The Essentials of Spirituality

by Felix Adler

But the ordinary judgment stops short right here. It recognizes the particular badness of a particular act, and desires that the agent be made to suffer for it. It says, this act is the expression of an evil disposition, and it identifies the whole man with the particular act of which he was guilty. The spiritual attitude is characterized by discriminating between the particular act and the whole of the man's nature. It recognizes that there is an evil strand; but it also sees or divines the good that exists along with the evil, even in the most seemingly hopeless cases. It trusts to the good, and builds upon it with a view to making it paramount over evil. Upon the basis of this spiritual attitude, what should be our mode of dealing with the bad? There are a number of steps to be taken in order, and much depends on our following the right order.

The first step is to arrest the course of evil, to prevent its channel from being deepened, its area from being enlarged. Pluck the whip from the hand of the ruffian who is lashing his beast; stay the arm that is uplifted to strike the cowardly murderous blow. Much has been said of the need of considering the good of society, of protecting the community at large from the depredations of the violent and fraudulent; and of subjecting the latter to exemplary punishment, in order to deter others from following their example. But the welfare of society and the welfare of the criminal are always identical. Nothing should be done to the worst criminal, not a hair of his head should be touched merely for the sake of securing the public good, if the thing done be not also for his private good. And on the other hand, nothing can be done to the criminal which is for his own lasting good that will not also profoundly react for the good of society, assuring its security, and deterring others from a like career of crime. The very first claim which the criminal has upon the services of his fellow-men is that they stop him in his headlong course of wickedness. Arrest, whether by the agents of the law or in some other way, is the first step. The most spiritual concern for a degraded and demoralized fellow-being does not exclude the sharp intervention implied in arrest, for the spiritual attitude is not mawkish or incompatible with the infliction of pain.

This, I think, will be readily granted. But the second step, a step far more important than the arrest of the evildoer in order to arrest the evildoing, is more likely to be contested and misunderstood. The second step consists in fixing the mark of shame upon the offender and publicly humiliating him by means of the solemn sentence of the judge. It may be asked, What human being is fit to exercise this awful office of acting as judge of another? Remember the words of Shakespeare in King Lear: ". . . .See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places; and . . . . which is the justice, which the thief?" Or recall what the Puritan preacher said when he saw from his window a culprit being led to the gallows: "There, but for the grace of God, go I." In other words, had I been born as this man was, had I been played upon by the influences to which he was subject, had I been tempted as he was, how dare I say that I should not have fallen as he did? Had it not been for some grace extended to me through no desert of mine, I might be traveling the road on which he travels now.

Furthermore, can we say that the sentence of the judge is proportioned to the heinousness of the deed? Is the murderer who in a fit of uncontrolled passion has taken a human life—it may have been his first and only crime—necessarily more depraved than the thief; or is the thief in jail who has indeed broken the law, necessarily more depraved than numbers of others who have dexterously circumvented the law, violating the spirit though keeping within the letter of it? Is even the abject creature who strikes his wife more abandoned than a man of the type of Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, whose insults are dealt with a marble politeness, and who crushes his wife's sensibilities, not with a vulgar blow but with the cold and calculating cruelty of a cynic? When it comes to passing moral judgments and fixing blame, and especially to measuring the degree of another's guilt, who of us is good enough, who of us is pure enough, who of us is himself free enough from wrong to exercise so terrible an office? Is not Lear right, after all: ". . . .change places; and. . . .which is the justice, which is the thief?"

It may be said in reply to these objections: First, that the judge does not speak in his private capacity, but that he delivers the judgment of mankind on the doer and the deed, serving as the mouthpiece of the moral law, so far as it is incorporated in the human law. We should select the highest characters available for so exalted a duty, but freedom from even great human infirmity we cannot expect to find. Again, it is not the judge's business to fix the degree of moral guilt; that not even the best and wisest of men can do. The inscrutable fact of the degree of moral guilt eludes all human insight. Only omniscience could decide who is more guilty relatively to opportunities, advantages, circumstances; who has made the braver effort to escape wrongdoing; whether the admired preacher, or the culprit on his way to the gallows; whether the President in the White House or the wretch behind the bars. The office of the judge is to pronounce that crime has been committed, irrespective of the subtle question of the degree of guilt. Murder has been done, property has been stolen, the sin and the sinner wedded together. The office of the judge is to declare the fact of that infelicitous union, and to pronounce the penalty according to the law. And this, in particular. The object of the punishment which the law pronounces is not vindictive chastisement of the culprit. The object of punishment is purely reformatory. Only it must not be forgotten that there can be no reformation without penitence, and no penitence without self-abasement. And this consists in confessing one's self guilty, admitting that the guilt has become a part of one's being, and humbling one's pride to the ground. The public sentence pronounced by the judge, the shame which he fixes upon the culprit, has, then, for its object to pave the way toward reformation, to break down the defenses which the sophistry of wickedness sets up, to compel the man to see himself as others see him, to force him to realize to the full the evil of his present state. Not to blast him utterly, not to exclude him forever from the kindly society of men, but to lead him into the way along which—if he travel it—he may eventually return, though perhaps only after many years, to human fellowship. If the verdict is pronounced in any other spirit, it is false and inhuman. The methods to be employed to bring about reformation must often be severe and painful, and one of these methods is shock, shock sharp and sudden enough to loosen the incrustations of evil habit, and to shake a wicked nature down to its foundations. The purpose of the trial of a criminal in a court of justice, and of the verdict in which the trial culminates, is to supply such a shock, a searching and terrible experience, yet salutary and indispensable in order that better things may ensue.

From what has been said, it follows that the death penalty as a punishment even for the worst crimes is morally untenable; for either the culprit is really irredeemable, that is to say, he is an irresponsible moral idiot, in which case an asylum for the insane is the proper place for him; or he is not irredeemable, in which case the chance of reformation should not be taken from him by cutting off his life. The death penalty is the last lingering vestige of the Lex Talionis, of the law which attempts to equalize the penalty with the crime, a conception of justice which in all other respects we have happily outgrown. It does not necessarily follow that the immediate abolition of capital punishment is expedient. It is not expedient in fact, because of the condition of our prisons, and because of the abuses to which the pardoning power of the State is subjected; because security is lacking that the worst offenders, before ever they can be reclaimed, may not be returned unrepentant into the bosom of society, to prey upon it anew with impunity. But, then, we must not defend the death penalty as such, but rather deplore and do our utmost to change our political conditions, which make it still unwise to abolish a form of punishment so barbarous and so repugnant to the moral sense.

The step which follows the arrest and condemnation of the evildoer is isolation, with a view to the formation of new habits. A change of heart is the necessary pre-requisite of any permanent change in conduct; but the change of heart, and the resolution to turn over a new leaf to which it gives birth, must be gradually and slowly worked out into a corresponding practice. The old body of sin cannot be stripped off in a moment; the old encumbrance of bad habits cannot be sloughed off like a serpent's coil. The new spirit must incorporate itself slowly in new habits; and to this end the delinquent must be aided in his efforts by a more or less prolonged absence from the scene of his former temptations. He must be placed in an entirely new and suitable environment, and encouraging pressure must be exerted upon him to acquire new habits of order, diligent application to work, obedience, self-control. It is upon this idea that the moral propriety of imprisonment and of prison discipline is based, whether the actual treatment of prisoners be in accord with it or not.

And so we may pass on at once to the last and chief element in the process of the reclamation of the evildoer, namely, forgiveness. An angel's tongue, the wisdom and insight of the loftiest of the sages, would be required to describe all the wealth of meaning contained in the sublime spiritual process which we designate by the word pardon. It is a process which affects equally both parties to the act, the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. It exalts both, transfigures both, indeed establishes a new tie of wonderful tenderness and sublimity between them. The person who forgives is a benefactor.

Is it a little thing, when a man is sunk in the slough of poverty, denuded of all the decencies of life, harassed day and night by grinding cares, knows not whither to turn to find shelter and food, for some fellow human being, moved by pure human kindness, or let us rather say moved by respect for the worth which he sees in his perishing fellow-man, to come to the aid of the latter, to lift him out of his distress, to place him on sun-lit levels, to put him on his feet and give him a new chance, to open for him a new career in which effort may meet with its reward? Such an act of human helpfulness is not a little thing; the man who does it is rightly esteemed a great benefactor. Or is it a little thing to save the imperiled sick, to bring back from the brink of the grave a precious life, already despaired of? This, too, surely is not a little thing, and the good physician who accomplishes such a miracle is rightly esteemed a benefactor to whom lifelong gratitude is due.

But there is a yet greater thing, a benefit, by the side of which even these—great as they are—appear almost insignificant. To take a man who is sinking in the moral slough and has no courage left to rise out of it; to give him back his lost self-esteem, that jewel without which health and wealth are of little avail; to put him in a position once more to look his fellow-men straight in the eye; to place him morally on the sun-lit levels; to put him morally on his feet—this assuredly is the supreme benefit, and the man who accomplishes this for another is the supreme benefactor. And a note of exquisite moral beauty is added if the benefactor be the same person whom the guilty man had injured. This is what is meant by forgiveness. This is why forgiveness is so divine a thing. This is the reason why, when an act of genuine forgiveness occurs, "the music of the spheres" seems to become audible in our nether world. And this is also the reason why we often see such a strange kind of tie springing up between a person who has been chastised and the one who has chastised him in the right spirit and then forgiven him—a tie into which there enters shame for the wrong done, gratitude for the unmerited good received, and a reverence akin to idolatry toward the one upon whose faith in him the sinner rebuilt his faith in himself.