By Robert Royal
Let us begin with a piercing question: Are we, almost all of us nowadays, Sadducees? If your knowledge of the groups that appear in the New Testament is fuzzy, we could put it this way: Are almost all of us now, even Christians who claim otherwise, basically like the Sadducees in Jesus’ time, dismissing eternal life and thinking that physical death is the absolute end and the worst of evils? If so, a war can do us a service because it reveals, in its terrible and severe way, the state of our souls.
War is hell. But do Hell—a place of eternal war—or Heaven—the place of the only true and lasting peace—play any real role in our minds and hearts during a time like this? It may seem insensitive to pose the question amid so much immediate suffering, but it is precisely because of those human evils that the deepest questions come to the forefront.
As C.S. Lewis put it in a similar era: «War does not create an absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it».
No one should want war except as an absolute necessity for the gravest reasons. Totalitarians love war because they often think it is a remedy for the flabbiness that overtakes people when things are going well. Mussolini said that modern Italians needed a «bloodbath» to recover their ancient discipline and virtue. And he tried to give them one. We already know how that turned out, just like other programs of renewal through war.
Peace and prosperity are goods in themselves, but they are not always good for us. Europe’s dependence on the United States for its security since World War II, for example, has turned it into a continent that finds it hard to muster the will or allocate resources to defend itself. Many Europeans—and regrettably not a few Americans now—even doubt whether our civilization is worth defending.
A Christian should not be surprised. «Man in prosperity does not understand: he is like the beasts that perish» (Psalm 49:20). It does not have to be that way. We can be wise even in prosperity. But both reason and revelation warn of the dangers.
At this moment, we are rightly concerned not only with the justice of the Iran war, but also with its possible spread, along with terrorism. And we try to imagine what a «successful» end might look like. We cannot help doubting what politicians and the media tell us. But in all this, do we lose sight of the truth that neither war nor peace is the last word for us?
Our Christian ancestors did not need to ask this basic question because, until very recently, bodily death was not considered the worst thing. There are things worth dying for. Most people knew, anyway from daily experience, that our years on earth are drastically limited, war or no war. And that the next life is, for better or worse, forever.
The traditional classification of sins and virtues reflected this. We quote Dante a lot on this page because… one simply must do so, for many reasons. In addition to the sheer imaginative beauty of his Divine Comedy, he makes it easy to see crucial distinctions, Christian distinctions, about the state of the soul, both in this life and the next.
For example, sins of violence and murder are, of course, punished in Inferno, but only halfway down in Hell. There are good reasons in the Christian tradition for this. In the correct Christian understanding, we are a composite of body and soul. Murder or indiscriminate killing in war are certainly horrible. But a Certain Person with Authority took care to say (twice): «Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell» (Matthew 10:28; Luke 12:4-5).
We rarely hear this these days, even from the highest Church authorities. Which is why both just war and capital punishment now appear as «inadmissible» to some ecclesiastical authorities. However, if you believe in eternal life and the greater importance of the soul than physical life, there are still many things worse than bodily death, which comes to all of us, even without war.
There are graver sins: against the mind, the soul, and the spirit, the higher exclusive elements of human nature. These can be attacked in many ways, which Dante places even further down in Hell than violence and even murder: flattery and seduction, simony and schism, divination, fraud, false counsel, falsification. And worst of all, betrayal of the soul’s own loyalties to family, country, guests, superiors, and God himself (Lucifer’s specialty).
If this shocks you, perhaps it is because we have been so fortunate in a worldly sense that we assume peace and security are the normal conditions on earth, and war and uncertainty rare exceptions.
Again, that Person with Authority says:
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there will be famines, and earthquakes in various places. And all this will be the beginning of sorrows.
Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake… many will then fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray; and because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:6-13).
None of this, of course, should make us complacent about violence, and much less about war. But it should make us reflect on unrealistic beliefs such as that «dialogue» or politics are remedies for the human condition in a fallen world. And lead us to an examination of conscience about whether we find ourselves among the many who have been deceived and grown cold, or among those who, despite everything, still love what truly saves.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West y A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.