God's Justice

Let me begin by paraphrasing a story I read more than a dozen years ago in Parabola Magazine. The original tale was an “Epicycle” in this excellent magazine, but I regret to admit that I no longer have the particular issue, nor can I recall the author. Whatever its provenance, it is a story that has deeply influenced my life.


Once, very long ago, in a remote and isolated part of the world seven
children were playing in the woods. At the exact same instant the seven
saw a sack hanging from the low branch of a tree. Each reached the tree
at the same time. When they looked into the sack they discovered twenty
gold coins. This was more money than their entire village would have
ever seen in its history!

The children were puzzled. How could they divide the treasure so that each
received a “fair share”? Seven did not go evenly into twenty. After several
minutes of argument the children decided to take their problem to the village
wise man. As they approached his home, they debated possible solutions, each
child loudly and assuredly proclaiming their solution to be the best. When
the noisy group reached his home, the wise man greeted them with admonition.
“Why do you disturb an old man having his afternoon rest?” he demanded.

The children related the story of their discovery. They said they had come
for his help. He was asked if he would determine a just distribution
inasmuch as each had an equal claim on the treasure. The wise man agreed.
He asked that they sit quietly while he thought of a solution. After several
minutes he stood before the waiting children.

“I will make my determination, but first I must know if you want Man’s
Justice or God’s Justice.” The children were unanimous in proclaiming their
desire for God’s Justice. “Very well,” said the wise man. “Sit quietly and
you will receive what you have asked of me.”

He picked up the sack of gold coins and approached the children seated in a
row before him. To the first child he gave 2 gold coins. To the second,
3 gold coins. And to the fifth child he gave all the rest.


Not long after reading this tale, I encountered Barry Unsworth’s novel, Morality Play. Unsworth’s book was short listed for a Booker Award, but overlooked by many American readers. The story is set in the Middle Age during the later years of the plague outbreak. A young religious, Nicholas Barber, has run off from his Bishop to “follow the wisdom of (his) heart.” He takes up with a troop of traveling players being sent by their patron as a Christmas gift to another noble. Along the way the actors encounter Death and Murder.

The Medieval Morality Play was designed to teach the faithful a lesson about the eternal struggle between Good and Evil to gain control over the soul of man. Everyman is probably the best known play of this type. The characters of a Morality Play represent qualities like Virtue, Ignorance, Vice, Poverty, and Justice. In Unsworth’s book “Justice” has a threefold representation. It is a thematic motif, a character that represents the King, and a role in the play.

As the story unfolds the troop’s leader has decided to break from the traditional Miracle, Mystery and Morality Play formats and present something heretofore unknown, a secular play based on the local “Murder of Thomas Wells”. Thomas was a child, heinously attacked. A deaf mute young woman is accused; the law demands her execution. The players seek the truth by interviewing witnesses. The facts they uncover inform the script of their “new kind of play.” The facts of the murder point to the noble household of Richard de Guise. Disclosure of the true facts places the acting troop in great danger.

This players’ revelation inadvertently provides the visiting King’s Justice with leverage in the resolution of an ongoing power struggle between the King and Lord Richard. Lord Richard’s son William, the “flower of knighthood,” is the guilty party, aided and abetted by the de Guise Confessor. Political expedience frees the accused young deaf mute. The confessor, a pandering monk named Simon Damian, must face his Maker, appropriately at the hands of the townspeople. But does Sir William, the true murderer, escape unscathed? Certainly he will never be charged in the King’s court. That bargaining chip is too good to use on trifles.

Our protagonist, Nicholas Barber, is dismayed when he states that this outcome “is an example of the King’s justice.” He wonders, “What of God’s?” The Justice tells Nicholas that God’s Justice “is more difficult to understand,” However, God’s Justice will not to be denied. The murdered boy, Thomas Wells, had contracted plague before his abduction and passed it on to his killer. Sir William will not live through the night.

How do these two stories elucidate this discussion of justice? Classical philosophers have debated the nature of justice, considered by the Greeks to be one of the four key virtues. In The Republic – Book I, Socrates and Thrasymachus debate the concept. Thrasymachus declares that “Justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man’s own profit and interest.” This would seem to be the case when the King’s Justice uses the truth of the murder to coerce Sir Richard’s compliance. Socrates disagrees with Thrasymachus’s definition, believing that justice is the burden of the strong. Socrates explains that injustice creates division, hatred and strife, while justice promotes harmony and friendship. He states that the just soul and the just man will live well because their excellence is not frustrated. Their discussion of the nature of justice recapitulates the confrontation of right versus might. Is justice expedience, Unsworth’s book suggests, or is it a measure of men and states not characterized by what is pragmatic, as the naïve Nicholas Barber believes?

Are the origins of justice to be found in political, social, or egalitarian ideals, or in some inalienable natural right? In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Aristotle stated that “the just is the lawful and the fair.” He taught that justice promotes personal harmony and social comity. He distinguishes among particular forms of justice. These include “one kind that is manifest in distribution of honor or money,” i.e. that which can be divided. He goes on to state that “the just is—proportional.” Aristotle hedges his bets. “Distribution must be according to merit in some sense.” In this sense justice becomes a “species of the proportionate” or an “equality of ratios.” One fails to understand how the wise man’s distribution according to “God’s Justice” is proportional. Surely each of the children had an equivalence of claim.

In the Ethics Aristotle distinguishes another particular justice as “one that plays a rectifying part in transactions between man and man” whether voluntary or not. In the Unsworth book, the hanging of the Monk reprises the primitive maxim of justice, “an eye for an eye.” In general however, this type of justice is not relevant to our discussion.

Aristotle devotes a great deal of time discussing political justice, which he describes as part natural and part legislated. It is natural inasmuch as it “everywhere has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that.” It is also constructed, in part legal, “that which is originally indifferent, but when it has been laid down is not indifferent.” In this latter instance, legal justice varies and is not everywhere the same but “political justice exists only insofar as it is governed by law.” He continues, “Law being the rational principle because man must act in his own interest.”

The self interest of a King is more complex than that of a man. In Unworth’s book Nicholas Barber imagines another setting where Kings are subject to more complex and ambiguous standards of political justice. If political justice is to prevail the King’s Justice must act in the self interest of the State, which is preservation of that State. His actions require strength which supersedes Nicholas’s idea of fairness. In Pensées, Pascal states, “Justice without strength is helpless, strength without justice is tyrannical…Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.” Failure of the Justice to reveal and punish the true murder of Thomas Wells is an injustice to the victim, but it is not an unjust act by the King’s representative.

And God’s Justice? The King’s Justice explained, “It is not King who visits us with pestilence.” Sir William contracted lethal plague as a direct result of his injustice to Thomas Wells. The pestilence seems appropriate, not tyrannical. Sir William’s condition has a satisfying element of the ironic. Perhaps this irony reflects the knowing smile of God.

On the other hand, God’s Justice to the children does seem tyrannical. One expects that in the wise man’s distribution of the gold coins division, hatred, and strife will surely ensue. Harmony and balance within the village will be destroyed. What jolts us in this story is that our expectation of fairness is frustrated. We are expecting constructed justice. Even an admixture of two and three coins given to every child would satisfy some sense of proportion. What we get is discomforting.

In Prejudices, 3rd Series, H. L. Menken may have best hit the mark on God’s Justice when he wrote, “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”