Patrick Henry 231

Critical Discussion

RESCUING THE RESCUERS IN

PHILIP HALLIE’S ETHICAL SUBLIME

by Patrick Henry

“Only stories or visions of transcending personal isolation and

indifference can move me . . . hope, joy lie only in the
transcendence of self-absorption—in expansion.”
—Philip Hallie

T hroughout his life, Philip Hallie expressed strong distrust for

abstract philosophy. He wanted his own philosophy constituted of
flesh and blood, and he believed in the centrality of narration in ethical
writing. The personality of stories, the irrefutable nature of the
individual’s account had to form the essential basis in the teaching of
ethics. It is no surprise, then, that in his posthumous Tales of Good and
Evil, Help and Harm1 Hallie leaves us with a series of powerful stories,
biographical and autobiographical, as the final expression of his
lifelong agonizing struggle to come to terms with his own ethical
beliefs. There are no general proofs here. No abstract principles. No
definitions of goodness and evil. Only stories that depict the being
referred to by e. e. cummings as “manunkind” mysteriously achieving
the “realizable ideal” of rescuer of strangers.
Given Hallie’s major work on the rescuers of Jews in the village of Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. The Story of the Village of
Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There,2 it seems appropriate that
he begin this particular account of “tales of good and evil” in that same

Philosophy and Literature, © 2003, 27: 231–240

232 Philosophy and Literature

village. Thus, the first biography he presents is that of Magda Trocmé,

the wife of the pastor of the Protestant Church in Le Chambon-sur-
Lignon, André Trocmé, who, with his fellow pastor Edouard Theis, is
said to have inspired the rescue mission in the village. Hallie under-
scores the communal nonviolent effort by clergy and villagers alike in
this “city of refuge.” While he admires both André and Magda as
practitioners of the “great virtues,” he more readily identifies with
Magda’s secularism than with her husband’s piety. He celebrates her
generosity, her refusal to turn anyone away from her door, her “quiet
habit of efficacious compassion,” and her terse explanation as to why
the rescuers in the village did what they had done: “What do you mean?
It had to be done, that’s all.”
As much as Hallie related to Magda’s secularism, he was unable to
identify fully with her because he felt tainted by the killing he had done
as an artillery man in the United States Army during World War II. “I
was a helpful killer who violated the negative demand against killing
[“Thou shalt not kill”] in order to obey the positive one to spread life.
But Magda and her villagers! Their ethical purity was beyond me. They
obeyed the negative demands of ethics by hating and hurting no one
even while they obeyed the positive demands of ethics by saving
[thousands of refugees].” Compared to Magda and the villagers, Hallie
clearly saw himself as someone operating in the grey zone.
With the introduction of Joshua James and the community of Hull,
Massachusetts, we ascend from Hallie’s personal quagmire of moral
ambiguity to the realm of the “ethical sublime.” Here the author relates
the story of James, whose mother and sister died at sea in 1837 when he
was 11 years old, and who would go on to a career of life-saving activity
on the Massachusetts coast. James founded the Life-Saving Rescue
Service, an organization that evolved into the Coast Guard (or more
specifically The Search and Rescue Service of the Coast Guard). He
spent his entire life in Hull (1826–1902) and over the course of nearly
sixty years saved hundreds of sailor’s lives and tens of thousands of
dollars worth of property.
Many coastal villages around the world, Hallie explains, profited
greatly from shipwrecks. Their cargoes and the stuff the ships were
made of were highly valuable to the generally poor people who
inhabited such villages. Yet the village of Hull, the smallest village in the
state, having roughly 200 families in 1850, was trying to prevent such
shipwrecks and was dedicated to life-saving activity in the event of their
occurrence. Hallie relates an amazing series of rescues during the 1888
 Patrick Henry 233

storm of the century when James (now aged 62 and twice as old as the
oldest man in his command) and his men, in about 24 hours, saved 29
people from five different ships. But Hallie is just as interested in the
people of Hull, the villagers who, that day, as always during rescue
operations, were almost as important to the life-saving as James and his
crew. Hallie paints them on the shore working in numerous ways:
helping to anchor ships, forming a human lifeline to pull survivors to
safety, carrying them to warm houses where they would be clothed and
fed, simply refusing to stand by and let people die. In an interesting,
unexpected juxtaposition, Hallie defines and illustrates the “aesthetic
sublime,” as he understands it, in Thoreau, Lucretius, and the paintings
of J. M. W. Turner. All of his examples deal with the sea’s power over
others, as observed from the shore. Hallie describes the “detached
ecstasy of a spectator” at a shipwreck and defines the “aesthetic
sublime” as “the exposure of terror and exaltation rendered tranquil by
our actual safety.”
Needless to say, Hallie prefers the “ethical sublime” of Joshua James
and the people of Hull, their will to resist and their commitment to
fight for others struggling to survive against overwhelming odds. James
was, for Hallie, a man of both nature and society, self-reliant and
committed to others. Hallie was not interested in him for what might
have been going on inside him, but for what he was doing in the world,
his courageous display of compassion in a ruthless universe. There was
moral beauty here in James and the people of Hull and in their
communal efforts for others. James seemed to occupy the same place in
the community of Hull as André and Magda Trocmé and Edouard
Theis did in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and both villages,
situated at the antipodes of indifference, were committed to rescuing
strangers. They didn’t stop hurricanes or wars, but they rescued their
victims.
This abandonment of interest in the “inside” of the moral agent in
favor of concern for the moral agent’s deeds can be traced back to
Hallie’s seminal essay on the ethics of Montaigne’s Essays.3 Hallie shows
how the essayist destroys the “Inward Government Theory” of ethics,
common to parts of the Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions,
whereby persons are deemed good when their passions are under the
control of their reason. Unlike Plato and Kant who both thought that
deeds and their consequences are too deceptive to be used as indicators
of a person’s goodness or evil nature, Hallie depicts a Montaigne who
radically reorients the trajectory of ethical thinking by declaring that
234 Philosophy and Literature

ethics has to do with how human beings act toward other beings. Boldly
formulated, it is no longer the state of Hitler’s soul that counts, but the
existence of the concentration camps. The essayist, then, moves ethics
out of the psyche into the world, away from an egocentric concern for
the moral agent into the world of which the moral agent is only a part.
For Montaigne and Hallie, good ethical behavior entails an active
relationship between moral agents and all sentient beings with whom
they live.
The final biography Hallie presents in Tales of Good and Evil, Help and
Harm is that of Kätchen Coley who, in 1972, with Nancy Flanner,
founded The Connection, the first and largest drug and alcohol
rehabilitation group in Connecticut. It was begun with the intention of
giving structured professional treatment and a transitional home to
young men and women (especially 16-to-18 year olds) suffering from
drug and alcohol problems in Middletown, Connecticut. Later it
attended in particular to pregnant women with drug and alcohol
problems. The victims here needed help but, unlike the situation in
Hull or Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the enemy came from within. As a
result, in the final analysis, only the victims could really save themselves.
Nonetheless, like Magda Trocmé and Joshua James, Kätchen felt
obliged to help anyone who needed her, anyone who knocked on her
door. The Connection was an oasis, however small, in the hurricane of
pain and indifference in which we live. Kätchen, “the vivifying spirit of
The Connection,” and her colleagues offered passionate care and
worked together in a precarious effort to save the lives of strangers.

II
As we follow the stages on Hallie’s way from article to article, preface
to preface, book to book—with a crucially important lengthy interview
with Bill Moyers4—it becomes clear that the most interesting life Hallie
narrates is his own. Now his journey is complete and, fittingly, his
ethical evolution is in large measure autobiographically inscribed in the
posthumous volume. Although only a couple of chapters deal directly
and in detail with his life, the stories themselves constantly reveal the
storyteller and allow us to trace his evolution over a sixty-year period
that takes us geographically from the Cockroach Building in Chicago to
Europe and finally to Middletown, Connecticut. We travel morally,
thanks to the discovery of communities of rescue, from the coercion of
despair to the reality of hope.
 Patrick Henry 235

Life began for Hallie not only in extreme poverty during the
Depression in a tenement referred to as the “Cockroach Building” but
as one of two sons born of a loveless marriage between two people who
waged “almost nightly battles” against one another. If this were not
enough to convince the young Hallie that life was a battle, his uncle
Louie, an ex-professional boxer, had to teach him how to streetfight so
that he could protect himself from anti-Semitic bullies in his neighbor-
hood on the southwest side of Chicago. “My uncle had removed me
from the coercion of despair,” explains Hallie, “and he had done it by
empowering me.” The only regular respite from this situation, some-
thing that offered a different view of reality and a release from fear,
came on Friday nights when he offered the Sabbath prayer with his
mother and brother. Here he would experience “peace” and an
“oceanic feeling” that meant “the universe was one universe and that
universe was God.”
Hallie’s wartime experiences and his professional research would
only compound his view that life was a battle and only violence could
put an end to violence. He relates his experiences as an artillery man in
WWII firing white phosphorus warheads “which made stone buildings
and people burst into flame,” emphasizing a specific incident that
would haunt him for the rest of his life. It happened during the last
months of the war in Europe when his company, after having fired their
warheads, went to verify the damage they had done. As Hallie walked
through the targeted area, he saw “the blond, beautifully symmetrical
head of a young man, with its SS cadet cap still firmly on it, but with no
body and hardly any neck. The eyes were open. They were light blue
and seemed to be looking dreamily up at the sky. The skin on that face
had never known a razor or a beard.” This vivid image of the evil he had
done in the name of “good” would never leave him; he would never be
able to see himself again as anything better than a “decent murderer.”
As a scholar and teacher of ethics after the war, Hallie did extensive
research on cruelty in human history which, needless to say, only served
to make his vision of the human condition still more bleak. His well-
known study, The Paradox of Cruelty 5 confirmed his view that, although
cruelty might often need the help of hatred and fear, it only took place
in situations of power imbalance. Everywhere he turned, therefore,
Hallie found at work the same law: “harm stopp[ed] harm; power
stopp[ed] power. That’s all there was.”
Seated in his office late one night in the mid-1970s, in the throes of
a quasi-suicidal depression brought on by a growing sense of the
236 Philosophy and Literature

overwhelming presence of violence and cruelty in the world, Hallie

happened upon an account of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
This was the first time he had heard about nonviolent resistance against
the Nazis. “I was seeing spontaneous love that had nothing to do with
sheer, brute power,” he writes. “I was seeing a new reality, undergoing a
revelation. Here was a place where help came from love, not from
force.” When he reached up to scratch his cheek, he discovered that his
face was full of tears. What had caused those tears? “It was joy that did
it, overwhelming joy,” he explains. Part of the joy came from the
knowledge that the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon had succeeded
in obeying “both the positive and negative ethics of the Hebrew Bible.”
Hallie had become a killer to obey the positive ethic of the Scriptures
but he had known “no one who was both clean and noble.”
Those tears were a testimony of moral praise for people who
demonstrated both the natural reality of goodness and the fact that
good nonviolent actions could combat violence and cruelty. This was a
revelation that caused a conversion in Hallie. As the Latin word
“conversio” indicates, it “turned him around” and changed his life. He
went to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, became as fascinated by the mystery
of goodness as he was horrified by the reality of evil, and wrote Lest
Innocent Blood Be Shed. Those tears were also tears of liberation. Once
again, he had been saved from “the coercion of despair.” Once again,
unexpectedly, mysteriously, he had rediscovered “the joyous comfort
[he] had felt on those Friday nights” during the Sabbath prayer in the
Cockroach Building.
The euphoria that Hallie experienced at the discovery of Le Chambon-
sur-Lignon and all that it came to mean for him personally remained
unabated for a while. But, as he explains graphically in the 1987 PBS
video, Facing Evil, “something in [his] heart [began to] resent the
village”: it didn’t shorten the war and it didn’t stop Hitler.

A thousand “Le Chambons” would not have stopped Hitler. It took

decent murderers like me to do it—murderers who had compunction,
but who murdered nonetheless. The cruelty that I perpetrated, willingly,
was the only way to stop the cruel march that I and others like me were
facing. . . . I am a decent murderer. . . . I am a conscientious killer. I am
somebody who would do it again if I were in similar circumstances and I
wouldn’t hesitate to do it again, and therefore, I do not have remorse for
it. I have nothing but disgust, and my whole life is a shambles because of
it, because my whole life as a thinker is based on the preciousness of
human life, and I violated it, and I would do it again. Now that labyrinth,
 Patrick Henry 237

that jungle of thought and feeling is my condition, and it’s the condition,
not only of Vietnam veterans who came from an unpopular war, but of all
veterans who have just a modicum of decency. But to me, whose whole
life is an ethical study of the preciousness of life, it’s an explosion, a
continuing explosion in the middle of my mind.

Even as Hallie unleashed this terrible truth from the depths of his
being, he knew that the village and its nonviolent activity counted for
something important. When he asked Magda Trocmé if the nonviolent
resistance of the villagers had helped the war effort in any way, and she
replied: “No. We were more interested in saving people than in fighting
Vichy or the Nazis,” he had no other recourse but to conclude that:
“There is more than one way to be our brother’s keeper.”
Finally, and again unexpectedly, Hallie found the ultimate answer he
had been seeking all along, the answer to an “emotional problem . . .
not an abstract, philosophical one.” As he words it: “I needed to know
where my heart lay. I needed to know what I most cherished in life:
force or benevolence.” The answer was provided to him one evening
after he addressed a group of women, all fund raisers for the United
Jewish Appeal. At the end of his talk on Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a
woman rose to say that her two children had been lodged in that
village. She then came to the front of the gathering and said: “The
Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And Le
Chambon was the rainbow.” This image of hope, drawn from the ninth
chapter of Genesis, pleased Hallie greatly because the rainbow was the
sign given by God after the flood, the promise that living, not killing,
would prevail. The rainbow meant “never again shall all flesh be cut
off,” and in his explanation God repeated the phrase “never again.”
In the final analysis, for Hallie, the war had to be fought; Hitler had
to be stopped. “I was still convinced,” he writes, “that killing is part and
parcel of living.” Although he certainly felt deep sorrow about the
killing he did, he could not repent for it inasmuch as he would have
done it again in similar circumstances. Nonetheless, at the end of his
life, when he tried to ascertain just what kind of human being he was,
he realized that he could derive no real peace or joy from the necessary
and useful killing he had been involved in, because he was still haunted
by “the detached arms, legs, and heads of young men lying on blood-
stained snow.” Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, on the other hand, where
people helped without harming, where lives were saved without tortur-
ing and destroying other lives, remained, for him, an inextinguishable
source of unsullied joy.
238 Philosophy and Literature

III
“There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they
have long been extinct. There are people whose
[goodness] continues to light the world though
they are no longer among the living.”
—Hannah Senesh

As befits the ethicist writing Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm,
Hallie covers a wide range in his discussions, from the “little virtues of
self-serving self-preservation” to “the great virtues of life-loving compas-
sion, generosity and courage.” So much of his concern is with trying to
understand not only violence and love but violence as love and love
without violence. Ethically, he is interested in actions and interactions
between human beings, not what one wills toward another but what
one moral agent does to other moral agents.
Hallie’s heroes go beyond the “negative” ethic of Exodus 20 to the
practice of the positive ethic of the Hebrew Bible, the ethic of doing
that puts the agent in contact with others. They are all doers who “do”
for others, and at the highest moral level, they are communities whose
sense of solidarity is so vast that they dedicate themselves to rescuing
strangers. The actions of these communities of rescue (Le Chambon-
sur-Lignon; Hull, Massachusetts) incarnate Hallie’s notion of the “ethi-
cal sublime.”
It is probably no accident that the final community of rescue in the
book, Kätchen Coley’s, is called “The Connection,” the very name of
which must have pleased Hallie whose entire ethical vision is infused
with the human need to create links and forge relationships, even in
the darkest of times, as he relates in a 1943 letter written from the army,
when it was only “the trench connecting two foxholes.” It is this idea of
communities of rescue, places of sanctuary open to any human being
who comes within the communal gates, that inspires Hallie, grants him
peace, and allows him to bathe once more in the long-lost “oceanic
feeling” experienced on Sabbath evenings during his youth.
There are three important conclusions to be drawn from Hallie’s life
and his posthumous volume that relate directly to the continued
necessity of narrating the stories of the rescuers of Jews during the
Holocaust. First of all, to remember the Holocaust and to be faithful to
the Jewish proverb, “In remembrance resides the secret of redemption”
(which is inscribed on the Yad Vashem citation awarded to those
gentiles who “at the peril of [their] lives, saved Jews during the epoch of
 Patrick Henry 239

extermination”), we must be certain to include the rescuers. The verb

“remember” has its surgical sense of putting things back together again
and the acts of solidarity performed by the rescuers, although they
comprised only a fraction of the millions of people who lived in Nazi-
Occupied countries during World War II, were part of the picture.
Indeed, these lights that shone only here and there in the overall
darkness enable us to see and to find our way out of the labyrinth of
blind hatred within which they were performed. Although they would
certainly object on the double grounds that what they did was perfectly
natural and they themselves are absolutely ordinary people, in the war
against the Jews, these mostly Christian people represented the “Lamed
Vav,” the 36 unknown Just Persons whose task is to do good for their
fellow human beings and who, the Talmud says, are required for the
survival of the world.
Second, it is important to recognize that Philip Hallie was a Jew
rescued by Le Chambon-sur-Lignon during the mid-1970s. This act of
spiritual rescue that saved Hallie from “the coercion of despair”
confirms the belief that we must continue to teach the stories of the
rescuers because, as long as we do so, they will continue to perform
such acts of rescue. Their actions constitute a vivid and powerful
communal memory bank that enables us to escape the prison of self-
interest and to recollect joyfully that, even in the most difficult
circumstances and against overwhelming odds, human beings are
capable of courageous self-transcendence. According to Primo Levi, it
was precisely what was signified by the act of self-transcendence, rather
than the material gift given, that saved his life in Auschwitz. When Levi
speaks of the nightly soup that Lorenzo brought to him, he writes: “I
believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not
so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me
by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that
there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone
still pure and whole, nor corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and
terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but
for which it was worth surviving. . . . Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not
to forget that I myself was a man.”6
Finally, even if we view the rescuers metaphorically as the “Lamed
Vav,” it is essential not to regard them as heroes outside of our reach. If
we were to do so, we would run the risk of becoming passive admirers,
bystanders, as it were. We must, on the contrary, see them as models
worthy of our imitation. Initially, when confronting André and Magda
240 Philosophy and Literature

Trocmé in the light of his own violence, Hallie had great difficulty
doing this; but he eventually came to see that “To turn Magda, Josh,
etc., into heroic figures is to exonerate ourselves from participation—as
if they were not in our moral sphere.” As president of “The Connec-
tion,” Kätchen Coley’s halfway house for recovering victims of drug and
alcohol addiction, Hallie, who himself had been rescued from “the
coercion of despair,” was now involved in rescuing others from the
same abyss. By envisioning the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust as
ordinary people like ourselves, Hallie allowed them to bequeath to him
their greatest gift: the ability to see himself as a being capable of rescue.
What is also implicitly clear here, in the final analysis, is the impact of
Hallie’s research on his life. Nothing could be more misleading than to
give our students the impression that our “scholarly lives” are somehow
detached from our “real lives.” Everything Hallie has written demon-
strates the umbilical ties not only between our scholarship and our own
moral and human development but between our scholarly lives and our
active lives as citizens and moral agents within the various communities
in which we live.

Whitman College

1. Philip Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
2. Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How
Goodness Happened There (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994 [1979]).
3. Philip Hallie, “The Ethics of Montaigne’s [‘Of Cruelty’],” in O un amy! Essays on
Montaigne in Honor of Donald M. Frame, ed. Raymond La Charité (Lexington, Ky.: French
Forum, 1977), pp. 156–71.
4. Facing Evil (New York: PBS Video, 1987).
5. Philip Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1969).
6. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 121–22.