BACCALAUREATE 2004
Baccalaureate Address by Jaroslav
Pelikan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale;
Visiting Scholar at Annenberg School for Communication,
May 16, 2004. This is the first of two he gave that
day; click here
for the second address.
Leges Sine Moribus Vanae
The motto of the University
of Pennsylvania, which appears (in Latin) on the diplomas
being awarded to you tomorrow,
reads: "Leges sine moribus vanae, Laws without
morals are useless."
If you have taken the
right courses during your years as a student at the University
of Pennsylvania--and if you
haven't, it's never too late to make up the deficiency
at your friendly local bookstore or library--you will
recognize in this maxim one of the several insights, like
the search
for wisdom and the quest for justice on which the two
major sources of our spiritual tradition, the Judaeo-Christian
and the Graeco-Roman, converge. The Hebrew prophets thundered
against the all but incurable tendency to equate legal
conformity with moral uprightness, insisting that
obedience to the will of God is better than sacrifice and
that the sacrifice most pleasing to God is a willing
heart. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is one uninterrupted
polemic against meticulously keeping all the rules while
nursing a hatred for our brother in our heart, and the
apostle Paul devoted his two most important epistles, those
addressed to the Romans and to the Galatians, to an attack
upon what he called "the, righteousness of the law" at
the cost of what he called "the liberty with which
Christ has set you free-" Meanwhile, as John Stuart
Mill said in On Liberty, "Mankind can hardly be too
often reminded that there was once a man named Socrates":
what Socrates lived for--and, lest we ever forget,
what he died for--was the superiority of moral integrity
to all laws and conventions, the ultimate authority of
that mysterious
inner voice which he called his Daimon,
which no Athenian court and no cup of hemlock could successfully
extinguish.
In making "leges sine moribus vanae" its motto,
therefore, this University proves once again that its roots
lie deep in the Western tradition--however much some
of its more nihilistic sons and daughters may try to deny
this.
We do not, of course,
have to reach back to the Bible and to Socrates for corroboration
of this principle. Within
the living memory of many of us here this afternoon, and
within the shared memory of this entire nation, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., who in his turn did indeed reach back
to the Bible and to Socrates (and to Mahatma Gandhi), took
dramatic action at Selma, Alabama and many other places
and used his powerful rhetoric at the Washington Mall and
many other places, all to prove that laws, howsoever hallowed
they may be, can be fundamentally immoral and that therefore
there are times--there must be times--when a truly moral
person has no alternative but to disobey such a law and
to take the consequences--as he did! Note please that be
meant laws that were truly immoral to obey, not merely
inconvenient or annoying or stupid or even unfair (and
there has never been any shortage of such laws in any human
society, either), but genuinely contrary to morality. Significantly,
Dr. King stood consciously in the heritage of the central
and unifying theme of the Hebrew Scriptures, which his
own heritage had unforgettably enshrined in the words of
the spiritual:
Go down, Moses,
'Way down in Egypt lan'
Tell ole Pharaoh
To let my people go.
For 'leges sine moribus vanae," so that even
the supreme law of this land, the Constitution of the United
States, required correction by the morality of the Declaration
of Independence and of the Fourteenth Amendment. As Supreme
Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote at the bicentennial
of the Constitution in 1987, "While the Union survived
the Civil War, the Constitution did not. In its place arose
a new, more promising basis for justice and equality--the
Fourteenth Amendment, ensuring protection of the life,
liberty, and property of all persons against deprivations
without due process, and guaranteeing equal protection." That is
what finally brought the leges into line with the mores.
Yet even
when laws are not basically immoral, the principle holds,
because, in one of the many profound insights of Blaise
Pascal in the Pensees, "the heart has its reasons
that the reason knows nothing of." We would all, with
a mixture of sweet and of bitter reminiscences acknowledge
those words to be true about the ways of our own heart
as it reaches out to others-it really does have its own
reasons, which are often unpredictable and can sometimes
be downright wild or even wacky. My colleagues on the Penn
faculty, who live as I do in a universe where it is books
and ideas, not feelings, that have hands and feet, would
also testify that when they fell in love-whenever, or even
however often, it may have happened-reason did indeed have
its reasons, but that what prevailed after those reasons,
and sometimes over those reasons, was the ultimately mysterious
reasoning of the heart. As Moses Maimonides and Thomas
Aquinas both knew very well without having some modern
smartaleck to point it out to them, their carefully formulated
and
delicately balanced proofs for the existence of God based
on the Aristotelian principles of reason about the First
Cause and the Prime Unmoved Mover would not ever argue
anyone into the faith; nor did their own faith stand or
fall on this basis. For Maimonides had learned from the
Talmud and Aquinas had learned from Augustine-and all of
them had learned from the Psalms--that there does come
a point in the relation of human beings to one another,
and supremely in the relation of human beings to the divine
Source and Judge of their lives, where "the heart
has its reasons that the mind knows not of." Also
Surah 24 of the Qur-an spoke for such a faith and
such a morality:
God is the light of the heavens and the earth.
The semblance of His light is that of a niche
in which is a lamp, the flame within a glass,
the glass a glittering star, as it were, lit with the
oil
of a blessed tree, the olive, neither of the East
nor of the West, whose oil appears to light up
even though fire touches
it not,--light upon light.
God guides to His light whom He will.
So does God advance precepts of wisdom for men,
for God has knowledge of every thing (tr. Ahmed Ali).
And since it is in those "precepts of wisdom," in
relation to our Creator and to our fellow creatures, that
the grounds of morality are found, the reasons of the heart
do trump the reasons of reason in shaping the principles
and the practice of the moral life.
Laws without morals are
useless also because without morals no law can be counted
on to produce and sustain authenticity.
This is what the saints and sages of our tradition have
taught us with a mixture of defiance and irony. "Whited
sepulchers" was the devastating description that Jesus
attached to a hypocrisy in which external appearance hid
the real truth of the "dead men's bones" within.
It is an ancient precept of wisdom that it is difficult
to denounce smugness and arrogance without exhibiting them.
So also hypocrisy has a special, capacity to put it an
appearance at the very moment when we axe trying to avoid
it, and never so effectively as when we are trying to avoid
it by keeping the law, Remember that in the biblical parable
the hypocrite began his boast with the pious words, "Lord
I thank Thee that I am not like other men." The mixed
motivations that churn within each of us all the time are
the reason why authenticity is such a gift to be cherished:
`Purity of heart,' Kierkegaard said in the title of one
of his most penetrating essays, "is to will one thing." But
if that one thing is the punctilious observance of all
the regulations, and nothing but that, purity of heart
will remain beyond our reach. For regulations and laws
do not have the capacity, in and of themselves, to achieve
it.
The moral corollary to
purity of heart is spontaneity of action. A cynical saying
that was making the rounds
a few years ago declared, "The most important thing
is sincerity: if you can fake that, you've got it made!" But
as sincerity cannot be faked, so it cannot be scripted.
Laws without morals are useless because conformity to law,
even when it is not grudging, is confined to meeting the
stated requirements, but does not motivate us to go the
crucial second mile: who ever heard of adding a fifteen-percent
gratuity to your income tax payment just in case someone
needs it? Yet the heart of morality is the very antithesis
of checking the index of some ethics cookbook to find the
right recipe for this or that situation. Spontaneous moral
action does not ask, "How little can I get by with?" but "How
much can. I do beyond the recipes?" And all of us
know the difference as we watch ourselves in action. We
recognize in ourselves those acts and those motives that
have bubbled up from the depths of our own reflexive love
and joy and that have not been produced by a pedantic observance
of somebody else's definition of the - good life. We recognize
the same thing, moreover, in the actions of others. Surely
you can remember, in. a classmate or a relative, supposedly
moral behavior or that was in fact dictated by conformity
to the rules, but by no more than a sense of duty. Although
you might have appreciated it at the time, you really did
not and could not admire it, because you reserve your admiration
for actions of moral imagination that go beyond mere conformity.
A truly moral action is in this respect like a truly creative
work of art, not just drawing lines between set numbers
or clumbering out the melody one painful note at a time,
but seizing the opportunity and responding to the occasion
with insight, sensitivity, and imagination, All of you
have, I hope, your special moral heroes and, yes, saints
(if I may be permitted to use the word!), those women and
men past or present whose example inspires you and whose
teaching guides you in the manner described by the still
profoundly true (if, to some jaded and over fastidious
modern tastes, somewhat corny) lines of Longfellow's 'Psalm
of Life":
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time,
Footprints that perhaps another,
Straying o'er life's stormy main,
Some forlorn and shipwerck'd brother,
Seeing, may take heart again.
If now you call to mind
your own special saints and heroes--most of the ones
whom I venerate on my church calendar spoke
Greek or Russian, and would make the sign of the Cross
in the Eastern Orthodox manner at the slightest threat-you
will also remind yourself almost instinctively that they
are the ones who "made their lives sublime" and
who guide us to do the same by displaying the cardinal
virtues of loyalty, courage, and kindness when they didn't
have to, because "leges sine moribus vanae."
Arguably the greatest
philosopher America has ever produced, and one to whom
we all continue to owe a great debt
even as we have gone beyond his pragmatism on many fundamental
issues, was William James, whose Gifford Lectures of 1901/1902,
The Varieties of Religious Experience, are the inspiration
and the despair of every thinker and scholar since him
who has been invited to occupy that Scottish lectureship.
Many of his brilliant ideas, for example the need to find "a
moral equivalent of war,"' challenge us more than
ever. From the tradition of William James comes the definition "that
for which you would be willing to die" to identify
the object of our ultimate loyalty and commitment. It is
a definition that serves well, in recognizing the sort
of moral virtuosity that I have been characterizing here.
For one thing, you can quickly, almost ruthlessly, mark
the distinction between those loyalties that are worthy
of you and those that are not, by asking whether they measure
up to this criterion--You can also, both as you make your
moral decisions for yourself and as you ponder the ones
you have already made, use it to take your temperature
and to see whether you have been pursuing false gods; for
there are plenty of these around! One false god whose idolatrous
worship is an especial danger for respectable people like
ourselves, who live on the right side of the law, is the
god of self-righteousness and legalistic self-satisfaction.
For all of us, whether we know it or not and whether we
like it or not, are sustained, in our relations with one
another and in our relation with God, by the daily gift
of forgiveness.
For these last dozen minutes
I have, both with and without Latin, explored and expounded
the motto that you will
see for the rest of your life, every time you look at your
Penn diploma, "Leges sine moribus vanae, Laws without
morals are useless." Through it I have sought to follow
the examples of Socrates and of Saint Paul in urging that
we refuse to content ourselves with the shallow and superficial
code that defines the moral life as keeping to the speed
limit and not crossing Walnut Street except at the 36th
Street corner "The unreflected life," Socrates
told the jury that would sentence him to death, "is
not worth living"--although, as a friend of mine reminded
me on one of the innumerable occasions when I quoted that
Socratic formula, "The reflected life is no bed of
roses either!" But all of this is only half the story;
for this truth that laws without morals are useless, like
so many of the ultimate truths that define us, is, as the
philosophers and scholars like to say, "dialectical":
it needs to be set off by its counterpart, the other principle
without which it is incomplete and can be dangerous. That
other principle, which does not appear on the diplomas
you will be awarded tomorrow, is, in my own Latin rather
than in the University's Latin, "Mores sine legibus
vagi, Morals without laws are unstable." Not because
you needed this message and your classmates needed that
one, but because one of the laws I believe in keeping
is to stick to the imposed time limits, I propose to turn
to that principle at the second baccalaureate exercises
of the afternoon.