PeaceDocs | Essays

PeaceDocs | Essay: Joseph Ratzinger’s Sermon on the Mount

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 08:44:09 -0400

Matthew 5:3–10.
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Yes, despite our power, palaces and limousines, our service staff and our expensive vestments, our in-vestments and our public relations expenses, we remain poor in spirit. But many do not understand the true meaning of “poor.” Some, those liberation “theologians,” fomenters of the material poor, were in league with Communists. We had to stop troublemakers like Boff and Gutiérrez and their divisive talk of a “preferential option for the poor.” We set the record straight, discreetly in our Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, threatening, humiliating, censoring and silencing.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the earth.
The meek will always be with us, that is why we need hierarchies, and that is why one so meek as we must remain on top, why our legions of appointees have closed ranks around us. Those who pretend meekness — American nuns defending healthcare, nursing, teaching — should remain truly meek and silent. We remain “the servant of the servants of God”: the meekest of the meek.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Technically that is true, except that many pretend to mourn. Take the so-called victims of abuse. Media attention is what they crave. After all these years they should really just move on. We all mourn the tattered unity of Holy Church, the challenges to our meekness. To borrow a phrase from the States: “We are the Church.” How dare they? As Padre Cantalamessa mourned: it’s a new Holocaust.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Same for their greedy, conniving lawyers and others puffed-up by the media. Justice is a complicated term. In terms of the canon law of the Church, we define it. Justice is often conflated with peace, but only by Communists. Peace is calming, justice ensures that everyone stays in his place. Thus we do hunger and thirst after justice. A reminder: we claim immunity from the justice of this world.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Yes: those poor members of the clergy and hierarchy, abused by the media and insatiable lawyers. We cannot show them enough mercy. Nor can we show enough mercy to those poor priests even we suspect of abusing children in their charge. We cannot move them often and far enough away from the merciless spotlight of godless media inquisition.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Yes the Church, like the State, must remain pure. The heart also plays a role. Yet we mustn’t be lead by emotion but by theological reflection, from which minor human concerns often distract us. Purity in the Church means that we must eliminate impurities. That is why we meekly accepted our role as grand inquisitor. We must remain pure of dissent, of unorthodox thinking and opinion, of impure lives. Homosexuals cannot be pure. As we said in our Letter…on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons (1986), one should not be surprised if attacks on homosexuals increased with their heightened profile. Impurity invites cleansing.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Franz Jaegerstaetter was childlike. Hardly the material for an advanced degree in dogmatic theology from a major German university. In 1943 this simple farmer defied the Nazi state, on the flimsiest premises, a childlike understanding of the Gospels, “let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us.” There are many interpretations of that trope. We were drafted ourselves in 1943 and we did not resist the Nazis. We did not question the reasons of state used to justify Franz’s condemnation and execution. Even his parish priest and the prosecuting attorney begged him to recant. He remained childlike and died needlessly. We survived to make peace later.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
1943 again? We Nazi Youth knew nothing of the White Rose, that Sophie Scholl and other students were arrested distributing literature at the University of Munich, defying the Nazis, condemning our war and our persecution of the Jews. Everyone involved begged them to recant: they were children of influential people. They invited persecution. Justice was swift. They didn’t suffer persecution all that long: they were guillotined the day of their trial. We attended that university a few years later. We do not recall them.

PeaceDocs | Essay: Obama on War & Peace

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:45:45 -0500

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2009 was widely seen as among the very best — and most controversial — of his presidency. His official Nobel Prize speech is divided roughly into four parts that lay out themes of individual and public morality, just and holy war, nonviolence and the true meanings of peace. The speech may prove among the most important documents in the history of peacemaking.
Obama begins (pars. 1–10) with a frank acknowledgement of his inadequacy to receive it, and of his role of commander-in-chief fighting two wars, one a mistake, one a justified struggle (1-5). Obama lays out a grand theory of justified war and peace and of their limits. Certain assumptions underlie his thinking: war is endemic to human nature (5), there is a distinction between public and private morality (4), and the just war — though rarely observed in history — can be waged today (7-8). He then calls for renewed internationalist structures for war and peacemaking (9-10).
Section 2 (11–29) contextualizes this legitimatized use of force. Though no longer worldwide, modern war remains devastating and aimed increasingly at civilians within nations (11-12). We therefore need renewed and newly imagined efforts to contain and stop it (13-14). While the nonviolence of Gandhi and King remains a “moral force” neither weak, passive nor naïve, it could not stop Hitler nor will it stop al Qaeda, Obama asserts. War will remain necessary (15-19). We therefore cannot await a radical shift in human nature but need a gradual evolution of human institutions and of our understanding of the use of force (20). This will necessitate both clear-cut rules of war and a reapplication of just-war criteria (21-23, 28-29). As important, it requires new understandings of “force” used for humanitarian purposes (24-27). In a restatement of the implicit Clinton doctrine, Obama praises the military as such a police force, “wagers of peace.”
Section 3 (30-41) asks how to “build a just and lasting peace.” Obama urges nonviolent alternatives to war as international tools: sanctions and other intervention in cases of nuclear proliferation, civil conflicts, genocide, repression and clear-cut brutality (31-34). Here he begins to focus on the core message of his speech: what does “peace” mean? Not just the absence of war but the creation of justice, the pursuit of inherent, universal human rights and dignity (35-38). Obama calls for active support for mass, nonviolent campaigns around the world through both exhortation and tough diplomacy (39-41). He criticizes those who prefer the “satisfying purity of indignation” to imperfect engagement (40).
Section 4 (42-56) defines peace. “A just peace includes not only civil and political rights — it must encompass economic security and opportunity” (42), but above all “the continued expansion of our moral imagination” (45). This imagination must bring us beyond the narrow definitions of race, tribe or religion to our common humanity. Obama levels specific and very thoughtful condemnations of the Crusade and Holy War as perversions of religion: “no Holy War can ever be a just war… such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it’s incompatible with the very purpose of faith,” which is the Golden Rule (48). Obama thus desacralizes war back into line with long religious and moral traditions. Simultaneously, he moves the concept of peace away from pragmatist and secularist definitions and returns it to its global religious roots. Obama then arrives at the heart of his message: nonviolence. It might not always be possible but must “always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.” King’s nonviolence remains our “moral compass.” (50-51). Each of us has the capacity to be a true peacemaker, because each shares “that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls” (53).
Finally Obama makes one of the most startling and important statements of any secular leader, and in doing so redefines the idea of courage in the modern world: he equates the bravery of the soldier on a peacekeeping mission with that of the nonviolent protestor defying the brutality of her government. King’s moral universe has come full circle, making the practitioner of nonviolence the equal of the warrior and equating their essential mission (54).
Despite the context of his inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama’s speech offers a consistent advocacy for the use of the military in a police role and introduces on the most official level a new vision of peace and peacemaking.

PeaceDocs | Essay: Peaceable Old Europe?

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 20:52:58 -0500

In the 1970s Marija Gimbutas shook the worlds of prehistoric European archaeology, feminist studies and peace history with a series of wide-ranging excavations, research reports and popular books. After decades digging the prehistoric remains of the Danube valley, mostly in modern Romania and western Ukraine, Gimbutas postulated a new theory: of “Old Europe.” [See Map.] Not the ancien regime or mythological Ur-realm of the northern European Aryans, but a distinct civilization linked directly to Anatolia and the Aegean. This civilization, lasting from c.6500 to c.3500 BCE, boasted permanent agricultural settlements — many far larger than anything in contemporary Mesopotamia — exquisitely sophisticated pottery, figurines, jewelry and metalwork in copper, and — most important for Gimbutas’ theory and its adherents — a nonviolent way of life marked by a distinct lack of weapon finds, walled towns or evidence of coercive social hierarchies. Central to this society was the worship of the Goddess, evidenced in myriad finds of statuettes of her various incarnations: fertility, mistress of animals, love, death. This “civilization of the goddess” gave its due to males, whose grave remains contain large numbers of prestige goods, but as a whole, if not matriarchal, it was clearly “matrifocal.”
All this came to a sudden end c.4100 BCE, when archaeological finds record hundreds of sites interrupted not by climate change, flood, or famine but by deliberate human destruction: fire and massacre. These disruptions were accompanied by the rapid overrunning of previously agricultural settlements by nomadic horsemen whose sheep soon grazed atop Old Europe’s ruined tells. Gimbutas was quick to associate this destruction with incursions of the Indo-Europeans and the replacement of the earth goddess cult with the sky cults that gave birth to the Greek and Roman pantheons.
Gimbutas’ findings have supported a generation of further research often critical but generally supportive of her grand synthesis. Feminists and peace researchers see evidence both of a time in (pre)history when war, violence and male aggression did not dominate and, as importantly, that history itself is not necessarily a process of continuous progress from savagery to civilization: it has its curves, ups and downs. Nothing is inevitable, genetic or atavistic about the human propensity toward organized violence. Gimbutas’ handsome coffee-table books worked their way into the public perception of this past and became an inescapable starting point for discussions of peace and nonviolence in prehistory.
Now, a new exhibition and splendid catalog from NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World reopens this issue as part of a far-ranging study of The Lost World of Old Europe. Experts from Romania, the US and elsewhere have contributed a series of maps, charts, drawings and interpretative essays to accompany the exhibit of pottery, jewelry, figurines and other daily artifacts. Its editor, David W. Anthony, offers the best assessment of the state of this particular question among others treated, accepting Gimbutas’ overall contribution and moderating her strong assertions of the identity and role of the full-hipped, decorated female figures on display. Gimbutas’ theory stands, though not without modification — or strong attack.
This comes from Douglass W. Bailey, whose strictly empirical methodology and world view does not allow for any inferences aside from the fact that these diminutive figurines were indeed common, that they seem to reconstruct some form of communal activity. He asserts that no one — lacking documentary evidence or definitive contextual finds — should draw any further conclusions (except that humans like to play with scale models). Nor should sound scholarship depend on our aesthetic or spiritual judgments.
Bailey’s points are well taken and necessary correctives to Gimbutas’ reading too much into such artifacts or relying on analogy to later mythological systems. Yet as noted art historian David Freedberg has demonstrated in a recent essay on the facial expressions of singers in Renaissance sculpture, neurological research has established that the human eye and mind does have the ability to interpret the evidence latent within works of art and to relate them to our most intimate and unspoken experiences: human art does mirror human life in more than surface markings. Further, Freedberg’s essay demonstrates that it is possible to support the fact of human “intuitions” with recent, empirical evidence. When Gimbutas and her colleagues see the power of these figurines they are not projecting feminist or any other ideology onto mute stones but drawing upon their human abilities to read, interpret and judge: skills — and scholarly responsibilities — that Bailey’s empiricist essay denies. We can make the mute stones speak: it is our professional training and experience that makes this speech approach the truth.

PeaceDocs | Essay: What We Write

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:46:54 -0500

The recent failure of our server’s hard drive has forced us to reconstruct the PeaceDocs site, one page at a time, copying and pasting, from our archival files. Among these were the entries from the PeaceDocs Blog, going back two years to October 29, 2007. In that first entry, on the film Across the Universe, we set out to record our immediate impressions of that movie and what it, and the 1960s, meant to the work and history of peacemaking. The entry was supposed to be that way: immediate and impressionistic. That’s what blogs are all about. All in all we posted only about two dozen entries over that two years: about one a month. Hardly a real blogger’s pace.
But as we continued to write, the entries to our Blog began to take on a much more formal quality. We began to limit ourselves to 750 words, and most of the entries were far from immediate responses, but became reflective — and often introverted and searching — essays on the broader issues involved in the arts, food, the economy, religion and politics.
We soon began to realize that “Blog” might not be the best term for what we were doing. Most blogs, from what we can see, tend to be quick-reaction vehicles, keyed to the events of the day, firm and timely expressions of opinion. And so we became uncomfortable with the form and its demands for a journalistic approach to writing. Not that we have anything against journalism, but with so much to cover in the historical and contemporary traditions of peacemaking, we did not feel that the blog form met our needs. Nor did the entries we were writing fit the blog format’s requirements. Many weeks could go by without an entry, and the PeaceDocs Blog began to look forlorn.
The crash of the PeaceDocs site offered an opportunity — in the midst of all the reconstruction work going on elsewhere on the files — to decide whether or not to keep the Blog and its entries. After reviewing the essays and the topics they covered, we’ve decided that, yes, we should keep them on the site. The writing’s not bad. They stay within their word limits. Collectively they do constitute a record of reflections on a great variety of peace topics and themes not readily framed by the structure of the site’s more historical, religious and political categories. But the blog format, and its expectations of immediate response and almost daily upkeep, would have to go.
We’ve therefore renamed this section of the site after what it really is: “Essays.” For most scholars the non-research essay is no longer of much value. Between the hefty monograph dominated by theory or backed up by archival data, and the journal article, a miniature of the monograph but with more of the self-consciousness of new discovery, most humanists don’t have time or need for what used to be the very core of humanist writing. In between their great editions of the classics or their scriptural and reform writing, the great humanist essayists — Petrarch (in his letters), Erasmus, Montaigne or Pascal — set out to present great themes, to treat them in an essentially discursive form where their command of language and rhetorical device could best highlight the essential themes of civic, intellectual and spiritual life that they set out to treat.
The essay became a key form of humanist writing and has remained so today in more popular, less scholarly forms, as readers of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books will recognize. The “essay” is what its French meaning indicates: an “attempt” to get at the truth or understanding of some issue. As we looked over the entries to our Blog we realized that, good or bad, successful or not, they were mainly only attempts to come to grips with some pressing issue of peace and justice.
We’ve tried to avoid the blog’s tendency to declarative certainty, but any essay will, of course, reflect the writer’s opinions of the moment and concerns of the day, whether or not one reflects on an idea or concern for an hour, an afternoon or a month. But the essay does allow the writer to stay true to a more reflective form and tone, to more slowly and carefully try to get at a truth that’s there but not so apparent, not so accepted; and all this seems appropriate to a site that tries to delve into the deeper meanings of peace and peacemaking.

PeaceDocs | Essay: Reason, Faith and Revolution

Sun, 7 Jun 2009 17:26:36 -0400

Can there be justice without God? Many of the developments in the modern state since the American and French revolutions have answered this in the affirmative. The Enlightenment and its legacy have tried to create a “secular” society in which natural law and reason guide both individual rights and the purposes and functions of the state. The results have been mixed.
But can there be God without justice? Can a world in which disease, ignorance, brutality, and all the causes and effects of war and oppression, really affirm a belief system that posits a supreme being who creates, sustains and then redeems humanity and the universe? In the wake of Hitler, the death camps, Stalin and Hiroshima and of a post-war world in which many millions more have been humiliated, starved or slaughtered, this remains the basic existential question of our time. How can a just, merciful and peaceful God cause or even allow these atrocities? Is it not more reasonable to assume that such a god is a mere projection of our primitive dreams and fears and to finally acknowledge that God is dead or has never existed?
On the other hand, to talk positively about the spirit, much less God, is to talk about the working of peace in the world, to attempt to intuit and then envision a universe that tends toward justice, harmony and unity, creativity and understanding. In the great God Debate of the past decade, peace, justice and the existence of God therefore remain inseparable for believer, agnostic and nonbeliever.
It is no coincidence that God’s most vociferous recent critics — Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett — take as central to their intellectual and moral condemnations religion’s social and political impact on the world: its historical role in actively preventing or passively delaying the creation of peace and justice. For the God Debate is not about academic definitions or the ego satisfactions to be gained from outwitting and out-arguing one’s opponents but about our vision of the world as it exists, and as we imagine its perfection.
Like most debates in which the stakes are high and the players highly skilled, rapid-fire discourse tends to remix reasoned argument with deep-seated passion. Almost all of what Dawkins and Hitchens say about religion’s role in the injustices and outrages of the contemporary world and its historical roots are true; all their passion for stripping off organized religion’s delusional masks correct.
But much of what they say about the role of spirit and imagination, of vision and aspiration in creating a more peaceful and just world has been amateurish, under-researched and unthinking. This is why Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate comes at such an important time and is such a valuable book.
Eagleton himself is a well known and accomplished literary critic who here extends his formidable abilities of deconstruction — and his Marxist sensibility — to both the basic texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition and to some of the current intellectual scene’s most prominent critics of that tradition.
With brevity, skill and good humor Eagleton asks some uncomfortable questions designed not to put down his opponents but to cast doubt on their and our own complacent certitudes. What does it mean when comfortable men of power — at the very center of influence — mock the beliefs and spiritual aspirations of the disenfranchised and the powerless whose very oppression and marginalization feeds the fundamentalisms of Christianity and Islam? On the other hand, what can such faith possibly mean if it is devoid of good works, that is, if the basic tenets of our religious systems are not keyed to the implementation of peace and justice in this world? Are not such “faiths” nothing but a set of fundamentalist propositions that look forward to and abet the apocalyptic resolution of the very existential problems that they confront?
For Eagleton, whether the Marxist or the Christian, such good works are at the very core of the Judeo-Christian, indeed of the Muslim, call for love in the world, a virtue, he notes, that seems sorely lacking in the arrogance of the “Ditchkins’” attacks upon the religious faith of their ignorant inferiors. Ultimately Eagleton as literary critic, political activist and spiritual man rejects postmodernism’s skepticism toward conviction and calls for a renewed faith based not on fundamentalist certitudes but on an openness to grace, imagination and art: the alternative space to both ideology and postmodern skepticism, a space where the roots of peace and justice forever take hold.