The Relation of Justice and Mercy in St. Anselm's Proslogion
In Ch. IX of the Proslogion, St. Anselm asks the following question:
How then is it just both that you punish the wicked and that you spare the wicked?1
It is a good question. We normally define justice as “giving to another their due.” But if the wicked are due punishment, why isn’t God obligated to punish them? Certainly the wicked are sometimes punished, but often they are not. In fact, all grace has some merciful effect, saving man from the punishment that he would otherwise receive on account of his sinfulness.
And what about salvation itself? If men do not, strictly speaking, earn justification (i.e. men are first wicked and God gratuitously gives them the grace whereby they begin to become holy), then is there not a great injustice in God letting souls off-the-hook, as it were, for their sins? If every man is fallen and deserving of eternal punishment, why is God not unjust in ignoring such just desserts? To put the question another way, why aren’t God’s mercy and justice competitive?
Surely in the temporal sphere, the judge’s justice and mercy appear competitive. Imagine a judge with a serial killer before him. The judge asks the killer if he is sorrowful for his sins. The killer responds that he is not the least bit sorrowful. If the judge sets him free, out of a display of supposedly profound mercy, would we not call the judge grossly negligent of his duty?
If, as was mentioned above, it is true that sin creates an infinite offense against God, and that men is incapable of paying off this debt on his own, then we cannot look to redemptive suffering or purgatory for our answer either. For there, even though men suffer, they do not experience all of the punishment that they are, strictly speaking, due.
We return to the original question: when God is merciful, is he being unjust?
Anselm provides us with an answer, and it is rooted in recognizing that divine justice is analogous (but not univocal) to human, cardinal virtue of justice.
You are just not because you give us our due, but because you do what befits you as the supreme good. Thus, without contradiction, justly do you punish and justly do you pardon.2
Human justice demands some degree of equality. Two individuals who part of some shared community have (either chosen or given) obligations to each other. But we are not peers to God, nor could the Creator owe anything to His creations, at least not in the strict sense of “owe.” And therefore, there is no strict sense of justice which binds or forces God to act in some particular way toward us.
This is not to say that God acts wantonly or arbitrarily. But if God is bound in any sense, He is bound only to Himself, i.e. He is “bound” by his own nature as the Good (though this is actually freedom, not true limitation). Thus, God is under no strict obligation toward men, neither to punish nor to give grace.
When God punishes, there is certainly a mark of fittingness. The wicked man is befitted for punishment (and he is certainly more befit for punishment than he is for grace, given its gratuitous nature). But to do other than what befits a man is not to do injustice, especially if in the lofty heights of the divine wisdom, God deems it more fitting to withhold punishment. There is no injustice to replace the fitting with the more fitting.
When God acts mercifully, he is not ignoring man’s due. He is choosing wisely, albeit beyond our comprehension, to give a gift. Sometimes he fittingly refuses the gift; and sometimes he fittingly gives it.
In this way, God’s justice and mercy are not competitive. In fact, the distinction between the divine mercy and justice is found only in the various effects of God within the created order. There is, of course, no distinction between God’s justice and mercy in him. Anselm says:
In fact, you are merciful according to our way of looking at things and not according to your way. For when you look upon us in our misery it is we who feel the effect of your mercy, but you do not experience the feeling. Therefore, you are both merciful because you save the sorrowful and pardon sinners against you; and you are not merciful because you do not experience any feeling of compassion for misery.
God does what is most fitting for his creation. Sometimes he permits us to feel the effects of our sinfulness, and this we call justice. Sometimes he graciously remits our punishment, giving us unowed gifts of virtue and happiness; this we call mercy. In either case, God acts neither out of obligation to men nor without meaning. God is not the manager of a machine, pulling the right levers at just the right moments. Nor even is he precisely like a human judge, bound by an obligation to the state to dole out certain punishments. He is an artist, doing that which he pleases. This judge is also capable of making saints out of criminals, which the human judge cannot do. Indeed, God himself has told us that “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance,” (Lk 15:7).
Truly, then, while divine effects are known disparately to us, they come forth from the simplicity of God. “All the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth,” (Ps 24). God is simultaneously just and merciful to us whenever when we feel his justice and whenever we feel his mercy.
St. Anselm, Prologion, Ch. 10: “Quomodo ergo et iustum est ut malos punias, et iustum est ut malis parcas?”
Ibid.: “Ita iustus es non quia nobis reddas debitum, sed quia facis quod decet te summe bonum. Sic itaque sine repugnantia iuste punis et iuste parcis.
This topic - divine justice and mercy, not Anselm's take thereon - came up in class yesterday. The question is why it should be considered merciful to give what is due, and how God can even be said to give what is due, since he doesn't owe anyone anything. It seems that God is only merciful, not just. As a moralist, my response was to think of Plato's conception of justice, which has to do with harmony, rather than with what is owed. So I responded by asking _why_ ought others be given their due. And the answer of course is that we want to have an ordered society. That provides us with another way of looking at things: God's justice is found in his ordering all things, and that very act of ordering things is merciful, since he certainly did not have to do it.
I've always wondered if Anselm found his answer to the question here particularly satisfying. My theory is that he didn't and only truly resolves the question in Cur Deus Homo (I read the affirmation of justice and mercy's identity in Christ to be the emotional climax of that book).
Given the absence (at least the apparent absence) of the Incarnation in the Proslogion, it makes sense why this would be the case.