A Casting Out of Beams

Extract

The casting out of beams is inevitably a more ponderous process than the discerning of motes. It has about it the heavy-handed inelegance of fly-swatting, in contrast to the darting agile dancing of dragon-flies in the sunlight. God forbid that anyone should wantonly swat a dragon-fly, or that I should attempt to toss a caber at the dexterous mote-discernment of Fr McCabe. I would, in any case, almost certainly miss. But dragon-fly antics, while they delight our gaze, are liable to leave us a trifle dizzy; and the virtuosity of Fri McCabe’s logic, sound and brilliant though it is, may easily reduce the holders of the opinion he attacks to a sad confusion. Now the confusion of the enemy is a legitimate object only of military, not of didactic, attack. Accordingly, in the hope of disentangling some of this possible confusion, I intend to poke about among a few of the fine threads of Fr McCabe’s weaving with my clumsy beam.

He establishes the wholly blameless position that it is possible to judge people’s morals by their actions, that we can say not only ‘That was a wicked thing to do’, but also ‘It was wicked of you to do that’, and even, though less often and with less assurance, ‘You are a wicked person for doing such things’. He does so in terms of two gospel texts, ‘Judge not, etc.’, and the one about discerning the mote in thy brother’s eye. Let us set out in full the passage from the Sermon on the Mount in which these texts occur. I give them in an unauthorized translation in order to avoid the incantation-like quality the well-worn words have acquired, which so insidiously blurs their meaning. ‘Do not judge, in order not to be judged yourselves; for by the judgment you judge by shall you be judged, and the measure you measure out shall be measured out to you. But why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, while you do not notice the pole in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother “Let me get the speck out of your eye”, and just look at the pole in your own eye! Hypocrite, first get the pole out of your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly to get the speck out of your brother’s eye’ (Matt. 7, i ff.).