Against The Grain

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Gaudium Et Spes offered several denotations of peace: a peace of the heart, flowing from our relationship with God in Christ; a peace of restored harmony in the creation (the Isian vision of shalom); the peace of tranquillitas ordinis. All of these are legitimate Christian undersandings of the richly textured reality of "peace." But the document would have been strengthened by more carefully deleating the relationship among these three meanings of "peace," and by more stringingly considering the relationship of the "peace of Christ" and shalom to the peace of tranquillitas ordinis. That they are related is not in doubt; but the question of how is very much part and parcel of moral judgement in this time between Easter and the coming of the Kingdom in its fulness.

(George Weigel, p. 102 Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace Oxford UP, 1987).

It's amusing -- much of the exchange between scholars at the time of the Council over this document, and its implications for just war debate, mirror the combox conversations between Catholic bloggers today. Even then, you had the same debates: James Douglass understood GeS through the lens of pacifism, hoping it would "bring down the curtain on just war doctrine" in "unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation."

Just war theorist Paul Ramsey differed in his assessment, believing the document to have "vindicated just war theory in its grandest dimensions: the effort to relate power, proportionate use of force, and political community to each other in a morally and rationally sound way." [Weigel, p. 99].

Things never change.

Labels: reading notes

Friday, January 03, 2003

"There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes most incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is the unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may be sometimes unthinking about it; unthinking, and especially unthanking. For he who has realised this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets and arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude . . . there is something much more mystical and absolute than any other modern thing that is called optimism; for it is only rarely that we realize, like a vision of the heavens filled with a chorus of giants, the primeval duty of Praise."

G.K. Chesterton, as quoted in
Wisdom & Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton
by Joseph Pearce.

Labels: reading notes

Friday, December 13, 2002

"Unless one supposes that all human powers are irremediably subverted by the Fall, that there has been a complete corruption of human nature, there will always be some instinct in that nature, however weak, which is oriented to reality and therefore oriented to these basic qualities of reality: truth, goodness, unity, and beauty. Also there is, of course, always the possibility that the grace of God is at work in uncovenanted ways in human hearts and situations, so that those instincts can be assisted by grace to respond to the divine presence in the Creation. This is what it ultimately comes down to."

Dialogue with a Dominican. An interview with Aidan Nichols, O.P.
Touchstone, Nov. 2000.

Labels: reading notes