{"id":16834,"date":"2015-05-21T00:09:41","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T06:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=16834"},"modified":"2015-05-21T16:28:39","modified_gmt":"2015-05-21T22:28:39","slug":"dzhokhar-tsarnaev-all-out-of-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2015\/05\/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-all-out-of-mercy\/","title":{"rendered":"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: All out of Mercy?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

For me \u2013 and, I suspect, for many people \u2013 defense witnesses\u2019 pleas<\/a> for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev\u2019s life made for a nauseating spectacle. Tsarnaev got the best America can offer \u2013 an education, a future, a wide circle of admiring friends. He threw it away to become a cold-blooded killer, a religious fanatic, and a living threat to d\u00e9tente between Muslims and, well, everybody else. So what if, as a toddler, he was so cute that his aunt let him pee in her sink? Big deal if his grade-school teacher can\u2019t help loving him, no matter how naughty he went on to become. From none of this flowing sap does it follow logically that his head deserves to remain on its shoulders.<\/p>\n

Nauseating or not, Tsarnaev\u2019s defense meant to exploit a fundamental Christian value. The Latin word misericordia<\/em>, which appears so often in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, translates into pity and compassion, but also into mercy. In Irish Theological Quarterly<\/em>, Thomas Ryan defines<\/a> misericordia <\/em>as \u201cBeing so affected that one moves to alleviate the distress of another.\u201d Get that? Affected. When someone is suffering, Christians are expected to get all emotional.<\/p>\n

But for Christians getting all emotional is a complicated matter. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between passions, or \u201cexcitement of the soul\u201d \u2013 what we would call feelings \u2013 and affects, or acts of the will. He conceived of the second as following from the first. In the case of misericordia<\/em>, affective mercy, or feelings of pity or compassion toward an object, can, if properly directed, become effective mercy, or a positive act of mercy toward the same object. Collapsing the two stages, Fr. John Hardon defines mercy<\/a> as \u201cthe ready willingness to help anyone in need, especially in need of pardon or reconciliation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normally, Thomas Aquinas judged emotions according to their congruence with reason. Feeling sad when good things happen to someone else is envy, a mortal sin and a capital vice. However, Thomas Ryan argues, the Angelic Doctor counted compassion among the emotions that are good in and of themselves, no matter their object. \u201cFor Thomas Aquinas,\u201d he writes, \u201cbasic humanity requires that we be aware of and recognize what is good in others. It also entails being affected by and responsive to their suffering through compassion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Church teaches that we can \u2013 and should \u2014 will ourselves into feeling the appropriate things at the appropriate times. In fact, precisely because consequent emotions, the ones we make ourselves feel, result from deliberate acts of will, they\u2019re likelier to increase the goodness of an act than antecedent emotions, which occur naturally. Feelings of compassion, in other words, are most meritorious when we can gin them up only through a hearty moral self-bludgeoning.<\/p>\n

Now, Thomas Aquinas never wrote that compassion for a condemned killer\u2019s family \u2013 much less for the condemned killer himself \u2013 should automatically rescue the criminal from the gallows. As outlaws were \u201cdangerous and infectious\u201d to society, it could be \u201cpraiseworthy and advantageous\u201d for society to put them to death. Still, according to Ryan, his interpreter, he believed that \u201cfriendship with God means that misericordia\u2019s<\/em> scope includes those whose suffering is due to their own actions (e.g. the sinner).\u201d Even if right reason won\u2019t permit you to let the bad guy off, you should, at least, feel moved to offer him a sponge soaked in myrrh.<\/p>\n

Tsarnaev\u2019s attorneys staked their client\u2019s life on the hope that jurors would feel so affected by the suffering of all Tsarnaev\u2019s friends and relations that they would move to end it, by giving the little goblin life instead of death. Or, failing that, that they\u2019d feel shame for not feeling affected, and \u2013 somehow \u2013 squeeze just enough pity out of their hearts to act mercifully in the end. It was a long shot \u2013 too long, as it turned out. <\/p>\n

Policing my interior life is always a grind, but never more so than when I\u2019m supposed to police it for the benefit of a mass murderer. I know I should figure out some way to suffer along with the condemned and his family. Precisely because it\u2019s so hard to do, I know I should prod myself a little. But in the end, I\u2019m lucky if I can talk myself down from blood lust to cold disdain. (I am, after all, a long-distance runner, bound to the victims of this crime in a brotherhood of blisters.) <\/p>\n

Well, barring successful appeal, Tsarnaev\u2019s for the needle. Patheos\u2019 Catholic channel recently declared its opposition<\/a> to capital punishment, so I won\u2019t rock the boat. Still, though I can oppose the death penalty in an abstract, blanket fashion, I cannot force myself to feel anything virtuous toward this particular killer, and I find it galling that this deficiency should have been exposed through a cheap pageant staged by a bunch of lawyers.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s also possible to be compassionate and merciful to a fault. Many believe that an earlier Massachusetts jury acquitted Lizzie Borden for a double murder because they couldn\u2019t bear the thought of a woman being put to death. Showing mercy to the right people in the right ways and at the right times may be a means of partaking in the Divine Nature, but it\u2019s awfully hard. Immunizing the imperative to be merciful from crass manipulation could be the best reason for outlawing the death penalty. Just as Oscar Wilde wrote that socialism would spare us having to live for others, a judicial system that defaults to mercy might spare us from having to feel for others \u2013 unless we really want to. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For me \u2013 and, I suspect, for many people \u2013 defense witnesses\u2019 pleas for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev\u2019s life made for a nauseating spectacle. Tsarnaev got the best America can offer \u2013 an education, a future, a wide circle of admiring friends. He threw it away to become a cold-blooded killer, a religious fanatic, and a living […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[717,1247,744,299,1249,119,1246,179,439,208,1248],"class_list":["post-16834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boston-marathon-bombing","tag-death-penalty","tag-dzhokhar-tsarnaev","tag-global-war-on-terror","tag-irish-theological-quarterly","tag-islam","tag-massachusetts","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-patheos","tag-saints","tag-thomas-aquinas"],"yoast_head":"\nDzhokhar Tsarnaev: All out of Mercy?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For me \u2013 and, I suspect, for many people \u2013 defense witnesses\u2019 pleas for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev\u2019s life made for a nauseating spectacle. 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