By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Aug 27, 2024
Pharisees take a lot of abuse these days. Let’s give them fair treatment.
Today, if you call someone a Pharisee, you’re insulting him. If you call him a Samaritan, that’s a compliment. That fact shows how thoroughly our Lord’s parables changed our perceptions, because at the time of Christ, Pharisees were respected figures, while Samaritans were objects of scorn. Jesus caused a sensation when he charged the Pharisees with hypocrisy; now in normal English parlance the two words, “Pharisee” and “hypocrite” are virtually synonyms. What was remarkable about the Good Samaritan was that he was good; the Jews who first heard that parable would not have expected that. Today we drop the adjective “good” and say that someone who helps others is a “Samaritan.”
Jesus clashed with the Pharisees because, as religious leaders, they commanded respect—or perhaps it would be better to say demanded respect—for the wrong reasons. His objection was not to their outward show of piety, but to their inner pride.
Take the Pharisee who appears alongside the publican in the 18th chapter of St. Luke’s gospel. He fasts regularly. He tithes. These are good things, for which he deserves to be commended. In these respects who is morally superior to the publican, who probably neither fasts nor tithes, and in fact recognizes himself as a miserable sinner. But the Pharisee’s external religious observances are not based on any genuine reverence; his pride sucks the life out of his piety. To be genuine, piety must always be accompanied by humility.
Piety, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a matter of justice: of acknowledging a debt. The virtue of piety is not exclusive to Christians, nor is it limited to reverence for the Almighty. The ancient pagans recognized the virtue and gave us the term pietas. Confucius sounded the same theme when he demanded respect for one’s ancestors. St. Thomas explained in the Summa (II IIae, Q. 101 A 1):
Man becomes a debtor to other men in various ways, according to their various excellences and the various benefits received from them. On both counts God holds first place, for He is supremely excellent and is for us the first principle of being and government. On the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.
Piety, applied to the natural order—to civil affairs, to public life—is recognition of what we owe to our ancestors. It is acknowledgment of a debt that we owe, not only because of the sacrifices that our parents made for our welfare, but also for the society they built, the heritage that they passed on to us. It implies a realization that (to use a contemporary idiom) our lives are not “just about us”—that we are involved in a great epic story, along with our ancestors and our heirs.
Natural piety, then, gives rise to an appreciation for what our ancestors have left us. We may come to criticize some things that they did, and we certainly expect to make some improvements. But our default assumption is that they knew what they were doing. It was Isaac Newton—who had every reason for confidence in his own innovative ability—who said: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
At roughly the time of Newton, however, and through the era of the Enlightenment, a series of influential thinkers argued that we should radically question all the thoughts of the past, subject all the thoughts of our forefathers to our own critical analysis, and build a new “scientific” way of thinking, a new order of society. The work of our ancestors came to be seen as a burden, as much as a blessing. Pietas became outmoded.
One problem (among many) with this new way of thinking is the failure to anticipate what economists call unintended consequences. We might think that we know why our great-grandfathers thought or acted in a particular way, but we could be mistaken; there may be something very important that we failed to take into account. Have you ever found an old dusty tool on your workbench, realized that you haven’t used it for years, and thrown it away—only to realize, months later, that it is absolutely necessary for an important repair?
Our society has tossed aside so much that our ancestors considered as common wisdom—about family life in particular. Our political leaders have redefined marriage, on the spectacularly arrogant assumption that we now know, better than all previous generations, that “love is love.” A few generations ago we began to ridicule traditional notions about women’s role in society, and now—surprise!—we find ourselves unable to state with confidence what a woman is. (Notice, too, that the more someone is exposed to higher education, the likelier that he will be unable to reconcile his confused thoughts on that subject with fundamental biological realities.)
Western civilization is in crisis, in no small part because of the “unintended consequences” of throwing off old ways of thinking without recognizing their value. We could save ourselves an enormous amount of trouble by learning the lesson of the Pharisees, as portrayed in the Gospel parables. Pietas is an essential virtue, and humility is the catalyst that makes it work.
Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.
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