The following notes were prepared for a panel discussion on the BBC’s controversial religious program, The Anvil, created as an offshoot of the Brains Trustprogram after the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, protested the latter’s “irreverent disregard for revealed truths in the Holy Scriptures.” The Anvilbegan weekly evening broadcasts on 7 Jan 1943. The lay chairman, Professor Victor Murray, and the panelists represented three strands of British Christianity: Anglican, Free Church, and Roman Catholic. Mary Trevelyan, TSE’s close friend and an Anglican panelist, wrote to him on 7 Oct 1942: “On Friday I am once more incarcerated with the Relig. Brains Trust for the day. They are going to try me out as Chairman I believe. Perhaps that will be easier than answering such questions as ‘If God made everything, who made evil?’ in two minutes. The whole thing is being very difficult and I am not sure that it isn’t a Mistake, but I’m so sorry for the people who are trying to organise it that I feel I can’t leave them in the lurch.” The team endeavored “to give honest Christian answers to listeners’ doubts, difficulties, and enquiries.” TSE’s notes were evidently prepared for Trevelyan, to whom he sent them. He wrote to John Hayward on 25 Jan 1943: “Please listen in some time to THE ANVIL, the Religious Brains Trust on Thursday evenings, and tell me whether I could bear it: my persistent friend Mary Trevelyan keeps asking me to listen and I never remember.” When she asked his opinion after the close of the first series, he replied on 8 Mar, “I don’t know what to say about the Anvil.” The unsigned single-page typescript at the Houghton (MS Am 1691.2, 224) is dated 1942 in Trevelyan’s hand and titled on a separate leaf: “Also Notes for a Discussion on THE ANVIL.”
I think that the proper sense of RETRIBUTION is either (a) pagan: whether conceived as a kind of physical law of compensation, or as spiritualised in anangke, atē, dirae, norns, fate, weird sisters etc. 1 or (b) as the act of God. It can be carried out by human agency, of course, but not by human intention. Retribution is implicitly just, and human action, in so far as it is related to human intention, cannot ever be wholly just and therefore cannot be conscious retribution.
Distinguished from PUNISHMENT, which is behaviour of society towards an individual conceived as a member of that society. In this sense we do not PUNISH an animal; our correction is merely a DETERRENT. In criminal punishment there is CORRECTION and DETERRENCE also. (To treat a criminal as merelydiseased is to diminish his human dignity, which we have to do with the undoubtedly insane.)
Essential difference between what is allowed to a society towards its members, and what is allowed to one or more nations to their neighbours.
Individual Germans can be punished for individual crimes. Germany cannot be punished for collective crimes. (Difficulty in practice of saying what is what.) Towards a nuisance nation you can only adopt attitude of PREVENTION (you can jolly well see that they don’t get a chance to do it again) and within limits COMPENSATION (give back what you have stolen and help put things in some sort of order).
If we took it upon ourselves to confer RETRIBUTION upon the Germans we should be doing ourselves moral injury, and also conniving at crimes against the Germans by their neighbours. I think that crimes of individuals should be tried in the countries in and towards which the crimes have been committed: this will probably lead to gross miscarriage of justice, but that is the business of the country concerned and not ours. Only criminals whose misbehaviour has directly affected several countries should be tried in international courts.
An attitude of Retribution also has the risk of taking our eye off the main thing, which is to protect ourselves in the future. Also HUBRIS. Of course...
