[Die Abschaffung der Todesstrafe]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
What is a crime—The name seems to indicate that it designates an act whereby the connection, which exists between the personal mortal man and his original, true, divine nature, is broken. By committing a crime a man commits, as it were, spiritual suicide; he separates himself from his own higher nature and descends to a lower level.
It is hardly conceivable that any person knows this not just from hearsay, but sees the truth of this fact himself and recognizes that he could commit a crime, because this would be against his own interest and the greatest possible stupidity. In fact, Gautama Buddha already taught that all evils which befall mankind arise from ignorance, that is, from (religious) non-knowledge of the higher natural laws. The freedom of man’s will depends on the degree of his (practical) knowledge.
He who does not thoroughly know the consequences his actions have for him is acting out of ignorance; anyone who basically does not know himself, does not act freely and cannot completely control himself, but is also driven against his will by blind natural forces which appear in him in the forms of desires and passions. He who has enough self-knowledge to master these natural forces is a sage; he who allows himself to be completely ruled by them is a fool, and between these two extremes lies the great majority of men.
Goethe says: “I have never heard of a crime, which I couldn’t have committed.” We have everything within us to become either saints or demons, as we use or misuse our power, and the manner in which we use it depends on the level of our knowledge. Everyone acts according to the spirit which animates and controls him, and the will of man is only completely free when he is no longer guided by desires, which do not belong to his true nature.
Supposing now, that a man actually sees evil and the harm it brings to him, and yet performs it because it has become “second nature” to him, the evident cause is that he has not the power to overcome the evil and master himself. In this case, his weakness of will can only be regarded as an illness which cannot be cured by any “punishment,” but which can only be cured by appropriate exercises towards self-control. Such a will-less person resembles an imbecile who is “possessed” by fixed ideas. The proper treatment of criminals amounts to the same way the insane are treated. Instead, the modern administration of justice treats the criminal as if he were a being endowed with self-knowledge, free will, and self-control, who has full responsibility for his actions and on whom he must take vengeance.
There are crimes however, which make short-sighted people want to seek quick retribution; but it is only the wise, who can see to the bottom of things and know the powers which often drive people against their will to do evil things, judge differently; he sees in the criminal the pitiable tool of an invisible entity which can neither be imprisoned nor killed and continues to exist and work even after the criminal’s death. Any limitation of the freedom of the will means an obstacle to human evolution.
For the discerning, every criminal is seen as a pathological phenomenon, and realizes that it is as foolish to kill him as it would be foolish for a doctor to kill his patients in order to move them out of the way or to punish them on account of their illness, instead of curing them. It is not the patient but his illness which is to be destroyed, not the criminal but the qualities which made him a criminal. Human justice does not have the right to destroy a human organism because that is where its sphere of competence ends. How strange indeed, is the role of the chaplain at execution, whose task it is to gloss over human presumption as an act of divine justice.
Any action which has no purpose, has no meaning either and is consequently nonsense, unreasonable, and contrary to the law of God in nature. Two reasons are usually given to justify judicial killing, namely the deterrence theory and the protection of society theory. Let’s take a closer look at the weakness of each of these theories:
As for the theory of deterrence, it used to be commonly held that the death penalty was a means of frightening people and discouraging them from committing crimes; but experience does not uphold this opinion, but rather has proved quite the contrary. In countries where the death penalty has been abolished, the number of murderers has not increased, while public executions, and the descriptions thereof, have a brutalizing effect on the people and belittle the value of life in their eyes. It is also understandable that a person who acts when aroused by a passion does not allow himself to be deterred by fear of punishment, and moreover, as is well known, punishment does not follow the act but only after discovery, and the criminal usually has no intention of getting caught. Far from preventing crime, execution breeds new criminals by suggestion.
All that remains as an excuse for the death penalty, is the theory of protecting society. One thinks that, in this way, the criminal is thoroughly eliminated and is rendered harmless. In fact, just the opposite is the case, as has previously been explained.
As long as a criminal lives and has the ability to reason, he can control himself to a certain extent, but after the separation of the soul from the body [upon death], there remains in the astral region, a mindless and unreasonable being, consisting only of evil instincts and passions and no judgement and is no longer capable of self-control, but is only blindly guided by his desires. What the criminal hesitated to do before, this remainder carries out through other means. The history of obsession and crime epidemics provide numerous examples of this.
But even if the death penalty gives us no protection against crime, what should we do? Fortunately, in an orderly state there is no lack of means to render criminals harmless. This can be done in two ways: Namely, either by raising them so that they will no longer commit crimes, or by depriving them of the power to commit crimes. In the former case, it would be necessary to convert the penitentiaries and correctional institutions into asylums for the insane, in which everyone would be treated in his own way by insightful and experienced physicians. However, these physicians would not only have to be anatomists, physiologists and pathologists, but actually psychologists. That is, they would have to understand how to assess and treat the character of their patients, and most of our modern physicians, who know nothing about the soul, are probably little capable.
As for the second case, there is prison and deportation.
The modern administration of justice has come to regard some crimes as the product of pathological conditions; but it should go a step further by recognizing all wrong actions as the result of wrong tendencies. Modern medicine recognizes a “hereditary burden” on the physical organism, which the criminal owes to his parents; but there is another burden which is the legacy of man’s previous incarnations. A knowledge of this type of burden comes from the teachings of karma and reincarnation, but these belong to a science which will probably not find its way into our colleges until later this century.
Notes:
[1] From, “Die Abschaffung der Todesstrafe,” Theosophischer Wegweiser V, no. 5 (February 1903), 158-163. By Franz Hartmann, M.D. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, 2025.