Chapter 13

Blessed Are The Peacemakers

From the Book

Transformation in Christ

By

Dietrich von Hildebrand

Sophia Institute Press, Manchester, New Hampshire

PEACE is a basic word of the Gospel; it occupies a central place in Christian revelation. Indeed, it is the primal word addressed to mankind by the message of the New Covenant: "Glory to God in the highest: and on earth peace to men of good will" (Luke 2: 14). Again, in His parting speech to the disciples, Our Lord says: "Peace I leave with you: my peace I give unto you" (John 14:27).

The object of the Christians' Advent longing was, above all, the Messiah, the bringer of peace, who would heal the strife of the world; the strife that, more tangibly than anything else, expresses the disharmony of a fallen creation. A touching desire and hope for peace cries out in the vision of Isaiah the prophet: "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb: and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. The calf and the lion and the sheep shall abide together: and a little child shall lead them" (Isa. 11:6). And the Psalmist sings: "Justice and peace have kissed" (Ps. 84:11).

At Christmas, the Church hails the Savior as princeps pacis, Prince of Peace. In the High Mass of earlier times, the faithful

before receiving Holy Communion exchanged the osculum pacis - kiss of peace -as a sign that all discord among them had been obliterated. On Holy Thursday, in the Liturgy of the Washing of the Feet, the Church sings: "Let malicious upbraidings cease; let wranglings cease. And may Christ, our God, be in the midst of us." Pax is the motto of the Benedictines; Pax et bonum, that of the Franciscans.

Peace is a central theme of Christian revelation

No one who does not love peace as a high good, and whose heart is not scorched with pain at the sight of strife or by the

thought of disharmony, has ever really understood the Gospels or can ever truly love Christ. Our imitation of Christ -and the more so, our transformation in Christ -necessarily involves a love for peace, a concord of hearts, a horror of all forms of discord, disunion, and dissension.

Nothing evokes more constant blame from St. Paul in his epistles than the dissensions et contentions arising in the Christian communities. Again and again he urgently admonishes the faithful to keep peace among one another: "I beg of Evodia and I beseech Syntyche to be of one mind in the Lord" (Phil. 4:2). It is a specific stigma of abysmal separation from God to maintain a quarrelsome and cantankerous attitude, a morbid delight in conflicts and bickerings, a perverse pleasure derived from disharmony.

However, an essential love for peace and aversion to strife is not enough. It does not by itself vouch for our being actually able to behave as peacemakers and to overcome the temptations of enmity in the evolving situations of life. The immanent logic of various events and relationships, with their autonomous demands and the interests implied in them, are only too apt to entangle in discords and conflicts even such men as essentially love and seek peace.

To begin with, we must make a fundamental distinction. The dangers to peace arising from a multiplicity of social contacts and oppositions require a different treatment, according as they originate in a situation whose theme is supplied by our interests as such (even though taken in a wide sense) or in a situation in which we are striving for some high objective value -in the extreme case, the kingdom of God itself. Let us next consider the first type of situation.

Dangers lie in a peace rooted in our own interests

There is a kind of people who, though by nature peace loving and far from quarrelsome, are so touchy as to feel insulted and wronged on the slightest provocation. The sense of being injured will incite them to acute outbreaks of anger or to more latent reactions of ill temper and sulking and thus involve them in clashes and disagreements.

Against this susceptibility, which is wholly incompatible with a life conceived in the spirit of Christ, we must wage a relentless fight. Whenever we feel offended, we should at once examine before God whether we are not really only indulging our susceptibility, without having suffered any objective wrong at all.

Perhaps the "offender" has done no worse than tell a truth which irritates us because it is unpalatable to our pride. Or again, it may be our jealousy that makes us fretful. Our egocentric squeamishness, too, may often present other people's actions or utterances in a false and distorting light. Sometimes, again, it is our distrusting disposition that incites us to look for a sting of insult or an edge of malevolence in whatever people say. I t may also happen that a stranger's words unintentionally strike upon a sore spot in our emotional system, an inferiority complex for instance. We then feel offended and unjustly put him down as tactless.

In view of these numerous possibilities of error, it is a Christian's duty always to examine, with a wholesome mistrust of himself, the objective side of the question when he feels wronged or insulted. Confronting his feelings and their occasion with God, he must attain to a freedom of mind enabling him to ascertain, with his vision un-blurred by any subjective biases, whether he has suffered any wrong in the objective sense of the term. If this proves not to be the case, he must wholly and thoroughly dissolve his rancor - have it "shattered upon Christ," as the Rule of St. Benedict puts it -and approach the misjudged "offender" with particular friendliness.

A great many people shirk this duty because, in their general reliance upon their nature, they implicitly trust its reactions and

unquestioningly interpret their moods as the index of objective fact. They deem their subjective state of mind the more sensitive instrument, whose findings cannot be tested and corrected by the clumsier methods of intellectual analysis. This overvaluation of one's subjective impressions is a tremendous mistake. or in truth, their legitimate role is not to outrun or supersede objective thinking but merely to provide it with initial stimuli and with part of its materials.

We must forgive all objective wrongs we suffer

If, on the other hand, an objective wrong has been inflicted upon us, we must endeavor truly to forgive it. To be sure, the

experiences we have had with a person (inasmuch as they disclose to us the general defects of his character, apart from our personal interests on which they have happened to impinge) may warrant on our part the drawing of certain consequences.

We may decide no longer to trust him. But we must not let a state of conflict establish itself. In confrontation with Christ and remembering His words, "Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you" (Matt. 5:44), as well as the many wrongs we have ourselves perpetrated upon others, we must truly and honestly dissolve all rancor, all embitterment, all enmity.

We must definitively expunge the debt our offender has contracted towards us. We should face him in serene charity, without any sullenness or cramped self - consciousness. The negative consequences we cannot help drawing in his regard must, without any trace of irritation and asperity, exclusively imply a noble and serene sorrow.

Ignoring objective evils does not establish true peace

Moreover, the attitude of rancorous enmity is not the only antithesis to the Christian spirit of forgiveness. Another attitude

opposed to it is that of simply ignoring the wrong inflicted upon us, as though nothing had happened. This aberration may result from laziness, from faintness of heart, or from a sickly, mawkish clinging to outward peace. We hold our comfort too dear to fight it out with our aggressor; or again, we feel terrified at the thought of any tension or hostility, and fear lest a sharp reaction on our part should exasperate the adversary; or perhaps we yield just out of respect for the abstract idol of peace.

This is a kind of behavior far remote from the genuine love of peace or from a genuine spirit of forgiveness. It can never achieve the true harmony of peace, but at best a superficial cloaking of enmity, a mood of false joviality which drags our souls towards the peripheral.

For his own good. To pass over it in silence may easily encourage him in his bad dispositions. Also, people who behave thus fail to consider the moral damage that their spinelessness is likely to inflict on others. It is very often necessary to draw a person's attention to the wrong he has done us -in fact, necessary

But we cannot reproach him to good purpose -that is, without provoking strife, unless we have ourselves attained to that serene attitude cleansed of all impulsive resentment; in other words, unless we have truly forgiven him. When we have risen above the narrow logic of the situation and ceased to face our fellow man as an antagonist with whom we are locked in strife on a battleground; when we have acquired in Christ that holy freedom, that humility before God and the human soul -His image -which confers upon us a sovereign detachment from the immanency of the situation, then only shall we be able to correct our offender in a manner really conducive to his good. Again, when we have risen above the mood of regarding his awareness or admission of his wrong as a satisfaction to ourselves, then only shall we be able to ponder judiciously and to decide pertinently whether or not it is necessary for us to remonstrate wiili him for his good.

Peace between friends requires that all wrongs be confronted and forgiven

All this refers to our disagreements with comparative strangers, persons with whom we are not linked by close bonds of friendship or love. Where such bonds do exist, the case is essentially different. Here it is strictly required by the logos of the relationship that our partner shall recognize and regret the wrong he has done to us. Here we must not quit the common level on which we are joined with him, for by so doing we should act against the spit of the relation that unites us, and indeed, implicitly disavow our friendship. In this case, the oilier person has a legitimate claim to the continuance of our being partners.

Most certainly we must forgive him; tool but here we must desire that he recognize and repent of his wrong, not merely for his own good but for the sake of our relationship itself -of the restoration of that intimate union of hearts which essentially demands the clearing up of all misunderstandings and the healing of all disharmonies. Format union of hearts is an objective good which we must guard and cultivate, and which imposes certain obligations on us.

True, here as in other cases, we must not let the autonomous mechanism of the situation run away with us and must carefully refrain from repaying an injury in kind. As victims of an aggression hic et nunc, we must - under these specific conditions, too -- detach ourselves from the situation of the moment and answer all gestures of irritation, all moral blows with kindness and charity only.

Yet, here we can on no account content ourselves with an act of inward forgiveness: at the proper moment, we must in love draw our friend's attention to his wrong and maintain our desire for his redressing it. However, we cannot do this in the right way before we have truly forgiven him, before all bitterness and irritation on our part have yielded to a purified, unselfish pain.

Our admonition should not bear, properly speaking, the note of a reproach. It should rather be in the character of a humble and amicable exposition of our grief, a gentle invitation to our friend to consider the matter in a valid perspective and to collect himself anew, taking his start from that incident on a plane of spiritual earnestness and love. Nevertheless, it remains true that the full harmony implied by the objective logos of the relationship is not reestablished before our friend has understood and admitted his wrong, until he has asked our pardon for it.

To insist on this condition is not to postpone but to uphold the value of peace. By so acting, we still keep aloof from strife. Our demand that our friend revise his conduct springs from our longing for an unsullied harmony and an enduring intimacy in our relationship with him; that is to say, for peace - perfect and undisturbed.

Ways of dealing with violations of our rights

The safeguarding of peace presents an even more difficult problem when the offense in question is not merely one against

charity -an act of unkindness or discourtesy, say -but an infringement of our rights, which we cannot refrain from defending.

To take a few typical cases -somebody assumes a patronizing attitude towards us and would illegitimately restrain our freedom of decision or is about to appropriate something that by rights belongs to us, or again, arrogates to himself certain claims on third parties who are really under our supervision: gives orders, for instance, which it is our exclusive right to issue, and the like. We cannot brook such things in all circumstances, let alone permanently; yet on the other hand, our insistence on our rights obviously entails the danger of dissension and conflict.

In such cases, we must begin by forming an unbiased view of the matter, so as to ascertain whether, objectively speaking, it is really we and not the supposed offender who is in the right, or whether the problem is not a complex one, with rights and wrongs in some way divided. On no account must we simply abandon ourselves to the natural automatism of our defensive reactions. Before deciding on our course, we must arrive at a detached judgment, which we should maintain as though it were not ourselves but a third party whose rights were encroached upon.

When, in confrontation with Christ, we have acquired an inward readiness to renounce the right thus challenged, should that be God's will, when we have performed the mental act of putting ourselves in our antagonist's place and envisaging the matter with roles reversed, as it were, and so gained the conviction that the right we attribute to ourselves is indubitably valid and not merely a putative one -then only have we created the necessary condition for taking action in defense of our claim, should further considerations decide us to do so.

Sometimes, the situation being unequivocal, it is very easy to arrive at such an impartial and sober judgment; in other cases it is apt to be more difficult. Having made sure, then, that our rights have in fact been interfered with, we must further examine before God whether the right in question is of such objective value as to justify us in risking peace in order to vindicate it. To a Christian, the mere fact that some right of his has actually been tampered with does not by itself constitute a ground for conjuring up the danger of strife. In many cases it may be more pleasing to God to renounce our legitimate claim; particularly, sometimes, in controversies concerning our material possessions.

On other occasions, however, it may be our duty to take up the challenge: thus, for instance, when somebody is bent on curtailing our legitimate freedom of decisions. In such cases we must oppose the encroachment, and therefore cannot shape our conduct with a view to avoiding a conflict at any cost. For our freedom is not ours to give away; it has been entrusted to us by God as an essential instrument for us to do His Will.

Even in the midst of conflict, we must remain eager for peace

Still, whenever we have to defend our rights, we must do so in such a fashion that we avoid getting caught in the self enclosed automatism of conflict. Steering clear of all irritation and malice, we must always preserve that inner freedom -that spirit of detachment -which looks upon everything in the perspective of God's will and of objective right, as though the rightful claims of an unidentified third party, and not one's own, were concerned.

As a first step, we should try amicably to persuade the offender to desist from his course; if this attempt fails, we should ask a third party to arbitrate the conflict. Again and again we should endeavor before God to evoke in ourselves that charitable attitude, free from all admixture of personal enmity, which makes us experience discord as a grievous thing.

We ought never to think ourselves dispensed from the essential pursuit of peace - justified, that is to say, because of the unreasonableness of our adversary, in giving free rein to the autonomous dynamism of conflict and tolerating in ourselves an essentially inimical attitude toward him.

Every further step imposed on us by the aim of protecting our right should impress us with pain. We must never lose our awareness of a fundamental duty of charity in regard to the person in question. Never, in particular, must the immanent evolution of the conflict (which, once set in motion, cannot be stifled so far as the objective order of events is concerned) come to determine our moral orientation. We must not be seduced into enjoying the wrangle or the blows we may manage to inflict on our antagonist. In other words, it is not enough that we ponder the matter before God at the beginning of the struggle, so as to decide whether we should embark upon it at all. During its entire course we must continue confronting ourselves with God again and again, lest its autonomous dialectic should become the law of our inward attitude.

Even though engaged in a conflict we could not possibly avoid, we must remain lovers of peace, who would at any time prefer a peaceful solution to a victory over the adversary obtained by means howsoever licit.

Oversensitivity to one's rights can be a vice

Notwithstanding the fact that in certain cases we are bound to defend our rights, we must never allow our mere displeasure at being threatened in some right of ours to become a motive of our conduct. There are people who feel upset by the fact alone that their sphere of rights is trespassed upon, though the offense referred to some good about which they care but little. Such a person will, for instance, if living in a tenement house, resent his neighbor's indulging in some noisy occupation (beating carpets, say) outside the hours legally reserved for such work, not because he is sensitive to noise but in view of the disrespect for his rights involved in the thoughtless neighbor's behavior. Or again, it arouses his anger when a stranger takes his seat in a railway carriage, though there be other empty seats nearby just as convenient.

Such people, then, jealously watch over the respect shown to their rights as such, independently of the interest they actually take in the good that their right happens to cover in the given case. The fact is that they attach an immense weight to the question of whether their person is treated with due esteem, which implies a scrupulous respect for their rights. Thus, if some property of theirs is stolen, they are much less grieved by the loss of that good than shocked by the sacrilegious interference with their range of rights. Hence, it does not lessen their fury if, owing to insurance, they suffer no material damage through the theft.

Something of this abstract sensitiveness about one's rights is present in practically all of us. The saints alone are entirely free of it. However, it is inconsistent with the ethos of the true Christian and should be diligently repressed. For, apart from its constituting a specific source of discord, it obviously harbors a residuum of proud self assertion and of petty self importance.

This attitude, again, must be precluded from contributing to the motivation of our conduct and tinging our state of mind in cases when we are compelled to resist aggression. Even should we deem it necessary to uphold some right of ours merely in order to curb the insolence of a reckless aggressor and prevent the establishment of a precedent that would place us in a false situation relative to him, we must remain inwardly free of that sensitiveness concerning our rights, and make our claim valid in a manner as though it were somebody else's.

Cowardly acquiescence is not the love of peace

Of course, as has been pointed out above, a spineless disposition to abandon one's rights is no more in keeping with the true love of peace than is the obsession with one's rights as warned against here. Not to defend one's rights, out of sheer cowardice or love of comfort, has nothing to do with the true spirit of peace. For these chickenhearted characters who would swallow any insult do not derive the principle of their conduct from a response to value, it is not the true value of peace that attracts them. They automatically obey the inclination of their nature, to which it comes easier to yield a right or to lose a possession than to sustain any conflict.

Not unlike a suggestible person who without critical reflection adopts alien opinions and outlooks just because he is exposed to their contact, these weaklings surrender anything for the asking, not on the ground of any conscious deliberation or of any reasoned conviction that would make them prefer surrender to strife as the lesser evil, but because they succumb to the dynamic superiority of others before they could even make an express decision. Such are the "helpless softies," pushed aside or exploited by anybody coming their way, incapable of opposing any resistance (independently of any question of value, nay, even of the question as to pleasantness and unpleasantness), a defenseless prey to any attack.

The kind of peaceable souls we have just been describing lack that basic response to value which is a prime condition for all true love of pace. They are unable, therefore, to ponder the essential problem as to whether their yielding does moral damage to the aggressor or not. For this, too, we must examine before -in addition to the question as to the value of the threatened good - before we decide between offering resistance or abstaining from it for the sake of peace. Our renunciation may encourage the offender in his unrighteous course, and habituate him to disregard the rights of others to the detriment of many, and above all, of his own soul.

Even in conflict we must maintain inward peace

It is clear, then, that true love of peace cannot dispense us from fighting for our own rights. There is no commandment enjoining man to behave peacefully in all circumstances and to abstain invariably from struggle and strife. It can be our duty to defend some right of ours.

Yet, "blessed are the peacemakers" implies two demands upon us: first, that we shall not decide to engage in a struggle unless, having examined the case in conspectu Dei and in a state of full inward peace, we are convinced that it is our duty to uphold our right.

Secondly, that even in the course of a conflict, which we had to take upon ourselves, we shall abide in a state of inward peace; that our attitude shall always remain a detached one, undefiled by bitterness and rancor, connoting no enmity but, on the contrary, charitable kindness towards are adversary, that we shall experience the conflict as a great evil, as a heavy cross we have to bear in pain.

In other words, so far as our state of mind is concerned, we must wage the conflict as though we waged it not. During all its phases, without ever allowing ourselves to be submerged by the blind automatism of strife, we must keep alive in us the longing for peace and, as far as our duty to right permits it, the immediate readiness for peace.

The spirit of peace may sometimes call us to fight for the kingdom of God

So much for the case where we must protect our rights against an aggressor. Let us turn now to the other type of situation: when we have to take our stand in defense of an objective value as such, in the supreme case, the kingdom of God itself. Here, evidently, to evade the struggle is much more difficult. For, mindful of the words of Our Lord, "I came not to send peace, but the sword" (Matt. 10:34), we should be warriors for Christ. The holy Church on earth is called ecclesia militaris ("the Church militant"). We cannot at the same time hunger and thirst after justice -an inherent basic attitude of the true Christian -and be at universal peace with the doers of evil and the unjust. The meek St. John the Evangelist goes so far as to advise the faithful against greeting heretics (2 John 10~11).

How are we to reconcile our character as a miles Christi (a "warrior of Christ"), who in St. Paul's words shall proclaim the

divine truth opportune, importune, and intrepidly oppose or even combat evil, with our love for peace and our eagerness to avoid all strife?

In order to solve this difficulty, we must first of all understand that an outward truce with evil- that is to say, a passive toleration of all objective wrong, an attitude of silence and of letting things pass which in some circumstances has the appearance of consent and sometimes actually results in consent --- can never derive from a love of true peace. For the real value of peace resides in its being an outgrowth of love and an expression of genuine harmony.

The unison we pretend to establish with evil- the attitude of coolly allowing a power of wrong to unfold -neither rests on actual love nor reflects true harmony. Rather it is a product of weakness and involves a defilement with evil, a participation in the wrongdoer's guilt. Through our feeble submission to evil we merely increase the disharmony that lies in evil as such and aggravate the discord that is implied in all evil, in all wrong that offends God: a discord deeper than the one implied in the sheer fact of conflict, however fierce.

It is, on the contrary, our struggle against evil that must be recognized as a necessary consequence of a true love of peace inasmuch as it also means a struggle against discord and an endeavor to limit its empire. It is not in our power to prevent evil from raising its head at this or that point, but we must strive to restrict its reign within the narrowest limits possible or else we connive at its expansion an thus actually contribute to the evil of discord. God alone, not peaceable behavior as such, is the absolute good. Our fight for the cause of God is necessarily also a fight for true peace, seeing that the latter coincides with the victory of the kingdom of God. Therefore, the spirit of peace which must animate a true Christian will never restrain us from fighting for the kingdom of God. It will determine a basic difference in quality between that fight and merely natural conflict.

Our struggle for the kingdom of God must not be mixed with self-interest

In this context, again, a true Christian should first examine whether his zeal for the kingdom of God is not alloyed with some

sort of personal interests, for that might easily be the case. Only too often, the fact that something objectively valuable is at stake provides us with a pretext for ruthlessly safeguarding our own interests on the strength of their incidental nexus with that higher cause. That is why it is necessary, before taking action, to consider the elements of the situation carefully before God -mistrusting our nature and the possible subconscious currents in our mind - and to probe our motives until we have gained a full certitude with regard to their character.

Be it understood: the fact that, in a given case, our struggle for the kingdom of God happens to converge with the line of our personal interests need not -nay, in certain circumstances, must not -prevent us from conducting that struggle to the limit of our forces. But neither must that fact be allowed to tinge in any way, to modify the quality of our combative attitude. We must carefully keep one thing apart from the other, and never for a moment stick the pretentious label of a fight for the kingdom of God on what is really an action meant to sub serve our own welfare. In no wise must our pure., selfless, serene zeal for the kingdom of God be contaminated with the base coin of self assertion.

We must not even struggle as if it were our own cause

Nor is that all. Even though we are standing for the kingdom of God, with no trace of personal preoccupations tarnishing our zeal- though we were acting perhaps, in effect, against our personal interests -the ethos of our struggle might still be overlain with aspects that render it closely akin to a conflict waged on behalf of one's own interests but under high sounding watchwords.

Thus, this is the case if we wage the fight for the kingdom of God after the fashion of a fight on our own behalf, making it our cause in a qualitative sense, conducting it, as it were, with the massive reaction of our nature. Many men, even good men, pursue an aim conceived purely in terms of objective value, simply because they have set it up as an aim and devoted themselves to it as though some private and passionately desired aim were at stake. Entirely subject to the sovereign automatism of their formal purpose, they conduct the struggle with all their natural register of moods; with all the harshness, bitterness, irritation, and petulance of one who is bent on asserting himself.

To fight in this way is incompatible with a true love of peace. Our fight for the kingdom of God must be not only motivated but informed by our response to value lifted to a supernatural plane. Its spirit must be derived not from our own nature but from God. This will find its main expression in our constant endeavor to fulfill St. Augustine's demand: "Kill the error; love him who errs."

While passionately combating an injustice, attacking a false doctrine, struggling to save a fellow soul, or pitting our force against an expanding evil, we must never lose our living charity for the sinners and the misguided, but always remain solicitous about their good, too. Our very indignation, our tireless resistance, our stubborn advocacy of the good, our inexorable opposition to these must, in all their phases, be permeated by the light of love and thus cleansed from all acrimony and fanaticism.

We must remain continually aware of the dangers inherent in struggle as such

The danger to be feared is that we might possibly assume such a truly Christian attitude when engaging in the struggle but desert it later, succumbing to the autonomous dynamism of hostility. That is why it is so important for the warrior of Christ again and again to actualize before God the meaning of his fight and to soften his heart in a supreme love for God, beholding his antagonists as brethren gone astray. He must always remain aware of the danger inherent to all fighting and never regard combative action as a neutral instrument which one may use freely if only it is ordained to an aim pleasing to God.

On the contrary, our activity with all its details must be altogether directed and colored by an ethical conception informed, in its turn, by our aim: = the glory of God and the eternal welfare of our fellow men. This kind of fight must be widely different, not merely as regards its object but also as regards its formal character, from a fight waged in a natural spirit and destined to protect our interests.

In particular, we must guard against placing ourselves on a level with the adversary and from being infected with his spirit and morality. It must be an unequal fight - with a sharp difference between his and our motives, principles, and methods. For our fight for the kingdom of God is by the same token a fight for true peace, whereas the fight of the children of the world is a fight for something that essentially implies strife and disharmony.

Two further supports must be mentioned on which to found the right attitude of a lover of peace engaged in fighting. One is patience, of which we have treated in the preceding chapter, the other is inward peace. The lover of peace preserves his patience while waging war. He lets God decide about whether he shall himself live to see struggle crowned by victory; he conducts it without that violence which is the infallible mark of impatience.

For he only fights in order to serve God and therefore with a complete detachment from self. In accordance therewith, inward peace is the central condition for abiding by the spirit of peace in the midst of an indispensable struggle for the kingdom of God. Of this second dimension of peace we shall have to speak now: the peace whose possession is most necessary for the true Christian and to which Christ was eminently referring when He said: "Peace I leave with you: my peace I give unto you, not as the world gives it do I give it to you." (John 14:27).

Lack of inner unrest is not necessarily the peace of Christ

We shall only do justice to the full importance and value of peace if we realize that the peace Christ came to bring was, above all, inward peace. Let us state at once that here, too, apply both antitheses: that antithesis between peace and discord, and between true peace and false peace. The absence of all inward unrest is by no means invariably a good. It is a good on the condition only that it comes from a harmony with objective good and expresses a response to Truth. Sated contentment or a peace of mind due to thoughtlessness or illusion, is not a good but an evil - no matter how pleasant it may subjectively feel.

It must be emphasized, however, that this false peace differs radically from true inward peace objectively grounded, not only in view of its ultimate worthlessness but also as regards its experienced quality. The relavent question then, is not "How we avoid an inward unrest?": It IS, "How can we find true Inward peace."

What we have said in reference to outward peace also holds true in the present context: not peace as such, but God, is the absolute good. The only decisive question always remains this -"When are we united to God; when do we behave in a fashion pleasing to God?" And the distinctive high value of true peace lies primarily in the fact of its being the fruit of a true union with God and an expression of the right response to God.

The value of an attitude depends on its adequacy as a response to a good

The value of an attitude depends on whether it embodies an adequate response to a genuine objective good -to what is truly valuable in itself. Hence, it has to be judged by the two following criteria. The important thing is, first, whether in a given case our will, our joy, our enthusiasm, our longing, our love (or our sorrow, our indignation, our fear, our repulsion) is each directed to an object to which such a response is proper and due. Malicious joy, delight taken in another's misfortune is bad; delight experienced at the moral progress of a fellow being is good. Enthusiasm evoked by an idol constitutes a negative value; as a response to a true good, it itself is a valuable thing.

Moreover, it is from the object that the attitude derives its moral sign but its distinctive note and quality. We know nothing definite about the specific quality of an act of love or of fear, of a mood of joy or enthusiasm, until we know the object to which it is directed.

Its value lies secondly in its consonancy with the hierarchy of values

The value, test of an attitude lies, secondly, in whether the intensity of our response, the role which an object plays in our soul's life, is consonant with the objective order of values. Thus, our joy about someone's conversion should be greater than our delight in a brilliant intellectual achievement.

Above all, what is intrinsically important or noble should delight us more than what is merely agreeable to us: for example, we should rejoice at having found God more than at having gained some earthly treasure. Hence, it follows that so long as we have not found God it is good that our spirit to be restless. Suppose the mere possession of any goods could satisfy us to the point of undisturbed happiness: this would mean a counterfeit happiness, a false harmony, and therefore a negative value. To be sure, we have seen (in Chapter 11) that earthly goods never can really gratify our longing; but the illusion that they can do so is obviously worse than valueless.

Inner peace is possible only in God

So long, then, as we are separated from God, as we have not found Him and are not reconciled with Him, we should have no peace. Blessed are the Advent souls, unsatisfied in the world, awakened to the truth that God alone can give us true peace, witnesses to St. Augustine's, "Restless is our heart until it reposes in Thee." Unhappy, however, are the restless who find not God, though He has spoken to us; who flee communion with God; who refuse due response to the fact of our redemption by Christ.

Those who are content in this world are farthest from God

We must not seek peace for its own sake, and on no account must we see any every kind of peace, but seek God and content ourselves with that peace which He alone can give our soul. Those restless in the world are nearer to God than those satisfied in the world. For the former at least take account of Truth insofar as they (in this fundamental sense) give the world the response due to it, and experience the objective evil of separation from God subjectively, too, as the evil it is. But they are unblest insofar as they do not recognize the whole Truth but pass by the true metaphysical situation of man -and, in particular, the radical change it has undergone owing to the Redemption -without yielding to it the right response.

Our transformation in Christ necessarily implies true inward peace. Yet, those are most remote from God, who possess a false peace; those who absorbed by purely terrestrial good, are sated and content without God; those who smugly reject the knowledge that no creaturely thing can ultimately quench our thirst; those who escape being disquieted by the incertitude of the future and the impermanency of all earthly things, because they are too busy with the concerns of the moment ever to collect themselves at all.

They live thoughtlessly as though this life were never to end; as though the warning which the holy Church addresses to us on Ash Wednesday, "Remember, man, that thou an dust and unto dust thou shalt return," had no validity for them. Some of them squander away their lives in shallow pleasures; others, again, are so engrossed in their daily concerns that, though ...not leading an agreeable life at all, they simply find no time to stop and think. The complete enslavement of their attention to the practical task immediately ahead deprives them of any leisure for feeling their want of peace. Like beasts of burden, they tread along their path in dull monotony, without ever becoming sufficiently awake to feel distressed by the meaninglessness of their lives.

Those who sense the disharmony of the world are closer to God

By comparison with them who have peace in this sense, those who sense -and suffer from -the disharmony inherent in a world severed from God are by one degree nearer to the truth and thus to God Himself. Those who are searching restlessly and ceaselessly for true happiness; who are disappointed by every earthly pleasure or possession which would masquerade as an absolute; who are disturbed by the idea of death, who feel secure neither in the world; who face the future with anxiety, and are deprived of peace by their worry about whatever they love, they, at least, feel the insufficiency of a world grounded upon itself alone.

Just because they vaguely feel, without correctly interpreting it, the disharmony implied in their separation from God, they are no longer so widely separated from God as those entrenched in a false peace.

Those who consciously suffer from estrangement from God are closer yet to Him

Even closer to Truth are such as, while equally lacking peace, consciously and explicitly trace their want of peace to their disunity with God. Such are those who are not without belief in God, yet keep on doubting; who hear the call of God but are reluctant to part with illicit joys; who are dragged to and fro between God and the world; who, held by the spells of sin, would yet wriggle themselves free; who, were it but possible, would fain serve two masters. These are the souls that most deeply experience disharmony, are most restless, and are most tormented by their knowing no inward peace.

The objective fact of their disunity with God is unquestionably a terrible evil, but the fact that it impinges upon their minds in the form of distress and anguish -robbing them of peace -is highly valuable, for it forces them into an awareness of Truth by one degree less indirect than is present in those who merely suffer from the immanent disharmony of the world without viewing it explicitly in terms of a disjunction from God.

They at any rate surmise the bliss that lies in a union with God; they recognize the seat of true peace and the central cause of their want of peace. They have taken profit from their trouble to the point of laying bare its real root. They have advanced as far as to evince an express yearning for God, though they still feebly evade a clear and unequivocal decision for God. Of such a kind was the tribulation St. Augustine suffered before his conversion, the unrest of which he was to give so moving and magnificent an account in his Confessions.

Inner peace comes only to him who attains full reconciliation with God

Inward discord, as we now see, is not n absolute evil but an adequate response to the world taken in separation from God; it cannot and must not be overcome except by man's awakening to the Truth and his adequate response to the fact that beyond and above all the disharmony of the world, God the infinitely Glorious and Blissful One, who is Love, is enthroned. It will disappear when man becomes aware of his metaphysical situation, particularly as modified by Christ's redemption of the world.

The nagging unrest of him who doubts and of him who writhes in the fetters of sin, the most deeply painful experience of unrest will dissolve as soon as he achieves an unequivocal surrender to God: peace will come to man when he lets himself fall into the arms of God and -submitting to the grace that makes him into a member of the Mystical Body of Christ, whose sins are washed away by the Blood of the Lamb -attains to a reconciliation with God.

Every one of us feels something of this same unrest, whenever he is aware of deviating from the paths which God has proposed to us; whenever his conscience warns him of a separation from God. No sooner do we turn back and renounce what has been separating us from God than our unrest commences to dissolve; but not until we have repented of our wrong and been forgiven by God, our peace will not be completely restored.

Inner peace requires a unified life ordered to goodness

The first and most obvious mark of inward peace, then, is a formal unity of our essential direction of life, an absence of different basic directions at loggerhead; with one another; a liberation from unrest and incessant searching; the integral ordination of our interests and pursuits to an ultimate life purpose. But this formal unity -this inner coordination and convergency -is not all that inward peace implies. It also implies a unity with the good; a participation in the harmony implicit in the good as such. No matter how integrally (in a purely formal sense) we give our attention to what gratifies our pride and our concupiscence -without ever flinching from this our course; without being haunted by any pangs of conscience -we still live in a state of disharmony and can never taste true peace, which emanates from the intimate beauty of values.

All attitudes opposed to value carry in them a germ of discord, a principle destructive of community. In values alone dwells a virtus unitiva. They alone, therefore, can fill us with true concord and harmony, which is a positive state of the soul, implying far more than a mere absence of instability or inward division.

Clearly, nothing could be more unlike true peace in its quality than the state of mind characteristic of high pride. The proud man, self-contained and seemingly free from all inner contradiction as he may be, through his fierce contempt for objective values inevitably becomes tainted with the disharmony attached to all negation of the good.

Inner peace also requires a personal relation with God

Yet, even our participation in the good does not by itself give us what may most properly be called inward peace; for the latter requires our incorporation, not only in the realm of values and their harmony, but in the living God, in the holiness of the Almighty Lord, who is the Good per se and who reveals Himself in Christ.

Inward peace, at its highest, means even more than our participation in the light of values, our reception of the tranquillity and simplicity conveyed by their power, our being integrally permeated with the tone of their accord and harmony. It means, beyond that, 'that clarity and limpidity of the soul which nothing except a real link, a personal communion, with the thrice Holy One can accomplish in the soul; that enlightening of which the Prophet Isaiah says: "Arise, be enlightened, 0 Jerusalem: for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee" (Isa. 60:1).

To sum up - true peace - the peace Christ means when He says, "My peace I give unto you,' includes three main aspects.

.First, a more formal one: a state of inner concord a unity takes the place of strife and division among conflicting orientations of indecision concerning the ultimate directions of live. By contrast to an unappeasable disquietude -a fidgety groping for what might prove to be the real thing and the secret of true happiness -there is the valid recognition and enduring possession of the aim that makes life worth living; the state of resting in an ultimate which lives to everything else its meaning and renders all further search unnecessary. It is the attitude which fills the soul of Simeon when he exclaims: "Now Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, 0 Lord, according to Thy word in peace: because my eyes have seen Thy salvation" (Luke 2:29,30).

True peace may only be established on the highest good

The second main aspect of true peace refers to its objective foundation. The good in which we repose must be of a nature to justify this attitude of ours. It must in truth be the highest good: a good that, once found, really does render all further quest superfluous and inappropriate. This principle of objectivity -a general presupposition, strictly speaking, of all valuable attitudes in man -is what prints upon true peace the seal of validity and sets it apart from all kinds of illusory peace based on this or that deception. And the highest good, which alone can validate our peace, is also the only one that can satisfy us completely.

True peace involves our participation in the harmony of values

Finally, true peace implies a participation in the immanent harmony of values. When truly at peace, we are illuminated by the light irradiating from values; whereas our surrender to what panders to our pride and our concupiscence is bound to darken us inwardly. It is here that we touch the nerve of positive peace and gain sight of its proper quality. By its incorporation and its habitation in the realm of values, the soul becomes, as it were, wide and luminous, soaring and lithe as these values. Its participation in the good opens it up to the virtus unitiva of values, and thus infuses into it a new principle of unity and harmony.

The spiritually unprivileged -whether depraved or merely primitive or obtuse -and those entirely concentrated on what is gratifying to their desires, do not know this peace. They allow themselves to be filled by something that, notwithstanding the moments of pleasure it procures, is utterly devoid of this principle of intrinsic harmony, which liberates and at the same time collects the soul, takes all harshness and cloddishness from it, and adorns it with a luster of supple serenity.

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