Pax Christi Pacific NW welcomes reviews of books, films, documentaries, any images or words that might be of interest to the content of its website. We are suggesting books that might be of interest to Pax Christi study groups.
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Thomas Merton's "Peace in the Post-Christian Era"
Reviews by Michael Gruber, Pax Christi and Tom Stratman
Chris Hedge's' "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"
Review by Michael Gruber, Pax Christi
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CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Documentary
"Peace on Trial"
The Pit Stop Ploughshares went to trial in Dublin, Ireland during March 2005 charged with $US2.5 million "criminal damage" to a U.S. Navy War Plane at Shannon Airport. The plane was en route to the invasion of Iraq. Following the disarmament it turned around and headed back to Texas.
The 35 minute DVD/video covers the week of the trial as peace activists converged on Dublin from around Ireland, the U.S. & Europe. The DVD/video features the Pit Stop Ploughshares 5, U.S. Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Iraq Veteran Kelly Dougherty, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Marriead Corrigan MacGuire, former U.N. Assitant Secretary General Dennis Halliday and Voices in the Wilderness founder Kathy Kelly. The video also contains file footage interviews with Dorothy Day and Fr. Daniel Berrigan SJ.
The "Peace on Trial" video is an excellent resource for schools, universities and community groups.
Ph. +353 1 454 9144
Text +353 87 918 4552
Dublin Catholic Worker
"comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comforted"
email: dublincatholicworker@yahoo.co.uk
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UPCOMING:
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MILITARISM
Peace in the Post-Christian Era
Thomas Merton
Orbis Books,
165 pp., $16.00
Review by Tom Stratman, St. James Cathedral
For me, the most convincing paragraph of Merton's Peace is this one, along with the two following it:
The mature moral conscience is one that derives its strength and light
not from external directives alone but above all from an inner spiritual
connaturality with the deepest values of nature and grace (page 149).
It grasps me because Merton here is giving me an insight, a portion of his wisdom. And he is allowing me to share enough of his vision that I may be changed by it. It's the scriptural notion of metanoia, gaining a new intelligence that, under the best of circumstances, will overflow into a change of how I am and how I live.
As such, those three paragraphs about conscience stand as a criticism
of much of the rest of the book. Merton states his purpose very clearly.
He is writing about the morality or ethics of war in a nuclear age.
But if you follow him through the book, you find out-and I agree with
him here-that it is also a post-Christian age. The contention that we
are living in a post-Christian age is not by any means unique to Merton.
Book after book that I pick up speaks of the emptiness of the old symbols,
their inability to effect real metanoia in our age, and the consequent
aimlessness and lack of grounding so endemic of contemporary life. Such
conditions generally accompany times of transition. Old paradigms melt
and new ones remain liquid and indistinct. Those who cannot live in
such emptiness easily turn dogmatic or fundamentalistic. Others search.
Searching is not easy.
But this being so, Peace will remain unconvincing to those who most
need to hear it, since it is, in effect, an attempt to change people
by "external directives" or norms in lieu of any "inner
connaturality with the deepest values of nature and grace."
Merton's writing is at its best when he is awakening us in a strong
and impassioned but non-attached way to that very connaturality which
is the core of genuine spirituality. His response to the Polonoruwa
rock carvings of the Buddha are apt here:
I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed. … Then
the silence of the extraordinary faces. … Filled with every possibility,
questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace
… that has seen through every question without trying to discredit
anyone or anything-without refutation-without establishing some other
argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established
positions, such peace, such silence can be frightening. … I don't
know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual
validity running together in one aesthetic illumination (Asian Journal,
233-235, italics his).
Unfortunately, Peace is written as argument and refutation, the stuff of academics. And to my mind, Merton is at his weakest in such a role. The energy of conviction arising from the sort of inner peace he describes above is absent, and that is Merton's trump suit.
In reading this book, I have the curious sense of being put off by a
statement with which I am in deep agreement. The issue is an important
one for me personally. And my stand on it is in tune with Merton's.
Yet the writing annoys me. It wanders, makes too many general statements,
and has an edge to it which cuts apart the fabric of his arguments even
as he is weaving it. And, interesting enough, he is using his own weapon
with some animus while advocating disarmament and peace. What I am saying
is that here Merton is preaching to the choir and even they find it
difficult to listen to him and he is acting in discord with the very
thing he is advocating as well. The result is static.
There are other places where this happens in Merton's writing. While
reading for the first time New Seeds of Contemplation, I was jolted
by the sudden change of feeling tone in the meditation on "Tradition
and Revolution" when I reached these words:
The notion of dogma terrifies men who do not understand the Church.
They cannot conceive that a religious doctrine may be clothed in a clear,
definite, and authoritative statement without at once becoming static,
rigid and inert. … In their frantic anxiety to escape from any
such conception they take refuge in a system of beliefs that is vague
and fluid, a system in which truths pass like mists and waver like shadows.
They make their own personal selection of ghosts, in this pale, indefinite
twilight of the mind. They take good carte never to bring these abstractions
out into the full brightness of the sun for fear of a full view of their
own unsubstantiality (pages 145-146).
There! Take that! I have no difficulty with what he is
saying here. It is the way in which he says it and the suddenness with
which the feelings flare up in an otherwise calm and convincing essay.
And note the contrast with his words from Asian Journal above. It's
the ax he not only grinds but swings at the reader that makes one stop
and wonder what is going on. Much of Peace has that same aggressive
edge to it. And I find that sad, for what Merton has to say there is
valuable and even urgent.
When Merton (or anyone else) wages war with the truth, it suggests that
he is really warring with himself. In other words, something is unresolved
within and so he strikes outward at those who reflect his own conflicts.
Perhaps the censors within Merton's religious order were not quite the
ogres they're made out to be. Perhaps they were not silencing Merton's
not so controversial opinions as responding to the manner of his writing.
Of course, I don't know this. At least, it seems to me, Merton had to
sleep on this text for a season or two and come back to it. He never
had the chance to do that. Even the fact that he managed to get what
he considered the core of his work published while bypassing those censors
indicates to me his intuition that something was not well.
On the whole, I think this series of essays is important, worth reading,
and at least presents many of the factors that make peace so pressing
for our world and at the same time so difficult to achieve. But I found
that I could read only small bits at a time principally because of the
tone and disorganization of the writing. I wish that a Merton scholar
would take the work and both deepen its scholarship and soothe the savage
beast in it. It could be done by way of a commentary and annotations.
And I think the work could be expanded both with selections from other
writings of Merton and the people he quotes. War is the fruit of attachment.
If one wishes to speak of peace in a convincing way, it must be done
with non-attachment. The writing itself must embody the goal toward
which it tends.
Thomas B. Stratman
tstratman@stjames-cathedral.org
4 October 2005
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Review by Michael Gruber, Pax Christi
The Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote the meditations on nuclear war that comprise this book as magazine articles in the late 1960's and was forbidden to publish them in book form by the Abbot General of his order, who believed that it was the entire duty of monks to pray rather than to argue publicly against the preparations by nuclear superpowers to wipe all praying creatures from the planet. Merton submitted to this command, and explained to his friends that, "my position loses its meaning unless I speak from the center of the Church." So he endured silencing, but not entirely, for he used his novices as donkey labor to produce quantities of mimeographed copies of this work, which circulated as a kind of American samizdat, reaching a wide audience of influential people. Ethel Kennedy got a copy and handed it on (it is supposed) to her brother, the President and perhaps it had something to do with the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. It also circulated widely in Church circles and was reputed to be an influence on the promulgation of the encyclical Pacem in Terris in 1963. Not bad for a silenced monk.
Merton's primary purpose in this work is to mobilize Christian witness against what was then called the balance of terror, the situation in which the USSR and the US had thousands of nuclear weapons pointing at one another, threatening the destruction of the greater part of humanity and ending civilization. He says, "The task of the Christian is at least to make the thought of peace seriously possible." In the years since he wrote this changes have taken place that were far beyond the imaginations of most of Merton's contemporaries. The Soviet Union utterly collapsed with hardly a shot fired. Communism went from being a nightmare on the march, commanding the loyalties of billions to a pathetic relic in which even most people in nominally communist nations no longer believe. America went from spending nearly half a trillion dollars each year on the military to spending nearly half a trillion dollars each year on the military. Yes, it seems that we spend the same crippling proportion of our budget to oppose a small band of fanatics as we did to counter a powerful totalitarian regime ruling half the globe and wielding a massive nuclear armament. This is one reason why a book written in 1960 still speaks to us. It turned out that it wasn't the communist menace, or not entirely: it was us.
Merton spoke (and still speaks) to a purportedly Christian nation about the immorality of force. He restated the simple doctrine that we are commanded to do good to them that hate us, and explains how we got from that to the Just War doctrine and far beyond it, so that our forces accomplished the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians and our leaders cold-bloodedly brought forth and arrayed the means to kill millions more. Originally, he tells us, Christians actually followed the directions of Christ with respect to war. Origen in the third century A.D. wrote that it was their nonviolence that distinguished Christians from all other peoples: "No longer do we take the sword against any nations nor do we learn war any more since we have become the sons of peace through Jesus…" In answer to accusations that this stance compromised the patriotism of Christians, Origen answered that Christians help the Emperor through their prayers as effectively as do front-line soldiers. By and large the Romans did not buy this, and much of the persecution of the early church stemmed from the idea that Christians were not good citizens because they would not fight.
Although a tiny minority of present-day Christians still hold this belief,
a much larger proportion of believing Christians, and the Catholic Church
as an institution, follow the doctrine of Just War, of which the primary
patristic author is St. Augustine. Merton points out that in the two
centuries that separate the saint from Origen, the empire had become
Christianized and the barbarians had conquered Rome itself, and while
Augustine was bishop of Hippo, barbarian armies were literally at his
city's gates. The destruction of a Christian state and the depredations
that resulted from a sack by the Goths were ills that seemed to Augustine
to require an escape clause in the law of absolute love given by Christ.
You still must not hate your enemy, he said, but you could fight him
in the cause of peace and to prevent a wider carnage: "Love does
not exclude wars of mercy waged by the good."
Augustine had a subtle mind but Merton suggests that not even he could
have conceived what horrors were founded by Christians upon his little
exception. When the military mind is told that it is moral to fight
the barbarians at the gates it concludes-and the logic is flawless-that
it would be far better to fight the barbarians some distance away from
the gates; in fact, it would be better to fight them as close to their
barbarian homes as possible, thus saving the good and the merciful from
any damages. In fact, who can tell whether folk who seem perfectly peaceful
are not thinking barbarous thoughts, are not contemplating an assault
on our gates? There is no end to this sort of "strategic"
thinking once started. Of similar modes of thought, Merton says:
"Amoral decisions are those which do not take into account the objective underlying order of realities, in terms of means and ends, but which are moved simply by the impact of events seen and understood in the light of certain superficial assumptions. Amoral conduct pretends to be more "realistic" than morality because it thinks itself to be more aware of the actual event in its concreteness. In point of fact, one of the greatest dangers of amorality is precisely its lack of realism…The amoral man may think himself keenly aware of the actuality of objective facts, when in reality he is simply experiencing the pressure and urgency of his own assumptions. Indeed, he may purely and simply be projecting his irrational and symbolic obsessions on the exterior world and experiencing them as objective realities, in which case he is not only unrealistic, but mentally ill."
This was written over forty years ago in reference to a system of terror
long gone but it remains relevant to modes of thinking all too common
among leaders today. Merton would probably not be very surprised to
learn that the great adversary with whom we as a nation created the
immoral system of mutually assured destruction was defeated not by a
great land battle, nor by the use of nuclear weapons, but by the simple
exhaustion occasioned by living a brutal lie, and having the lie exposed
over and over by harmless people like Lech Walesa, Andrei Sakarov, and
the late Pope. Living a lie remains the great danger facing even the
most powerful and richest of nations, far more dangerous than the attacks
of foreign fanatics. Merton speaks to his countrymen thus:
"Faced by the supercilious contempt of friends as well as the hatred of our avowed enemies, and wondering what there is in us to hate, we have considered ourselves and found ourselves quite decent, harmless and easygoing people who only ask to be left alone to make money and have a good time. The keystone of our admittedly nebulous optimism is that if everyone is left alone to take care of his own interests, the laws of economics will benignly take care of the needs of all, and anyone who is not a slacker can get rich. But this philosophy of life is questioned, and when it is questioned, we are also forced to examine our beliefs. And when we examine them we find we are not too sure what they are. We tend to operate on sentiments of good will or civilization rather than on deeply based convictions."
Forty years later, and what a shame it is, he speaks to them still.
Michael Gruber, Pax Christi, September 2005
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War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
Chris Hedges, Public Affairs, 211 pp., $23.00
"War is hell," said the famous general and Chris Hedges agrees, but then asks the vital question: why do we then love it so much, why do we persist in making war despite that knowledge, why do our leaders send us again and again into that well-known hell? The answer he provides arise out of his own experience as a war correspondent on many fields of battle over the last two decades: "The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living." Now, this is fraudulent, as Hedges goes on to point out. Most war is based on a lie: the purposes are invented by power-hungry leader, the meaning is therefore false, and the reason for living leads to death--either the actual death of the participants or their victims, or the spiritual death that results from the act of murder in the service of a lie.
Much of this book is an agonized recounting of the genesis
of needless and stupid wars: in the Falklands, in Iraq, in the former
Yugoslavia. He describes the intoxication of the early days of war,
when otherwise sensible people let themselves be carried away by the
scoundrelly rhetoric of patriotism. After that we see the up-ending
of the moral order, as deeds that were once condemned become noble because
directed against the despised "other," the enemy-murder, rape,
mutilation, torture-and groups of men who were recently the dregs of
society emerge as heroes. And after the intoxication, the hangover:
"The nationalist myth often implodes with startling ferocity. It
does so after the lies and absurdities that surround it become too hard
to sustain….The contradictions and tortuous refusal to acknowledge
the obvious becomes more than a society is able to bear. The collapse
is usually followed by a blanket refusal, caused by shame and discomfort,
to examine or acknowledge the crimes carried out in the name of nationalist
causes."
But it is hard for a nation to handle shame. Unless the crimes of nationalism are embodied in institutional memory, and literally engraved in stone, they are soon forgotten and then the whole cycle starts again. One reason why war between major powers in Europe seems to be a thing of the past is that the nation at the heart of the continent, Germany, is institutionally committed to not forgetting what it did in the name of nation, and its neighbors have more or less followed suit.
This is why the Yugoslav catastrophe is worth examining, and Hedges devotes the bulk of his book to it. Here is a nation that endured tremendous suffering during the Second World War, losing nearly ten per cent of its population, largely through intercommunal massacres and the depredations of the occupying fascist powers. After the war, the country was united under Tito's police state which was, on the other hand, the most livable of the communist states of eastern Europe. Yugoslavs were fairly free to travel, had an increasingly high standard of living-far higher than their communist neighbors-and considerable autonomy on the job. The traditionally conflicts seemed a relic of the past. Yet in the scramble for power after Tito's death it was all too easy for the communist sub-bosses to revive them. Hedges blames what he calls "the cult of victimhood" for providing the fuel for civil strife. Croats, Muslims, and Serbs all were encouraged to believe that they were victims of the others, and all discourse devolved into a litany of complaint and broadcasts of atrocities against "us" by "them," so that in an amazingly short time people were murdering people who looked just like them, spoke the same language and had been accepted by them as good neighbors for two generations.
The most horrible thing about this process, next to the actual deaths and physical torments, seem to Hedges to be the destruction of the ability to reason as people once did in peacetime: "the sense that we cannot trust what we see in wartime spreads throughout the society…We lose our grip. Whole worlds vanish or change in ways we can not fully comprehend. A catastrophic terrorist strike will have the same effect."
As indeed it has, in our own nation. What hope is there
for us? Hedges observes that in the chaos of war ordinary people desperately
seek love. This makes sense, since, as he writes, "And however
much beyond reason, there is always a feeling that love is not powerless
or impotent as we had believed a few seconds before. Love alone fuses
happiness and meaning. Love alone can fight the impulse that lures us
toward self destruction." Well, yes, but how do we incorporate
this truth, which is of course also the truth told by Christianity for
two millennia, into our political discourse? How do we love in the public
sphere, how to we love even our enemies, without at the same time encouraging
aggression by the unlovely among the nations? This book does not give
an answer. No one has figured this out yet.
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Just War
Andrew Bucevich
Documentaries: (can be purchased in DVD form)
The Unfinished Symphony
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