay here, I believe justice as a state of creaturely being is best understood as the harmonious order between parts of a whole wherein each being may realize its nature to the greatest possible extent. This view is based on the understanding that each creature’s particular existence is enmeshed in a web of relations and that these relations determine the degree to which said creature may express its nature. Only in the context of justice, of each being appropriately relating to all others, can all things flourish as what they most fundamentally are. This justice is, moreover, a reflection of the justice of God, which is ultimately the perfect unity of the divine. God is one, and so the greater the degree that the plenitude of finite beings realizes unity in accord with their natures, the greater their reflection of God and thus the greater their justice.
When made to suffer in a context or mode unnatural to it, a being becomes deformed and diminishes, sinking toward the nothingness from which it originally springs. This may result either from external oppression or from interior elements that distort the way a being relates to others. A worker, for instance, may be forced into endless drudgery whereby her intellectual and moral capacities stagnate, leaving her humanity largely unexpressed and frustrated. Yet she may also allow a passion for drink to distort the inner workings of her soul to the extent that a large swathe of her being is drowned in liquor. Either way, such a person exists in wrong relation to the world, and her humanity is deformed as a result. The opposite state, that of justice or of virtue (which is a version of the same thing), is one in which she would suffer neither external oppression nor internal disorderliness: her work would allow for holistic development, and she would approach alcohol with appropriate moderation, guided by her inner reason. This state of self-realization, moreover, is a state of freedom, for freedom properly understood is the extirpation of external circumstance that impinges upon the realization of what one essentially is as well as of those interior states that are foreign to one’s true nature and thus twist the proper ordering of one’s being. For justice to prevail, an analogous version of this harmony, of this freedom, must be realized at every level of creation.1
Yet we must go one step further. For not only is the nature of each being only properly expressed within the bound of appropriate relations to all else, but the particularity of those beings is defined by the specific relations by which they find themselves connected to the world. For the flourishing of persons to prevail, for the realization of personal rather than merely abstract justice, the particular relationships that define our personhood must also be whole and uncorrupted. It is not enough for a woman merely to develop her human capacities in some form, for she is not just a human, but this human. She may be a wife or a mother of other particular people; she is certainly a daughter. Thus, for this woman to live in justice, the relations, the loves by which her particular personhood is defined, must be included, must be made to contribute to her ultimate freedom as this woman.
Given that this is the state of justice, the act of justice, of judgment, is best conceived as the restoration of this harmonious freedom from a situation of injustice. To enact justice is to restore the proper relations of the beings involved so that proper freedom may be achieved, so that healing may be effected. As each being is particular, as each human is also a person, this must involve the specific relationships that constitute that particularity or else the beings in question have not been truly healed, but only replaced by other, different beings.
Justice, then, cannot ultimately be divided from mercy. Its enactment simply is mercy, as it is the giving to each what is properly its own, namely, itself as constituted by the relations necessary to its nature and particularity. Mercy is not, then, the refraining from punishment, the choosing to spare the criminal from an otherwise deserved infliction. Indeed, this would not be mercy at all to the degree that it leaves the deviant creature destitute of rehabilitation. Only in giving back to each the freedom that was lost in damage of evil can mercy be had, for it is only in this freedom that there is justice.
All this to say that justice and mercy are identical and are only truly justice and mercy if they involve healing. The sword of judgment must be the scalpel of the surgeon, or it is the weapon of revenge, of the tyrant and the sadist. Of course, this does not mean that healing does not entail suffering. The fact that so many of the church fathers use the image of the surgeon’s knife in a time before anesthetic ought to make us aware of this. To be healed is not a pain-free process, but one that can (and often must) entail a certain amount of purposeful violence. Yet this is infinitely preferable to the alternative: the infliction of suffering as entirely purposeless or as mere retribution, a monstrous end none ought to countenance.
This healing cannot be an isolated reality, moreover; the integrity of all must be realized for the full integrity of each. If this does not occur, then justice has not been established, mercy and judgment have not been realized. The loves that connect the beings of the world are the conditions upon which each being can truly be itself. Without those loves, without the clarity of love between two whole creatures, there is no justice, there is no realization of God’s intention. If one has been hurt by the depravity of another, both the depravity and the hurt must be made right, or truth has failed to flourish. And neither can be fully made right if the other is not, for the pain of being hurt, which increases with the closeness of the relationship, is always also the pain of a loved one breaking the bonds of a self that is greater than either the perpetrator or the victim; it is the pain of losing a piece of oneself in the violence of the other’s destruction in an evil act. No person can be fully regained without the other.
True justice, then, reveals that we are all intricately connected to, and thus radically responsible for, one another. Full reconciliation, full justice, can only be realized by the healing of every relation. The son beaten by the father needs not only healing from the wrong, physically and spiritually, but also to be reconciled to a father who is no longer the vessel of that sin. For without the father, there is no son, and so without the healing of the former there cannot be complete flourishing. Each of our sins, then, burdens the ones we love, and indeed the whole cosmos, and every act of personal repentance and righteousness heals and elevates the entire world, for by enacting justice, it makes the world increasingly just.
All of this quite clearly suggests that what passes for judgment in human society and thought is too often anything but. We need only consider the convolutions of history to note that retributive justice is a common feature of many, if not most, societies. Violence is frequently used as a means to inflict compensatory measures upon those who step beyond law or custom. Sometimes this is done purely out of injured pride or “honor” or a sense that the “scales must be balanced.” Other times, such justice is pursued to provide satisfaction to an injured party, and at yet other times, it is done as a warning to others not to transgress. And, of course, there are societies that claim to be pursuing remedial justice (at least in part) and yet act in such a way as to make that claim absurd. The United States is one such society, as no sane concept of rehabilitation can find the gathering of criminals into singularly inhumane and exploitative institutions to be an effective means of healing. In many cases, the antisocial behaviors of those confined to such grey halls and cellblocks are radically magnified.
At best, such sickly institutions can act not as a means of rehabilitation but as centers of confinement for the purposes of preventing greater injustice from occurring, for keeping chaotic elements of society tightly kept within secure borders. But sequestration is not the enactment of justice; it merely avoids greater destruction. There are cases, of course, where the means of rehabilitation are not presently available, and the best a society can do is to keep the particularly wicked securely and humanely isolated. In the most perverse of institutions, however, the reprobate who shows no capacity for immediate rehabilitation or whose crimes are deemed too vile for the attempt to be made are simply executed. Such “justice” may be meant as a deterrent, in which case human beings, regardless of whether they could be redeemed, are knowingly sacrificed to the Baal of legislation. Of course, such killing may also be based on pure mechanisms of revenge, in which the state becomes a means to destroy for no other purpose than the satiation of vindictiveness towards those who have wronged the public. Or again, it may be based on the belief that there is a point in which a human being can so violate his or her humanity as to become essentially and irredeemably evil, the spawn of some looming Ahriman and no longer the child of God, worthy, at the very least, of enough consideration to be merely put aside in the hope that the good will yet triumph within. Whichever basis one considers, justice is absent.
These atrocities of human injustice have a correlate in conceptualizations of God: the doctrine of eternal damnation. For it is in this doctrine that we find the exact theological parallel of the false human justice I have just described, now applied to the highest dimensions of reality; indeed, in this doctrine, a false sense of justice, a justice that is contrary to mercy, is applied to the foundation of reality. In the worst version of eternal damnation, the sufferings of the damned are seen as necessarily flowing from the impingement of God’s “honor.” As the injured party, God has a “right” or even a “necessity” to expel the wicked and inflict his wrath upon them; he must be satisfied, and only the infinite screams of the derelict can sate his rage and bloodlust or display the full range of his “glory.” Yet even at its best, this doctrine paints an image of a God who abandons his lost children to a permanent and useless estrangement, who leaves (or perhaps forces) them to wander into the wastes for all eternity, where they shall never again see the sun or lay their heads in peace—he abandons them to meaningless suffering. Whether God directly tortures the damned or merely closes the shutters of heaven upon the lepers in the abyss, no justice has been done, no healing has occurred.
No matter what version of it one considers, the doctrine of eternal damnation drives an adamantine wedge between God’s justice and his mercy. He forgives the saved, even those who have not yet been perfected; he ruthlessly subjects or abandons the damned to a never-ending pain that can have no possible purpose, except, perhaps (one shudders), God’s own need to be proved the final tyrant of existence. Purposeless or retributive punishment cannot be justice, and mercy that does not include the establishment of justice by way of the purification of all things is not mercy, and as such neither can be applied to the divine. To quote St. Isaac the Syrian:
For it would be most odious and utterly blasphemous to think that hate or resentment exists with God, even against demonic beings; or to imagine any other weakness, or passibility, or whatever else might be involved in the course of retribution of good or bad as applying, in a retributive way, to that glorious divine Nature. Rather, He acts towards us in ways He knows will be advantageous to us, whether by way of things that cause suffering, or by way of things that cause relief, whether they cause joy or grief, whether they are insignificant or glorious: all are directed towards the single eternal good, whether each receives judgment or something of glory from Him—not by way of retribution, far from it!—but with a view to the advantage that is going to come from all these things. . . .
That is how everything works with Him, even though things may seem otherwise to us: with Him it is not a matter of retribution, but He is always looking beyond to the advantage that will come from His dealing with humanity. And one such thing is this matter of Gehenna.2
We all, I like to think, know this already, for we apply true justice regularly within our own lives. We are indignant towards the evils of our prison systems; we complain of the vindictiveness of those above us; we preach against the sin of revenge. Those of us who have children know that to punish a child is always, however maladroitly, to seek the child’s good, or else it is wrong. Moreover, one would never allow a child to suffer just because it was the natural consequence of his or her actions unless one felt that doing so could lead to a reformation, to healing or learning. We know that to leave a child, or anyone, to suffer for no reason (not to mention for retribution) would be an act of wickedness.
Nor do we treat those whom we know and love as if they could ever fall so far as to be worthy only of abandonment. Whether we are Christians or not, I think few of us are willing to say that our mother or brother or best friend could ever become so debased as to be intrinsically evil, as to have no spark of original goodness left that could be recovered or worthy of love. Nor indeed would we (I hope) feel ourselves capable of the bliss of heaven without the correlative bliss of our loved ones.
Alas, we allow the better insights of our basic moral intuitions to be suffocated by cynicism and bad doctrine, or, indeed, by malice and sadism. We allow qualities to be imputed to God that we would shiver to impute to all but the most loathsome of men. We allow our justice system to pursue a vision of law and order that too often seeks the healing of neither the victim nor the victimizer, but only the retribution of balanced scales, an eye for an eye. Justice becomes the name of arbitrary strength, of violence, of hollow screams in the nothing, nihilism and the grin of the torturer.
But this is only a nightmare; let us wake. Justice is not the death of mercy but its sister. It is the realization of truth, of the world before the world that calls out to us in our deepest longings; it is the healing of every pain, every blemish, every twist and turn of channels finally pulled aright to empty into their proper estuaries. It is the making all things new, the giving to each true freedom, freedom from sin.
Since at some time these middle partitions are going to be destroyed (the partitions by which evil has shut us off from the sanctuary which is inside the curtain), when our nature will have its tabernacle pitched again by the resurrection, and all the corruption which has entered in connection with evil will be abolished from the things that are, then the festival around God will be inaugurated in common for those who are covered by the resurrection, so that one and the same joy will be set before all. No longer will rational beings be divided by different degrees of participation in equal good things. Those who are now outside because of evil will eventually come inside the sanctuary of divine blessedness, and will join themselves with the horns of the altar. . . . “To Him every knee will bow” of heavenly, earthly, and subterranean beings, and “every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”3
Only in this, the true justice, can be found the shout, the clarion call of joy that brings all together, walking hand in hand into ever greater unity in the blissful repose of being joined, at last, to God. This is justice. This is mercy.
P.S.: It should be fairly obvious that this essay does not, and is not meant to, constitute a complete argument for universalist eschatology. For those wishing to know more about the various dimensions of the issue, the following can offer guidance: David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved; the works of Ilaria Ramelli; Alvin Kimel, Destined for Joy; Sergius Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death; everything by Gregory of Nyssa, but especially On the Soul and Resurrection and On the Making of Humanity; the works of Maximus the Confessor; and many others.
For a more complete discussion of freedom, see David Bentley Hart, “What Is a Truly Free Will?,” Public Orthodoxy, April 24, 2020, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2020/04/24/what-is-a-truly-free-will/.
Ascetical Homilies 2.39.3, 5.
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 106.
Aspects of this argument I’ve encountered in David Bentley Hart, but I haven’t had it pieced together so cohesively and simply before. It gives me simple cognitive frame through which to look at a many issues, theological, political and artistic. Thanks.