Judge Not

 

“Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
— Matthew 7:1–3

 

Holiday. I have some freedom to write today. I have thought about this passage before but guess I still don't understand in full. 1) I am more inclined to judge men of the present than the past. I want to say Trump and Netanyahu (not only them, not by a long shot) have blood on their hands. I guess so do Churchill and Roosevelt but it is not as natural to say that for me. 2) How can it make sense to say x is evil because it destroys that which is sacred but I (following Christ's injunction) do not judge the evil-doer?

 

    What I am circling around is an old and very deep distinction between judging acts and judging souls. We can hold firmly that certain actions are objectively evil while also recognizing that the interior reality of the person who committed them exceeds our knowledge and moral competence to assess fully. Thomas Aquinas makes this distinction but it is also in the Gospels themselves (see passage above). Christ repeatedly judges actions – hypocrisy, cruelty, exploitation, betrayal, hardness of heart – yet simultaneously warns against the spiritual arrogance involved in placing ourselves in the position of ultimate judge over persons: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The warning is not that moral distinctions disappear but that finite, wounded beings do not fully know the depths of circumstance, fear, ignorance, psychological deformation, historical pressure, self-deception, or suffering that shape another soul.

     That connects directly to my earlier reflections on finitude. If human beings are radically limited knowers, then moral knowledge too must contain humility. We may sometimes perceive with clarity that a particular act – deliberately bombing civilians, murdering hostages, torturing prisoners – violates the sacredness of life. But we do not stand in a position to comprehend fully the inner history and condition of the agents involved. This helps explain the asymmetry between past and present. Historical distance softens immediate moral reaction because we no longer experience those actors as living antagonists within our emotional world. Churchill and Roosevelt have become historical figures embedded within narratives of catastrophe, exhaustion, fear, propaganda, incomplete information, and civilizational struggle. Time widens perspective and allows tragedy to appear more clearly alongside guilt. Contemporary figures, by contrast, confront us in the immediacy of outrage, media cycles, partisan rhetoric, and living consequences. The passions are active rather than cooled by historical contemplation.

     There is also another factor: we inherit the moral atmosphere created by victors. The Allied cause in WWII was genuinely tied to resistance against monstrous evil, and this moral reality understandably shapes emotional perception. To say the Allied bombing campaigns were wicked in themselves can therefore feel emotionally dissonant because it partially disrupts a deeply ingrained narrative of moral clarity. Yet I am trying to preserve two truths simultaneously: 1) the Allied struggle against Nazism was just in its fundamental defensive aim; 2) certain means employed within that struggle violated the sacredness of innocent life. That is not incoherent. It is tragic realism.

    I also want to resist a temptation present in many moral systems: the tendency to reduce persons entirely to their worst actions. If life is sacred, then even the wrongdoer remains more than his crime. That does not abolish responsibility. Rather, it means the person retains a depth that cannot be exhausted by moral classification. In fact, I believe the refusal to condemn souls absolutely follows from the same root conviction as the opposition to the destruction of innocent life. Both arise from the sense that human beings possess a depth and mystery that exceeds political, legal, ideological, or even moral reduction. To destroy innocent life is evil because the person is not merely a means or a number. But similarly, to imagine ourselves as capable of fully seeing and judging another soul may also involve a kind of spiritual overreach, as though we possessed God's vantage point.

     This does not mean abandoning ordinary moral language. We can still say this act was evil; this policy was gravely unjust; these leaders bear responsibility; or indeed these deaths cry out morally against those who authorized them. What humility forbids is the final metaphysical judgment that collapses the whole person into the evil act and claims transparent access to the state of the soul itself. Therefore, because human life is sacred, certain acts are objectively evil regardless of political ends. Yet because human beings are finite, wounded, and often formed within conditions of fear, ideology, ignorance, and historical tragedy, we are not competent to render ultimate judgment upon the souls of those who commit such acts. That position is neither moral relativism nor moral absolutism in the harsh ideological sense. It is a kind of chastened moral realism grounded in both the sacredness of life and the finitude of human judgment.

 

. . .

 

I agree with Gaita and Murdoch that judging these acts to be evil does not depend on faith in a living God (I do suppose it presupposes something like Plato's Good). The prohibition to judge may make sense within a Christian framework, but how does it make sense if we doesn't inhabit this framework?

      Outside an explicitly Christian framework, the prohibition against judging persons can still make sense if rooted in the recognition of the depth, opacity, and fragility of human beings rather than in divine command alone. We need not believe in a personal God to see that there is something morally dangerous, even corrupting, in the tendency to reduce another person to a moral category and imagine ourselves capable of fully “seeing through” him.

This is close to what I understand from Murdoch and Gaita. For both, moral life begins not in abstract rule-following but in attention: that is, a just and loving perception of reality. The opposite of morality is not merely rule-breaking but forms of blindness, fantasy, simplification, and egoism that prevent us from seeing persons truthfully. Condemnation easily becomes one such simplification. It tempts us to transform another human being into a fixed object: monster, villain, barbarian, fascist, terrorist, imperialist, orc. Sometimes these descriptions capture something terribly real about actions or ideologies. But the danger lies in allowing the category to consume the person entirely.

     Even secular people can know how partial our understanding of others is. We do not know fully things like the fears that shaped them, the wounds they carry, the ideological worlds they inherited, the pressures under which they acted, the degree of self-deception involved, the possibilities for repentance or transformation, and so on. Recognizing this opacity can ground humility without requiring theology. In fact, we could argue that modern ideological violence often depends precisely on the loss of this humility. The revolutionary, nationalist (e.g., MAGA), racist, the self-righteously politically correct, or technocratic mindset frequently assumes transparent moral vision: we know what these people are. Once persons are fully reduced to categories, extermination, humiliation, or cruelty become psychologically easier.

    This is why the refusal to judge persons absolutely follows naturally from my earlier reflections on finitude. If human knowledge is radically finite, then moral knowledge of persons must be finite too. I may see clearly enough that a bombing campaign or massacre is evil, because the act itself is public and its violation of human dignity manifest. But the interior totality of the human being remains partly hidden.

     Plato’s idea of the Good may indeed help here. The Good transcends every finite formulation and every human standpoint. To possess complete moral vision would require a kind of godlike perspective that finite creatures do not have. Thus humility before persons is partly humility before reality itself. Human beings exceed our conceptual grasp. We might even say that to judge acts is often necessary for moral clarity; to judge souls absolutely is often a failure of metaphysical humility.

      And there is another, more existential reason this prohibition persists even outside religion. Hatred and moral self-righteousness deform the soul of the one who judges. Murdoch especially emphasizes this. The fantasy that we belong simply among “the good” looking upon “the evil” nourishes vanity, cruelty, and blindness to our own capacity for wrongdoing. The twentieth century repeatedly showed how easily ordinary people, under fear, ideology, humiliation, or tribal passion, become participants in horrors they once thought unimaginable. Thus the prohibition on judging may arise not only from compassion for others but from truthful knowledge of ourselves and human nature. The line between victim and perpetrator, courage and cowardice, humanity and brutality, does not run cleanly between groups; it runs through every finite and wounded soul. I think Jesus, whether you think him God-man or only man, understood this more deeply than any other. To me at least it seems like something God would say. Plato got close to it but no mortal that I know of had ever understood such a thing in its full truth before Jesus.