The law of God and the death penalty: can the courts act “in a Christian way”

Everyone knows the phrase “execution cannot be pardoned”. In this problem, the matter is small: where to put a comma, it will be so – either life or death. What principles should be applied so that the law is not violated, and so that the conscience does not torment later? The capricious princess from the fairy tale “12 months” wrote “execute”, since this word has fewer letters. In order not to suffer, the liberal Democrats passed a constitutional law on the so-called moratorium on the use of the death penalty. That is, we sentence, but replace it with a life sentence.

Liberal-sentimental arguments that it is inhumane to execute and kill, and the like, are characteristic of people who have not been touched by the tragedy of the death of their loved ones. Ask those who have been touched, and you will get a clear answer: the killer and the rapist should not live. History knows exceptions. So, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna asked not to execute the murderer of her husband Sergei Alexandrovich, a certain Kalyaev, and even visited him in prison, calling for repentance. But for this one must have a great gift of mercy, as Reverend Seraphim of Sarov had, who also asked the authorities not to punish the peasants who almost killed and maimed him. Here the authorities put a comma in the right place: Kalyaev was hanged, and the peasants were sent to hard labor. You say tough? Suppose that Kalyaev would have been pardoned and the peasants released, then Kalyaev would have killed someone else and the peasants would still have robbed. A forgiven thief is a dangerous fellow, especially since Kalyaev refused to repent and confess, and the peasants were also not very worried about what they had done, since they left the wounded Seraphim in the wilderness.

It is on this eternal confrontation between the worldly state law, designed to punish the caught and condemned villain, and the spiritual law (for us the Gospel, for Muslims the Koran, etc.) that there is an endless dispute between the power of Caesar and the power of God for more than one century. The smartest and most erudite philosophers and theologians strive from the bottom of their hearts to bring God’s authority into the territory of Caesar, while positivist lawyers strive to tamp God’s law behind the walls of churches and monasteries, to lock it up in private houses and apartments.

Trying to involve the Orthodox Church in resolving the issue of where to put a comma in the mentioned text is counterproductive: in the Orthodox primary sources one cannot find direct hints that criminals must certainly be executed. This is not in the Quran and in the Torah. In general, the Savior only once directly answered the Pharisees how to separate Caesar’s from God’s, offering to give God’s to God, and Caesar’s to Caesar, meaning obligatory payments to the state. The gospel teaches us: be perfect, like your heavenly Father. We try to be similar even in small things. But perfection is far from perfect, and after all, no judge can act like He, releasing a sinful adulteress, saying to her: “Where are your accusers? nobody judged you? and I do not condemn you; Go ahead and don’t sin.” Criminal, criminal procedural, civil and other codes of laws of the state require law enforcers to be conscientious, conscientious and fair. But judge for yourself: if an interrogating officer, investigator, judge, prosecutor has carefully examined all the circumstances of the legal relationship that has arisen and has found the corpus delicti of a specific crime confirmed by all legal means, then he cannot, without violating the laws in force, show an act of non-Caesarean mercy and say “go and do not sin again”, that is, like Christ, turn to conscience and give to God what is divine.

When in ordinary earthly life, according to human concepts, a criminal is not punished severely enough or, on the contrary, punished excessively severely, the first thing that comes to the fore is the concept of “fair” or “unfair”. More than one hundred works have been written about justice by philosophers and theologians. But the confident opinion of not a philosopher or a theologian, but an actor P. Mamonov (remember “The Island”?): “Justice is evil, this is a demonic concept … Christ did not create a legal state, although he could, but he said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” God is not just, he is merciful, he is merciful.” Pyotr Mamonov was a Christian person, but theologians and Christian philosophers have long proved to the world that justice from God will never coincide with human justice, especially when it is enclosed in legal formulas: God and Caesar will always have their own judgment and their own measure of justice. With God, this is the measure of love for one’s neighbor and truth: “The judgment does not consist in the fact that the light has come in the world, but people loved darkness more than light, because their deeds were evil, but he who does righteousness goes to the light, so that his works, because they are made in God.” This is a spiritual court and understandable only to those who recognize the phenomenon of conscience.

Many well-known philosophers, in search of moral grains among the chaff of legal norms, believed that these norms themselves are capable of providing only the lower limit of the so-called. “universal morality”. But if a certain general morality exists, then where to look for it when passing a lenient or severe sentence? The Christian thinker O. Spengler pointed out at the beginning of the 20th century: “Every culture has its own measure, the significance of which begins and ends with itself. There is no universal morality… There are as many morals as there are cultures… No one has a free choice here.” A member of a free civil society in a state governed by the rule of law will, of course, be indignant at this encroachment on his freedom. Well, this is how he now sees (if not blind) how in 2022, obviously, all civil liberties and norms of international law turned out to be empty declarations, which are defiantly spit on in Europe, America, and the so-called. Ukraine. And the root of this evil is “the extinction of living inner religiosity, which gradually forms and fills even the smallest features of existence and means in the historical picture of the world the turn of culture towards civilization as a climax of culture” (O. Spengler). Here it is useless to look for a way out among the God-deserted corridors of the “rule of law” and on the territory of the so-called. “civil society”. This is a fact that has been tested by time and proved by many philosophers not blinded by liberalism, for example, the German K. Barth: “If the state begins to demand love, it always intends to become the church of a false god and thereby an unlawful state. The rule of law does not need love, but sober deeds, resolute responsibility… The civil community as such is spiritually blind and “ignorant.” She has no faith, no love, no hope.”

But it is from the civil community that the rule of law recruits judges, investigators, prosecutors, and finally, jurors. The procedure for the participation of assessors is strictly prescribed and just concerns the resolution of cases where execution is possible. But even here there are no guarantees that they have enough knowledge and culture to determine the presence or absence of guilt of the defendant. Remember Mikhalkov’s film “The Twelve”, where the jurors have only emotions from their life experience and a complete lack of the necessary legal knowledge. Note that jurors are free from following the letter of the law, but not free from political tendencies prevailing outside the window. So, at the beginning of the fashion for liberal humanism, the jury acquitted V. Zasulich, who shot at the St. Petersburg governor-general Trepov. Lawyer Aleksandrov spoke not on the merits of Zasulich’s crime, but with the aim of placating the jury with her unfortunate fate and inciting them against the “tsar’s satrap” Trepov. He succeeded, but the well-known jurist F. Koni called the court’s decision the end of justice.

Wise theologians reminded us more than once that God forbade Adam and Eve to eat apples from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they were self-willed, and now we sinners have the problem of assessing good and evil, crime and punishment, where the phenomenon of a living conscience is shackled in shackles of legal rules codes.

In our Criminal Code of the Russian Federation there are some signs of justice and humanism, but they are very primitive, for example, justice is connected only with the degree of social danger of an act, its circumstances and the personality of the perpetrator. If so, then the above-mentioned P. Mamonov is right: justice from God in a state governed by the rule of law has been turned into justice from Caesar. Humanism presupposes the non-admission of physical suffering for the guilty, but do not the very deprivation of liberty and the requirements of the regime of detention cause suffering?

Of course, V.V. Putin is right when, at collegiums of security officials and meetings of judges, he demands an end to the practice of indispensable conviction to imprisonment and the use of alternative measures (fines, compulsory work, etc.). But besides statistics, does someone control the real implementation of this position, which is not legitimized as a principle? Nobody!

And more for understanding. Remember how in the struggle against Stalinist repressions under Khrushchev, not the courts, but all sorts of commissions released Ukrainian and other accomplices of the Nazis. Their grandchildren are now continuing their business. If these grandchildren are imprisoned, then there will be another “Khrushchev” who will release them as victims of repression and they will organize another “Maidan”. For such, it should not be too lazy to amend the Constitution and put a comma in the right place.