Pints With Aquinas - We Are WAY Too Obsessed With Justice! | Fr. Gregory Pine O.P.

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Many Christians have become overly interested in justice, and not concerned enough with mercy or the other virtues. Father Pine in this video teaches about Justice and it's proper place in the Christian Life and Polity. 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican Friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work as an assistant director for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pines for the Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about justice. Why? Because justice is all the rage these days. Everyone is asking for justice or demanding justice or insisting upon justice. But my fear is that the justice that is being proposed is a justice that's somehow been taken out of context, divorced from the

Christian tradition, and as a result of which kind of perverted or twisted. So I'd like to talk a little bit about justice but talk about justice in the setting in which God intends it to take root in your life and to bring about your salvation. So here we go. Okay, so justice. Justice is that virtue by which we give to another his due with a constant and perpetual will. Alright, so due there you hear a language which will often bring with it the notion of rights. There's a sense that we as human beings

are born into a network of relationships. So, we're created by God, we're born of these parents or citizens of this country, we are already related to these various persons as a result of the pre-existent kind of institutions or networks into which we have been inserted. And in recognition of who these people are and how these people stand to me, there are certain things that I owe them and maybe there are certain things that they owe me. So there's this sense with do or right that there's a gift that goes before us. Like we can only ever insist

upon our rights because we have been blessed, we have been gifted with a nature on account of the fact that we are this type of thing, a human being, right? Minds with which no hearts with which to love. There thereby we're kind of geared towards the preservation of our existence and we're geared towards the procreation and education of family and we're geared towards knowing the truth about God and living peaceably in society. So it's on account of what we are that we think of what we are due and what our responsibilities are in turn. Alright, so what you'll hear often enough amongst our contemporaries is like an insistence upon certain rights, a kind of shrill insistence upon certain rights,

but you lose sight of the gift that goes before upon certain rights, but you lose sight of the gift that goes before us. And also you lose sight of the full breadth of justice. So when St. Thomas talks about justice, he distinguishes between general justice and particular justice. And usually when people talk about justice, they're talking about particular justice. There are two main species of it. All right, so there's distributive justice, which is what the state gives or owes to the citizenry, maybe because the citizenry needs something or because it merits something or whatever. So you can think here of the distribution of honors or the distribution of wealth. And then commutative justice, which is like the justice of exchange. So when you go to

the supermarket and you buy some fruit and you give $10.57 to the cashier, and then you leave with your product and a receipt. That'd be commutative justice. So we're often thinking in terms of what the state owes me, or we're thinking about what another owes me, but it's less often that we think about what we owe to others, or how we can contribute. But general justice brings this into view. There's the idea here that we as individuals are ordered to

The common good. All right, the common good isn't just like let's take all of our goods and throw them on a pile the common good is actually the network of relationships which Creates or which begets a kind of goodness that transcends our individual goodnesses So like we get some indication of what the common good is when you support a sports team. It's like, yeah, let's go Phillies, or yeah, let's go 76ers, or yeah, let's go Eagles. You can tell what city I'm from. And when our team does well, we all share in the excellence of their achievements. We all share in the glory of their victory.

And if there are like a million Phillies fans or like two million Phillies fans, it's not like you get less of their glory if there are more fans. Rather, this is the type of glory that can be divided out or parceled out amongst fandom without being diminished. So like when we think about common goods, we're thinking about we can make a contribution to something that goes beyond us, to something that transcends us as individuals and actually represents our flourishing, our perfection, alright? As it happens, like, the most excellent things in life, the most transcendent goods in life, are common goods. So if we keep thinking about, like, our individual rights, and if we keep thinking about excellences or merits or monies or whatever

as kind of limited things, scarce things to be parceled out as we try to heap up as much for ourselves and alienate as much from others, then we're just going to miss out on the best things in life, okay? Like the good of a family isn't diminished when you have another child. It's actually strangely increased and everyone partakes in the increase. So I would say when thinking about justice, we can't just think about what the state owes us or what someone else owes us, but we also have to think about what we owe someone else and what we owe the common good, the polity, the state. So we need to think in terms of our contribution. And then it's also helpful to think about the kind of claims of justice which are a little harder to pin down or a little less easy to describe in terms of rights. So like for instance, by virtue of the fact that God is your Creator in your end, you owe him praise, you owe him worship, right? You owe him subjection and submission. We refer to this as religion,

like the virtue of religion governs that response. By virtue of the fact that you are the son or the daughter of these parents in this country, you owe a kind of debt of gratitude, a kind of debt of love, which we refer to as the virtue of piety, and so too with like superiors. But also there, a kind of debt of love, which we refer to as the virtue of piety, and so too with like superiors. But also there are other kind of social arrangements where you owe other people the truth. You owe your benefactors gratitude. You owe your friends, your associates, your colleagues, a modicum of liberality, right? There are things that are just harder to pin down, but we need to think in terms of our contribution, or we need to think in terms of our building up of the common

good or our building up of a common life such that it becomes a wonderful place in which we can enjoy our human relationships, right? And ultimately be led unto a relationship with the Most High God. So I think that like when we drill down and insist upon justice sometimes we can narrow the frame of our flourishing and exclude other aspects of human life, which in fact are more important, or at the very least, complementarily so. How do you pronounce that word? Complementarily? Whatever. Regardless. Moving on. Kind of accent those relationships into which we're born to accent those kind of social conditions which help us to flourish But ultimately like justice is not going to save you. All right. Justice is not going to save you Justice is going to help rectify your interactions rectify your relationships But it's not necessarily going to get you all the way there for that

We need love All right And you've already felt this strain you felt this tension in some of your relationships. Because when you start insisting upon what you need or what you're owed in a relationship, you'll probably have noticed that it begins to break down. Because our relationships aren't just a mere matter of what we're owed or what we ought to be given. Relationships don't make too terribly much sense unless we're pouring into them. Because it's more important to love than to be loved. And we as lovers in a relationship want to think in terms of how we can contribute.

Want to think in terms of how we can be poured out or poured into the other as a way by which to enrich. But ultimately love kind of gets us out of the dialectic of push and pull back and forth, assessing my rights and your rights. Because with love, you know, like we're welcomed into friendships, right? We're welcomed into marriages. And there, what it's about is a common project with a common vision, with a common embrace of reality and those things that are most important, all right? And it becomes less a matter of adjudicating what's mine and what's thine and then beginning to kind of describe or Yeah, kind of parcel out. What's ours? Like what's genuinely ours? So in a friendship, you know, like I'm not worried about denying myself so that I can give you all the goods that are to be gained from this relationship

Nor am I caught up in this strange kind of Nor am I caught up in this strange kind of dialectic between altruism and egoism, as if I have to be holy for you, or I'm a selfish person, or, you know, whatever, just give up and be holy for myself and exclude the possibility of genuine communion. No, no. The point is that in these types of relationships, we will the good of the other, but we also will union with the other, in the recognition that part of the good that we will is the union. And that is to say, part of the good that we will is ourselves. So in relationships of love, in friendships, all right, it's about kind of engendering a common vision and being about a common pursuit so that we can be in the pursuit of the same good brought together, so that we can generally be bound up and so that we can get out of this like endless cycle of adjudicating our rights or insisting upon what's ours. So I think that one of the most important things in this regard is forgiveness, all right? Forgiveness because you've noticed in the culture that a lot of people they nurse their

wounds, they hold on to their hurts because it gives them power. Because if I can't be the hero of the story, well then at least I can be the victim. And in being the victim, then I can control people and manipulate people and bend them to my will and cause them to bend over backwards to accommodate me in the future. All right? No, we have to let go of that. All right? We have to rebuild. I was once talking to a sociologist who was doing studies of post-war Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, where the bomb fell, was a zone subsequently memorialized as a kind of scar in the earth. And in Nagasaki, where the bomb fell, which was in fact the cathedral, right? You know Nagasaki was a very Christian city,

a very Catholic city. And what the Christians chose to do was rebuild. So too in our lives. If we want to get beyond the adjudicating of claims, the pushing and pulling, the insisting on my rights of whatever else, then we have to forgive and we have to rebuild in relationships. Which means, you know, within the bounds of prudence, trusting anew, investing anew, committing anew, engaging anew. So then what does it mean to forgive? It means to love where formerly there was hurt, where formerly there was wound, offense, you know. And so I pardon the offense. I say the offense is no longer for me, alright? And in place of the offense, I choose to reaffirm the

relationship, to hold fast to the relationship, to love, alright? At the very least, I want you to know to At the very least, I want you to know to serve, you know, I want you to know, love, and serve God in this life and to enjoy Him in the next. And I, if it's possible without being taken advantage of or without suffering the effects of further abuse, I want to be part of that story. I want to will your good and will a union. I want to be bound up with you in the pursuit of it. But that forgiveness requires an ongoing choice. It's something that we need to continue to reaffirm, something that we need to continue to ratify, or else we're going to fall back into patterns of resentment and unforgiveness and then become trapped, as it were, in the adjudication of our rights as we ideate as to how we're going to get vengeance and prove

that person wrong and show them up at the next opportunity. We don't want to live there. That's to live in a prison. And it's a prison of our own fashioning. Now mind you, there are emotional and psychological reasons for which we might be pushed in that direction, but we can't consent to them. We can't cooperate with them. We have to push back and lay claim to the healing power of Christ's grace, the elevating power of Christ's grace, as we choose to pour ourselves into a relationship. All right? Aristotle, like, in making observations about friendship, he says you have to focus more on loving than on being loved. All right? And ultimately, it's more praiseworthy to love than to be loved because loving is virtuous. Being loved, all right, there's some things there that's excellent in the

individual and that is an occasion whereby he or she is loved. But like, at the end of the day, it's about your agency, it's about your being the protagonist of a common life in which you engender a common vision and embrace a common project and get about the business. So in that regard, or I said, seen from that perspective, what you have control over is loving, that is to say in this case, forgiving. Mending wounds or whatever, binding up wounds, whatever the better description thereof is. So I would just say by way of summation, justice is good. It's a virtue. It rectifies our operations, our relationships with other people.

Obviously it's the highest virtue of appetite within the four cardinal virtues because temperance and fortitude are lower insofar as they inform our sense appetites, whereas justice informs our intellectual appetite. But I would say that we have to broaden the scope of justice, not just thinking about distributive justice or commutative justice about what is owed me, but thinking also in terms of legal justice or general justice, what I owe the common good and how I can contribute to these relationships into which I was born and for which I am responsible so that they flourish, so that we together flourish. Because life isn't about looking out for myself and getting mine.

It's about pouring myself out, making of myself an offering and seeking to be about that business with other people of good will insofar as they are willing to be about it with me. Alright, so we zoomed out and thought about religion and piety and observance or we thought about truthfulness, veracity, I mean it goes by a variety of names, and liberality and gratitude and you know other virtues besides. But then beyond that there's a higher virtue in the intellectual appetite, in the will, which is infused by God, which is the very love of God poured into our hearts whereby we cry out, Abba Father. And that virtue is charity, and charity is perfect because it gets us all the way to God, it brings all of the

virtues to their term, it gives us full scope and a kind of full grandeur for our Christian existence. So that way we can be about a holy excellent work. That way we can be about a godly work. And in love, right, we think more about loving than about being loved, not because we're denying ourselves, although, you know, at times it's necessary to deny ourselves, but we don't want to think about it in terms of like altruism or egoism. We want to think about it in terms of willing the good and willing union insofar as we're inclined towards it, insofar as we recognize in the other one like me, one who is good, one for whom there is a kind of call already at

work to communion, right? I am called to communion because I'm not alone, right? And no man is an island because we're social and political animals, we're meant to come together in bonds of fellowship so as not only to achieve our ends, but to get all the way to God. Alright, so I'd say justice, fine, but we as Christians are responsible for going beyond justice and the way in which God's grace and virtue pulls us beyond justice. So that's what I hope to share. Alright squad, this is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, do subscribe to the channel, push the bell and get sweet email updates

when other things come out. Also, I contribute to a podcast called God's Planning. We have conversations about stuff. Some of them are interesting, some of them are not. Hard to say which is which. In other news, I work for the Thomistic Institute. We have a couple of job postings. One is for a campus chapter coordinator, one is for a social media manager.

Look those up at ThomisticInstitute.org and submit your application. Look forward to hearing from you. And then God's Blending as a Retreat coming up for men up to age 40, it's in Brevard, North Carolina. Father Bonaventure and Father Patrick are gonna preach it. Second weekend of August. Those are my announcements. Know of my prayers for you, please pray for me

and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.