Blessed Be the Peacemakers
Forgiveness is Theosis in Motion
World Peace—you'd love to have it. All agree that world peace would be great, though our ardour has faded markedly, through so many decades of the dream failing to materialize.
There is a small group of power brokers and war lords who scoff outright, albeit privately, at the notion. It can't be done, they reckon, on account of Human Nature. Keeping them closer are the mass of technocrats who still believe we can achieve world peace through rational progress, reform, international cooperation. Do they have any real faith, or are they merely unable to stomach the alternative?
Simone Weil says “Among those who have not awakened the supernatural part of themselves, the atheist is right and the believer wrong.” Likewise, among rational globalist moderns, the hard-hearted cynic is right, and the hand-waving idealist is wrong. The latter is infinitely more right—but only by a logic incompatible with that which they actually inhabit.
World peace cannot be achieved rationally, because people are not rational. We can only enact peace through the paradoxical miracles of forgiveness and mercy. Yet even these are but seeds for trees of which lasting peace is the fruit. We cannot legislate or engineer this fruit into existence; we must tend to the seed, which takes time, which takes patience, which takes faith.
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? - Dorothy Day
I made a friend recently from high-demand locale The Holy Land. Though born and raised in Jordan, he identifies as Palestinian, since his grandfather was among those expelled in the early days of Israeli occupation. A strict never-forget policy is upheld by refugees and their descendants. My friend counts himself a child of that soil, despite never having touched it.
We discussed Israel’s misconduct and the incomprehensibility of popular Western support for same. Of course it makes sense, since support for Israel is closely linked to certain load-bearing nodes in these people’s sense of cultural identity, but at the same time it makes no sense, since opposing tyranny should in theory be an even more central node.
Consider this, the testimony of Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour (from a recent article by Michael Warren Davis):
Archbishop Elias was born in 1939, in what was then known as Mandatory Palestine. Their village, Kafr Bir’im, was made up entirely of Arab Christians. As a boy, Elias would accompany his father to visit a Jewish village down the road. Palestinian Christians were friends with Palestinian Jews, as they were with Palestinian Muslims.
One day, Elias’s father called the family together. He explained that an evil man named Hitler had come to power in Europe and was killing every Jew he could find—men, women, and children just like their neighbors. Some of Europe’s Jews were coming to live in Palestine, their ancient homeland. Elias’s father was excited to welcome them, as were all the villagers.
Then, in 1948, when Elias was nine years old, the Israeli Defense Force invaded Kafr Bir’im and evicted the Christian residents. Much of the Chacour family was deported to Jordan. However, the IDF told the villagers they could return on December 25. Here’s how Archbishop Elias remembers that Christmas:
“Mother, Father, Wardi, and my brothers all joined in singing a jubilant Christmas hymn as they mounted the hill…At the top of the hill their hymn trailed into silence…Why were the soldiers still there? In the distance, a soldier shouted, and they realized they had been seen.
A cannon blast sheared the silence. Then another—a third…Tank shells shrieked into the village, exploding in fiery destruction. Houses blew apart like paper. Stones and dust flew amid the red flames and billowing black smoke. One shell slammed into the side of the church, caving in a thick stone wall and blowing off half the roof. The bell tower teetered, the bronze bell knelling, and somehow held amid the dust clouds and cannon fire…Then all was silent—except for the weeping of women and the terrified screams of babies and children.
Mother and Father stood shaking, huddled together with Wardi and my brothers. In a numbness of horror, they watched as bulldozers plowed through the ruins, knocking down much of what had not already blown apart or tumbled. At last, Father said—to my brothers or to God, they were never sure—‘Forgive them.’ Then he led them back to Gish.”
If this is how Israel treated a small village of Christians who never dreamed of doing them any harm, imagine what they’re capable of doing to a million furious Muslims, who have brutally stung them time and again, over generations of constant conflict and mutual loathing! Well, we don't have to imagine. Yes—Israel is guilty of some very bad behaviour, and only the voluntarily brain-dead could turn a blind eye to this obvious fact.
Yet I was equally surprised to learn from my new friend that almost everyone in Jordan, and the Arab world at large, supports Hamas—as in, the notorious baby-killing terrorists.
I said: I guess it makes sense, it’s just like people in the West supporting Israel (the notorious baby-killing terrorists). My friend didn’t like that. He raised an eyebrow. “Explain,” he said…and tread lightly, his eyes added.
Well, I said, obviously Hamas is no good. Generations of oppression and trauma have forged an organization defined by resentment—and fair enough, since being under the thumb of those bastards has got to be the most infuriating thing ever. Still, nothing good ever comes of resentment and fury. Hamas is a group of wounded and angry men driven by revenge. It doesn’t build anything. It can’t get anywhere. It has no vision. It’s all about hatred and rage and getting those bastards, even if it means their own nieces and nephews get blown up in return; that’s just more fuel for their fire; they’ll fight to the end. Ultimately, they value their pride over the lives of their people.
Vengeance, I suppose, is motivated by pride. Hamas doesn’t actually expect to benefit from bombing Israel. They only can’t stand to be the kind of people who just roll over and take it. The collective ego, wounded and inflamed, salivates at the prospect of harming the enemy, and gorges on hypnotic stories of “justice.” But it’s porn, no more and no less; a self-indulgent, temporary distraction. There is no life in it.
Therefore, Hamas is unworthy of support; at least as unworthy as the state of Israel, which, for all its evil, does at least maintain a positive vision of a prosperous nation, rather than being entirely negatively-oriented. Hamas is nothing without their enemy. And simply, they are out of sync with reality. They chant “death to Israel,” and this is clearly an inappropriate thing to desire; that is, it is incommensurate with their conditions. Their rage is justified, but totally counterproductive. Peace is the only way.
My friend said, “we tried peace, with Yasser Arafat and the treaty in the 90s. Israel just kept encroaching. They systematically take an inch a week. Before you know it, they’re miles over the line. But they hold all the cards. What leverage do we have? They step over the line all asmirk like ‘and what are you going to do about it?’ All we can do is fight back. Otherwise they’ll keep taking an inch and kicking a few of us out at a time, until we’re all gone. They’ve got it down to a science—they know exactly how much they can get away with at a time. Peace will never work. Peace hands them our land all wrapped up with a pleasant bow. Violence is the only way.”
This conversation really drove home for me that Christianity is the ‘right religion’—a statement I would’ve once considered unconscionably retarded.
Because what my friend says is true: according to all laws of human nature, violence is the only way here. Israel and Hamas are too used to bombing each other. Neither will stop until the other ceases to exist. They’ve both been hurt too badly and for too long.
All things naturally tend towards equilibrium, and the simplest equilibrium is universal death. Weil uses the term “gravity” for this drive towards nothingness. “How can we escape from that which corresponds to gravity in ourselves?” Only by the grace of God. Weil:
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.
Christianity comes into a world already saturated with the gravity of retribution. Christ’s call to Love your enemy, to Forgive those who sin against you, is
Genuinely novel.
Terrifyingly strange; unnatural.
Necessary in hopeless situations like this one.
Revenge makes sense here. To hate him who has taken your land, destroyed your home, and killed your family is natural, righteous, and seemingly inevitable. To forgive him is miraculous and terrifying. It is impossible. Yet we know that it is done. And it is the only way out. Christ is the rupture in history’s revenge loop.
~
The proof is in the pudding: look at the early Christians in Rome. They were horrifically persecuted, over centuries, in an effort to break their spirit and get them worshipping Empire. They steadfastly refused to worship Empire. But nor did they snap and start chanting “death to Rome!” If they had done, we would not now be Christians. They were peaceful, they held the line, they followed Christ and did this impossible thing of loving their oppressor. And now, you go to Rome, and Rome is first and foremost a Jesus-place. This is the most incredible reversal in history! How could we fail to learn from it?
Peace works. But you gotta be patient. You can’t just say “well we sort of tried peace for a few years and it didn’t get us anywhere so now we’re back to bombing.” Peace only works when it is practiced unconditionally. We are called to plant trees with no expectation that we will ever personally enjoy their shade. Living righteously and with peace in our hearts is sufficient reward; armed with this awareness, we can take on the fallen world with infinite patience.
My crucial point here is that you can’t just choose peace as a rational strategic maneuver; reason alone cannot sustain this kind of self-sacrifice. Peace can only be achieved through the paradoxical miracle of forgiveness, which Christ has modelled for us.
But why is forgiveness necessary? Why can’t one rationally pursue peace as the optimal course, while continuing to loathe the other? Hamas cannot win this fight—they are smaller and have fewer and weaker guns. Why can’t they just give up? Perhaps they expect the West to eventually abandon Israel as its own internal crises intensify. But then why not wait and strike later? Why not retreat to Egypt or Jordan for a few generations, regroup, and survive, rather than wasting your lives now in futile resistance?
It’s strange, because we know that for most of human existence, the beaten tribe is happy to retreat. Even our divergence from chimps probably occurred when the bigger and stronger proto-chimps bullied our smaller ancestors off the remaining branches of dwindling East African rainforest, leaving them to fend for themselves on the open savannah. Migration has always been the refuge of the vanquished, the out-competed. If people naturally had an all-consuming urge to stay and fight to the bitter end, hominids never would’ve populated the globe. We would’ve been too busy wrestling over some tiny and long-barren patch of land.
Nationalism somehow is able to hijack that most primal of instincts: the will to survive.
Our natural instincts snap under conditions of unnatural intensity and twist into self-negation.
Human-scale conflict tends towards equilibrium. Even the worst case scenario—say, a guy killing your whole family—is “resolved” by you killing his whole family, and then one of you killing the other.
Mass warfare between large-scale societies, still motivated by tribal loyalty but these tribes being defined and held together by abstractions rather than bonds of kinship and personal trust, has the potential to be infinitely more destructive and to go on indefinitely, achieving its own twisted equilibrium. War as we know it is novel, as Graeber and Wengrow point out in The Dawn of Everything:
While human beings have always been capable of physically attacking one another…there’s no actual reason to assume that war has always existed...As Raymond Kelly has adroitly pointed out, it's based on a logical principle that’s by no means natural or self-evident, which states that major violence involves two teams, and any member of one team treats all members of the other as equal targets. Kelly calls this the principle of ‘social substitutability’—that is, if a Hatfield kills a McCoy and the McCoys retaliate, it doesn’t have to be against the actual murderer; any Hatfield is fair game…The murder of entire populations is simply taking this same logic one step further.
Thus, complex civilizations take the old program of animal combat and raise it to a level where it becomes completely absurd and dysfunctional.
Last time, I wrote about how our evolutionary inheritance is warped and corrupted under conditions of civilization, forcing us to transcend it, for which Christianity has provided the blueprint. This is another example of the same pattern: the natural law of tit-for-tat, which works fine in small tribes, now leads us inexorably to genocide.
~
Two weeks since the conversation with my Palestinian friend, and I’ve just gone and seen a film called No Other Land, a chronicle of Israeli demolition of Palestinian villages in an area called Masafer Yatta. Everyone should see this film.
I said that Israel, unlike Hamas, has at least a “positive vision” of living well and prospering, rather than being defined entirely in reaction against the enemy. The villagers of Masafer Yatta also have a positive vision, of raising their families and living a nice human life, free from constant fear. Israel would be a lot more credible if they were not attacking these peaceful villagers all the time—and all of the cruelty and destruction shown in the film took place before October 7.
Observing the Israeli soldiers, I was reminded of Dostoevsky’s insight that sinning against another makes you hate them more. Like the abusive parent whose every sin against their innocent child fills them with evermore hatred towards the child: the living reminder of their own sin and wretchedness. I noticed this pattern in the IDF fellows who come to demolish homes and clip water mains and confiscate building tools the villagers may have spent a year saving for. The women confront them in fed-up desperation: “have you no shame! This is our home! How can you do this and face your God?” I see the soldier and I know what is in his mind. His shackles raise in contempt. Indeed he cannot face God or even himself. Instead he internally hates and mocks the woman standing before him. “Stupid savage cunt, yeah we can come and knock down your house and do whatever the fuck else we want; you’re nothing.” Such a man, having gotten used to habitual sin against his fellow beings, the mere sight of a veiled woman, the sound of her wailing, will come to arouse his baleful contempt. He is possessed, a stranger to his own soul.
At one point in the film, the IDF soldiers come to town and are demolishing some school or something for no reason, and filmmaker Basel Adra starts filming them, and the soldiers recognize him, being aware of his activism, and they start harassing and mocking him: “hey Basel, why don’t you go write something? Yeah, go write about it, you fucking idiot. What else can you do?”
Simone Weil understood violence. “A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves. That is why we are inclined to commit such acts as a way of deliverance.”
You know, this film made me feel a lot of empathy for Hamas. When I watch the Israeli thugs coming in and demolishing these people’s homes under the pretext that their land has now been classified as a “military training area,” I want to kill these guys. I want to make them suffer. I want to bomb their stupid military training area and their houses too. This is a dangerous part of the mind. Once I gave it my attention, things got dark, quick. I thought of ass-raping Netanyahu. Whoa! Where did that come from? Man, there’s a barbarian in me, buried. And this is me, a sheltered Canadian, who enjoys long walks on the beach! Imagine growing up with guns in your face and being totally powerless to resist whatever bullshit these smug implacable sadists have up next!
Even as a little boy I remember desiring to have Hitler in a room and just torture him, to have infinite power over him and use it to hurt him as much as possible. Dostoevsky knows this impulse, and his Elder Zossima warns against it in certain terms:
If the evil-doing of men should arouse your indignation and uncontrollable grief, even to make you wish to revenge yourself upon the evil-doers, fear most of all that feeling; go at once and seek suffering for yourself just as if you were yourself guilty of that villainy.
The film No Other Land centres on Basel Adra’s family and village. I was particularly impressed by his father, Nasser: his energy, his dignity, his stoicism, and his joy. He exemplifies how Zossima concludes his discourse:
The righteous man departs, but his light remains…You are working for the whole; you are acting for the future. Never seek reward, for your reward on earth is great as it is: your spiritual joy which only the righteous find. Fear not the great and the powerful, but be wise and always worthy. Know the right measure, know the right time, get to know it. When you are left in solitude, pray. Love to fall upon the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth ceaselessly and love it insatiably. Love all men, love everything, seek that rapture and ecstacy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. Be not ashamed of that ecstacy, prize it, for it is a gift of God, a great gift, and it is not given to many, but only to the chosen ones.
I suspect that Nasser Adra is one man who has been given this gift of sublime joy to undergird the suffering he must face in this life, and the strength and steadfastness with which he must weather it, for the sake of his family and his people. His is a genuinely heroic task, and God has blessed him with what is necessary.
Nasser builds. He weathers the storm, and he permits himself to fume at the injustice, but he is too strong to give in to the animal urge to kick back, too focused on what matters. So, the bastards come and knock down his house, and he rebuilds it. They tell him he can’t drive, and he walks. They kidnap him and take him to some detention centre for emotional torture, and he waits. When he is released, he betrays no trauma, no indignation—only joy at being back with his family, and good humour about the absurdity of it all. He is the reason why everyone should watch the movie—not only to receive incontrovertible evidence of pure unprovoked brutality on the part of Israel, but to witness the true spirit of Palestine. It’s not Hamas. It’s a noble, righteous, patient father, channeling his strength of will into service, into building, into living, in spite of everything.
Yet even Nasser must have a breaking point—what if he lost his family, for whom he has endured so much? Oh, this would be the ultimate tragedy. Yet we know it has happened time and again, and it forms the emotional core of this conflict, on both sides.
That’s why divine grace is necessary. It’s a lifeline when you’ve nothing left.
Hamas are broken. They will fight until the last man, woman, and child. They would sooner destroy themselves and everyone they’re fighting for, rather than give in to the bastards.
It’s only natural to hate the bastards, and want to make them pay. It’s only natural to get carried away. A guy kills your whole family, and you want to get him back. You want to hurt him as bad as you can. In practice, that means killing his whole family. It’s only natural.
But we are called to acts of love beyond our natural capabilities: to forgive the unforgivable. This heroic act of love transforms the very shape of time.
~
Lately, I tell people I’m a Christian, and there’s often a subtle expectation or explicit invitation for me to make clear that it’s just something that works for me, is all, and I certainly would never dream of imposing it on anyone.
I have taken to saying: no, I think it is true for everyone. I think it is a revealed truth, and the world would be better off if we all got on intimate terms with it.
Islamism, Zionism, and Globalism are all prideful ideologies. This makes them unfit for men, for whom pride is the greatest spiritual danger—the king of sins.
Christianity is the key to our predicament. We genuinely can change the world with forgiveness and love, and this is the only way to do it.
We jaded moderns roll our eyes at talk of forgiveness and love. Is Christianity just a bunch of platitudes? No. The only reason we see them as platitudes is because we take our spiritual inheritance for granted. They are just as new as they were when Christ first spoke and lived them; and we may live them, too, if we choose to follow him. To do the impossible is available to all.
To love your enemy is to prove that you are one: with them, and with God; for only God can forgive the unforgivable. That’s why Christ says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Forgiveness is theosis in motion.
Time bends around the decisive act.
This is the criterion of what is human that has been laid down by Christianity: how a man can be eternal in the moment, how he can act once for all. - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
The physical universe, like ourselves, is a creature of habit. Energy flows through the groove which has already been carved, and in so doing carves it deeper.
Yet we observe also a universe constantly flowering into newness, evolving and reinventing itself along unprecedented lines. Star-bursts into life-forms…not just more star-bursts. What gives?
Terence McKenna saw the universe as an engine for the creation of “novelty”—meaning complexity, emergence, higher-order organization. Following Teilhard de Chardin, he reckoned that the exponential acceleration of novelty is bound to crescendo into some kind of transcendent singularity. But before that, we will see weirdness aplenty. His credo is that of the physicist Haldane: the universe is not just stranger than we imagine—it is stranger than we can imagine! And its telos is to grow stranger still.
Evolution is not linear; novelty comes in waves which are fractal and paradoxical. The flowering and ultimate fulfillment of the old form comes in the guise of its negation. The caterpillar seems to die in the chrysalis.
Weil writes: “Adam and Eve sought for divinity in vital energy: a tree, fruit. But it is prepared for us on dead wood, geometrically squared, where a corpse is hanging.”
If the revelation of the new frontier of novelty came in an expected form, then it would hardly be novelty. Novelty dawns absolutely. Thus, you don’t get a guy who is the strongest guy and is so strong he conquers the whole world and declares himself King of the World—that would merely be the logical conclusion of the existing habitual mode. Instead you get a guy who is the most loving and articulate guy and he gets nailed to a cross and dies. Now that is a story! And wait ‘til you hear what happens next.
Into a world soaked with blood, groaning under the weight of countless tragic generations, the gravity of habit, pain endlessly begetting violence—Christ came, and transcended it all in loving acceptance.
In His mercy, he has revealed to us the only way out of the endless loop of vengeance and death. He is the lighthouse which leads us to shore. And then we find ourselves on a new continent, and our adventure has only just begun.