Searching for God # 22

 Anyone who has been following along in this space will not be surprised to learn that Tolstoy’s explication of the divide between what in theology we call the secular society’s conventions and practices and the religious exhortations. Tolstoy’s framing comes from the ‘state’ and Christ’s Christians taking seriously the Sermon on the Mount.

It is  not only the hypocrisy in which many of us are caught, that interests him, but the devastating impact on personal lives for many caught in a divide between what we all know to be good and healthy for mankind and how we are continuing to ignore, deny, suppress, or even dismiss our ‘better angels’ in favour of conventions that we know are both wrong and dangerously unhealthy.

I intend to build a word-and-thought link between a 1987 piece of writing by James Hillman and the renowned and historic treatise from Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, first published in 1894.

In 1987, James Hillman published the essay, ‘Mars, Arms, Rams, Wars: On  the Love of War’ as part of the collection Facing Apocalypse, edited by V.Andrews, R. Bosnak, and K.W. Goodwin.

Here are some of the words we find in that essay, published again in A Blue Fire, Introduced and Edited by Thomas Moore, 1989:

I believe we can never speak sensibly of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This special state must be ritualistically entered. We must be ‘inducted,’ and war much be ‘declared’ –as one is declared insane, declared married or bankrupt….

My method of heading right in, of penetrating rather than circumambulating or reflecting, is itself martial. So we shall be invoking the god of the topic by this approach to the topic….

In our most elevated works of thought-Hindu and Platonic philosophy- a warrior class is imagined as necessary to the wellbeing of mankind. The class finds its counterpart in nature, in the heart, as virtues of courage, nobility, honour, loyalty, steadfastness of principle, comradely love, so that war is given location not only in class of persons but in a level of human personality organically necessary to the justice of the whole….Love and war have traditionally been coupled in the figures of Venus and Mars, Aphrodite and Ares. This usual allegory is expressed in usual slogans- make love not war, all’s fair in love and war—and in usual oscillating behaviours—rest, recreation and rehabilitation in the whorehouse behind the lines, then return to the all-male  barracks. Instead of these couplings which actually separate Mars and Venus into alternatives, there is a Venusian experience within Mars itself. It occurs in the sensate love of life in the midst of battle, in the care for concrete details built into all martial regulations, in the sprucing, prancing and dandying of the cavalliers (now called boys) on leave. Ar they sons of Mars or of Venus?...

Compared with our background in Europe, Americans are idealistic: war has no place, It should not be. War is not glorious, triumphal, creative as to a warrior class in Europe from Rome and the Normans through the Crusades even to the Battle of Britain. We may be a more violent people but not a warlike people---and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself….’The object of war,’ oy says on General Sherman’s statue in Washington, is a more perfect peace,’ Our so-called double-speak about armaments as ‘peacemakers’ reflect truly how we think. War is bad, exterminate war and keep peace violently: primitive expeditions, preemptive strikes, send in the Marines. More firepower means surer peace. We enact he blind God’s blindness. (Mars Caecus as the Romans called him and Mars insanus, furibundus, omnipotens) like General Grant in the wilderness, like the bombing of Dresden, overkill as a way to end war. (A Blue Fire, pps.180-181-182)

Those are the words and thoughts of a twentieth century Jewish scholar, the founder of archetypal psychology, who considers the atomic bomb and the nuclear age as a tectonic shift in world consciousness given that we all are, now and forever, living under that shadow of nuclear annhiliation.

Tolstoy, whose conception of Christianity is not mystical, but almost generic and inherent in the consensus to which he believes all humans are endowed, as epithets depicting the Christian theology.

Here are some of Tolstoy’s prophetic, poetic and deeply Christian words:

Not to speak of all the other contradictions between modern life and the conscience, the permanently armed condition of Europe together with its profession of Christianity is alone enough to drive any man to despair, to doubt the sanity of mankind and to terminate an existence in this senseless and brutal world. This contradiction, which is a quintessence of all the other contradictions, is so terrible that to life and to take part in it is only possible if one does not think of it—if one is able to forget it.

What! All of us, Christians, not only profess to love one another, but do actually life one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse-we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness and find in this closeness the meaning of life!---and tomorrow some crazy rule will say some stupidity, and another with answer in the same spirit, and then I must to expose myself to being murdered, and murder men—who have done me no harm—and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote

contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which is not only probable but an inevitably certainty. To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man our of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end….(TKOGIWY, p.131- 132)

And as reinforcement to his argument, we read these words:

People are astonished that every year there are sixty thousand cases of suicide in Europe, and those only the recognized and recorded cases—and excluding Russia and Turkey; but one ought to be surprised  that there are so few. Every man of the present day, if we go deep enough into the contradiction between his conscience and his life, is in a state of despair. (Ibid, p.131)*

Originally written in 1894,  they could just as easily and justifiably be included on the editorial pages of major newspapers around the globe today.

The world, and certainly the Western so-called Christian, world hardly needs another anti-war screed, at a time when wars are killing thousands, wounding and leaving millions more homeless and hopeless and the so-called Christian leaders are justifying the closing of borders to the same people that suffer, innocently and without having in any way caused those wars.

In his deplorable speech to the United Nations, the American president claimed that some 53-4% of all prisoners in German prisons are foreign nationals. Using that as a reason for his outright, illegal, unjustified deportation of immigrants, refugees and the undocumented from America, the president would be on more solid ground if he were to examine the causes of the displacement of millions.

War, high among those causes, poverty, disease, lack of education, health care, clean water and terror comprise only a partial list. And the determined exploits of leaders bent on the accomplishment of their military murderings, none of which are amenable to any kind of negotiated settlement add significantly to the causes.

Any discussion of addressing the root causes of war, however, is unlikely to include the notions expressed courageously by Hillman. And so, the pleadings of those who cry for peace, as if it were an ideal justified by its own existence, will continue to go unheeded, even unheard, and certainly considered irrelevant.

While Tolstoy promotes the developmental notion that the Christian path of and to brotherhood of all mankind, as we ‘transition’ (recall he wrote in 1894) from what he calls the ‘social’ stage, following the individual stage of human development, and his ‘stages’ have both demographic and intellectual merit, many will be despondent that it takes so long to transition.

Indeed, given the tidal wave of information about the immediate situation, 24-7-365, we are drowning in data points often failing to see the forest for the trees.

Both Hillman, from a psychological and Tolstoy from a Christian perspective, have hit upon one of the world’s most heinous hypocrisies, contradictions and what amounts to a shared ‘psychic pathology’ of the anima mundi.

If we were each to sit in front of our personal private mirror, and to face the question of how and why we have been inoculated into the social, secular and war mentality, that has, in so many different variations and iterations commandeered leaders a citizens alike, would we not likely come to the conclusion that to shift our personal loyalties from war, murder, killing, weapons, revenge, retribution, lies and the ignominious motivations and actions, words and policies of the leaders of various war machines, we might enhance our chances of protecting and preserving the civilization and the planet we need to keep it alive?

Anyone in doubt?

*In 2019 the VA released it national Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, which stated that the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times the rate of non-veteran adults, and between 2008 and 2017 6000 or more veterans committed suicide. (Wikipedia)