[This column, as usual, avoids spoilers for the work discussed.]
Contemporary social conservatives are well aware that we live in a time in which the great gift of human sexuality is deeply misunderstood and often abused. Conservative publications regularly release articles rightly bemoaning the state of the family and the ways in which contemporary sexual ideologies are harming our societies. Those of us who recognize the sorry state of prevailing attitudes towards sex may be tempted by two different, but still dangerous, attitudes: defeatism and Pelagian legalism.
Defeatism needs little explanation, and more eloquent writers than I have written of its dangers to conservatism. The latter, however, is not often discussed, and thus necessitates more attention. As the name suggests, it has two aspects, Pelagianism and legalism. The first, Pelagianism, is a technical term for the Christian heresy that claims that salvation is procured not through the grace of God but through our own efforts. It is named for Pelagius, a fourth and fifth-century theologian whose doctrines and practices were roundly rejected by the Church and powerfully refuted by St. Augustine. So much for Pelagianism, but what of ‘legalism’? By “Pelagian legalism,” I mean the view that human society can be perfected if we just work hard enough to win political battles, pass the right laws, and enforce them to the letter.
This Pelagian legalism is something many social conservatives are coming to find more and more attractive. In a world that is increasingly hostile to healthy ways of life, especially in the sexual realm, it is tempting to think that if ‘we’ could just ‘win’ enough political battles the world would return to a utopian state of affairs that existed somewhere in the past. In my own nation, the United States, a new generation of politicians and political theorists have begun advocating for a ‘post-liberal’ approach to politics, one that, among other things, embraces the coercive power of law to enforce a comprehensive vision of the good life. I commend this new generation. There is no such thing as ‘morally neutral’ laws, and for decades (or perhaps centuries) our government has passed laws that presume a harmful idea of the good life for man. However, many young conservatives and reactionaries are, in my opinion, going beyond these legitimate insights and falling into the view that they can perfect society by their own, purely human, efforts.
Sin is a perennial reality in this life. We are not meant to fix the world through our own political will. Instead, we are called to heal the world by being channels of grace, bringing the love of God to broken people and offering them His healing sacraments. Some are called to improve the world through politics, but they must not forget that they are in need of grace to do this well. The temptation to Pelagian legalism, however, is not new, and fortunately our tradition has resources to deal with it. Perhaps the best dramatic resource is Shakespeare’s hilarious, beautiful, and criminally overlooked play, Measure for Measure.
The venality of Vienna
Measure for Measure is an odd work of literature. Though traditionally classed as a comedy, it is often today considered a ‘problem play.’ This is because, like The Winter’s Tale or Merchant of Venice, it does not adhere strictly to the conventions of comedy. When watching it, the first half or so feels quite dramatic, while the second half becomes far more comedic in the contemporary sense. Even so, it has an undercurrent of seriousness that straightforward comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew lack.
The play takes place in Vienna, where—much like our own times—the city had become rife with fornication, prostitution, and general depravity. The duke, Vincentio, though a righteous man, doesn’t know how to heal his diseased culture. He knows that the city will flounder so long as its sexual mores are so debauched, but how can he possibly help his people? He hatches a plan: he will pretend to leave the city and temporarily place a man named Angelo in charge. Angelo is a rigorous and scrupulous man. He is dedicated to cleansing the city of sexual sin, an important and noble goal. He orders, for instance, that all brothels be razed. He goes too far, however, in expecting the city to heal immediately through his own political action. For our purposes, he is the play’s embodiment of Pelagian legalism; he believes that the best way to clean up the city is to begin enforcing laws requiring the death penalty for anyone found guilty of fornication, laws which have always been on the books but haven’t been implemented in many years.
This brings us to Claudio and Juliet, an engaged couple who are deeply in love. They have not yet married and have fallen into the sin of fornication. This has left Juliet pregnant, and thus Claudio is to be the first person put to death for fornication under Angelo’s new regime. This outcome is particularly sad, since many men who habitually fornicate without any love for those with whom they sin are running free while Claudio, a relatively chaste man by the city’s standards, is to lose his life for a moment of passion with his betrothed love whom he fully intended to marry.
Claudio’s friend, Lucio, wishes to see Claudio pardoned. Lucio knows that his defense of his friend’s character will be impotent before Angelo’s rigorism, so he comes up with a plan. Claudio has a sister, Isabella, who is a novice in formation to become a Poor Clare, an order of contemplative nuns. Lucio, knowing that Isabella’s character is unblemished, visits her at the convent, explains the situation, and asks her to advocate for her brother. Isabella immediately agrees to plead Claudio’s case before Angelo.
Once granted an audience with the severe Angelo, Isabella beseeches him to pardon her brother. Isabella explains that she is of one mind with Angelo about how wrong fornication is, and how deserving it is of condemnation. She says, “There is a vice that most I do abhor,/And most desire should meet the blow of justice.” However, she continues, Angelo should work to make “the fault die” and not her brother. This wish, echoing much traditional Christian language of sin and forgiveness, of death and resurrection, is rejected by Angelo. She further pleads her brother’s case, saying that Angelo could pardon him “And neither heaven nor man grieve at the mercy.” Isabella knows that she is asking, not for justice, but clemency. What her brother did was wrong, and Angelo, as the embodiment of the state, may legitimately demand that he be punished, but as ultimate adjudicator Angelo could go beyond mere legalism and show mercy to a poor man who wishes only to marry his betrothed and raise his child. Afterall, the ultimate purpose of the fornication law was to prevent men from absolving themselves of their duties towards the children they beget and the women with whom they sire them.
Isabella makes a final push for her brother, arguing that every man is a sinner whose only hope is God’s mercy. As she puts it:
Alas, alas!
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.
Isabella, the absent Duke, and, indeed, Angelo himself are all deserving of the same fate as Claudio, were it not for the grace merited by Christ’s sacrifice, one made out of mercy for them. But this appeal makes no headway with the hardhearted Angelo, and hope seems lost.
However, over the course of the audience, though Angelo’s heart is not softening to Claudio, it is flaming for Isabella. He is consumed with passion for her. Angelo ultimately succumbs to this passion and, despite his own fierce opposition to fornication, offers her a deal: he will pardon Claudio if Isabella goes to bed with him, offering up her own virginity for her brother’s sin.
I leave the rest of the plot to your own reading (or better yet, viewing). The remaining action of the play involves profound plumbing of the depths of human depravity, reminders of the need for God’s grace, and even a ‘bed trick.’ Despite being a problem play, it is, after all, a comedy, so a felicitous ending is guaranteed, but the way of getting there is far from straightforward.
Law and grace
Literature, it need barely be said, is not philosophy. It does not tend explicitly to make universal claims about reality, but rather it tells the stories of particular persons, albeit usually imagined ones. It is through this very particularity, however, that readers are forced to confront the universal. (This is an insight I owe in large part to William F. Lynch’s astonishing Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination, a work well worth any reader’s careful attention.) Just as the Second Person of the Trinity was made a particular man with a mother and a hometown and a heritage but nonetheless taught mankind universal truths, so does literature need its very particularity in order to help us recognize the universal. Indeed, not for nothing is Christ’s teaching expressed mainly through parables, evocative stories that bring those who hear them to consider the nature of God and man.
I say all this because Measure for Measure presents us with a city different from those in which we live today. Few Western nations—or perhaps none—can rely on the kind of consensus about the truths of Christianity and the moral law that Shakespeare’s Vienna possessed. Nuns today need to go to court just to plead that they not be forced to pay for contraception and abortifacients, so the idea that a postulant’s pleas for mercy would hold water is foreign to us. And, most obviously, no Western government is going to legislate in favor of capital punishment for fornicators.
By entering into the world of the play, it remains the case however that we are given eyes to see our own world more clearly. We, like the Vienna of Measure for Measure, are living in a time in which the gift of human sexuality is widely misunderstood and misused. We politically engaged social conservatives often find ourselves envying the place of Angelo in the play: “if only we had control over the government, we could fix our broken culture!” Or, even if we do not fall into this temptation, we are still guilty of falling into Pelagian tendencies in a different way by thinking that we need only protect ourselves and our families from the world and, by working hard enough, we can create a small space of perfection where we can live out healthy ways of life.
In reality, both social and personal regeneration require grace. Yes, it’s true that man can understand by natural reason alone that, for instance, that fornication is harmful to both the people who commit it and the society in which it occurs, but in a culture like ours even a simple moral insight like this is extremely difficult to have outside of a religious framework. And besides, even if a person recognizes, for instance, the need to abstain from sex until marriage, this is a difficult injunction to live by without grace, especially in a world in which obsession with sex surrounds us.
But where does this leave those who wish to heal our culture? Ultimately, we should recognize that we cannot fix the world by our own efforts. Indeed, we may not even personally be called to take part in widespread social change. But each of us is called to two things that can help heal our diseased sexual culture: The first is prayer and the second is love.
We must pray for those who are victims of our culture: those who have never known love, those who are addicted to pornography, those who have had abortions, those who find their identities in LGBT ideology, and so many more. Each of these people is called by God to live lives of holiness and love, but so many people are so overcome by the demonic powers of our culture that they can see no way out. Pray for them.
Then, there is love. Each one of us must be open to God’s grace and offer it to others. This need not mean evangelization (though it can). Often it simply means caring for those around us. Whatever your job or hobbies, you can find ways to love those who are hurt by our culture. I often think, for instance, of how easy it is for me and my fellow conservative writers to fail to recognize that, for instance, while LGBT activists do real damage to our society, our rhetoric should not fail to recognize the distinction between political actors and the real human beings who struggle with same-sex attraction or the mental illness of gender dysphoria. While conservative views about sex, or, more accurately, Christian views about it, can greatly help people who have fallen pray to modern culture, the way that we speak about these people often ends up preventing us from earnestly offering the healing that can come from this kind of change of life.
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is, as I said earlier, an odd play. But it is also a beautiful play and a timely one. It forces us to confront the tendencies of our own hearts and encourages us to live our Christian charity in our dealings with others. I hope you take the time to watch a production of it or to read it and that it helps you consider your own role in the healing of our ailing culture.
