cell913blog.com #75

 Who among us is not still struggling with headlines of war….in Ukraine, In Gaza, now in Lebanon, and in Israel…in the Sudan and ……?

In the Middle East, particularly, the conflict between Islam and Jews, seems not merely intractable, historic, epic and endless and  deeply rooted in their respective holy writings.

In his outstanding work, Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell, writes a full chapter entitled, ‘Mythologies of War and Peace’.

He writes:

It is for an obvious reason far easier to name example of mythologies of war than mythologies of peace: for not only has conflict between groups been normal to human experience, but there is also the cruel fact to be recognized that killing is the precondition of all living whatsoever: life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist…..(Rather) it has been those who have been reconciled to the nature of life on this earth (who have survived). Plainly and simply: it has been the nations, tribes, and peoples bread to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to descendants. (Campbell, op. cit. p. 174) 

Integral both to his thesis and to his personal biography, are these lines:

One of the first books that I had the privilege of editing was of a Navaho war ceremonial, accompanied by its series of sand paintings (or rather, in this case, ‘pollen’ paintings, made of the pulverized petals of flowers…..The name of the ceremony was ‘Where the Two Came to Their Father.’ It told of the journey of the Navaho twin heroes to the home of the sun, their father, to procure from him the magic and weapons with which to eliminate the monsters that were at that time at large in the world. For it is the basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one’s own people.  (Campbell op. cit. p. 176-177)

While our papers and screens are replete with images of war from Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Israel and Sudan and their collective impact is to churn the intestines and the nervous systems of millions of what were once dubbed, ‘peaceniks,’ ( an often disparaging word to depict an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention, also a pacifist), some people continue to uphold a Greek notion of empathy for the enemy. On the website, romankrznaric.com, in a piece entitled. Empathy with the Enemy, this Australian philosopher writes this:

In the spring of 472 BC the people of Athens queued up to see the latest play written by Aeschylus, the founder of Greek tragedy. The Persians was an unusual production, and not only because it was based on an historical event rather than the usual legends of the gods. What must have really shocked the audience was that it was told through the eyes of their sworn enemy, the Persians, who only eight years earlier had fought the Athenians at the Battle of Salamis…..The audience is encouraged to feel the personal sorrows of their military rivals and to see the battle from the perspective of the vanquished barbarians. Although some Athenians watching the unfolding drama may have been gloating over their victory, Aeschylus was asking them to undertake the radical act of empathizing with the defeated enemy just at their moment of triumph. Even more striking is the fact that Aeschylus himself fought the Persians at the earlier Battle of Marathon, where his own brother had been killed. Perhaps when writing the play he was remembering that while 191 Athenians fell in the conflict, 6,400 Persians lost their lives. The imagined cries of Persian mothers and widows may have been haunting him ever since.

This attitude of empathy for the enemy, however, is very different from the attitude of the major Abrahamic religions to their own wars.

From Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By, we read this:

But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a Thou (to use Martin Buber’s term), but a thing, an ‘It.’  (p. 180-181)

Campbell quotes from Deuteronomy:

When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens up to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites the Cannanites and the Perissites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God had commanded. (Deuteronomy 20:0-18) (Campbell Myths to Live By, p.181-182)

Campbell continues:

And of course…the Arabs have their divinely authorized war mythology too. For they too are a people who, according to their legend, are of the seed of Abraham: the progeny of Ishmael, his first and elder son. Moreover, according to this history, confirmed in the Koran, it was Abraham and Ishmael, before the birth of Isaac, who built in Mecca the sanctuary of the Ka’aba, which is the uniting central symbol and shrine of the entire Arab world and of all Islam. The Aabs revere and derive their beliefs from the same prophets as the Hebrews. They honor Abraham, honor Moses. They greatly honor Solomon. They honor Jesus too, as a prophet. Mohammed, however, is their ultimate prophet, and from him-who was a considerable warrior himself—they have derived their fanatic mythology and unrelenting war in God’s name.

The jihad, the duty of the Holy War, is a concept developed from certain passages of the Koran which, during the period of the Great Conquests (from the seventh to tenth centuries), were interpreted as defining the bounden duty of every Muslim male who is free, of full age, in full possession of his intellectual powers, and physically fit for service. ‘Fighting is prescribed for you,’ we read in the Koran Sura 2, verse 216. ‘True you have an antipathy to it: however, it is possible that your antipathy is to something that is nevertheless good for you. God knows, and you know not,’ ‘To fight in the cause of Truth is one of the highest forms of charity,’ I read in a commentary to this passage. ‘What can you offer that is more precious than your own life?’ All lands not belonging to ‘the territory of Islam’ (dar al-Islam) are to be conquered and are known, therefore as ‘the territory of war’ (dar al-harb). ‘I am commanded,’ the Prophet is reported to have said, ‘to fight until men bear witness, there is no god but God and his Messenger is Mohammed.’ According to the ideal, one campaign a year, at least, must be undertaken by every Moslem prince against unbelievers. However, where this proves to be no longer possible, it suffices if any army, efficiently maintained, is kept trained and ready for the jihad. (Campbell, Myths to Live By, pps. 184-185)

Campbell then proceeds to posit the Jews as the target of Islam.

And the Jews, ‘the People of the Book,….hold a special place in this (Moslem0 thinking, since it was they who first received God’s Word but then -according to Mohammed’s view) repeatedly forsook it, backsliding, rejecting, and even slaying God’s later prophets. In the Koran they are repeatedly addressed and threatened: of which passages I shall cite but one, from Sura 17, verses 4-8 (and wherever the word ‘We’ appears in this text, the reference is to God; where ‘you,’ to the Jews; while the ‘Book’ is the Bible):

And We gave clear warning to the Children of Israel in the Book that twice they do mischief on the earth and be elated with mighty arrogance, and twice they would be punished. When the first warnings came to pass, We sent against you Our servants given to terrible warfare (the Babylonians 685 B.C.): they entered the very inmost parts of your homes; and it was a warning completely fulfilled. Then did we grant you the Return as against them: We gave you increase in resources and sons, and made you the more numerous in manpower. If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil ye did it against yourselves. So when the second of the warnings came to pass, we permitted your enemies to disfigure your faces and to enter your Temple (the Romans 70A.D.) as it had been entered before, and to visit with destruction all that fell into their power. It may be that your Lord may het show Mercy unto you; but if ye ever revert to your sins, we shall revert to Our punishments: and We have made Hell a prison for those who reject the Faith. (Campbell, Myths to Live By, p.185)

Some have argued that the deeply embedded notion, construct, belief and theology of monotheism, the belief in the existence of one god, or in the oneness of God. (Britannica.com), a position held by the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, has contributed to, perhaps even injected ‘steroids’ of discipline, commitment, passion, and morality into devotees of the three faiths. Alternatively, it might be posited that faith ennobles its devotee to aspire to, envision, and strive to attain, and to ‘fight’ for, with, and under the command of, the deity of that faith.

Britannica.com further articulates a social, intellectual, cultural and even psychological minefield in the dichotomy of monotheism and polytheism.

Monotheism and polytheism are often thought of in rather simple terms—e.g. as merely numerical contrast between the one and the many. The history of religions, however, indicates many concepts that should warn against oversimplification in this matter. There is no historical material to prove that one system of belief is older than the other, although many scholars hold that monotheism is a higher form of religion and therefore must be a later development, assuming that what is higher came later. Moreover, it is not the oneness but the uniqueness of God that counts in monotheism; one god is not affirmed as the logical opposite of many gods but as an expression of divine might and power.

Whether in and through a shift from a literal, bilateral, numerical, empirical perception, epistemology and attitude of monotheism to polytheism, at least as a psychological matter, or a more ephemeral and metaphoric notion of monotheism as ‘divine might and power,’ without the historical accretions and barnacles of exclusivity, absolutism, self-righteousness and the need to ‘war’ on behalf of a deity and one’s faith in that deity, we continue to recognize and confront the inescapable notion:  life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist.

There is also an inescapable unifying force in that reality; we are all intimately, intricately and often unconsciously engaged in “life” in which we dwell in the between of literal flora/fauna and all of their respective complexities and the also inescapable image (whether metaphoric and aesthetic or religious) of a force, energy, mystery and numinosity of the divine.

And how, when where and in what  measure we bring, insert, activate or infuse our imaginations into that ‘between’ will tell us much about our relationships to ourselves and all others on the planet we share…there is no PLANET B!