Readings

Is Peace Possible?

by Rick Dietrich

I wrote last time that I had been reading in all sorts of directions. I was reading Ovid’s The Art of Love, Augustine’s The City of God, and J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.

I am still being pulled this way and that. I continue dabbling in the classics, though now instead of Ovid it is the epigrams of Philodemos of Gadara, a Greek poet of the first century BC (from Galilee!). My reading retains an African component. I have just finished Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, about the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and started Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, about the Mobutu years.

And I’m still reading Augustine. In Book XIX of The City of God, particularly chapters 11 – 14, the great North African theologian writes about peace. He begins by calling it a “highest good,” and he acknowledges that there is “nothing that we can talk about, long for, or finally get [that] is so desirable, welcome, so good as peace.”

There is no human heart that does not desire peace. Even those who are bent on war desire peace. Even when they “are plotting to disturb the peace, it is merely to fashion a new peace nearer to the heart’s desire; it is not because they dislike peace as such. It is not that they love peace less, but that they love their kind of peace more.”

Loving our kind of peace is dangerous, however. Too often when we go to war for the sake of “greater peace,” what we really want to do is not only to defeat our enemies but also “to impose on them the victor’s will and call it peace.” For, though we all love order, it may not be God’s order that we love. Thus, we go to war for the sake of peace for our own society, desiring insofar as possible, “to make all men members of that society, so that everyone and everything might be at the service of one head,” or, I would add, one idea of how people ought to live together. There are two ways, Augustine asserts, to accomplish this goal of bringing people into one “peace” under one head (or idea)—fear and love.

Moreover, the leader who seeks to conquer and impose peace assumes a pride that is God-like but perversely. “Sinful man hates the equality of all men under God and, as though he were God, loves to impose his sovereignty on his fellow men.” Note that this does not mean that “sinful man” hates peace; it does mean—and this is the nature of our sinfulness—that we prefer our own peace to God’s peace. We don’t trust God’s ordering of the world.

And why should we? God may have so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son; but God hasn’t so ordered the world that it isn’t a mess. And we detest a mess.

Here is where Augustine’s argument takes an interesting turn. Augustine finds in our passion for order evidence that however far we stray from God, God is at work around and in us. We detest a mess, because we long for order; and our longing for order is part of our desire for peace, or the other way around: our desire for peace is part of our longing for order. Here, Augustine offers several examples:

“The peace of the body lies in the ordered equilibrium of all its parts; the peace of the irrational soul, in the balanced adjustment of its appetites; the peace of the reasoning soul, in the harmonious correspondence of conduct and conviction; the peace of body and soul taken together, in the well-ordered life and health of the living whole.” Further, peace between us and God lies in “ordered obedience”; peace between “man and man consists in regulated friendship.” For families to live in peace, and for states to live in peace, there must be “an ordered harmony of authority and obedience.” Finally, “the peace of the heavenly City lies in a perfectly ordered and harmonious communion of those who find their joy in God and in one another in God. Peace, in its final sense, is the calm that comes of order.” [All italics mine.] And this order is in God’s creation and in us, in what Wallace Stevens calls our own “blessed rage for order.” The poet means here by rage not anger but urge or passion. God has created in us such a passion for order that we cannot escape it no matter how far we are separated from it. Augustine offers here two examples:

First, even the most miserable, those whose lives have been separated from the possibility of calm, will seek in the midst of the storm “some measure of adjustment to their surroundings and, hence, some tranquility of order and, therefore, some slender peace.” We should pray that they might find what they seek—and more.

Second, even the Devil, who rejoices in creating disorder, does not escape the justice of God. His rejoicing is hollow, as the disorder he causes is nothing in itself—it cannot exist without God’s good order—but also as the same disorder will cause pain and misery not only for those he wishes to torment but also for himself. Even the devil is miserable in war.

Where does that leave us in the year of our Lord 2004, more than a millennium and a half after Augustine wrote his City of God? It leaves us, even if war rage around us, in a position to hope. For “God, the wise Creator and just Ordainer of all natures, has made the mortal race of man the loveliest of all lovely things on earth. He has given to men good gifts suited to their existence here below. Among these is temporal peace, according to the poor limits of mortal life, in health, security, and human fellowship, and other gifts, too, needed to preserve . . . peace or regain it, once lost.”

Let us not call “Peace,” where there is none. But let us not think peace is irrevocably lost. Rather, let us pray and work, knowing it may be regained.