I am not elevating man at all.
If you read someone like Fesser on the distinctions between vengeance and justice, he basically looks at vengeance as good and bad. The good fits within his definition of Justice in the Thomistic sense.
I say the exercise is like sifting through strands of smoke.
The easiest example is the Adulteress. I think it impossible to act in zeal of Divine Justice and segregate that from the primal blood lust of a good public stoning. From the purient pleasures. From the bad thoughts associated with vengeance as Fesser says, like hate.
I like to call them the righteous stone throwers.
First, you engage in one of the cruelest, most blood thirsty merciless acts imaginable. Then you depart, have a beer, and revel in your piety as God’s own tool of Divine Justice. Does that sound psychotic?
For Hannibal Lechter, an " ideal day"!
One problem is the idea that people continuously love, not hate, the executed. Yes, maybe someone somewhere can think as Fesser describes. My observation is that does not happen. He deserves it( Retributive speaking,) is always laced with hate. OR SADISM, a tiny tiny pleasure perhaps? If even a tiny tiny tiny bit it makes my point… And we self defend by " dehumanizing" the killer. Personified evil.
We give the job to the state, and we remove the participatory zeal in the killing, but we also grow more callous to the mechanics at the same time. The killer becomes " a theory" not " real" in our minds. Impersonilizing does alter the soup of ideas, with perhaps less conscience involvement. Shouldn’t the conscience be fully engaged? And in representive government, aren’t you participating anyway( Thomas didn’t anticipate representive government). In fact, in the richness of the Gospel, wasn’t the crowd given a vote with Barrabas? Wasn’t the blood, in fact, on our hands as well as Polite?
I ask, do you create more sin? In some, yes. Are you willing to opine that the Catholic victims family does not harbor some hate? In the sterile catagorical Thomistic Justice of the Thomist, do the victims suffer an overlap between good vengeance and bad category of vengence?
In terms of my statement about Christ, perhaps I can alter by saying I saw no retributive acts. He had plenty of opportunity. He was given a retributive justice exam with the Adulteress. From the cross, who else would have the will to pray for no application of retributive justice. Stop! That act," OF A FORGIVING VICTIM," is the central symbol of the faith.
