PUNISHMENT

We are told "The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom". What does that mean? We tend to think that Love is inconsistent with Fear; are we not to love God? After all, we are also told to "Love the Lord your God". I believe much of the modern disorder is connected with this confusion. Often, when one refers to the Fear of the Lord, someone will say "Love casts out fear" or even quote St. Anthony in saying "I no longer fear God, but I love Him, and Love casts out fear". We much too easily forget what an exalted life was led by our Father among the Saints St. Anthony of Egypt, and how far we fall below even the most minimal standards in terms of sobriety of mind and ascetic practice. Many of those who say such things don't even believe asceticism is necessary, but St. Anthony, who did not fear God, spent his life in repentance, doing battle with demons lest he should be deprived of the grace of God. It is no doubt true that St. Anthony would not have learned to love God as he did had he not lived in the fear of Him all his life. Reverential fear, the fear engendered by just authority, inspires love, counter-intuitive as that may seem to the debased reasonings of our time, which knows only the craven fear of tyrannical authority.

I much prefer prisons to asylums; punishment is a moral thing, and the prison is a moral environment, erected by those who believe that the will is free, and that there is such a thing as moral choice. Asylums, on the other hand, are shops for repairing broken machinery, and therapy the tool by which we seek to re-create damaged psychological instruments in our own image. They are, therefore, a mechanistic environment which cannot truly believe there is such a thing as real choice, and as a consequence cannot really believe in freedom. In the one, people on the outside are regarded as free, and a person is only put in prison because he has abused this freedom; in the other, the person on the outside is already in prison, and people are brought to the asylum for adjustment so that they may become better adapted to the conditions of their incarceration.

This is, perhaps, a somewhat perverse portrayal, but I believe it communicates the ideal essence of these institutions; Prison is a moral environment and the Asylum is not. Morality is the practice of Right and Wrong; a Moral environment is one that aids the clear perception of Right and Wrong, one that rewards right behavior and punishes wrong-doing. Modernity, on the other hand, has an acute abhorrence of the very idea of Right and Wrong; it believes with fanatic intensity in a world where different shades of gray blend gradually into each other. In the Modernist twilight there is no longer sufficient spiritual illumination to make a moral distinction. The stronger the light of the Spirit, the clearer emerges the distinction between black and white. It is, of course, possible to over-simplify. The color gray does really exist, as a generality, but when one examines the situation particularly, it becomes a field of black and white particles in a very complex arrangement. Since every human heart is a similar dot-matrix, we do not judge the souls of Men, but we can and should be able to say right is right, and wrong is wrong, and act accordingly.

One who perceives moral categories clearly is in an atmosphere of Justice. Punishment is Justice in action. Human justice is, of course, fallible, and fails to perfectly reflect perfect justice, but human justice is the model in society of Divine justice. Mercy is the reconciliation of one who has fallen under condemnation, the receiving into fellowship of a brother who was once lost, and has returned to his Father's house, not an eternal excusing of the offences of those who do not truly have any wish to be reconciled with their brothers. Ultimately, justice and mercy are the same; justice which is not merciful is no true justice, and mercy which is not just is not really mercy, though only God can reconcile the two perfectly.

One who preserves clear memories of childhood can no doubt remember the pain of one who turns to authority for the redress of a wrong to find that his situation is regarded as being of no significance; it is a feeling of violation, a loss of innocence, and diminishes one's sense of goodness in the world. The idea that evil may continuously revel unchastened is souring, and erodes the very concept of Justice. Ceasing to believe in Divine Justice is the beginning of moral degradation; once we believe completely that there are no penalties, sin becomes bold. It is interesting that, as mankind ceases to believe in Hell, it has also ceased to believe in the necessity of punishment in governing human affairs. Earth becomes Hell as Man ceases to believe in Hell, as evil no longer is under effective restraint. Since reality keeps intruding even into the heavily-protected sanctuary of the modern psyche, modern institutions in fact oscillate between extreme permissiveness and iron-handed oppression, without once touching down on the hallowed ground of sanity, stressing forgiveness where it has no right to forgive, and exercising unremitting harshness against those who have truly transgressed its values.

Forgiveness is a divine virtue, but modernity forgives offenses committed against other people, which requires no very high degree of magnanimity, and is rather a sin against compassion for the victim, showing plainly a marked inability to give any weight to another's anguish, as the complaint of the outraged individual is shrugged blandly aside. Sometimes multiple crimes are committed before the offenses are taken at all seriously, thereby increasing the burden on the souls of unjust judges of crimes that would not have been committed had action been taken in the first place; this is the result when the societal organ of justice ceases to believe in Justice. The penalty for those that offend against the values of Modernity, on the other hand, is never to be forgiven, even if they have paid a substantial penalty, for punishment is expiation, and Modernity accepts no expiation for sins committed against it. Modernity is unjust in two different directions, and there is no justice in it.

Human justice is finite; infinite punishment is reserved for diseases that are truly irremediable, and only God can judge of that. Sin and disease are often equivalent terms; sin produces spiritual disease, and perpetuates it. Spiritual disease is cured by repentance, and only our own will can keep us sick. No matter what the condition of mind and soul, no one is forced to do wrong; everyone fights a different battle against the passions which prevail within them, and what is a walk in the park for one person is a battle for another in which he has to strain every nerve to avoid falling into evil. Those who lose this battle to the extent that they represent a continuous threat to human society must have their cases referred to the high court of Heaven; this is the true meaning of the death penalty.

Ultimately, the power to punish is the power to form; with this in mind, it is plain why the worldly powers don't want parents to be able to freely punish their children. Parents are not to be permitted effective tools of interference in the instruction of "The State's" children. The State will hold the instruments of coercion, and will dispense reward to those who are submissive to its will; children will be formed collectively by adapting to institutional structures designed to mould body and soul as it wishes, and there is to be no alternative, and no redress permitted. As punishment is an inevitable aspect of government, to cede the power to punish would be to disperse governmental powers on the popular level, to have ordinary people making decisions of real moment, which would shape their families and communities, and this would be the death of the era of centralized government, and the end of the Modern State.

SELF-ESTEEM

When I speak of Self-Esteem, I do not mean the self-infatuation promoted by modern Psychology, which is a deadly sin. True self-esteem is closely related to humility, as counter-intuitive as that may seem to us in this Dark Age of the Soul. The Prideful put themselves in a false position, as they wish really to be regarded as gods by their fellows; as they can never fill these shoes, they become filled with a deep sense of insufficiency, and this turns all their strivings to best their fellows into a hollow mockery. It is this which leads to the posturing and strutting that we are all so familiar with. The Humble person, on the other hand, truly does not regard himself as anything special; he is a child of God, like any other, and whatever his abilities may be, they are to be used in His service. So the Humble live in Reality, rather than the He-Man/Marvel Comics universe inhabited by the Prideful, in which each one tries to play the role of the ultimate Hero, with a throng of admiring on-lookers. One advantage of living in reality is that the universe backs you up; if you know who you really are, everything around you confirms this. By contrast, the prideful man is always getting shot down by reality; his expectations are always unfulfilled, and so he lives continually with wounded Self-Esteem. What is currently endlessly promoted as self-esteem is in fact the cherishing, pampering, and perpetuating of this woundedness; those caught in the current Self-Esteem environment can never even aspire to true self-esteem, because they have chosen to be moral and psychological cripples rather than apply themselves to the hard therapy which leads to healing, freedom, and the proper estimation of the self in the light of Truth.