A just peace or just peace?
Plus: more mind cleansing with the greatest poem ever written
First the good news. 20 Days in Mariupol just won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Please watch if you haven’t already.
Now the unsurprising but nonetheless infuriating news. As The Guardian reports,
Pope Francis has said in an interview that Ukraine should have what he called the courage of the “white flag” and negotiate an end to the war with Russia. Francis made his comments in an interview recorded last month with Swiss broadcaster RSI.... “Don’t be ashamed to negotiate before things get worse,” the 87-year-old pontiff said.
Equally unsurprising is the shitstorm this has generated on former Twitter and other social networks. Pope Francis, whose Twitter handle is @pontifex, has become the Putinfex, and the Vatican has become the Vatnican. According to Pekka Kallioniemi, creator of the priceless resource Vatnik Soup, a Vatnik is “a steadfast jingoistic follower of propaganda from the Russian government”—much like Pope Francis.
“Upon becoming Pope, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose the name Francis to express his solidarity with those facing injustice. In the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine, he risks insulting his namesake,” Rory Finnin, Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Cambridge, observed. Francis ought to listen to St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that "Those who wage just wars seek peace. They do not therefore oppose peace." Or St. Augustine: "We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace.” As one reads at the website of the United States Institute of Peace,
Though the Catholic Church’s “just war” doctrine has been modified over the centuries—accounting for things like new technologies and the changing nature of warfare—its basic principles remain the same. As the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church describes, in order for the church to sanction engaging in a war, “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain [Check]; all other means of putting an end to (the conflict) must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective [Check]; there must be serious prospects of success [Check]; [and] the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated [Check].”
The first to have thought of a just war appears to have been Cicero. As one reads at the Hoover Institution’s website,
More than any of the other ancients, the Romans understood war in ways that foreshadowed our own. Marcus Tullius Cicero’s De Officiis first raised questions of just war that concern us even today.... For Cicero, the natural state of mankind was of peace; war was an unnatural rupture. “Wars, then, are to be waged in order to render it possible to live in peace without injury,” wrote Cicero.
If Pope Francis were living in 1940, he would probably suggest that Great Britain should surrender, lay down their arms in front of Germany, and negotiate with Hitler. We know from Sri Aurobindo what the result would have been:
The struggle that is going on is not fundamentally a conflict between two imperialisms — German and English, — one attacking, the other defending itself.... It is in fact a clash between two world-forces which are contending for the control of the whole future of humanity. One force seeks to destroy the past civilisation and substitute a new one; but this new civilisation is in substance a reversion to the old principles of dominant Force and a rigid external order and denies the established values, social, political, ethical, spiritual, altogether. Among these values are those which were hitherto held to be the most precious, the liberty of the individual, the right to national liberty, freedom of thought; even religious liberty is to be crushed and replaced by the subjection of religion to State control....
The other Force is that of the evolutionary tendencies which have been directing the course of humanity for some time past and, till recently, seemed destined to shape its future. Its workings had their good and bad sides, but among the greater values it had developed stood the very things against which the new Force is most aggressive, the liberty of the individual, national liberty, freedom of thought, political and social freedom with an increasing bent towards equality, complete religious liberty, the humanitarian principle with all its consequences and, latterly, a seeking after a more complete social order, which will organise the life of the community, but will respect the liberty of the individual while perfecting his means of life and helping in every way possible his development....
You can read the full text here.
Why doesn’t it occur to the “Vicar of Christ” to say, “Putin should have the courage to withdraw his invading troops from Ukraine and abandon his genocidal imperial pursuits”? Instead, he blathers about “mutual forgiveness.” What the hell does Russia have to forgive?
Ask the Ukrainians in Russian occupied territories how they feel about negotiations. Russian occupation means torture chambers, rape and murder, enforced disappearance, denial of your identity, forcible abduction and adoption of your own children (see picture), filtration camps, and mass graves. As has been stressed by Kristi Raik (Deputy Director at the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn, Estonia),
The option of reaching sustainable peace by going for a negotiated compromise with Putin’s regime does not exist. Russia is only interested in surrender of Ukraine and destruction of its independence; a ceasefire, negotiations and possible deal would be just an interim step in that direction. Just like the Minsk agreements were. In the meantime, Ukrainians living in occupied territories would continue to live under terror. The rest of Europe would be under constant threat and pressure for further concessions. Russia has not been hiding its goal to dominate Europe.
Now I need to cleanse my mind, and perhaps yours as well. To this end I will offer some further passages from Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri. At the end of this post, I mentioned how, after a protracted struggle with Death, Savitri ascends to higher and higher levels of consciousness, until she comes face to face with the “One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night”:
Transfigured was the formidable shape.
His darkness and his sad destroying might
Abolishing for ever and disclosing
The mystery of his high and violent deeds,
A secret splendour rose revealed to sight
Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.
Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.
Here’s what happens next:
Then like an anthem from the heart’s lucent cave
A voice soared up whose magic sound could turn
The poignant weeping of the earth to sobs
Of rapture and her cry to spirit song.
The genderless voice puts a choice before Savitri:
... Space shall draw back
Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be
The quivering of the spirit’s endless bliss.
Attend that moment of celestial fate.
Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law...
Wait patient of the brittle bars of form
Making division your delightful means
Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced
By attraction in the throbbing air between.
The “two” are Savitri (the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save) and Satyavan (the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance), brought back from Death’s abode. Now the second option:
Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world....
Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,
Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts....
Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.
This she rejects:
“O besetter of man’s soul with life and death
And the world’s pleasure and pain and Day and Night,
Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven,
Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,
I climb not to thy everlasting Day,
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night....
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven....
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.
O to spread forth, O to encircle and seize
More hearts till love in us has filled thy world!...
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?...
Break not the lyre before the song is found;
Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?...”
The voice replies:
“How shall earth-nature and man’s nature rise
To the celestial levels, yet earth abide?...
Heaven’s call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;
The doors of light are sealed to common mind
And earth’s needs nail to earth the human mass,
Only in an uplifting hour of stress
Men answer to the touch of greater things:
Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air,
They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;
In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know
They joy in safe return to a friendly base,
And, though something in them weeps for glory lost
And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.
To be the common man they think the best,
To live as others live is their delight....
My will, my call is there in men and things;
But the Inconscient lies at the world’s grey back
And draws to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep.
Imprisoned in its dark and dumb abyss
A little consciousness it lets escape
But jealous of the growing light holds back
Close to the obscure edges of its cave
As if a fond ignorant mother kept her child
Tied to her apron strings of Nescience....
Leave to the circling aeons’ tardy pace
And to the working of the inconscient Will,
Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:
All shall be done by the long act of Time....
O flame, withdraw into thy luminous self.
Or else return to thy original might...
O miracle, where thou beganst, there cease!”
But, nah:
“In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss
Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;
My soul and his indissolubly linked
In the one task for which our lives were born,
To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine.
I keep my will to save the world and man;
Even the charm of thy alluring voice,
O blissful Godhead, cannot seize and snare.
I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds....
If thou and I are true, the world is true;
Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,
To be is not a senseless paradox;
Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;
What hides within her breast she must reveal.
I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.
If man lives bound by his humanity,
If he is tied for ever to his pain,
Let a greater being then arise from man,
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.
Else were creation vain and this great world
A nothing that in Time’s moments seems to be....”
It’s evident by now that the voice belongs to a god but not as yet to the “highest authority”. It replies:
“O living power of the incarnate Word,
All that the Spirit has dreamed thou canst create:
Thou art the force by which I made the worlds,
Thou art my vision and my will and voice.
But knowledge too is thine, the world-plan thou knowest
And the tardy process of the pace of Time.
In the impetuous drive of thy heart of flame,
In thy passion to deliver man and earth,
Indignant at the impediments of Time
And the slow evolution’s sluggard steps,
Lead not the spirit in an ignorant world
To dare too soon the adventure of the Light,
Pushing the bound and slumbering god in man
Awakened mid the ineffable silences
Into endless vistas of the unknown and unseen,
Across the last confines of the limiting Mind
And the Superconscient’s perilous border line
Into the danger of the Infinite.
But if thou wilt not wait for Time and God,
Do then thy work and force thy will on Fate.
As I have taken from thee my load of night
And taken from thee my twilight’s doubts and dreams,
So now I take my light of utter Day.
These are my symbol kingdoms but not here
Can the great choice be made that fixes fate
Or uttered the sanction of the Voice supreme.
Arise upon a ladder of greater worlds
To the infinity where no world can be....
If thou must indeed deliver man and earth
On the spiritual heights look down on life,
Discover the truth of God and man and world;
Then do thy task knowing and seeing all.
Ascend, O soul, into thy timeless self;
Choose destiny’s curve and stamp thy will on Time.”
He ended and upon the falling sound
A power went forth that shook the founded spheres
And loosed the stakes that hold the tents of form....
Invisible that perfect godhead now.
Around her some tremendous spirit lived,
Mysterious flame around a melting pearl,
And in the phantom of abolished Space
There was a voice unheard by ears that cried:
“Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;
For now from my highest being looks at thee
The nameless formless peace where all things rest.
In a happy vast sublime cessation know,—
An immense extinction in eternity,
A point that disappears in the infinite,—
Felicity of the extinguished flame,
Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,
End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,
Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.
Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,
O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks.”
The moments fell into eternity.
But someone yearned within a bosom unknown
And silently the woman’s heart replied:
“Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep
Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time
For the magnificent soul of man on earth.
Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy.”
Limitless like ocean round a lonely isle
A second time the eternal cry arose:
“Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.
My spirit leans down to break the knot of earth,
Amorous of oneness without thought or sign
To cast down wall and fence, to strip heaven bare,
See with the large eye of infinity,
Unweave the stars and into silence pass.”
In an immense and world-destroying pause
She heard a million creatures cry to her.
Through the tremendous stillness of her thoughts
Immeasurably the woman’s nature spoke:
“Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,
My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls.”
Mightily retreating like a sea in ebb
A third time swelled the great admonishing call:
“I spread abroad the refuge of my wings.
Out of its incommunicable deeps
My power looks forth of mightiest splendour, stilled
Into its majesty of sleep, withdrawn
Above the dreadful whirlings of the world.”
A sob of things was answer to the voice,
And passionately the woman’s heart replied:
“Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man,
To take all things and creatures in their grief
And gather them into a mother’s arms.”
Solemn and distant like a seraph’s lyre
A last great time the warning sound was heard:
“I open the wide eye of solitude
To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss,
Where in a pure and exquisite hush it lies
Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy,
Resting from the sweet madness of the dance
Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was born.”
Breaking the Silence with appeal and cry
A hymn of adoration tireless climbed,
A music beat of winged uniting souls,
Then all the woman yearningly replied:
“Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,
Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,
Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,
Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.”
Then after silence a still blissful cry
Began, such as arose from the Infinite
When the first whisperings of a strange delight
Imagined in its deep the joy to seek,
The passion to discover and to touch,
The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds:
“O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,
Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice.
My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose:
All thou hast asked I give to earth and men.
All shall be written out in destiny’s book
By my trustee of thought and plan and act,
The executor of my will, eternal Time....
But there are strings attached. There is a huge “but” in the offing:
But since thou hast refused my maimless Calm
And turned from my termless peace in which is expunged
The visage of Space and the shape of Time is lost,
And from happy extinction of thy separate self
In my uncompanioned lone eternity,—
For not for thee the nameless worldless Nought,
Annihilation of thy living soul
And the end of thought and hope and life and love
In the blank measureless Unknowable,—
I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,
I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,
I yoke thee to my power of work in Time.
Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,
Because thou hast chosen to share earth’s struggle and fate
And leaned in pity over earth-bound men
And turned aside to help and yearned to save,
I bind by thy heart’s passion thy heart to mine
And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.
Now will I do in thee my marvellous works....
When all thy work in human time is done
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
The body of earth a tabernacle of God....
Till then, this is what she will have to endure:
Thou shalt be hunted through the world by love,
Naked of ignorance’ protecting veil
And without covert from my radiant gods.
No shape shall screen thee from my divine desire,
Nowhere shalt thou escape my living eyes....
Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change....
Thy mind shall urge thee through the flames of thought,
To meet me in the abyss and on the heights,
To feel me in the tempest and the calm,
And love me in the noble and the vile,
In beautiful things and terrible desire.
The pains of hell shall be to thee my kiss,
The flowers of heaven persuade thee with my touch.
My fiercest masks shall my attractions bring.
Music shall find thee in the voice of swords,
Beauty pursue thee through the core of flame....
My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force
Thy being bathed in fiercest longing’s streams....
Even my disasters’ clutch shall be to thee
The ordeal of my rapture’s contrary shape:
In pain’s self shall smile on thee my secret face:
Thou shalt bear my ruthless beauty unabridged
Amid the world’s intolerable wrongs,
Trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time
Cry out to the ecstasy of my rapture’s touch....
I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,
I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.
And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy,
And when thou liv’st one spirit with all things,
Then will I spare thee not my living fires,
But make thee a channel for my timeless force....
She obviously can’t complain, since she has asserted that
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven,
and has pleaded:
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?...
Break not the lyre before the song is found;
Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?
Related
Whence this mess? An answer from Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem “Savitri”