Justice is the demand the heart makes of reason. For the person who has been in love, they must believe Justice is real. To be passionately in love is to desire beyond reason for justice to truly exist. The man who denies that justice can exist is the man who has never been truly in love, because how can I love without desiring her flourishing? 

That we can have this desire suggests, or at least very strongly implies, there is justice even if we can never perfectly obtain that blessed state. Justice is an attribute of the good God that every human desires.

No man in love has ever drawn breath without desiring justice for the one he loves. Justice is what the Beloved is due: an appropriate life that allows flourishing in the soul of the loved one.  The very essence of true love would be the desire for this justice for the Beloved. Love is the fuel for our soul that drives us toward eternal Justice, or we do not love at all. 

If we love, then we know by experience what that Justice is. 

How?

The loved one, the beloved, deserves justice. This is an intuition love gives us that is so basic we cannot deny it without denying love. We desire that the beloved flourish completely. 

Any culture is the sum of individual loves. Any love demands justice for the beloved. As a result, a civilization is an accumulation of love. Every civilization; however imperfectly, seeks the good of the beloved through the love of the beloved. Justice exists more truly than the device on which you read these words. Any material object exists dependent on the will of the good God. The device you hold need not exist, there could be many realities in which it is not, but justice is necessarily in all possible worlds. Justice exists perfectly for all time in the relationship between the persons of the Triune God.

Justice exists because God exists and God, the very ground of all being, must exist. Why? The words that allow us to reason lose meaning if there is no God. The best way to be sure of these basic truths is to look to God. He is perfectly good and so beautiful, and this beauty drives us to His justice. 

When we see full beauty, or at least the glimpse we can take into our minds, our hearts are filled with love. That love then moves the soul to demand justice and thus transforms the lover and the beloved. Love is the natural result of seeing such beauty. How can a man not love the Divine?  

This lesson is the most basic in the textbooks of Christendom.

“Is love of something or of nothing? Socrates asks. He has just endured a set of speeches on love from a group of men at a party pledged to sobriety but drunk on their own words and ideas. Finally, one of them, Agathon, is good enough to let Socrates examine his thoughts and look for the truth. 

They begin to find, if not a definition of love, truth about love. 

Socrates suggests “love” is a poverty: a need. We want something or someone when in love. This feeling, this unrequited drive, may misunderstand the beloved but still ultimately desires what is best for the loved one. We want justice and so we will not accept anything less. 

We want our spouse, our parents, our children to flourish as themselves. 

We want justice. 

The great fear though is, unlike our other desires, the possibility that our desire for justice is inherently unrequited. We hunger — food exists. We thirst — drink exists. We are lonely — other humans exist.  What if we love so passionately, only for that great Good to not exist? If so, that is a worse hell than any ever imagined by any Christian. I do not think it reasonable to deny hope to every lover who has ever existed. All this might seem far removed from UN meetings and discussions of justice. It is not.

Every longing for something more or better is induced by a vision of what is not now but might be. It is an institutional affirmation of the truth that justice exists as an ideal, even if we cannot perfectly obtain it. The argument is simple. 

If you love, you wish justice. We love. Therefore, there is justice that might be had. 

Every moment I look Godward I see a glimpse of justice in the Known Unknown and am motivated by a love that in Him moves the Heavens and the furthest stars. 

John Mark N. Reynolds is the President of the Saint Constantine College and School. He is the founder of several great text programs and an author and speaker on Orthodox and classical, Christian education.

 

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