PART ONE
JUSTLY LOOKING
Â
Â
In this part, Rowan and I explore together some philosophical and theological thinking around justice to set the context for the book. We disentangle ideas of justice from senses of individual entitlement and right, and we investigate the idea of justice as a virtue and how this approach to justice has to do with seeing fairly or seeing wholly, which is a qualitative way of perceiving and understanding what is just. This is an invitation to the imagination and how to rethink âdoing justiceâ through different values and virtues. We explore some of the ideas of Saint Paul and other theological thinkers in considering how to approach what is âjustâ and âdiabolicalâ in our lives.
We call upon on various literary, artistic and cultural practices that enable us to justly look at the world to reflect upon what this might mean for ideas of the âgoodâ in our lives today. Through some of Shakespeareâs plays and different literary texts, we address the limits of mercy, law and justice, and through artists such as CĂ©zanne and Monet, we think about the perceptual quality of seeing and justice.
As novelist and painter John Berger once wrote, to paint the existent may be one of the last revolutionary acts. It promises the potential of hope, and it is in this manner that we consider that to see the world wholly or fairly requires this attention to detail and fact. This may be some of the real evidence that we need to address and respond to the suffering as well as the joy in our lives and the lives of others.
I
On Justice
April 2015
MZ Letâs start these conversations with the etymology of âjusticeâ â it has Latin roots, right?
RW Itâs Latin, yes, and related to the idea of jus â meaning law, or ârightâ. This is slightly different from the way in which it works in Greek and Hebrew. The Hebrew, tzedakah, has more the sense of âalignmentâ, a ârightnessâ of posture, or direction, perhaps. And a bit of that comes over in the Greek dikaios as well. If the Latin justitia and justus bring to mind the sense of resorting to or relating to the law, you donât quite get that in Greek or Hebrew. Itâs a more intrinsic thing, I think. To act with justice, in Hebrew, or to do justice, is to align yourself properly; it is not so much to do with settling a claim.
MZ I think thatâs really important, that reminder of an alignment to something as opposed to a settling of a dispute. When do you think that moment happened, where the settling of a dispute came into the language as âjusticeâ?
RW I donât know. But I think any language that depends on Latin, any culture that depends on Roman culture, is going to be inheriting something of that distributive or apportioning sense, the conflict-settling side of it; it is why, historically, when the Greek New Testament gets into Latin, all sorts of ideas about whatâs involved in the ârighteousnessâ of God change their emphasis and you get a much stronger emphasis, in Latin theology, on satisfying claims and settling things.
MZ If you were to go and think more about the Greek and the Hebrew, then youâd have this sense of âalignmentâ, or what is ârightâ.
RW Yes. If you think of how Saint Paul speaks about the righteousness of God, and how we are made righteous, itâs not so much how we are made compliant with law, but how weâre made compatible â if thatâs the word â with God.
MZ If itâs not about being lawful or law-abiding, then we are looking at something more robust and interesting that aligns us with a different sense of what justice might involve.
RW I suppose you could say that the problem, as Saint Paul himself sees it, is this: he has recognised that simply keeping to the law doesnât in itself deliver ârighteousnessâ, in the sense of becoming aligned or compatible with God. So you can clock up all the particular acts that youâve done rightly, but you wonât actually achieve real âjusticeâ â because that is your compatibility with the life of God, your capacity to live in Godâs company without agony or shame. Godâs rightness, or right-directedness, makes demands on your right-directedness, but you canât put them together just by law-keeping. The whole problem about the Christian understanding of justice has roots somewhere in that complex of thought.
MZ Yes. There seems to have been a historic split, between ârightnessâ and law, when the law became an entity in itself from the sixteenth century onwards.
RW Increasingly so, yes. Especially once ârightsâ are understood as certain specific entitlements.
MZ Yes. So thatâs what Iâm really wanting to get at: what is that difference in approaching rights? That is, between the former sense of the right direction â which seems, to me, to be the one that offers the possibility of âcommunionâ or a relationship â and the individual sense of my rights, or entitlement to things. In the latter way of thinking, the person becomes the centre of everything.
RW Thatâs right. I was thinking about the different ways in which we use âdoing justiceâ to something or someone. We might say, âThat photograph doesnât do justice to himâ. What does that mean? Not that some claim has been left unfulfilled, but that the photograph doesnât allow the person to be seen as they should be. And thatâs much more on the relational end of the spectrum, rather than the problem-solving or conflict-settling end. Itâs not that a photographer or a portrait painter has somehow failed to pay his or her dues. Theyâve just not seen something, theyâve not been on the proper wavelength.
MZ Yes. And similarly, I think, if youâre looking at a portrait or a painting or an image, youâre wanting to see something and attribute something, whereas there might be something you see that isnât in the framework that youâre bringing with you, something youâre not expecting from the image. So itâs not necessarily the unspoken, itâs something to do with the spirit in which you enter or relate to the image.
RW Essentially, itâs to do with how you want to see whatâs before you. There are ways of trying to see that seek to contain or swallow things, and there are ways of seeing that allow the vision to be sent off in different directions and filling out whatâs there.
MZ Yes. And the imagination comes into play.
RW And the imagination, yes. Itâs one reason why portrait-painting fascinates me. My sister-in-lawâs a painter and most of her work is portraiture â almost entirely of people she knows very well. I often look at her work and think of it in terms of this âdoing justiceâ. In some respects, sheâs not what youâd call a realistic portrait painter, but what she produces are quite obviously portraits; they are very definitely ways of seeing whatâs there, and they often have an indeterminacy in them that allows you to see more as you look again. Thatâs why â for her, as for other painters and portraitists â often a sketch will do better âjusticeâ than a full-scale oil painting. It can be very illuminating to think about what it means to say, in that context, that an image âdoes justiceâ.
MZ Yes, doing justice. This is something interesting that Roland Barthes talked about in his book Camera Lucida, and his search for the âjustâ image of his mother.1 He was looking at photographs after she died, looking for images of her, and he found one photo from when she was a child (what he called the Wintergarden photograph), and it was a surprise to him. What he found in it was a sort of kindness in her hands, things like this; he found a tenderness in her through the photograph and he didnât expect to see her like that. He wanted a âjustâ image of his mother and he found it in unexpectedly in that photograph. And this surprise or unexpectedness has something to do with the ability to see. So maybe there is something in that. But to do justice is wanting a result, isnât it, in some ways? Youâre wanting some kind of definitive result, some finality â something which, actually, is never the case.
RW Yes. The trouble with starting from the legal claim end of the spectrum is that in those terms it is possible to âfinish the businessâ â or, at least, it seems to be, though it isnât so in practice, of course. In fact, this is the kind of illusion thatâs quite cruel to people who feel that the law is going to deliver closure for them. âThe killer of my daughter has gone to prison and now thatâs all settledâ; but it isnât. To claim that it is, is certainly one approach to the doing of justice but not a particularly interesting one, in some ways, and certainly not a very decisive one. It does a bit of necessary business, but it canât be the whole picture.
MZ I think the clue is in what you were just saying. The law has its function, but the truth is that itâs never going to satisfy, in some respects, because itâs not going to deal with the emotional trauma of whatâs happened, or other things that may arise ⊠and thereâs the question of what happens when justice fails? I think ideas of justice and law are necessary, but that there is something else that needs to be addressed in the understanding of what is just or what is justice?
RW And because thatâs potentially a really enormous issue, it is alarming for people. It seems a lot easier just to tick off the things that have been âsettledâ.
MZ Yet itâs that approach that creates the problems.
RW This is a particularly interesting question for me at the moment in the context of the development charity I chair. In Christian Aid, weâve been having quite a lot of discussion over the last few years about the need to move from the language of charity to the language of justice, because we donât want to see international aid as âcharityâ, in the sense of a nice thing to do with our surplus, kindly throwing coins to the poor, as it were. Itâs about what is properly due to the deprived and disadvantaged; and I think all of us have wanted to say, as many Christians would want to say, âYes, of course.â But what weâre in the business of is rather more than simply rectifying a balance, or clearing the slate, or paying our debts. The justice we want to affirm and sustain canât simply turn its back on the proper root of charity â the element that has to do with mending relations and so on.
MZ What is coming to mind is if we go back to the proper root of charity, it opens up something interesting, and, in a way, that has to be thought through in relationship to justice.
RW Exactly.
MZ And how would we begin that understanding without dismissing either? I can see the discussions that could go on in an organisational context: there would be a limit to how you could intervene and what you can do; but if youâre thinking about the core of the idea of charity and the core of the idea of justice, which are very different things to the way we popularly consider them âŠ
RW Yes. Both words have come down in the world and got into bad company.
MZ Charity in particular.
RW I read something on this years ago in some of John Bossyâs work on s...