This is a guest blog by PBI Professor Ethan Vanderleek
From April 8-May 27, I will be leading an 8-week module through Forging Ploughshares entitled “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled”: Perspectives on Peace. Here I offer a few initial reflections on peace, as well as some guiding questions for the module, in the hope that others will join me in reading some excellent texts and asking some tough, relevant, and meaningful questions.
The question of peace involves every level of human, even cosmic, existence. Spiritual teachers often say to start with inner peace, in your own heart and life. Such inner peace will spill over into relationships with others. The reverse is also true: inner peace, peace with and within yourself, is impossible if you live in deep enmity with your neighbor. And peace in neighbourly relationships extends to include our communities, cities, churches, nations, and the human race as a whole. When we talk about peace, then, there is ultimately no human reality that is left out of the discussion: when we truly desire peace we desire it at every level.
There is also a sense in which peace is primordial or foundational to human existence and experience. Many people, perhaps most, would say they desire peace. St. Augustine says that wars are fought not for their own sake but so that peace may be won. Violence is only engaged to bring about peace. No one could say they love violence for its own sake. The peace that is violently fought for may indeed be a false peace, but there is some connection to peace nonetheless. “What men want in war is that it should end in peace. Even while waging a war every man wants peace, whereas no one wants war while he is making peace” (Augustine, City of God, XIV.12).
What do we desire when we desire peace? First, it is a negative desire. It is the desire to be freed from certain forms of un-peace, of dis-ease, from violence and war. When a parent yearns for a moment of peace and quiet in a chaotic household, it is a desire that the noise, commotion, and inter-sibling conflict would cease. Peace from war and conflict, in our historical moment, often starts with a ceasefire, with something stopping, not so much something starting. This is negative peace: the cessation, even temporarily, of violence, conflict, and aggression.
But this negation of violence is only the barest condition for peace. Is there a positive sense of peace? First, peace is a positive, dynamic, energetic relationship between people or between things. There is peace when an infant slumbers on the breast; though there may be quiet, there is also excitement and anticipation at what this little life will hold, how the mother and father will encourage and behold the child’s growth and curiosity. Peace between friends involves conversation, exploration, pursuing common projects together: building a swing-set, perhaps, cooking a meal, or talking through some complex matter. Religiously, peace may involve the silence of prayer, listening for the voice of the creator; even here, in silence and stillness, there is an energy of relationship, of receiving life and love from beyond. So peace is not just an absence of violence: it is a positive set of relationships, sharing life and energy between differences.
To attempt a formula: peace is dynamic life-giving relationship between differences. Peace does not involve collapsing or eliminating all difference, where all that remains is an undifferentiated whole. Nor, though, does peace involve an absolute emphasis on difference, where individual people or communities isolate themselves from the unity that comes through relationships. Peace involves a delicate balance between unity and difference: an over-emphasis on either is the destruction of relationships, either collapsed into a whole or spread out so thinly and remotely that no relationship is possible.
Starting April 8, I will be leading an 8-week module through Forging Ploughshares on the question of peace. Four key questions will guide our inquiry. I sketch out some preliminary thoughts here, but these are open questions that admit to ever further thought and prayer. They are:
- What is true peace?
- What is false peace?
- Is peace possible or even desirable? Is peace more fundamental than war and violence?
- What is the peace that Jesus gives?
- What is true peace? Peace is dynamic, energetic, ordered, exploratory, relational, and freeing. It operates at every level of existence: personal, relational, communal, political, and cultural. Peace at one level integrates with peace at other levels: I cannot have true personal peace if I am not at peace with my brother or sister. We cannot have true peace between nations without peace between cultures and civilizations.
- What is false peace? Peace masquerades in many forms. There is the false peace of withdrawal into the self, the self making peace with itself totally apart from relations with others. There is the false peace of uniformity, where everyone must fit into one expected way of being. There is the false peace of the common enemy, where peace is made in a community by finding an enemy that everyone agrees to despise and hate. There is the false peace of victory, where one person or group achieves peace by defeating, perhaps subjugating, another person or group. There is the false peace of indifference, where the effort of relating is too great, and we agree to ignore difficult aspects of a relationship. There is the false peace of distraction, where work or entertainment keep us from deeper relationships, questions, or human endeavors.
- Is peace possible or even desirable? Is peace more fundamental than war and violence? There is the further, troubling question of whether peace is a worthwhile question and whether it is a true or worthy object of desire at all. Is it possible that all peace is ultimately false? The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “war [polemos] is father [pater] of all” (F23, The First Philosophers, trans. Robin Waterfield). Conflict seems constitutive of reality.And sometimes we crave the adventure of conflict, war, or aggression. Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ, “Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency” (New York: Penguin, 1990; 128; trans. R.J. Hollingdale). On the one hand, then, peace might simply be brief moments of rest within reality’s deeper constitutive violence. On the other hand, peace might cover over our fundamental humanity, which needs to express itself through conflict, power, and victory. Nietzsche warns us against desiring a lazy peace that squelches the endeavoring human spirit. Perhaps the pursuit of peace is one of Christianity’s lies, uncritically accepted, but needing a total revaluation when we return to the fundamental human drive to life, a drive which, far from fearing or shunning war and violence, seeks out and embraces them. This is a question that invites ever further inquiry, sometimes troubling inquiry, when we consider how deep seated the impulse to violence and war is in our world and in ourselves.
- What is the peace that Jesus gives? Christian faith teaches that peace is the truth of creation and redemption. “My peace I leave you,” Jesus says, yet “not as the world gives.” The peace of Jesus is set firmly against all forms of false peace. But false peace is endemic, and so his presence is not first pacifying but aggravating. He exposes false peace. He is identified not as a wise, serene sage but as a man of sorrows. He suffers all the effects of our forms of false peace, our insistence on making peace through violent means. Jesus’s peace cannot be secured through military violence, which would be to totally compromise it. He makes real and accessible the peace of the Triune God, that infinite relationship of source, response, and openness, of Father, Son, and Spirit.
These questions and more will guide our inquiry in the “Perspectives on Peace Module.” We’ll examine historical sources with Augustine and Julian of Norwich. We’ll address critiques of peace from Heraclitus and Nietzsche. We’ll learn from Jewish and Muslim writers on peace. We’ll consider peace between nations, cultures, civilizations, and religions with Raimon Panikkar. Through it all we’ll strive to keep Jesus himself as the ultimate criteria and judge for what true peace is.