Wednesday Wisdom - 4/26/17 - Augustine on the Death Penalty

I had a little unpleasant interaction on the internet recently with a fellow Catholic.  This person was offended that I thought the death penalty and war were pro-life issues.  This fellow held up St. Augustine (Aquinas and Council of Trent too) as supporters of the death penalty and war and told me I was spreading a massive lie.  Dear reader, I blocked him right after I showed him an article about Pope Benedict's thinking on the death penalty and he told me that the pope was theologically flawed.  People who are more Catholic than the pope tend to be toxic angry people I've found, unfortunately.  So I said a quick prayer for him and with a lovely click of a button, he no longer was there to say nasty things to me about how I am following Jesus' Church all wrong.

But it just so happened that at this point in The City of God Augustine began to talk about the death penalty and torture!  Now I don't know where Augustine states that government should be granted the power of capital punishment, but he certainly seemed to think that even so, it is a problematic thing!

Here is the great saint himself.  He is systematically going through the idea that we can create happiness in ourselves as the pagans taught.  Augustine is saying this is unrealistic because of sin and ignorance, which is why we need God for happiness.

This is from Book XIX, Chapter 6 - under the heading:  The mistakes of human judgment when the truth is hidden:

What of those judgments passed by men on their fellow-men, which cannot be dispensed with in cities, however much peace they enjoy?  What is our feeling about them?  How pitiable, how lamentable do we find them!  For indeed those who pronounce judgement cannot see into the consciences of those on whom they pronounce it.  And so they are often compelled to seek the truth by torturing innocent witnesses in a case which is of no concern of theirs.  And what about torture employed on a man in his own case?  The question is whether he is guilty.  He is tortured and even if innocent, he suffers, for a doubtful crime, a punishment about which there is no shadow of doubt and not because he is discovered to have committed it, but because it is not certain that he did not commit it.  This means that the ignorance of the judge is often a calamity for the innocent.  And there is something yet more intolerable, something to be bewailed, and, if it were possible, washed away by floods of tears.  It is the fact that the judge tortures the accuses for the sole purpose of avoiding execution, in ignorance, of an innocent man, while his pitiable lack of knowledge leads him to put to death, tortured and innocent, the very person whom he had tortured to avoid putting the innocent to death.
. . . .Then after his condemnation and execution the judge still does not know whether it was a guilty or innocent person he has executed, after torturing him to avoid executing the innocent in ignorance.  In view of this darkness that attends the life of human society, will our wise man take his seat on the judge's bench, or will he not have the heart to do so?  Obviously, he will sit for the claims of human society constrain him and draw him to this duty; and it is unthinkable to him that he should shirk it.

[Augustine goes on to enumerate more injustices of capital punishment, like the fact that even if the judge were going to acquit an innocent person they may die from the torture itself, or the witness may give false testimony because of the torture and thus help condemn an innocent man]

. . . All these serious evils our [pagan] philosopher does not reckon as sins; for the wise judge does not act in this way through a will to do harm, but because ignorance is unavoidable - and yet the exigences of human society make judgement also unavoidable. Here we have what I call the wretchedness of man's situation, at any rate, even if it is not to be called the wickedness of the wise man in his judicial capacity.  Yet if it is through unavoidable ignorance and unavoidable duty of judging that he tortures the innocent, are we to be told that it is not enough to acquit him?  Must we grant him happiness as a bonus?  How much more mature reflection it shows, how much more worthy of a human being it is when a man acknowledges this necessity as a benchmark of human wretchedness, when he hates that necessity in his own actions and when, if he has the wisdom of devotion, he cries out to God:  'Deliver me from my necessities!"

These are not the reasonings of a man who is gung ho about capital punishment.  He acknowledges the likelihood of killing an innocent man (and how many on death row have been exonerated now with new scientific testing, 1 in 9, I think!  This opportunity to test is often denied in appeals!)  This is a mark of the wretchedness of man's situation and is something that we, if we are devout, should pray to God to be delivered from!

The more I read the great saints and theologians the more I love Catholic teaching.  Don't listen to angry, ignorant bozos on the internet who try to lead us into sin.  Go to the source!  It is always worthwhile and refreshing!