St. Maximos' Hut

A fine one at The Claremont Institute website.

Fr. M was in good form yesterday at Liturgy and I shall pester him to post a version of his sermon.

Jeff Jacoby (whose columns are one of the few things I miss from living in Massachusetts) has a typically wonderful column on the Mass. AG's efforts to shut down Whole Foods Markets attempt to violate the state's "blue laws" forbidding stores from being open on Thanksgiving (and other holidays). The article includes such great details on the origin of blue (and similar) laws as the fact that "church doors were bolted during Sunday services [in Puritan Mass.] to prevent restless congregants from leaving early." Read it all here.

Here's the excellent conclusion:

''Thanksgiving is not like any other day," [Mass. AG] Reilly insists. ''It's been the one day when people didn't have to work. People should be allowed to be off that one day, to have a day to spend with their family. This is one of those issues where tradition wins over for me."

Tradition is a fine thing, and Thanksgiving is suffused with it. But what Reilly is defending is not tradition but coercion. Americans are able to decide for themselves how to spend Thanksgiving. Given a choice, some will opt for family and turkey. Others will grab the chance to go to work for double pay. It isn't for the attorney general of Massachusetts, or any other state official, to make that choice for them.

The blue laws are and always have been obnoxious deprivations of liberty. That Whole Foods might have sold carrots or cinnamon to a Thanksgiving Day customer who needed them is no crime. What is a crime is that there are still laws on the books that make such a sale illegal -- and latter-day Puritans who defend them.

Right. Let's hope the Whole Foods workers denied the chance to earn double pay, the consumers denied the chance to buy last minute items, and the rest of the Massachusetts electorate tell AG Reilly that the state has no business engaging in such coercion. Tradition "wins" for Mr. Reilly, whose got a nice job where he isn't paid by the hour. What about those folks who would prefer the money - perhaps to earn enough to enable their family to have a particularly nice dinner on Friday or to visit relatives for Christmas? Do they get a vote on whether tradition "wins"?

The article on Luther and self-defense is most interesting, particularly the distinctions between private right, and the duty to others.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has a nice summary of the views of St. Augustine as amplified by St. Thomas Aquinas on the topic, as well as the issues of defense of personal property and honor. You can find it here. While the views expressed in the entry have been diluted by "contemporary moral theologians", I think that the article more accurately reflects the contents of St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica .

Just to be provocative, let's look at the part of the article on defense of property:

It is lawful to defend one's material goods even at the expense of the agressor's life; for neither justice nor charity require that one should sacrifice possessions, even though they be of less value than human life in order to preserve the life of a man who wantonly exposes it in order to do an injustice. Here, however,we must recall the principle that in extreme necessity every man has a right to appropriate whatever is necessary to preserve his life. The starving man who snatches a meal is not an unjust agressor; consequently it is not lawful to use force against him. Again, the property which may be defended at the expense of the agressor's life must be of considerable value; for charity forbids that in order to protect ourselves from a trivial loss we should deprive a neighbor of his life. Thefts or robberies, however, of small values are to be considered not in their individual, but in their cummulative, aspect. A thief may be slain in the act of carrying away stolen property provided that it cannot be recovered from him by any other means; if, for example, he can be made to abandon his spoil through fright, then it would not be lawful to shoot him. If he has carried the goods away to safety he cannot then be killed in order to recover them; but the owner may endeavor to take them from him, and if the thief resists with violence he may be killed in self-defense.

Obvously, this does not square with the views of "gentle jurists" wno believe in a requirement of retreat in lieu of defense of life and property.

I was trying to think how to say something useful regarding Kurt Vonnegut's comments on the "sweet and honorable" nature of suicide bombers' actions but Eugene Volokh said all that needs to be said (James Lileks has lengthier and excellent comments as well - anyone who works a quote from The Princess Bride in gets bonus points (read all the way to the end).)

From Thomas Woods' The Church and the Market (page 196):

To say that the demands of Christian charity are binding on the Catholic conscience, and that these demands must inform the pious man's disposition of his property, is something very different from claiming for the state a right to violent interference with a man's use of his property if he is considered not to be sufficiently generous towards his fellows. He will have to answer to God for his lack of charity toward his fellow man, to be sure. But to claim that the state is obligated to seize his possessions violently is a mere statement of opinion. Moreover, surely it at least possible that the dangers inherent in granting the state such powers could be so great as to render wealth redistribution undesirable even to those who might otherwise support it.

This seems like two crucial points missing in our moral dialogues today. First, advocates of the use of state power to solve social dilemmas are generally optimistic about the ability of the people who make up the government to resist the temptation to abuse their powers, even as many also tend to find the current U.S. government to be persuasive evidence of Satan's presence on Earth. If the existence of social problems are, as these same folks generally contend, the result of bad actions by people (price gouging, racism, etc.) in the private sector and the Republican Party, why then is it legitimate to assume that the government is populated largely by people able to resist the temptations of power and self-interest?

Second, because something is right does not mean it is mandatory or that it should be mandatory. If we mandate charity, is it really charity for it is no longer the result of a voluntary choice? If we accept the idea that life on earth is a mere prelude to eternity, then it becomes far less important that we cure every problem. Only in a secular world view in which this is all there is does it matter so critically that all suffering be ended right now. The moral obligations to the poor are placed on us because they are a test of our response - it is our actions in helping or not for which we will have to answer.