The Evening Star (December 25, 1944)
ON THE RECORD —
Peace evolves from common human needs
By Dorothy Thompson
God’s peace, primeval leader to fellowship, we now peacefully praise. For, peace is the atonement, the consent who generates and operates one common nature in all. All long for peace. She converts the divisible multitude to total oneness, not silencing all movement but intending everyone’s proper movement. She reduces the civil war of the universe to a harmonious settlement.
Johannes Eriugena
I have headed this Christmas editorial with a quotation from a medieval philosopher, attributed to the year 850 AD, toward the close of the so-called “Dark Ages,” which bear for all our modern science a terrible resemblance to our own age. For then, as now, a world system and civilization had fallen to pieces, leaving social and political disintegration and an Intellectual and spiritual vacuum to fill which two ideas were contending – what in modern phraseology would be called “power politics,” and that of the Christian faith preaching unity in God.
It was this antagonism which made the Dark Ages dark. In the time of Eriugena, the darkness was beginning to lift as the concept of a moral and spiritual order governing the behavior of princes and kings and the relations between classes and peoples was slowly emerging.
Eriugena’s words reveal the true nature of peace. “She converts the divisible multitude to oneness… she reduces the civil war to a harmonious settlement… peace operates one common nature in all.”
The presumption of the “common nature” is essential to peace. Yet the times when this common nature was assumed by the philosopher, at the beginning of the 9th century, showed no outward and visible signs of it. All Europe rocked with wars – not one war but continual and unremitting wars – for centuries the fragments of a broken civilization had been fighting each other; Asiatic hordes were attacking Europe and settling in its midst; Moorish tribes were coming from the south; strong men, mobilizing the countryside, fought to establish fiefs for themselves, and other strong men sought to oust them. The concept of law was nonexistent. The idea of equal citizenship partially established in the Roman era was gone. Wars were “wars of survival.” The enemy had no rights.
The contenders sometimes carried the banner of Christ, but it was a charter only for themselves. Thus Charlemagne, in the name of Christ, having conquered the Saxons (who believed in Wotan), executed them wholesale in a bath of their own blood. And there seemed no end of all this.
Yet the philosopher dared to speak of a common nature in all men.
Peace has its laws no less than war. No lasting peace can be made on the concepts of war. There is no peace as long as an enemy is an enemy. It only exists when he becomes a friend. He can only become a friend, when a new integration can be formed around a superior social and political concept, in the framework of which persons and nations can find oneness not through elimination of any but of the “proper movement” of all.
Our war continues because that superior integration in which all persons and nations can find peace and proper movement is not before the eyes of the people.
Peace is consent. Peace is agreement. Peace is the recognition of a common nature, in which all find liberty under equal law.
The presumption of peace is that what is good for me, and for my nation, is good for you and for all nations.
And until we find that concept under which victorious nations and defeated nations can live by consent, in recognition of Justice, this war will not end, though it may manifest itself in other than the present ways.
Peace is not something to be negotiated. It is not of the marketplace. It is not to be bought or sold, for a haggled price.
Peace is not security to be grabbed by expansions of power, each expansion of one necessitating an expansion of the others until they clash.
Peace is not something to be imposed by force.
Peace is organic harmony, growing out of the factors that unite men – their common needs, rights, loves, yearnings, ideals, despairs.
Statesmanship is the art of discerning and promoting the indivisible factors: it lifts a banner to which all men and nations can, without prejudice to their just aspirations, freely repair; it articulates maxims that are of universal validity, and promises impartial application of them.
Only thus is harmony possible, only harmony is social happiness, and only social happiness is peace.