The Name of the Month

 It is the sixth month of the year.   The common name for this month is June, a name derived from Juno, the Queen of the Olympians in Roman mythology corresponding to the Greek Hera.   While occasionally one encounters a Christian who has a problem with the month’s name on the basis of this pagan origin, most of us are sensible enough to recognize that words take on new meanings, that “June” now simply means “the sixth month of the year”, and that one is in no way evoking the pagan goddess by calling the month after its common name.   The more educated among us will also recognize that the kind of reasoning used to condemn those who call the month by its common name would also condemn the writers of the New Testament who employ the word “Hades” to refer to the place the Old Testament calls “Sheol” because of the similar concept – a dark, shadowy, underworld, inhabited by the spirits of the dead – even though “Hades” as a name for the underworld is borrowed from that of the god who ruled it in Greek mythology, the god the Romans called Pluto.   A good rule to follow when trying to determine whether you are taking a principled stand for Christ or just being a nut is that if you are doing something that the Puritans, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Maoists liked doing, such as renaming everything, then you are probably just being a nut.

 

At any rate, June is certainly a better name than the alternative name that so many now use for this month.   The sort of people who identify themselves by one of the letters in the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY – and others, businesses and politicians mostly, who wish to be seen as supportive of the alphabet soup gang, refer to it as Pride month.   It was not that long ago that it was Pride Week.   Now it has grown into a whole month.   Originally there was a Gay before the Pride but at some point this was dropped presumably because the other letters in the alphabet soup had grown jealous of the G.   

 

The irony of this, for orthodox Christians, of course, is that of the two terms, Pride is by far the most objectionable.   Gay, which in this context does not have its older and, until well into the twentieth-century primary, meaning of light-hearted, cheerful, and happy, but rather its more recent and as of late sole sense of homosexual, denotes something that violates the standards of orthodox moral theology on the basis of both explicit Scriptural passages against it (Genesis 19, Leviticus 20, Romans 1, and Jude being the most obvious examples) and its deviation from the exemplary pattern of a man leaving his father and mother, being joined to his wife, and the two being one flesh.   Pride, however, is the name of the worst of all sins.

 

While the ancient Greeks did not have the same view of Pride as orthodox Christianity they did, in a way, anticipate the Christian point of view in their concept of hubris, which was a form of Pride.    It had various connotations depending upon context.   In early Greek literature it frequently designated words and acts by which men insulted and offended the gods with arrogant boasting.   Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia, boasted that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the sea nymphs the Nereids, which brought upon her and her kingdom the wrath of Poseidon.   This was an example of this sense of hubris.   Numerous similar examples could be given, in each of which the person who offended the gods with his or her arrogance met with swift punishment, sometimes fatal, sometimes non-fatal but permanent, often involving a transformation.   The myth of Arachne whom Athena transformed into a spider for boasting that she was a superior weaver is an example of the latter sort.  So, for that matter, is basically every example of hubris related by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.  Occasionally the punishment was thwarted, at least in part, by another agent.   In the aforementioned example of Cassiopeia, Andromeda was as much an object of Neptune’s wrath as her mother and to spare Ethiopia, Cassiopeia was told she would have to sacrifice Andromeda to a sea-monster.  The hero Perseus intervened and rescued the princess whom he then married.   In Greek mythology, both hubris and the divine wrath that punished it, like most abstract concepts were personified as divinities, Hubris and Nemesis.   A more general version of this same basic concept, that arrogance brings about one’s downfall, also appears in Greek mythology and literature of equal vintage.   Think of the myth of Icarus, the son of Daedelus, architect of the Labyrinth.   Daedelus, having offended his king, Minos of Crete, was imprisoned and escaped the prison with his son, on wings he constructed of wax and feathers.  Icarus, ignoring his father’s warnings, flew too high, the sun melted the wax, and he plummeted to his death.    It can also be found illustrated, along with other themes, in “The Tortoise and the Hare”, from Aesop’s Fables.   Aesop lived the century after Homer and Hesiod – he is believed to have been born only a few decades after the latter died – and this particular of his fables is of unquestionable antiquity, having been famously referenced, albeit with the details altered and with an entirely different point, by Zeno of Elea in one of those delightful paradoxes “proving” motion to be impossible.   

 

The Greek poets and storytellers who related the above myths stressed the offensiveness of mortal hubris to those above men, the gods.   One of the most well-known definitions of hubris to come down to us from ancient times is that of Aristotle.   It comes from the second book of his Rhetoric, a work that both defines the principles and rules and instructs in the art of persuasive speech.      This is the section in which Aristotle is exploring the usefulness of pathos – emotion – both on the part of the speaker and the audience, in making an argument.   His definition of hubris – which is generally rendered “insult” in English translation of Rhetoric – emphasizes its offensiveness in the opposite direction to that stressed by the ancient myths, i.e., to its human victims.   As translated by J. H. Freese it says that hubris “consists in causing injury or annoyance whereby the sufferer is disgraced, not to obtain any other advantage for oneself besides the performance of the act, but for one’s own pleasure”.   At first glance, it seems almost as if Aristotle were discussing something completely different from the hubris of Greek mythology and, indeed, he obviously had the laws of his city-state Athens in mind here.   In Greek law in general, hubris denoted a wide category of crimes.   The Athenian lawmakers had put more effort into defining the category than most and in Athenian law hubris consisted of crimes that deliberately inflicted shame upon their victims.   Some recent classical scholars have argued on the basis of this definition that our entire traditional understanding of the Greek concept of hubris is mistaken, an anachronistic reading of English usage and Christian concepts back into ancient thought.    This, however, reads too much into this one passage of Aristotle.   It is understandable that the legal connotations of hubris, in which its effects on human victims would be stressed, would be foremost in Aristotle’s mind in Rhetoric – consult Plato’s dialogues that feature Socrates interacting with the Sophists, or for that matter Aristophanes’ lampooning of Socrates himself in the Clouds, and it will quickly become obvious, as in fact, it is self-evident, that the main reason rhetoric teachers were in demand was because people wanted to win lawsuits in court.   

 

Aristotle was also the author of Poetics, the work that established the framework in which theoretical discussion of drama, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Aristotle – and everything he wrote, from the basic unities to catharsis has been subjected to rigorous debate - has been conducted ever since.   While other forms of poetry such as Epic, and of drama such as Comedy, are discussed, the bulk of Poetics, which is not a long work, pertains to tragedy.    Aristotle, remember, lived in the period immediately after tragedy had come to dominate the Greek theatre.   Two of the great Athenian tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, had been contemporaries of Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, and of Socrates, Plato’s teacher, while Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, had lived into Socrates’ youth.   Tragedy, according to Aristotle, was a form of dramatic poetry that like Epic but in contrast with Comedy, involved an imitation (Gk. Mimesis) of the higher sort of character in serious events or actions, the purpose of which was to achieve a cleansing or purging (Gk. Catharsis) of the emotions, particularly of the fear and pity that the play was supposed to produce in the audience through empathy with the characters.   It had six parts – Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Song – and of these, the Plot, the most important of the six parts, had to involve a Reversal (Gk. Peripeteia) of fortune and circumstance from good to bad, brought about not by vice or depravity, but by a great error, weakness or failing (Gk. Hamartia) of the hero.    Hubris was the most common example of this Hamartia.  Hubris, as an Aristotelean tragic hero’s “fatal flaw”, is more recognizable as the hubris of Greek mythology than the legal hubris of the Rhetoric.   The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were, for the most part, retellings – in the case of Euripides often radical re-interpretations – of the older Greek myths.  

 

The Greek view, as I pointed out at the beginning of this discussion, anticipated the Christian view but was not identical to it.   This is evident in Aristotle.   By contrasting Hamartia, the general category to which hubris belonged, with vice and depravity, he spoke of it in terms that had a less harsh moral tone to them, although, interestingly, about a century after Aristotle, the Jewish scribes who translated the LXX for Ptolemy II Philadelphus would use it to render Chata, the basic Hebrew word for “sin” in the Old Testament, which led to it becoming the main word for “sin” in the New Testament.     Hamartiology is the designation of the study of the doctrine of sin in Christian theology.  It was the natural translation choice – both Chata and Hamartia have the same root meaning of an archer missing the mark he is aiming for – but when it comes to usage, Chata in the Old Testament has the same general connotations and tone that “sin” does in English, which is not true of Hamartia in Greek literature prior to the LXX and New Testament.   Thus Aristotle, using Hamartia, “missing the mark”, to mean the “mistake” “error” or “flaw” that brings about the Peripetia of his tragic hero – someone, whom he says, should be depicted as neither exceptionally virtuous or villainous – contrasts it with moral depravity and vice, whereas St. Paul, also alluding to the basic meaning of the word when he writes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), does so after making the point with a series of Old Testament quotations that emphasize the depravity of the sinner (“their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth if full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood:” etc.).

 

Neither Aristotle nor the ancient Greeks in general thought of Pride in general in the same terms in which they thought of Hubris.   The former they thought of as a good thing, the latter as Pride taken to excess.   Excess, of course, was fundamental to Aristotle’s entire concept of Vice, just as moderation was to his view of Virtue.   A Virtue was the middle path of moderation between two Vices of excess.   Indeed, in Book IV of his Nicomachean Ethics, he speaks of Pride as the Virtue (Gk. Arete) that falls between a false humility and excessive Pride.   Spoken of in these terms, it means the acknowledgement of one’s own strengths, accomplishments, etc. as they actually are, as opposed to speaking of them as if they were less than they are in reality (false humility) or laying claim to greater strengths and accomplishments than one actually possesses (excessive Pride).   From this perspective, since people’s strengths etc. can be ranked in terms of best, various degrees of better, good, bad, various degrees of worse, and worst, for the person who actually belongs to the top rank of best to acknowledge such is ordinary Pride and not Hubris.

The Holy Scriptures, by contrast, never speak of Pride positively, in either Testament.   Nor do they ever speak negatively of humility.   To be fair to Aristotle, it should be noted that they never use these words with precisely the same sense that he gave them either and that the Scriptures do indeed place a high premium on speaking of things as they are.   The closest thing to even a neutral use of the word “Pride” in the Bible that I could find is Job 41:15, which describes the scales of Leviathan as his pride, although, since the sea-serpent discussed in that chapter almost certainly represents Satan, this may not be as neutral a usage as it seems.   Pride is the sin that brought about the devil’s fall.   This is explicitly stated by St. Paul in the New Testament (I Tim. 3:6), and if the traditional interpretation of Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:12-19 as God speaking to the devil through the human representatives of the kings of Babylon and Tyre and describing his fall is accurate (1), it is found in the Old Testament as well.   The Isaiah passage does not use the word Pride, but it is clearly the motive of the actions described.   The expression “thine heart was lifted up” in Ezekiel 28:17 essentially means “you became proud”.   Just as Pride led to Satan’s own downfall, it was the means he used to bring about the Fall of Man as well.  He tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by telling her that the only reason God had forbidden it to her and Adam was because it would open their eyes, giving them the God-like knowledge of good and evil, leading her to distrust God and to desire the forbidden God-like knowledge.   The Temptation worked by stoking and appealing to Pride.  When later, Satan unsuccessfully tempted Jesus, each of the three Temptations was an enticement to act based on Pride in one form or another.  

The Bible uses the word Pride to characterize the wicked (Job. 35:12, Ps. 10:2) and the foolish (Prov. 14:13).   It leads, like hubris in Greek thought, to a fall and to destruction (Prov. 16:8) and brings God’s judgement both upon Israel (Is. 9:8-12, Jer. 13:9)and the nations around her, (Ez. 30:6, Zech. 9:6) including or perhaps especially the powerful ones that she relies upon instead of God and which He uses as a scourge against her (Zech. 10:11).  It deceives (Obad. 1:3) and prevents the wicked from seeking God (Ps. 10:4).   To fear the Lord is to hate Pride (Prov. 8:13).   Interestingly, it is said to lead to shame and being brought low in contrast with humility and (voluntary) lowliness leading to wisdom and honour (Prov. 11:2, 29:23), which may be where Greek and Biblical thought on the subject were the furthest removed from each other.   Very interestingly, considering the occasion of this essay, is that Ezekiel gave it as the first example in his list of the iniquities that brought judgement upon Sodom (Ez. 16:49).   Jesus spoke of Pride as one of the things that comes from out of the heart and defiles a man (Mk. 7:22).   The cognate adjective proud is used less frequently and no differently.  

 

It is only when it comes to the conceptually related verbs “boast” and “glory” that we find references that are positive and these generally speak of a “boasting” or “glorying” that is fundamentally the opposite of the kind that would be associated with Pride.   Here are a few examples:

 

My soul shall make her boast in the LORD: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad. (Ps.  34:2)

 

In God we boast all the day long, and praise thy name forever. Selah. (Ps. 44:8)

 

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world. (Gal. 6:14)

 

While Greek thought with regards to hubris approached Biblical thought regarding Pride, it fell short.   The Greeks worshipped gods whom they thought of as being superior to mortal men in terms of strength and power but generally not in terms of righteousness and justice.   Indeed, it could be argued that Greek mythology generally presented the gods as men’s moral inferiors.   There are some exceptions to this among the ancient writers, but it was noticeable enough to attract attention, comment, and attempts at reform from Plato and Euripides among others.   Something like hubris that offended such deities, therefore, simply could not be thought of in the same terms as that which offends the True and Living God of the Bible, Who is man’s superior in every way, in the superlative and not just the comparative degree.   Since the Scriptures tell us that men were created Innocent by the True and Living God, but fell into sin which offends against Him Who is Supremely Perfect in His Holiness, Righteousness, and Justice, it can hardly be surprising that the same Scriptures universally condemn human Pride, and counsel sinful men to adopt an attitude of brokenness, contrition, and humility, warning them that if they lift themselves up in Pride He will bring them low, but promising that if they humble themselves in the sight of the LORD, He will lift them up (Jas. 4:10).    The Church’s traditional identification of Superbia – Pride – as the source of all other sin, the worst and deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins, represents Scriptural thought faithfully.   In this as in many other areas, ancient Greek thought demonstrates how far human philosophy can go relying upon General Revelation, but also how far it falls short of the Special Revelation of the Scriptures and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.  This is the Hamartia of human philosophy.

 

When it comes to the Pride that is contemporarily celebrated on the sixth month of the year, however, ancient Greek thought would condemn it as much as Christian thought.   This might seem paradoxical, in that the ancient Greeks were famously tolerant of some of the sexual conduct associated with Pride month, but as noted earlier the modifier which once qualified Pride was dropped years ago, the reference to the lesser sin which the Greeks tolerated being eliminated leaving only the name of the worst of all sins.   The arrogance of the current demands of the intolerant Left that everybody pay homage to the celebration or face “cancellation” is such than any of the ancient Greeks would have recognized it as hubris.  

 

It is best that we stick to using the name of Jupiter’s wife for this month.   Pagan in origin, thought it undoubtedly be, it is far less objectionable than the other alternative.

 

(1))   In my opinion the traditional interpretation is correct.   Although the early Reformers rejected it, it has strong Patristic support, going back at least as far as Tertullian and Origin in the second century.   That this interpretation may have dated back to the intertestamental period cannot be ruled out – there is insufficient evidence from the period itself.    The Church Fathers, however, relied upon a handful of New Testament passages that speak of the fall of Satan using language that suggests allusion to the Isaiah passage. The two passages in question use language that obviously does not apply literally to the kings of Babylon and Tyre and which it would be rather a stretch to apply to them in any metaphorical sense.

Obnoxious Self-Righteous Jerks versus Basic Human Decency

The late Fred Phelps was a man who earned for himself the reputation of being a jerk. Not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, jerk, either, but a jerk on such a scale that the character which Denis Leary portrayed in the song “Asshole” from his 1993 album No Cure For Cancer had absolutely nothing on him. It is not just that the founder and “pastor” of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas disavowed the conventional Christian wisdom that God hates the sin but loves the sinner and that we ought to do the same in favour of an extreme five-point Calvinism that proclaimed God’s literal hatred for certain people. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, the way he choose to publicize his message. It requires an astonishing level of low-life creepiness to intrude upon the grief of people who are mourning the loss of a loved one by picketing a funeral. Indeed, perhaps the kindest thing that can be said in Mr. Phelp’s favour, is that he never – at least to the best of my knowledge – took it a step further and attempted to prevent the funerals he picketed from taking place.

As we shall see in a moment, that cannot be said of certain other people. First, however, let us consider just how contrary to the wisdom of the ages this sort of thing actually is.

Of the ancient Greek poets, none was more inspiring and influential than Homer, the epic poet of the eighth century BC. The most important of his works was the Iliad the story of which is set in the last year of the Trojan War. The many different conflicts and intrigues that take place among gods and men over the course of the poem’s twenty four books are tied together by the poem’s theme, identified in its very first line: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος “Sing goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” At the beginning of the poem, that wrath is directed against Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the leader of the Greek forces. Achilles, in his anger withdraws his Myrmidons from the war. His mother Thetis secures from Zeus the promise that the tide of the war will go against the Greeks until Agamemnon gives Achilles the honour he deserves and he returns to the war. When the Trojans are on the verge of burning the Greek ships, Achilles’ closest friend Patroclus obtains his permission to lead the Myrmidon army back into the battle. Wearing Achilles’ own armour, Patroclus is mistaken for Achilles and, ignoring the latter’s instructions to fight only in defence of the ships, he drives the Trojans back to their city where he is killed by the crown prince of Troy, Hector. At this point Achilles’ wrath turns from Agamemnon to Hector, and he re-enters the war himself, lays waste to the Trojan forces, and eventually kills Hector. Then, however, Achilles takes his wrath too far. Rather than turn the body of Hector over to the Trojans for proper burial, he ties it to his chariot and drags it around the walls of Ilium. This is in violation of the laws of the gods but he continues to do this until his mother arrives from Olympus with a message from Zeus telling him in no uncertain terms to knock it off. So rebuked, Achilles turns the body over to Hector’s father, King Priam, when he, smuggled by Hermes into the Greek camp, pleads for it, and assures Priam that he will make the Greeks abide by an armistice that will allow Priam sufficient time to bury Hector with all the proper honours.

The idea that it is against divine law to refuse a proper burial even to an enemy recurs in the Antigone, one of three surviving tragedies by fifth century BC playwright Sophocles that deal with the curse that Oedipus brings upon himself and his city, Thebes, by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother. After Oedipus learned the truth, blinded himself, and went into exile one of his sons, Eteocles, drove the other, Polynices, into exile. The latter found refuge in Argos where he married the daughter of king Adrastus who then supported him in an expedition against Eteocles in Thebes. In the course of the battle, both brothers were killed. Creon, Oedipus’ uncle/brother-in-law was then made king of Thebes and he decreed that Eteocles was to be fully honoured, but Polynices was to be left to rot, imposing capital punishment upon anyone who defied this edict. This is where the Antigone begins for the title character, daughter of Oedipus, refuses to obey the edict and performs the burial rites for her brother. Although he is warned by the seer Tiresias, Creon persists in defying the law of the gods and orders Antigone to be buried alive. Divine judgement falls upon him in the loss of his own house, as his son Haemon who had been betrothed to Antigone kills himself in anger and grief, to be followed into suicide immediately thereafter by his mother Eurydice.

That one ought not to interfere with the proper burial even of those who were your enemies was evidently an idea that the Greeks felt rather strongly about. The Romans had a saying, de mortuus nil nisi bonum dicendum est – “about the dead, nothing except good, must be spoken” – which, while not entirely the same concept, nevertheless indicates a sort of consensus among the ancients, that the grievances we have against people in their lives ought to be buried with them in the grave and must not be allowed to interfere with the duty owed by the living to the dead.

There are some here in Canada today, I am sorry to say, who disagree with the wisdom of the ancients and have recently shown it in actions that make Fred Phelps look classy by comparison. It is not merely the ancient tradition dictating respect for the dead and mourning that they have disregarded, however, in their recent attempts to shut down a memorial service for an Ontario lawyer, but some of the most foundational principles of our system of justice. Their indecorous posthumous vendetta against this woman is based entirely upon who her clients were. One of the fundamental principles of our system of justice is that it is better for the guilty to escape punishment than for the innocent to be unjustly condemned. This too is a principle with ancient antecedents. Socrates argument against Polus in Plato’s Gorgias that it is better to suffer wrong than to commit it is one example, Abraham’s negotiations with God over the fate of the righteous in the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis is another. Upon this foundation rest such other basic principles as the right of the accused to confront his accuser and to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial. Imagine what would happen to these principles if we were to allow the precedent to be established that defence advocates are to be treated as participants in the guilt of their clients.

If that were not bad enough in this case the lawyer’s clients were not people accused of crimes that are universally recognized as such – murder, robbery, rape and the like – but rather of thought crimes.

There is a backstory to all of this that goes back several decades. For a long time certain groups lobbied Parliament to have laws against “hate literature” passed. NB that hate literature does not mean literature that literally expresses hatred of the “I hate you, you lousy rotten sonuvabitch, I wish you were dead” type but rather literature that portrays racial and religious groups in a negative light. Unless, that is, the racial and religious groups are whites or Christians. In the 1960s, Lester Pearson appointed a committee to look into this and in 1971 Pierre Trudeau, who had been a member of that committee, added Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause, to the Criminal Code. Those who wanted these laws were still unsatisfied, because those charged under this law were entitled to the full protection of the rights of a defendant and so Trudeau passed the Canadian Human Rights Act which prohibited discrimination in 1977 and this included Section 13 that defined the communication via telephone of anything “likely to” expose a member of a protected group to “hatred or contempt” as a discriminatory act. Later Jean Chretien would add Section 13 b) that extended this to all electronic communication to cover the internet as well. Since the Canadian Human Rights Act is considered civil rather than criminal law it was much easier to charge and convict people under this law than under Section 318.

For anyone acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes or with the body of literature by authors such as Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that shone a light on the nature of such regimes the outcome of these laws will be chillingly familiar. A list of prohibited books was drawn up which were seized at customs and removed from libraries, public and academic. About a decade after these laws were passed widely publicized show trials of a handful of individuals accused of this new form of crimethink were held. The press tried these individuals in the court of a public opinion which they manufactured by making these individuals the subjects of a two-minute hate but remained largely mute about the much larger number of people who were being dragged before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals under Section 13.

That would change, of course, in the late 2000s when two magazines with national circulation were charged under the provincial equivalents of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Hoist with its own petard, the media which had stood by and said nothing while Section 13 was used to ruin the lives of Canadians for daring to express forbidden thoughts, but now aware of the threat to its own freedom, began to report on Warman v. Lemire, the last Section 13 case to be heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. The light this shed on Section 13 and the shady behaviour of the Canadian Human Rights Commission generated enough of a backlash that Conservative MP Brian Storseth was able to garner sufficient support in Parliament for a bill that brought about the repeal of Section 13. Nevertheless, there is much more work that needs to be done to completely rollback this Soviet-style thought control and recover the atmosphere of freedom that Canadians used to know and which our Common Law birthright as subjects of the Crown.

In this fight for traditional Canadian freedoms against this kind of soft totalitarianism those who deserve the most honour are those who stood up against it from the beginning. It is one thing to speak out when someone tries to censor MacLean’s magazine. The true test of commitment to freedom of conscience, thought, and speech is when you dare to speak out when they go after an Ernst Zündel, James Keegstra, or John Ross Taylor. This is a point that Pastor Martin Niemöller would certainly have understood. Foremost among those who demonstrated such commitment were BC lawyer Doug Christie and his long-time associate Barbara Kulaszka of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Although Christie, who passed away four years ago, was the better known of the two, Kulaszka had been a key figure in the fight for free speech from the beginning, when she worked alongside Christie in the Zündel case back in the 1980s. She passed away from cancer this year on the fifteenth of June.

The Canadian Association for Free Expression rented space in the Richview Public Library in Toronto for the purpose of holding a memorial service for Kulaszka last Wednesday. When word of this got out several individuals and organizations placed pressure on the Toronto Public Library system to cancel the event and a number of newspapers and other media outlets expressed manufactured outrage when the library, to its credit, refused to do this. Keep in mind that this was a memorial service – an occasion for those who had known Kulaszka, had worked with her, and whom she had defended in court, to remember her and pay her public tribute. It was not, despite the dishonest way in which it has been reported in many media sources, something akin to a Klan rally.

Overlooked and ignored by Kulaszka’s detractors is the fact that while many of her clients are said to have expressed admiration for Nazism and the Third Reich and questioned the accuracy of the crimes and atrocities attributed to it – I use the words “said to” because hate speech laws by their very nature are intended to prevent us from having access to what the thought criminal has actually said and to force us to rely upon the word of hate speech experts, themselves extremely hostile to the thought criminals, to tell us what they think and say - in fighting on their behalf against those who sought to penalize them for their ideas she was fighting, not for the ideology of National Socialism, but for the principles of freedom and justice that belong to the tradition of Great Britain and the Commonwealth – the countries that went to war to defeat Nazism. It is this desire to silence people with laws that penalize them for their thoughts and words that lies behind the hate laws that Kulaszka fought against which is akin to the spirit of the totalitarianism that was Nazism, not her brave and dedicated efforts to fight this tyranny.

So who are these people who are so utterly lacking in class as to begrudge Kulaszka her memorial?

Well, there are the politicians of course. John Tory, the present mayor of Hogtown, and Toronto City Councillors James Pasternak and John Campbell all gave quotes to the media expressing their dismay over the library’s decision to allow the memorial. Politicians being what they are it is reasonable to suspect that if the media had taken the opposite approach to the story they would have been quoted as supporting the library’s decision. So take their words for the nothing they are worth.

Then there are the usual suspects – the professional anti-bigots. Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, and Warren Kinsella were all on hand to vent their impotent rage at the library that actually dared to defy their edict as to who should or should not be allowed to rent public facilities for a memorial service. It is easy to see why these three are so upset. Warman, whom the media describe as a “human rights lawyer”, is a former investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission who went on to become the complainant in the vast majority of Section 13 cases. Farber was the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress until it was swallowed up by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs about six years ago. The CJC was the chief organization that lobbied for hate literature laws before the Liberals acquiesced and while this was before Farber’s time as CEO he was himself an avid supporter of hate laws throughout his career. Kinsella, lawyer, Liberal Party strategist, and political commentator, has also been an outspoken advocate of hate laws over the years. It is people like this, who have devoted their lives to the cause of fighting views that they perceive to be bigotry, who, blinded by their zeal, seem incapable of distinguishing between lawyers and their clients or understanding that those who hold the views they object to do not thereby forfeit their rights.

Smug, soulless, and absolutely convinced of their own righteousness, they see no need for showing the basic human decency of allowing their opponents to mourn their dead in peace, and so they have been carrying on with the lack of class we have come to associate with Westboro Baptist Church. Is it that surprising, therefore, to learn that Fred Phelps in his first career, before starting Westboro Baptist Church, was a lawyer who specialized in racial discrimination cases?

The Female of the Species is More Randy than the Male!

To point out the hard truth about women qua women as I am about to do in this essay goes against many of my deeply cherished convictions. As a Canadian Tory, which is something different from a right-liberal which is what most American conservatives are, I do not believe that everything worth defending in Western Civilization came about in the Modern Age as the result of the Enlightenment but insist rather, that there is much that is worth fighting and dying for to be found in the tradition that antedates modernity. That includes the concept of chivalry, which arose out of the code of honour of the knightly orders of the Middle Ages. One aspect of the attitude and behaviour towards women prescribed by chivalry, that of pretending that they are as pure as the driven snow, could be described as the maintenance of what Plato called a “noble lie.” It was based on the recognition of a greater truth, which was that men and women are different and not equal and that the natural inequality is such as warrants protective behaviour on the part of men towards women, even to the point of publicly holding such an illusion about them.

Unfortunately chivalry is dead having been murdered by the monstrous beast that is feminism. By insisting, contrary to reality that men and women are equals, and contrary to the superior morality of pre-liberal tradition that they must be regarded and treated as equals, feminism has so altered the relationship between the sexes as to remove any justification for the noble lie. That might not, in itself, be a good reason to say something unchivalrous, but female hypocrisy has never been more on display than it has for the last week and so the time has come to speak the ignoble truth.

In ancient Greek mythology there was a prophet by the name of Tiresias. He was an unusually long-lived man who lived in the city of Thebes. If you are familiar with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex you will recall that he is the man who reluctantly, and only after the provocation of an unjust accusation of conspiracy, revealed to Oedipus that he was the man who had killed King Laius and in doing so, unwittingly murdered his own father. Another well-known story about Tiresias is how he received the world’s first gender-reassignment surgery. One day he came across two snakes mating and whacked them with his staff, offending Hera, the notoriously psychopathic wife of Zeus, who turned him into a woman. Having undergone this apogynosis, she changed her name to Caitlyn, got her picture on the cover of all of Thebes’ popular entertainment magazines, was offered her own show at the amphitheatre, and became a star until, seven years later, she came across another pair of snakes going at it, and was changed back.

Don’t worry, I am going somewhere with all of this.

Tiresias was, as is quite unusual in a seer, blind. The stories vary as to how this came about, but one version says that he was called upon to judge, on the basis of his ahead-of-the-times transgendered experience, in a dispute between Zeus and Hera over which sex enjoyed copulation more. Zeus claimed that women got more out of it, Hera insisted that the pleasure mostly belonged to men. Tiresias, unwisely, answered truthfully and said that men get only one tenth of the pleasure that women do, thus pissing off the vengeful Hera yet again, and was struck blind as punishment.

Ancient stories of this sort are usually ways of telling truths and this is no exception. The truth contained in this story is that the female of the species is not only, as Rudyard Kipling famously noted, more deadly than the male, but she is also hornier and more randy as well.

As difficult as this is for most people to accept, having had it drilled into our heads most of our lives that the male is dominated by his libido, a violent and powerful force from which the female must be protected, it is also quite evidently true. Is there anybody who seriously thinks that a scientific comparison of the conversation men have among themselves, with that women have among themselves, would reveal that the former spend more of their time talking about women than the latter do about men? If so, such a person needs to get a grasp on reality.

Several years ago in a Bible study class at church the subject of pornography was addressed. It was put forward that this is a sinful addiction to which men are more prone than women. I made the objection that if we do not limit our concept of pornography to merely visual depictions of sex but include verbal descriptions as well, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, by that broader definition, a case can be made that the vast majority of fiction written for primarily female consumption constitutes smut, plain and simple.

Consider popular music for a further example. The most highly sexualized lyrics and performances on the pop music scene today are to be found among female recording artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga. Let us grant that these are women with a very strong business sense who are providing a supply to meet a market demand. Is that demand coming from heterosexual males? You would find little evidence of that by looking at the fan bases of these stars. Their audiences are composed mainly of females.

Women do not like to acknowledge this truth and understandably so. It greatly weakens their bargaining power when it comes to negotiating their relationships with men. So they would prefer that society continue to maintain the fiction that the larger portion of lust has been allotted to men. The hypocrisy in this has been magnified to the nth degree by the feminist movement which purports to speak for women. Feminism demands that the expression of female sexuality be free from the constraints of traditional morality. It complains that traditional morality held a double standard which condemned promiscuity more severely in women than in men and interprets this as an attempt to maintain a male monopoly on power by controlling female sexuality. This ignores the far more realistic explanation that women get pregnant and men do not, a fact which means that the natural consequences of sexual activity are visible in women and place a heavy burden upon them, so that the rules of traditional morality actually serve women’s own self-interest far more than they do that of men.

While feminism has rejected the constraints of traditional morality on female sexuality the natural consequences that explain the existence of what feminism wrongly perceived as a double standard still exist. Feminism’s solution to these is a monstrous one, to assert for women a right to terminate the lives of their unborn children while developing in the womb. Meanwhile, it has replaced the old morality with a new one of its own mold and manufacture replete with a double standard of its own. It is masculine sexuality the new morality seeks to constrain, not with simple and straightforward rules like “thou shalt not commit adultery” as in the old morality, but with loosely defined jargon that is malleable and expansive enough to allow feminists to read virtually any expression of masculine sexuality that they don’t like as a form of sexual aggression. If that was not bad enough, the feminists insist that women who accuse men of sexually aggressive offenses have a “right to be believed” which, as I pointed out in my last essay, is completely incompatible with the right of the accused – male or female – to be considered innocent until proven guilty which is fundamental to our civilization’s concept of justice.

All of this feminist hypocrisy has been on prominent display for a week now as women of both sexes have been waging a blitzkrieg on Donald Trump in their determination to see a woman who makes Queen Jezebel look like the Blessed Virgin in comparison become the next President of the United States simply because she is a woman. In the face of such hypocrisy, the time has come for all of us, distasteful as it may be, to leave chivalry aside and call a spade a spade where women are concerned. The fact of the matter is that women, the raunchier of the two sexes, say things publicly all the time that are far worse than what they have been condemning Donald Trump for saying privately. Their hypocrisy is so great they could offer lessons in it to the scribes and Pharisees.

"The Crimes of Motherhood"

Elle ravale ainsi l'écume de sa haine,
Et, ne comprenant pas les desseins éternels,
Elle-même prépare au fond de la Géhenne
Les bûchers consacrés aux crimes maternels. – from “Bénédiction”, in Les Fleurs de Mal, by Charles Baudelaire

The subject of discussion announced in the title of this essay may strike you as being rather odd or even grossly inappropriate for the second Sunday in May which is, after all, Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is a day set aside to honour our mothers, to express our affection and love towards them, to show our gratitude for them and for all they have given us and done for us. It is not the time to break open their closets and bring out the skeletons, to drag them before the assizes and draw up indictments against them. Would it not be better to write a glowing eulogy about the virtues of motherhood?

There would be countless ways of doing it. One could approach the subject from an historical angle and show how the influence of mothers has time and again steered the ship of human events away from hazards and perils to flow smoothly down a safe course. An example might be the devotion of Susanna Wesley, and how the pious upbringing she gave her sons John and Charles contributed to the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century that helped spare England from the horrors of the revolution in France.  Or we could turn to the Confessions of St. Augustine, where we can read about how he grieved his mother by turning away from the true faith to the Manichean heresy and a life of sin, but how the prayers of St. Monica for her wayward son eventually bore triumphed in the conversion of the man who laid the intellectual foundation for Western Christendom.

Or, if we were not in the mood for history, we might comb the pages of mythology and classic literature for illustrations of motherhood at its best. Perhaps Rhea, the Titan queen who saved her youngest son from her husband’s barbaric culinary tastes by handing over a well-swaddled boulder and then smuggling her son away, would come to mind. In Homer’s Iliad we would find Thetis pleading the cause of her son Achilles’ before Zeus and obtaining from the king of the Olympians the promise that the tide of the Trojan War would not swing back towards the Greeks until Agamemnon gave her son the honour that was due him. Later, when Achilles has sworn to avenge the fallen Patrocles against Hector of Troy, Thetis, burdened with the foreknowledge that if her son persists in this course he too will shortly fall, obtains for him armour fashioned by the gods’ own smith, in a loving, if vain, struggle against fate.

Perhaps, however, it is from Holy writ that we wish to find recourse in our quest for positive inspiration. That would not pose a problem for here there is ample material for positive portrait studies of virtuous motherhood. The New Testament alone is full of examples. There is the Canaanite woman who persisted in pleading with Jesus for the healing of her daughter until she got what she asked. There are Eunice and Lois, the godly mother and grandmother of Timothy, from whom he learned the Christian faith. There is St. Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist and, of course, the ultimate example of motherhood, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Son of God.

With all of these possibilities for a positive approach to motherhood, of the kind one expects to hear or read on Mother’s Day, why choose a topic like “the crimes of motherhood”?

For the same reason that one, intent on gazing upon the constellations of stars that appear in the firmament at night, does not choose as his viewing point, a balcony immediately below a street-lamp in a large, well-lit city. To fully appreciate the beauty of the heavenly lights one must view them against a background of pure darkness. Indeed, even the elimination of artificial light is not enough for some people. Wordsworth compared the fairness of his deceased Lucy to that a star “when only one is shining in the sky.” So, to gain a full appreciation of just how wonderful true and virtuous motherhood is, one must occasionally view it against the backdrop of its opposite.

The phrase we are using to express the opposite of virtuous motherhood, “the crimes of motherhood”, can be interpreted in several ways.   In the right context, it could be imputing crime to motherhood itself.  Or it could be suggesting that mothers are prone to certain types of crimes.   It could mean that in certain circumstances, motherly duty requires the commission of acts that are technically crimes.   Or it could speak of crimes committed by mothers that are in direct violation of motherly virtue and duty.

It is in this last sense that we will be speaking of “the crimes of motherhood”.  This would seem to be the way in which the man from whom we have borrowed the expression used it.  You may have recognized it as a translation of the last two words in our epigram.   That epigram is the fifth stanza in the poem “Bénédiction” by nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire, which is the first poem in the first section of his magnus opus, Les Fleurs de Mals, first published in 1857.  “The crimes of motherhood” is from the translation by Francis Scarfe.  An earlier translation by Roy Campbell (1), renders the fifth stanza like so:

She swallows down the white froth of her ire

And, knowing naught of schemes that are sublime,

Deep in Gehenna, starts to lay the pyre
That's consecrated to maternal crime.

“Bénédiction” resents the life of a poet whose experience would seem to be anything but the blessing alluded to in the presumably ironic title. It begins with his entry into the world by a providential decree, against which his appalled mother blasphemously rails, declaring that she would rather have birthed a brood of vipers and vowing to pass on to her son the hatred she feels God has bestowed upon her. This is what leads up to the fifth stanza in which she swallows her hatred and heaps fuel upon the flames awaiting her for her maternal crimes in hell.

In this context, “the crimes of motherhood”, would appear to be referring to a mother’s instinctive and persistent hatred of her son.  Since a mother’s instinct is supposed to be to love her children this would be a crime against the very nature of motherhood. (2)

The Holy Scriptures, as we noted earlier when considering alternative, more positive, Mother’s Day themes, provide several examples of saintly mothers.  Since one of the main overarching themes of the Holy Scriptures is human sin and depravity, we would expect it to provide plenty of the opposite examples as well.   Examples of sinful and criminal behaviour on the part of mothers are not necessarily examples of the crimes that violate the very nature of motherhood, however.

The sin of Eve, for example, could arguably be described as the ultimate example of a mother’s crime for it brought the curse of sin upon all generations of her descendants.  Eve, however, clearly did not intend harm upon her children in partaking of the forbidden fruit.  For this reason, and because it would be the ultimate act of impiety to impeach the first mother of us all, we will not lay this charge against her. 

An example of a mother who does possess mens rea, whose crimes against her son were clearly committed with malice aforethought, is Rebecca, the wife of Isaac.   It might come as a shock to find her mentioned.  She is not ordinarily thought of as a bad mother. The reason for that is that her story is told as part of the backstory of the Israelites, the descendants of her son Jacob.  One ordinarily reads the text from their point of view, which is Jacob’s point of view, and to Jacob she was a good mother.  The text, however, does not exclude the possibility of an alternate reading, from the perspective of her other son Esau.  From his point of view, his mother’s actions appear quite different.  She conspired against him with his youngest brother to deprive him of what was due him by right as the firstborn.  It was a malicious act towards her older son, but not exactly the example we are looking for.

There is, in Scripture, a story that apart from one tiny but not insignificant detail would be the perfect example.  That would be the story of the two prostitutes who came before Solomon the wise with a dispute over a child.  Each claimed that the child was her own and that the child of the other had died.   Solomon’s ruling was that the child should be cut in half and one half given to each.  We will have to excuse the prostitute who agreed to this ruling on a technicality.  She was not, as Solomon’s ruling was intended to demonstrate in the first place, actually the child’s mother.

None of the three Scriptural examples we have considered are quite what we are looking for, although the third comes closest, having been snatched away from us by a mere technicality.   Let us see if we fare better in our search for the archetypical criminal mother among mythological and classical sources.

An example that comes immediately to mind is Jocasta.    There are two maternal crimes that could be charged to her account.  The one she is most remembered for is that of incestuously marrying her own son Oedipus after he unknowingly killed his own father Laius.  This crime was committed in ignorance, however, as neither she nor Oedipus was aware of their relationship at the time.   The other crime is that of instructing her slave to put her son to death when he was newly born.   In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus learns from Teiresias that the plague which Thebes, the city over which he rules is suffering from is due to the gods’ displeasure over the fact that justice had not been dispensed to the murderer of Laius.  In the course of his investigation, Jocasta casts aspersions on the oracles by saying they had been wrong before, that they had prophesied that Laius would be killed by his own son who would then marry his mother.  By an odd coincidence, a similar prophecy that he would do just that thing had caused Oedipus to flee from Corinth, thinking that the Corinthian king Polybus who had raised him was the father signified in the prophecy.  A timely messenger then shows up to tell him that Polybus is dead, and identifies himself as the Corinthian shepherd who had given Oedipus to Polybus when he was an infant.  Oedipus, who is not the quickest hare in the race, only clues in to what everyone else has figured out already, when he sends for the Theban slave who had given him to the Corinthian shephered, and the slave fingers Jocasta as the one who turned him over to be exposed in his infancy.

That is a promising start.  What other criminal mothers stalk the pages of the literature of classical antiquity?

There was Clytemnestra, of course.   She was the wife of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae.  While her husband was away fighting at Troy, she had an adulterous affair with his cousin Aegisthus, who believed, not entirely unjustly, that Agamemnon’s father Atreus had robbed his own father of the throne.   In collusion with Aegisthus, she murdered her husband upon his return from Troy.   Her son, Orestes, avenged his father by killing her and her lover, and was then pursued and tormented by the Erinyes, the spirits of vengeance.

The difficulty with using Clytemnestra as an example of the “crimes of motherhood” is that while she was a mother who committed crimes, those crimes were committed against her husband rather than her children.   Indeed, many versions of the story present extenuating circumstances which, while hardly justifying adultery and murder, point to an outraged maternal instinct as the source of her anger against her husband.  Agamemnon, according to these versions, had appeased the anger of Artemis which was preventing his ships departure from Aulis, by sacrificing his and Clytemnestra’s eldest daughter Iphigenia. (3)  The way her story is ordinarily presented, it is not her behaviour towards her children that is called into question, but rather their behaviour towards her.  In the Eumenides, the final play in Aeschylus’ Oresetia trilogy, Orestes is put on trial before an Athenian jury and it boils down to a moral dilemma over which is greater, when the two come into conflict, a son’s duty to his father or his duty to his mother.

Clytemnestra, therefore, although usually considered a less sympathetic character than Jocasta, is not as useful as an illustration of crimes against maternal nature.  There is one more example from classical mythology that we ought to consider and that is Medea.

Medea was a sorceress and the daughter of Æëtes, the king of Colchis, a land on the eastern edge of the Black Sea.  When Jason went to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, she fell in love with him, assisted him in the tasks her father had set as conditions of his obtaining the Fleece and fled with him on the Argo, assisting in the escape and in the adventures of the Argo on its trip back to Greece. (4)  She married Jason and when they arrived in Thessaly helped him to get revenge against his uncle Pelias who had stolen the throne of Iolcus that had rightly been his father’s.  The couple then had to flee to Corinth because of the wrath of Acastus, Pelias’ son.

Euripides, in his play Medea, tells what happened after they arrived in Corinth.  Jason proved himself to be rather a jerk.  He dumped her in order to marry the daughter of the Corinthian king.   In response, Medea, after obtaining a promise of refuge from the king of Athens, sent a poisoned dress to the Corinthian princess, and then avenged herself on Jason by murdering their two children.

This is the example we have been looking for. When a mother murders her own children it is the ultimate crime of motherhood. For motherhood is all about the production and sustaining of new life, not about its termination. A mother is the person who conceives a child, bears it in her body, gives birth to it and nourishes it. For the mother to wilfully terminate that same life is an obscenity.


In the classical era, fathers had the legal right of life and death over the members of their households. Exposure, the death to which Laius and Jocesta had condemned the young Oedipus, was the usual means whereby infanticide was carried out. Christianity condemned the practice and as its influence began to spread throughout the Roman Empire it was gradually abolished.

In the twentieth century, as Christianity’s influence over Western civilization has waned more and more, the idea of a legal right to terminate the life of one’s children has begun to re-emerge. This time, however, it is being claimed for mothers rather than for fathers. When the feminist movement was revived in the 1960’s, it asserted that a woman has a right to an abortion and demanded that this right be given legal recognition.

This newfound right to an abortion has been expanding ever since. From the right to mercilessly and unceremoniously slaughter your children in the first trimester of a pregnancy, it gradually grew into the right to terminate their existence up until the very moment of birth. This is known as partial-birth abortion and the advocates of abortion rights, who prefer to think of themselves in euphemistic terms as being “pro-choice”, consider it to be dirty pool, down-right unsporting as a matter of fact, for those of us on the opposite side of the issue, to actually have the nerve to try and educate the public about it.

Ah but partial-birth abortion is oh so last season.   In the brave new world of fashionable infanticide, it is after-birth abortion that is all the rage. (5)  It makes perfect sense, after all, that this would be the logical next step.  Why bother with all the fuss and muss of a pre-birth abortion when you can just give birth and have the baby killed immediately thereafter?    What the exciting next chapter in the book of ever-expanding abortion rights will be we will simply have to wait to find out. Rest assured, however, that progressive activists, politicians, and bureaucrats are on the job, ensuring that the march to ever more freedom and equality will continue unabated, until a woman’s right to abort her child up until it reaches the age of majority is enshrined in law.

If this outlook seems dark and gloomy to you, then take comfort in that light which shines ever more brightly in the midst of all this tenebrosity. If you are reading these words then, in this dark age of women’s choice, your mother, bless her soul, did not “choose” to exercise her “women’s right” but instead followed her maternal instinct to give birth to you, love you, and raise you.

Happy Mother’s Day

(1) Francis Scarfe’s translation of the verse of Baudelaire was first published by Penguin in 1961, and then later re-issued by Anvil Poetry Press in 1986. Roy Campbell’s translation was published by Pantheon Books in 1952.

(2) Although the identification is not made explicit, it is fairly clear from the poem that the reader is supposed to identify the unnamed poet with Baudelaire himself. It would be unjust, however, to take the poem as an accurate depiction of the feelings of Baudelaire’s mother as they were or even as he actually perceived them. There had been a falling out between the poet and his mother for which Baudelaire himself was mostly to blame. His prodigal living had led his family to place the estate he had inherited from his father in trust to keep him from blowing it all on booze, women, and magic beans. He was not pleased with this, nor was he ever satisfied with the allowance he was given. His mother was the trustee. Spite, brought about by these circumstances, would seem to be the origin of the astonishing display of filial impiety in these verses.

(3) In the two plays Euripedes devoted to Iphigenia, she actually survived the sacrifice, with Artemis substituting a deer on the altar at the last minute. Clytemnestra, however, did not know of this.

(4) Although the story of Jason and the Argonauts and their search for the Golden Fleece is much older, it is most familiar in the rendition of the Argonautica, a 3rd Century BC epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes.

(5) http://static.publico.pt/docs/sociedade/JMed%20Ethics-medethics100411.pdf

War and Peace: Part Two

As we have seen, since the dawn of time men have been fighting wars, talking, writing, and singing about their wars, and talking and dreaming about peace. On the one hand we glorify war, build monuments to battles, and honour our warriors. On the other hand we long for and pray for peace. Is there a contradiction between the way we long for the tranquility and security of peace and the way we honour our society’s warriors in our culture?


This question has been around for a long time. The ongoing discussion of war and peace has taken place across the boundaries of several different branches of human thought. One of those is ethics. Ethics, a word derived from the Greek word for habit or custom, is the branch of human thought that pertains to the division of human behaviour into the categories of right and wrong and human character traits into the corresponding categories of virtues and vices. The question of whether or not our desire for peace contradicts the glory we attach to war points to the basic question of the ethics of war and peace – is war right or wrong?

There are three possible ethical positions with regards to war. The first is that war is always right. The second is that war is always wrong. The third is that war is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. All views ever expressed about the ethics of war have been variations of one or the other of these positions.

The position that war is always right would appear to contradict the idea that peace is good and desirable. At the very least the two ideas would be extremely difficult to reconcile with one another. This position is a hypothetically possible answer to the question. It has not played a significant role in the actual ethical discussion of war and peace, and so we will not concern ourselves with it.

That is not the case with the position that war is always wrong. That position is held by a large number of people, such as those who believe in non-resistance for religious or philosophical reasons and progressives who believe they can establish a permanent and universal peace on earth through politics and diplomacy. Those who hold to this position, ordinarily frown upon the way the traditional culture celebrates past victories in war, and honours warriors who have fought and/or laid down their lives for us. If they are progressives who believe that war can be eliminated they may see these elements of our culture as roadblocks standing between them and their goals.

It is the third position, in which war can be either right or wrong depending upon the circumstances, that has been the mainstream traditional position in the Western world. It should therefore come as no surprise that this position is the one which is most easy to reconcile with both our traditional longing and praying for peace and our tradition of lauding and honouring acts of bravery and heroism in war.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Stoic philosopher, orator, and Roman statesman from the last days of the Republic in the first Century BC, is often quoted as having said “the most unjust peace is preferable to the most just war”. In fact he expressed this sentiment more than once. (1) While this is a favourite quotation of those who are opposed to any and all wars, the Roman senator was in fact one of the most important pre-Christian thinkers in the just war tradition. In 44 BC, the last year of his life, Cicero wrote one of his most important works, De Officiis or On Duties. In the first book of this treatise addressed to his son, in the context of explaining that men have just obligations even to those who have wronged him, he addressed the subject of just war. Disagreements, he argued, can be settled in one of two ways – discussion or force, and since human beings, not being mere brutes, are capable of discourse, we are to resort to war, only when discussion has failed us. The only acceptable reason for going to war, he states, is “sine inuria in pace vivatur”, i.e., that we might live in peace, without harm. (2)

This idea, that peace is the only acceptable reason for war, can be interpreted and applied in a number of ways. Cicero lived in a time when his city, Rome, had succeeded in conquering the Mediterranean world and, having become an imperial power, was in the process of converting its republican political structure into an imperial political structure. Livy’s account of the history of Rome depicts Rome’s gradual conquest of her neighbours as an ongoing series of battles against troublemakers bent on disturbing the peace of Rome. Cicero wrote De Officiis in the year of Julius Caesar’s assassination. A little under two decades later, Caesar’s nephew Octavian because the emperor of Rome marking the dawn of two centuries of relatively tranquil Roman order. The wars of the Roman republic could be interpreted as the necessary historical means to the end of the Pax Romana. Throughout history numerous world powers have looked to Rome as an example and sought peace through war by means of conquest.

It is unlikely that this is what Cicero had in mind, even though he does immediately go on to discuss Rome’s treatment of the peoples she conquered. Cicero was an opponent of the transformation of Rome from a republican to an imperial structure, which had placed him in opposition to Caesar and would lead to his being proscribed by the Second Triumvirate and put to death on the orders of Marc Antony. It makes more sense to interpret his statement that peace is the only acceptable reason for war as further commentary on what he had just been saying about how disputes should only be settled by force when discussion is no longer an option. Diplomacy requires the cooperation of both sides in order to work. Sometimes one of the sides cannot or will not be reasoned with. By saying that war is only morally acceptable in these circumstances and that the only acceptable motivation for going to war in these circumstances is that we might live in peace after, Cicero is seeking to place limitations on when and how war is conducted. This is the purpose of the classical concept of just war.

The classical concept of just war is an ancient element of the traditional Western dialogue about war and peace. It is not the only component of that dialogue however, neither is it the oldest component, nor is it the only element to discuss war in terms of justice. To understand the classical concept of just war we need to distinguish it from both the official justification for war and war criticism. These two elements of the dialogue are, of course, opposed to each other and the classical concept of just war differs from both, although it also has similarities with both.

The official justification for war is the oldest element of the dialogue about war and peace. This is true not only of the Western dialogue but of parallel conversations in non-Western traditions as well. Today we have a technical term for this element. That term is propaganda.(3)

When the leaders of one society wish to go to war with the leaders of another society they cite grievances against that other society. This is true today and it has been true for as long as wars have been fought. The purpose of this is to unite their society in support of the war effort. The grievances may be legitimate and serious or they may be fabricated and petty. They might be the actual cause of the war, i.e., the reasons that convinced the leadership of the society to go to war. They might be just an excuse, a pretext given for a war motivated by other, presumably less noble, causes. Late in the second millennium BC, the Mycenaean-led Achaean alliance sailed across the Aegean sea, lay siege to Troy, then captured, looted, and burned the city, putting its men to the sword, taking its women for concubines and its children for slaves. This event, confirmed as having taken place by archaeologists in the 19th Century, became the subject matter of Greek myths, legends, poems, and plays. The legends record the justification Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gave for this war. Paris, prince of Troy had stolen Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon. Whether or not this was the actual justification given at the time for the war its inclusion in the legends demonstrates that even in ancient times, governments felt they needed to give reasons for wars. If the abduction of Helen was the actual grievance cited as the casus belli at the time it was almost certainly just an excuse for a war that was actually motivated by a desire to plunder Ilium. (4) Note that the “wrath of Achilles” which is the subject matter of Homer’s Iliad was caused by Achilles’ feeling that he had not received his fair share of the spoils of war and the honour due him, which erupted into a quarrel between him and Agamemnon over their captured concubines.

Both the official justifications of war and the classical concept of just war identify circumstances in which war is considered to be just. Propaganda, however, starts with a specific war that has already been decided upon and offers reasons why it is just, with the purpose of facilitating the act of war, whereas the classical concept of just war proposes general conditions under which war would be acceptable, which specific wars are supposed to meet in order to be considered just, with the purpose of setting limits upon war. The similarities between the two exist on the surface, whereas the differences in terms of fundamental purpose are much deeper.

If the purpose of the official justification for war is to generate support within a society for its war effort and its political leadership in a time of war, the purpose of war criticism is the exact opposite, to call into question the wisdom and rightness of the decisions of a society’s leaders in wartime, including perhaps, the decision to go to war itself. War criticism is not the same thing as pacifism, although a war critic might be a pacifist. Pacifism, rejects all war as a matter of principle. War criticism, like propaganda, begins with and pertains to particular wars.

The greatest poet-playwrights of ancient Athens wrote in the fifth Century BC. The earliest of these, the tragedian Aeschylus, died before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war (5). The rest lived and wrote during that thirty year conflict between Athens and Sparta. The youngest of the tragedians, Euripides, was much more of an innovator than the traditionalists Aeschylus or Sophocles. While they used their plays to convey ancient moral truths, Euripides used his as vehicles for commentary on the events of his own day, especially the war. Some of that commentary is very critical of how the leadership of Athens was conducting the war. The Troades, for example, commiserates with the women of Troy in their plight after the Greek victory. It came out in 415 BC and is believed to have been a negative commentary on the way Athens treated the people of Melos following their conquest of the island earlier that year. (6) Euripides’s criticism of the Athenian leaders, however, was subtle and moderate compared to that of Aristophanes, the comic playwright. He mercilessly lampooned the war and its leaders in several of his plays. Of his surviving works, the oldest is The Acharnians, written in the early years of the war. The hero of this play is a private citizen named Dicaeopolis who wants an end to the war. He goes to the Athenian assembly, but finds that body to be hopelessly incompetent and uninterested in peace. After ridiculing the buffoons who are wasting Athens’ time and money he sends Amphitheus, who claims to be descended from the gods, to make a private peace treaty between himself and Sparta. Amphitheus succeeds, but incurs upon himself and Dicaeopolis the wrath of the veterans of Acharnae, who are represented by the chorus. In a speech to the chorus, who are eventually won over to his side, Dicaeopolis defends his opposition to the war on the grounds that it had been started for bad reasons (7) and continued for the sole purpose of lining people’s pockets. These have been the primary accusations of war critics ever since.

War criticism of this nature is similar to the official justification for war in that both concern themselves with specific wars, rather than the question of the rightness or wrongness of war in general. In this similarity, war criticism and propaganda both differ from just war theory and pacifism, which are themselves similar in that they address the rightness or wrongness of war in general, albeit from opposite standpoints just as war criticism and propaganda look at specific wars from opposing points of view.

The traditional discussion of justice in relationship to war and peace has largely consisted of these four elements, one of which, pacifism, is a version of the second possible position on the justness of war, i.e., that it is always wrong, the other three of which are versions of the third position, that war is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. (8) The just war element is, is the philosophical, ethical and sometimes theological discussion of two basic questions. The first of these is: Under what circumstances is it right for us to go to war? The second question is: What is the right manner of conducting a war?

That there was a right and a wrong time to go to war, and a right and a wrong way to conduct war, was recognized before philosophers began their enquiry into the justice of war. (9) The war criticism of Euripides and Aristophanes points to such an earlier understanding, and the roots of the philosophical discussion can be traced back to the same era. Socrates was a contemporary of both Euripides and Aristophanes. We only know about him through the writings of others, including the derogatory portrait of him in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, (10) but mostly through the dialogues of Plato in which he appears as the chief character, and often the voice of Plato himself. The Peloponnesian War forms the background setting for many of these dialogues. There is a subtext about the war that runs throughout Plato’s dialogues, in which leading figures of the war appear as characters. According to the Symposium, Socrates himself fought in the Peloponnesian War and was honoured for bravery. In one of Plato’s earliest dialogues, the Laches, one of the dialogues in which Plato is widely thought to have presented the actual Socrates rather than to have merely used him as the voice of his own ideas, Socrates discusses the nature of courage and the necessity of military training. Plato does not discuss the subject of justice in war very often. He does, however, present ideas that would influence later just war theorists such as Cicero.

Plato’s best known work is The Republic in which Socrates, invited to the house of Polemarchus, enters into a debate with several of the people present, including Plato’s older brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus about the nature of justice. Much of the discussion involves the hypothetical construction of an ideal city-state, governed by philosopher-kings whose government is enforced by a guardian class. In the fifth book of  The Republic, Socrates is asked to describe the guardian class in detail. In his response he says a number of things which pertain to war. He says that the children of the guardians should be apprenticed in the art of war by being made observers of wars, that guardians who behave bravely in war should be rewarded, and that those who behave cowardly should be removed from the guardian class. Finally, he draws a distinction between “discord” and “war”. The difference is that the former is a conflict between Greeks, the latter a conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks. Socrates says that there ought to be a set of rules governing discord – Greeks should not enslave other Greeks, the corpses of Greek enemies slain in battle should not be despoiled, Greek territory should not be destroyed nor Greek houses burned. These rules apply only to discord between Greeks, and not to war against non-Greek barbarians.

This is a sort of limited just war theory. It only addresses the jus in bello side of the theory, the question of how to fight justly in war, and the proposed rules apply only to internecine battles among the Greeks.

In Plato’s final dialogue, The Laws, the Athenian stranger, who may or may not have been Socrates, discusses the actual laws and constitutions of Crete and Sparta with Cleinias and Megillus. As we have seen (11), at the very beginning of dialogue the Athenian stranger challenged the idea, put forward by Cleinias that the purpose behind the laws requiring certain disciplines, such as the wearing of arms, was to prepare the city-state for war. Demonstrating the peace is preferable to war, the Athenian stranger declared that no one is “a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the sake of peace.”

This idea, that a state, even in the time of war, should be organized for peace, rather than the other way around, would seem to be reflected in Cicero’s declaration that the only acceptable motivation for war is peace. Cicero was certainly aware of Plato’s statement – his own treatise De Legibus, written about five to six years before his De Officiis, was modelled after Plato’s The Laws. This idea then, should be understood as the first, basic principle of the just war concept, a concept that Cicero developed much further.

After stating that to live in peace unharmed is the only acceptable reason for war, a jus ad bellum principle, he proceeds within the same sentence to give a jus in bello principle. It is similar to what Plato had Socrates’ say in the fifth book of The Republic, except that the distinction Cicero makes, is not between Greeks and non-Greeks, but rather between those who were “crudeles in bello” – “cruel in war” and those who were not. The latter should be spared, upon victory, Cicero wrote, but not the former. He illustrated by pointing to Roman history. Earlier generations of Romans had admitted the Tusculuns, Aequians, etc., to Roman citizenship after defeating them, but, at the end of the third Punic war had razed Carthage to the ground.

Cicero goes on to enumerate several other principles of just war – that protection should be given to those laying down their arms and surrendering, that war is not just unless there has been a formal declaration of war after the other side has been given a warning and the opportunity to settle the grievance peacefully, that a man should not fight in the war unless he is a soldier, legally bound by an oath of loyalty, and that wars fought for supremacy and glory rather for survival, while having to meet all these other standards in order to be just, must also be fought with less bitterness. (12)

This was the fullest pre-Christian expression of the concept of just war to be formulated in the Western tradition.

The largest part of the discussion of just war has been carried out by theologians within the Christian tradition. Not everyone in the Christian tradition has believed in the just war concept – pacifism in various forms has also had a strong voice within Christianity. In War and Peace Part Three, we will address the question of whether the authoritative Scriptures of the Christian tradition, and particularly the teachings of Jesus Christ, support the just war concept or non-resistance/pacifism. We will conclude this essay by looking at the concept of just war as it has appeared in the Christian theology and ethics of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Augustine was born in Numidia in 354 A.D. His mother was a Christian, his father was not. Sent to study at the University of Carthage, he rejected the faith of his mother. He moved to Milan to take up the position of professor of rhetoric, and there converted to Christianity, being baptized by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He returned to Africa, where he was ordained a priest, and made the bishop of Hippo (13).

It was during St. Augustine’s lifetime that Rome was sacked by the Visigoths. This occurred in 410 AD. Two years later, St. Augustine wrote a letter to St. Marcellinus of Carthage in response to some questions the latter had passed on to him. The second question concerned the statements from the Sermon on the Mount about not returning evil for evil, and turning the other cheek. The idea was circulating, based upon these statements, that Christian teaching and practice was not consistent with the duties of a citizen of Rome. Several ideas of this sort were going around at the time, because many were blaming Christianity for the fall of Rome, saying that it was divine punishment on Rome for abandoning the Roman gods for Christianity. Eventually, St. Augustine would respond to those accusations in his treatise De Civitas Dei. In response to this specific question, he pointed out that the men who brought Rome to its position of greatness, were attributed with practicing the very thing Jesus’ commanded. He points to Cicero’s praise of Caesar, for example, as one who was prone to forget nothing except the wrongs done him. This, St. Augustine said, not remembering wrongs done, pardoning rather than seeking revenge, is what Jesus meant by not returning evil for evil. In this context, St. Augustine writes that a commonwealth that practices Christianity, will conduct its wars in such a way, that both sides will be able to enjoy peace and justice after the war has concluded. If the Christian religion condemned all wars, he went on to write, soldiers would be commanded to abandon their profession, when instead they are commanded to be content with their wages. (14)

In another letter, written six years later to Count Boniface, the Roman governor of Africa, St. Augustine pointed to King David, the centurion who came to Jesus and Cornelius in the Book of Acts as examples of military men who had God’s favour, and again mentioned that John the Baptist did not tell the soldiers who came to him for baptism to abandon their profession. He told Boniface that he should consider his physical strength a gift from God and that he should make peace his objective, waging war only when necessary, in order that peace may be restored. (15)

In these letters, we see that some of the qualifications that were identified by Cicero as to what makes a war just have been reasserted by St. Augustine, namely that peace must be the ultimate objective of war, that war is to be fought only when necessary. We also see the bishop of Hippo’s concern with demonstrating that Christianity does not make a person a bad citizen, that civil duty is compatible with Christianity and even required by the faith, and that military service is not forbidden by the Christian faith. These are ideas that keep popping up throughout his writings.

One of his most well known passages on just war is found in his De Civitas Dei. In the seventeenth chapter of the nineteenth book, building upon his argument in the previous chapter, he described the entire world as being the third circle of human society, after the home or family, and city or state. In the world, differences of tongue divide men, but imperial powers impose their language upon the peoples they conquer. This creates unity, but at a terrible cost. Wars are full of slaughter and bloodshed. Imperial conquest of the world would not lessen the horrors of war, because the civil wars bound to break out in so large of an empire, would be even more terrible than imperial wars. Here, he described the attitude of the wise man who wages just wars. Such a man laments the necessity of just wars, he wrote, because they are the only wars he fights, and if they were not just out of necessity, he would not fight them and therefore would not fight any at all. He wages just wars, because of the injustice of the other side, which would be a cause for lamentation even if it did not result in a war.

If we took this chapter in isolation from the rest of De Civitas Dei, it could be interpreted as saying that only defensive wars are just wars. This is not what St. Augustine meant. Earlier, in his account of the history of Rome, he, like Cicero, had counted as just wars, the wars by which Rome had conquered her neighbours. Livy’s history depicts these wars as a long string of responses to provocative action on the part of these neighbours but they were not defensive wars in the sense of responses to invasions that threatened their existence and territorial integrity. Later theologians and other just war theorists, have taken the basic principle St. Augustine has expressed here, that to be just a war must be a necessary response to wicked acts on the part of the other side, to argue, as St. Augustine did not, that only defensive wars can be just.

He does, however, give other qualifications as when a war is just. His Contra Faustum was written as a rebuttal of a book written by a leader of the Manicheans, a sect he had been involved with before his conversion to Christianity. In the twenty-second book he states that war contains many evils – lust for bloodshed, vengeful cruelty, ferocious hatred, etc., but that it is in order to punish such things that good men fight just wars. Their justice in doing so, he goes on to explain, depends upon the cause for which they are fighting, and their authority for doing so. Rulers have the authority to wage war according to the natural order, and if they abuse that authority, a soldier fighting under their orders is not personally culpable for fighting in a war lacking a just cause. (16) St. Augustine made these points as supporting arguments for the argument that if human rulers have the lawful authority to conduct wars, then laws conducted under the authority of God must be that much more just, which was a response to Faustus’ claim that the writers of the Old Testament libeled God by depicting Him as commanding the wars of Moses.

The idea that rulers have the authority to wage war, also contains a limitation upon when war can rightly be conducted. If the lawfully constituted rulers of a society have the authority to wage war on its behalf, this implies that other people do not have that authority, and St. Augustine stated this outright in the same book, a few paragraphs earlier. (17) This principle of just war theory could be implied from what Cicero had written in De Officiis, about the need for a formal declaration of war. St. Thomas Aquinas, would make it the first and most important principle, of his just war theory.

St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian, Dominican priest in the 13th Century. He was a philosopher, one of the Scholastics, as well as a theologian. His most important work, was his Summa Theologica, a massive work of systematic Christian thought. It consists of a series of topics, in which he first presents a question, then a series of objections to his own position, after which he rebuts the objections and presents arguments for his own position. It is organized into three large parts, the first of which deals with theology, the second of which deals with ethics. The second part is itself divided into two parts, the first of which discusses broad ethical principles, the second of which deals with specific moral questions. The fortieth topic, in the second part of the second part, is the topic of war. The first of four articles that appear under this head answers the question whether or not it is always a sin to fight a war. He answers the question in the negative, stating that war is just if it meets three conditions. The first of these is that to be just, a war must be declared by a legitimate ruler, the second is that a just war must have a just cause, and the third is that the intentions of those fighting the war must be good.

Apart from the Scriptures themselves, St. Augustine is the main source St. Thomas Aquinas relied upon in arguing his case for just war. After his initial listing of objections to his position, he quotes St. Augustine’s argument, from the letter to St. Marcellinus referred to above, about how John the Baptist told the soldiers who came to him for baptism, to be content with their pay rather than to abandon their position. When he presents his three conditions for just war, he quotes from Contra Faustum to support his argument that a just war must be conducted by legitimate authorities and his argument that those conducting a just war must have the right intentions, and he also quotes from other Augustinian works. In his specific replies to each of the four objections, he quotes St. Augustine in all but the fourth. The concept of just war he presents in his Summa is essentially Augustinian.

That, of course, does not make it right. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas saw the just war concept as serving the cause of peace, by placing limits on when war can be rightly conducted. Pacifists see the just war concept as justifying that which is morally unjustifiable, and if the pacifist also has anarchistic leanings, he will probably see it as bolstering what he considers to be the unjust regime of the state. Do the Scriptures support the Augustinian/Thomistic concept of just war, which has been the mainstream in Western Christian thought, or do they support a version of the doctrine of non-resistance/pacifism? That is the question we will consider in the third and final part of War and Peace.

(1) It can be found in at least two places in his letters: Epistularum ad Atticum 7.14.3, and Epistularum ad Familiares 6.6.6. The Latin wording is slightly different in each letter, but both contain the meaning expressed in the English quotation.

(2) Cicero, De Officiis, 1.11.34-35.

(3) The term propaganda is also often used for many examples of what I have here called “war criticism.” Nevertheless, it is more often used for arguments put forth by a government to defend its position, and when we apply it to arguments made by opponents and critics of government it is to say that these arguments are similar in style to those put out by the government.

(4) On the other hand, Menelaus is supposed to have held his throne by virtue of his marriage to Helen who had been the daughter of Tyndareus, the previous king of Sparta. In which case, her having run off with or been abducted by Paris, would have been more than just a case of cuckoldry and a personal insult to Menelaus, but threatened the legitimacy of his rule as well.

(5) He had fought, however, in the Greco-Persian wars, including the Battles of Marathon and Salamis. His play The Persians celebrates the Greek victory by depicting the arrival at Susa of the news of Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis. Needless to say, this is not a work of war criticism.

(6) Thucydides records this incident in the fifth book of his History of the Peloponnesian War. His account includes the famous Melian Dialogue, in which, after the Athenians under the leadership of Cleomedes and Tisias, sailed against the island of Melos, with 38 ships, 3000 hoplites, and 320 archers, their generals were invited to dialogue with the representatives of Melos, a Spartan colony that had remained neutral until this incident. The Athenians demanded the surrender of Melos and the Melians attempted to argue against the Athenian demand on the basis of justice. This points to an understanding of rightness and wrongness in war, before the question was taken up by dramatists and philosophers. The Athenians refused to accept these arguments, or subsequent arguments that it was in their own self-interest not to persist with their demands. They insisted that they would look weak if they abandoned their demands, while the Melians insisted that it would dishonourable on their part to surrender without a fight. Ultimately the Athenians destroyed Melos, but this marked a turning point in the war that led to their own final defeat at the hands of Sparta.

(7) Specifically, he claims that the Megarian Decree of 432 BC, banning Megara from trade with the Delian League, was Pericles’ heavy-handed response to the kidnapping of prostitutes from a brothel run by Pericles’ lover Aspasia, itself a Megaran response to the kidnapping of a Megaran prostitute by some Athenian lowlifes.

(8) Although pacifists are war critics in a general sense, war critics in the sense in which I have been using the term are not pacifists. Aristophanes, for example, did not view the Greek resistance to the Persian invasion in the same way he regarded the Peloponnesian War.

(9) See Note 6 above.

(10) Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates, was that of a deceitful sophist and trickster, who thought up clever ways of making weaker arguments defeat stronger arguments. Although Plato, in Apologia, suggests that Aristophanes’ The Clouds was partly responsible for the unpopularity that led to Socrates’ trial and death, in Symposium he portrays the two as being on good terms at a drinking party.

(11) In Part One.

(12) De Officiis, 1.11.35-3 and 1.12.38.

(13) Now Annaba, Algeria.

(14) St. Augustine, Epp. 138.2.12-15.

(15) St. Augustine, Epp. 189.4-6.

(16) St. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 22.74-75

(17) Ibid., 22.70.