Sublime

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” We try; we fail; but we must try again, and again, and again, for only in trial is progress possible.

Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading post–World War II theologian, put his finger on the problem: “The human ego assumes its self-sufficiency and self-mastery and imagines itself secure. . . . It does not recognize the contingent and dependent character of its life and believes itself to be the author of its own existence.”[5]

Justice is a commitment to the common good, a recognition that we are interdependent. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius believed that justice was “the source of all other virtues.” When we act with justice we are honest, and we take the full consequences of our actions into account. We can’t build good habits alone, and the latter part of this

“The tragedy of man,” the twentieth-century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “is that he can conceive self-perfection but cannot achieve it.” And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.

For many Americans, especially non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality can be a useful guide to much of anything is risible, particularly since so many white evangelicals from 2016 forward chose to throw in their lot with a solipsistic American president who bullies, boasts, and sneers. Yet Lewis’s life suggests that religiously

There is the common ground of the common good, and there are the semi-private domains of our diverse religious traditions. We are responsible to society for the former, to our own community for the latter.