Straightening Crooked Judgments

By the early 6th century B.C., the people of Athens were embarking on a course free of monarchy. Without a king, a maelstrom of ambition ensued. Plutarch tells us of a struggle between the people of the hills who clamored for democracy, and those of the urban valleys who sought the protection of an oligarchy. The universally admired aristocrat Solon, full of poetic sparkle, seized this deadlock to make promises of "straightening crooked judgments" and equal justice for all. Shouts of acclamation from rich and poor alike made him dictator for a year. Solon quickly took control over the city's olive oil producers and banned the selling of cereal crops abroad so that they could instead feed Athenians. It didn't matter to Solon whether or not this meant bankrupting the cereal farmers. Solon's most radical reform was the abolition of the commoners' debts. Not only usurers, but all creditors, saw their money forcibly disappear as it was redistributed to the poor. Abuse was rife. The annals tell us of several of Solon's friends who anticipated this policy by taking out loans to buy swathes of land in the very hours before debts were to be eradicated.

Several centuries later we can see Rome's reformers treading the same proverbial road to hell paved with good intentions. As the Republican armies haphazardly acquired lands abroad, and as the Equestrians and Populares sought more influence in government, the Senate became divided. A starry-eyed reformer named Tiberius Gracchus arose from among the governing class. Tiberius had traveled throughout the colonies and had come to identify the financial plight of farmers as Rome's greatest problem. Encouraged by two Greek scholars, Tiberius presented a proposal to seize the lands of Rome's noble families and spread them to the lower classes. The tribune Octavius became the voice of the aristocrats' furor at this blatantly unjust scheme. But democracy, then as now, knew no law. Tiberius simply held an unconstitutional election where the Roman mobs deposed Octavius. After even this, the measure was not to pass. Tiberius was killed by rioting senators; his brother Gaius followed him when he attempted to carry out the very same plan. Robbing the rich to give to the poor was something that Romans were not yet anesthetized to.

So much for the celebrated ancient reformers. To find an example of reform that was fair to all, regardless of the money they had or didn't have, it's necessary to look beyond the West. We now turn to the story of the exiles' return to Israel. Although the Israelites astonished their neighbors by reconstructing Jerusalem's walls, problems still abounded. The fields that had lain un-tilled for so long could not immediately bear a harvest. This plunged farmers into debt as they enslaved their children in order to get grain. The governor, Nehemiah, recognized the property of all men as sacrosanct. Instead of using his power to force the redistribution of weath, he relied on the Israelites' fear of the Lord to prompt their voluntarism. Nehemiah exhorted the noblemen to restore the fields, vineyards, sons and daughters that had been taken from the poor, lest they all become an object of scorn amongst their neighbors. As one, the nobility disavowed usury and restored what they had taken. Unlike Solon's bankrupting of Athens' creditors, or Tiberius Gracchus' socialistic seizure of private property, this manner of reform didn't entail taking at sword point from those who had in order to give to those who had not. It required a people who feared the Lord, and an understanding that only by encouraging man's free will, his voluntary effort, can good ever be done. Socialism knows no higher law than the here and now, and so it compels what is right. The fact that it creates poverty by grinding down the rich reminds one of Proverbs 12:10: "Even the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel."

The Early Church and Abortion

Several years ago, I distinctly remember when I first learned that abortion was practiced in the ancient world. This came as no small surprise to me, having always associated the murder of the unborn with either advanced surgery or coat-hangers, neither of which was known a couple of millenia ago. The historian's classic conflict between vilifying or romanticizing the past had me in its grasp; I had forgotten that, in the words of King Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun.” It takes a peculiar -and usually unintentional- form of arrogance to presume to have problems today that our ancestors didn't share.

As it turns out, abortion stretches back to the beginning of human history. Not only were there primitive attempts at surgical abortion, but people as varied as the civilized Greeks, the Romans, and the itinerant shepherds of Illyria, had access to the Iron Age equivelant of the birth control pill: herbal abortifacients, such as pennyroyal, saffron and rue. The pagan world was divided over the issue. Some men, like Hippocrates, defended the unborn and refused to administer abortive mixtures. Other men, like Aristotle, found themselves defending abortion. This philosophical position was based on the belief in “ensoulment,” the notion found in Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals that human beings don't have souls until between 40 and 90 days after they're conceived.

When the Gospel surged across the vast openness of the Pax Romana, Christians encountered a world whose peace and order were deceptive. Although the watchmen along the sweeping frontiers were idle, this lull had been bought by decades of incessant warfare and violence. Inside the Empire, Christians encountered daily bloodshed not only in the arena, but in the streets. Abortion and infanticide were widespread from one end of the Roman world to the other. It was such a problem, in fact, that the Didache (an early Christian catechism) saw fit to include a line specifically condemning abortion and infanticide as murder. Faced with a world where life was held so cheaply, Christians immediately began to defend the Bible's definition of life. God had said to the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart...." This belief in the eternal nature of the soul was in direct opposition to the philosophy of the day. Almost every one of the early Church Fathers -Tertullian, Clement, Jerome, Basil, Felix, Hippolytus- unanimously declared abortion's absolute moral wrong. Athenagoras only echoed the rest of Christendom when he petitioned Emperor Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 177: “We say that women who induce abortions are murderers, and will have to give account of it to God.... The fetus in the womb is a living being and therefore the object of God's care.”

For hundreds of years, the Church's position on abortion was consistent and uncompromising. In the 13th century, however, a challenge came from a surprising source. Thomas Aquinas, leader of the Scholastic movement, reintroduced the mixed legacy of Aristotelian thought to Europe. Renewed reading of Aristotle's theories of the political world were unfortunately accompanied by the reemergence of his metaphysical musings. Among these was the old doctrine of ensoulment, which some spiritual and secular scholars of the day embraced, including Aquinas. The consequence was a temporary weakening of the Church's stance against abortion by a group of churchmen who proclaimed that fetuses that had not yet received a soul (as the theory went) could be aborted. This temptation to defer to philosophy and science in place of faith has been with Christians since the days of the apostles and will be until the end. Hundreds of years later, in the 20th century, a similar acceptance of the “prevailing wisdom” of the day over and above of biblical revelation would lead to some Protestant denominations condoning abortion.

But for the time, the influence of this idea was short lived. By the 15th century, Pope Sixtus V had renewed the classification of abortion as murder and prescribed severe punishments for its practice. Although in the 16th century Pope Gregory XIV briefly returned the Church to Aquinas' position, it was soon once again widely accepted throughout all of Christendom that abortion at any stage was immoral. Despite the many differences between the burgeoning denominations of the Church in that era, any Christian of the 17th century would have agreed with John Calvin when he made this simple argument: “The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being and it is a most monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.”

The Story of the Parthenon

Built in 15 years (447-432 B.C.) at the height of the Athenian golden age under Pericles, the Parthenon was the fruit of Greece’s finest craftsmen. Its symmetry, harmony with its surroundings, and gracefully commanding air testify to the faith the Greeks had in human perfectibility. At 469 silver talents, the building was costly enough, but if it drained the Athenian purse, it bankrupted their moral purity. The funds had been illegally seized from the treasury of the Delian League, a confederation of Greek states allied to take the offensive against the Persians who had been pushed out of Greece in 479 B.C. This money had been intended for defending member states against the enemy. The Athenian demagogue Pericles, however, was more concerned at the moment with flattering his fellow citizens. His city had recently come under a firestorm of criticism for its growing abuse of power as head city in the League. Athenians needed reassurance of their leading role. Mumbling something about the silver not being “theirs that give it, but theirs that receive it, if… they perform the conditions upon which they receive it.”, Pericles lavished the money on the beautification of Athens in a move of vain defiance that shocked the classical world. Part of this project included setting aside 469 talents for a monument to grace the Acropolis -the Parthenon. This symbol, ostensibly to honor Athena Parthenos, was in reality an in-your-face display of Athenian pride and supremacy.

Athens paid a horrible price for going to such lengths to assert its vanishing reputation and appease its citizens.  Two years after the Parthenon’s completion, Pericles and 1/3 of the Athenian populace died during a plague as the Greek world rent itself in two. This was the beginning of the Peloponnesian War -a war caused by Sparta’s indignation at Athens’ growing wealth and usurpation of power. Athens would never regain the glorious position it had held for so brief a time, but it did leave us a monument whose story became complete 2117 years later: In 1689 Venetian warships bombarded the temple (now an ammunition dump for Turkish cannons), sculpting it more decisively than any chisel ever could have into the symbol of ancient Greece that we know today. It’s a symbol not only of the consummate skill of the ancient Athenians, but of their excessive egotism. When men try to make a lasting name for themselves, they're faced with a dilemma. A symbol grand enough to overshadow their neighbors and startle their foes requires more skill and more resources than is native to anyone. They find that to create such an edifice they must betray their own laws, their own consciences, and exploit their fellow men. This is a theme common to many of the monuments we're familiar with. The Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Solomon's Temple, and the Coliseum all became showcases for their patrons; all were built by slave labor. These monuments' stories were similar to the Parthenon's, whose friezes and sculptures had been bought with stolen money. While these exorbitant ornaments may have depicted Athena, in reality they were meant to honor their own craftsmen.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

When, Where and Why Justice Became Blind

"The Fountain of Justice,"
Hans Gieng, A.D. 1543

The concept of "justice" hasn't always been pictured or portrayed in the way that we Westerners have grown so used to. As early as the 3rd millenium B.C., the ancient Egyptians chose a goddess, Maat, to be the symbol of truth and justice. Maat was usually painted wearing an ostrich feather in her hair, embodying immutable, eternal truth (when the wind was clement, at least). The Greeks later beautified this idea, dispensed with the feather in favor of scales, and gave this goddess the name Dike (In a typical insight into human nature, the Greeks told how Zeus had placed Dike on earth, to enforce justice among mortals. When she at last despaired of her lot being utterly impossible, he hastened her away to Mt. Olympus). The Romans didn't so much re-imagine this idea as they did deftly and elegantly rename it: Justitia. This goddess had many of Dike's attributes (the flowing, white robe, noble visage and scales) but, in keeping with the Roman character, it wasn't the idea of justice alone that was important, but how it could be enforced. To that end, Justitia was commonly depicted brandishing a double-edged sword, with which she could quickly attack either party in a suit. At this stage of development, Justice was now recognizable even to our modern eyes, but she was still lacking a vital detail.

It wasn't until the sculptor Hans Gieng graced Bern, Switzerland with his "Fountain of Justice" in A.D. 1543 that the ancient symbol found herself subtly, yet fundamentally, transformed by the addition of a blindfold. The time, place and reason for this was no coincidence. It reflected a new depth of understanding and passion for justice that was a direct result of Bern's religious, and therefore cultural, revival. Nineteen years earlier, the city had become one of the first four of the Swiss cantons to formally cease burning the works and followers of theologian Ulrich Zwingli. Central to Zwingli's message was the necessity of everyone's understanding of, and accountability to, the Word of God. One of his prayers began "...open and enlighten our hearts, that we may understand purely and clearly thy words: may they transform us according to this exact understanding, that we may never be displeasing to thy divine majesty, through Jesus Christ, our Lord." Since a large portion of the Bible is law, a revival in understanding of God (the author of law) by both Protestants and Counter-Reformation Catholics, infused Europe with a new appreciation for law. It was around this time that theologians Hugo Grotius, Alberico Gentili and Francisco de Vitoria wrote their seminal volumes on international law. Switzerland of Zwingli and Calvin's era was especially centered around the Bible and its reverence for a God who "is no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34); who alone can grant impartial justice to all men, whether priests, kings, or laymen. Upon closer examination of Gieng's statue, one can see four smaller busts carved symbolically underneath the foot of Justice. These represent a pope, a sultan, an emperor and a schultheiss, all alike under the even judgment of justice, blind at last.