No Harmony, No Peace!
Lesson 3
No Harmony, No Peace!
We cannot live in peace with others
unless there is peace in our souls.
Question 3
How can we have peace on earth?
Thomas answers that . . .
“Concord denotes union of appetites among various persons, while peace denotes, in addition to this union, the union of the appetites even in one man.”
— Summa Theologica II-II, 29, 1
Penetrating the Principles of Peace
As a child of the 1960s, I grew up in the midst of the Vietnam War and the American “peace movement,” with circular peace symbols and two-finger peace gestures all over the place. By the end of April 1975, the Vietnam War had ended, but wars around the world have come and gone since then. In more recent times, we sometimes hear chants of: “No justice, no peace!” as people protest against real or perceived injustices and imply the threat that unless their demands are met, their behavior may be anything but peaceful.
Now, to desire peace is indeed a good thing. In fact, St. Thomas, echoing St. Augustine and Dionysius,22 notes that “all things desire peace.” But what will truly bring us peace? Is the absence of war a guarantee of peace within our hearts? Will justice itself really do the trick? We will examine justice in some detail in our next life lesson, but I’ll note briefly here that justice is primarily of matter of giving everyone his rightful due. So, let’s imagine that our nation is not at war and no one has treated you or me unjustly. No one has stolen from us or abrogated any of our rights as citizens. I don’t know about you, but at the moment, I do not feel that I am the victim of any particularly significant injustice (setting aside the fact that some of my tax dollars, and those of many others, are used to support causes I vehemently morally oppose). Still, if our nation is not at war and we suffer no injustice from another person, does that mean that we, as individuals, are necessarily truly at peace?
The absence of war and injustice between individuals may denote the “concord” or “union of appetites among various persons,” as in the first half of our opening quotation from St. Thomas. In Latin, con means “together” and cordia means “heart,” so people in concord are of one heart in their appetites. Their appetites do not conflict. They do not desire or try to obtain what belongs to each other! Such concord, of course, is a very good thing, but it falls short of peace. The actions of no human being, human institution, or society are sufficient to bring any one of us true peace.
Further, there can be concord or unity of desire among criminals who work together for evil ends, but Scripture tells us that such people do not attain peace: “ ‘There is no peace,’ says the Lord, ‘for the wicked’ ” (Isa. 48:22). “Therefore,” says Thomas, “peace is not the same as concord. I answer that, Peace includes concord and adds something thereto” (II-II, 29, 1).
That additional something is “the union of appetites even in one man.” This is the fundamental principle of peace. To achieve true peace, we must be of one heart, not only in our relationships with others, but within our own souls.
If the desires in our souls are conflicted, we are in no position to achieve concord with others. This is why our lesson declares not, “No justice, no peace!” but “No harmony, no peace!” If we do not attain harmony in our souls, in the workings of our intellects, wills, and appetites, we will not have peace in our hearts, and we will fare very poorly at making peace with others. Justice will not live even in our own hearts when we do not do our own souls justice.
The Wrath of Contumely
It is no easy thing to achieve such inner harmony. Long ago, St. Paul, referred to reverently in St. Thomas’s writings as “the Apostle,” told us as much: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me” (Rom. 7:19–20). Sin then, is the source of disharmony within our souls. All manner of sins produce and proceed from such inner conflicts, but for now we will zoom in and attempt to pulverize just one sin that especially destroys our concord with others, while also broadcasting to others the lack of peace in our own souls.
Among the seven deadly sins, one champion of discord is clearly that of wrath, or excessive anger. Anger can, at times, be an appropriate emotion, prompting us, for example, to take corrective action when someone has harmed someone we love. The appropriate expression of anger must be directed at the right person (a truly guilty party), at the right time (after a delay to allow for cooling and reflection), and for the right reasons (to avenge a true wrong and rightly to punish and correct the guilty party, rather than to harm him). The vice of wrath, on the contrary, leads us to lash out at the wrong people, at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons, and in an excessive manner that brings further harm instead of correction.
St. Thomas, borrowing from Aristotle, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. John Damascene, describes three common varieties of the vice of wrath that may be displayed by different wrathful people, or at different times, even within the same person.
If we are to find peace with others, we need to discern when we look in the mirror whether a choleric, sullen, ill-tempered, or rancorous face glares back at us.
Wrath also has several war-mongering daughters who work together in wreaking havoc in our souls and between us and others. One of wrath’s daughters is called swelling of the mind, in which our calm, rational thinking capacities become overwhelmed by festering, mushrooming thoughts of revenge. Such irrational swelling is fed by indignation, in which we enkindle our wrath by mentally belittling the object of our anger. In his ancient book on anger (De Ira), from which Thomas sometimes cites, the Stoic philosopher Seneca suggests that one remedy for intense anger is to look at our faces in a mirror when we are enraged to see how insane we look when our mind is irrationally swollen!23
Wrath and its daughters are obviously harmful to concord between persons, but they are every bit as inimical to harmony in our hearts as well — even our physical hearts! Consider, for example, that modern research on people with the driven, type-A personality indicates that those most prone to heart attacks have a tendency toward frequent bouts of anger. Quite interestingly, nearly eight hundred years ago, St. Thomas wrote that some consider anger “a kindling of blood around the heart” (I-II, 22, 2).
The dangers of wrath have been known to humanity since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Indeed, through envy and wrath, their second son, Abel, was slain by their firstborn, Cain. Concord and peace had indeed reigned in that garden until sin entered the world, through the envy of Satan and the pride of man. Ironically, in our time, wrath itself is sometimes encouraged by people who are not at all religious, but who believe that we can build a veritable Garden of Eden on earth.
The belief I refer to can be called utopianism, and it holds that we human beings are capable, through our own powers, of creating a perfect state and society. According to this increasingly widely held belief, once such a state is achieved through some kind of ideal political and economic system, everyone will live happily and peacefully ever after, just as in a fairy tale. In the absence of an actualized utopia, according to this view, we are right to express our wrath toward anyone who we believe prevents us from reshaping the world to match our desires, and to seek revenge for wrongs done by less enlightened people who lived long ago.
Utopianism carries with it not only heinous pride, but a completely unrealistic view of human nature and the denial of the potential for sin in every one of us. It is imbued as well with what psychologists call an “external locus of control,” the belief that one’s successes and failures, one’s sense of happiness and tranquility, are determined by forces outside of one’s control. According to this view, if we are unhappy, the responsibility lies not within ourselves, but within our society.
We see a corollary in our time in what is sometimes called a culture of victimhood, which sees the world as divided between victims and oppressors, where victims are completely innocent and oppressors start each day by thinking up schemes for keeping their victims down. This is not to deny or downplay actual victims of various specific crimes or abuse, but according to this mind-set, if any of us are not happy and at peace, we need to pick up the banner of victimhood and find some class of oppressors to blame. This view imputes evil motives to those with other opinions in search of “micro-aggressions” hidden within ostensibly benign statements or even facial expressions, fabricating apparent discord in the face of intended concord! This kind of vitriolic nonsense saturates our politics and media today and makes it harder than ever to build concord of appetites between different people, let alone the harmony of appetites within our hearts, the kind of harmony true peace requires.
But what does it mean to obtain the union of appetites within ourselves? How do we achieve it? Is peace itself a virtue we must build in our souls? St. Thomas answers our last question with a perhaps surprising, “No!” Let’s turn now to flesh out each of his answers so that we may more fully understand that without internal harmony, there can be no peace.
Another Succulent Fruit of the Virtue of Charity
Our appetites are in union in our own souls when our passions, intellects, wills, desires, thoughts, and deeds work in harmony to achieve our most important goals, the foremost being that of our first life lesson: to attain eternal bliss with God. We achieve harmony and peace when we do not fight within ourselves and succumb to sinful desires that bring us temporary pleasures but alienate us from God and neighbor. We cannot build such peace in our own hearts by our natural powers, but God has given us powerful graces that can do so, if we will let Him into our hearts.
Christ told us: “Be at peace with one another” (Mark 9:50), and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). Might peace then be a theological virtue, a God-given gift of grace? Thomas says no, and here’s why. Virtues are means to last ends and, as Augustine wrote, peace is the last end, in a sense. When we finally attain God, only then will our hearts be fully and eternally at peace. Peace then, is the result or effect of a virtue, the highest of all virtues on which Christ based His law, a law, if you will recall from our last chapter, of love, or charity.
Thomas tells us that charity causes peace because charity is the love of God and neighbor. When charity empowers us to act out of love of God and neighbor, our appetites will be in union with the highest and noblest parts of our souls. Peace in our souls is an effect of charity, and the law of charity commands us to keep peace with others as an act of charity. Indeed, such peacekeeping is a most meritorious act. Christ places peacemaking among the beatitudes, “which are acts of perfect virtue. It is also numbered among the fruits, in so far as it is a final good, having spiritual sweetness” (II-II, 29, 4).24
Peace then, like joy, is another succulent fruit or effect of the virtue of charity. We experience joy when we obtain the highest object of our love, and with that joy comes the peace that expresses the end to restlessness. Only when we place the love of God and neighbor above our inappropriate selfish appetites for things such as material goods, property, power, or fame will we achieve the kind of harmony in our hearts and souls that can bring us the inner peace that can help foster peace with our neighbors as well. This requires that we put all kinds of other virtues within charity’s service as well; for example, the temperance, or self-control, that will moderate our desires for physical goods that belong to others, and the affability, or general disposition of friendliness and kindness toward others, that will leave us little time and inclination to think of them as our enemies or oppressors. When imbued with the affability that flows from charity, we will be too busy thinking of ways to love our neighbors as ourselves to comb their every word or action to see if we can find or fabricate something insulting to us.
A Prayer for Peace
We certainly can and should simply ask God in simple, heartfelt words of our own crafting to grant us the peace that comes from harmony within our desires and concord with the desires of our neighbors. Of course, as Catholics, we are also blessed with a two-thousand-year tradition, including a host of marvelous prayers composed by a host of marvelous saints, and we should freely draw upon the holy gifts that such saintly men and women have given us. As for a beautiful prayer for peace between others, let’s consider, pray, and act out in our lives St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer for peace:
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
So dear was peace to St. Francis that a classic Franciscan greeting still used today is “Pax et bonum!” (Peace and goodness [be with you]).
As for a simple prayer for the inward peace of internal harmony, behold the simple, beautiful words of a prayer of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini:
Fortify me with the grace of Your Holy Spirit and give Your peace to my soul that I may be free from all needless anxiety, solicitude, and worry. Help me to desire always that which is pleasing and acceptable to You so that Your will may be my will.
Note well that Mother Cabrini (1850–1917) was the founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Let’s recall as well the Angelic Doctor’s lesson on prayer from our last chapter. The prayer Christ gave us is the model of perfection in its confidence, rectitude, order, devoutness, and humility. Through the Lord’s Prayer, we have indeed been instructed to seek concord with others, as is clearly seen in its fifth petition: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Thomas highlights that God’s forgiveness of our sins is a great source of hope because of His great mercy, and yet, of all of the prayer’s petitions, only this one is expressly conditional. Something essential is required of us. We must also forgive those who have sinned against us if we are to receive God’s forgiveness. If we pray this prayer with sincerity, we cannot remain sullen and angry with others, seeing them as potential enemies: “Anger and wrath, these also are abominations, and the sinful man will possess them. He that takes vengeance will suffer from the Lord, and he will firmly establish his sins. Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray” (Sir. 27:30; 28:1–2).
Still, keeping this prayer’s perfect order in mind, before this request for and pledge of forgiveness comes the third petition, in which we pray: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This is our prayer for the internal harmony of appetites necessary for true peace. Among Thomas’s many insights regarding this petition, he observes: “God wills that man be restored to the state and dignity in which the first man was created, which was so great that his spirit and soul experienced no rebellion on the part of his flesh and sensuality.”25 Thomas harks back to St. Paul’s writings on the war between the spirit and the flesh, which will ultimately be won only in the next life, when we are raised in an incorruptible and imperishable state (see 1 Cor. 15:42-43). Even in this life, though, the extent to which we can unify our wills with the will of God will be the extent to which we attain the inner harmony of peace. Indeed, St. Thomas, in his prayer “For Ordering a Life Wisely,” would ask that his own heart be unified in its appetites according to God’s will:
Give to me, O Lord, God,
a watchful heart
which no capricious thought can
lure away from You.
Give to me
a noble heart
which no unworthy desire can debase.
Give to me
a resolute heart
which no evil intention can divert
Give to me
a stalwart heart
which no tribulation can overcome.
Give to me
a temperate heart
which no violent passion can enslave.26
Sacramental Signs of Peace
That Christ wants us to have peace is seen clearly in how He employed an ancient Jewish greeting: “Peace be with you!” (Luke 24:36; John 20:21; 20:26). Each of the sacraments He left us can, in its own way, contribute to peace with others and peace in our hearts. Through the sacrament of Baptism, we all become part of the Mystical Body of Christ, and brothers and sisters in God’s family, through the graces breathed into our souls through the Holy Spirit. As we reflect on our Baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” may it remind us of the utterly complete harmony between the three Persons of the Holy Trinity and inspire us to establish harmony here on earth, being made in the image and likeness of God.
Through the sacrament of Penance, we take concrete actions inspired by the Lord’s Prayer, seeking forgiveness of our sins against others, including perhaps our less-than-perfect willingness to forgive the sins that others have committed against us. The very act of going to Confession is also an expression of our willingness to abide by God’s will, since He has called us to confess our sins and provided the means for their forgiveness and the reopening of the channels of His grace.
The greatest sacrament of peace within and between human beings is the greatest sacrament of all, in which we become one with the Sacred Heart of Christ and, indeed, in a mystical sense beyond our complete understanding, with His entire Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. Note well how we prepare for this sacrament of the Eucharist in every Mass with fervent prayers for peace.
In the Novus Ordo Mass, after reciting the Our Father, the priest shares Christ’s blessing of peace, and the people exchange words and a gestural sign of peace. In the Traditional Latin Mass, there is no gesture of peace between the people, but the priest proclaims, “Pax Domini sit semper vobis cum” (May the peace of the Lord be always with you) as he makes the Sign of the Cross three times.
Go to either the Traditional Latin Mass or the Novus Ordo Mass, and before Communion you will also hear the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) prayer, the last petition being “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem” (Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace). After the Host is consecrated, the priest turns to the faithful and declares: “Ecce Agnus Dei: ecce qui tollit peccata mundi” (Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.) In elaborating on this prayer at Mass, Thomas says that “the people are prepared by the Pax27 which is given with the words, Lamb of God, etc., because this is the sacrament of unity and peace” (III, 83, 4).
The prophets of old also knew well that this Lamb of God, sent to us by the Father for the ultimate sacrifice re-presented at every Mass, would not only take away the sins of the world, but would also provide us with the only true means for peace with others and within ourselves:
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government will be upon his shoulder,
and his name will be called
“Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isa. 9:6)
Life Lesson 3 Summa
We will never achieve true peace with others unless we strive for harmony in our own hearts and souls by rejecting wrath and the culture of victimhood and seek to temper our worldly desires and reach out to our neighbors in a spirit of love expressed in the simple, friendly warmth of affability extended to all. We can pray to God for this peace in our hearts, with special attention to the prayer that Christ gave us and to His Sacred Heart. We must remember as well that our truest fonts of harmony and peace during our time on earth are found in the Church’s sacraments, which bind us together in concord with our neighbors as we harmonize our wills with the will of God.
22 Author of works including On the Divine Names and The Celestial Hierarchy and believed in the Middle Ages to be St. Dionysius the Areopagite converted by St. Paul (Acts 17:34). He is usually referred to now as Pseudo-Dionysius or Pseudo-Denys and is believed to be a late fifth- to early sixth-century Syrian Christian theologian and philosopher who wrote under the name of the famous St. Dionysius. “Areopagite” refers to a rock called the Areopagus (“Ares’ rock”), near the acropolis in Athens where St. Paul preached so persuasively.
23 I cannot help but note here a new related phenomenon, courtesy of modern technology, in which people acting out in public are recorded by cell phone movie cameras and broadcast throughout social media. The incident I saw just this morning involved an individual apparently born with XY chromosomes (a male), wearing makeup and carrying a purse, flying into a harangue of threats and kicking over merchandise when a store clerk apparently addressed this person as “Sir.” We need to remember that if we allow wrath to carry us away in public, our image in the mirror could end up all over the world.
24 See Galatians 5:22–23 for the scriptural list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
25 Aquinas Catechism, 133.
26 Anderson and Moser, Aquinas Prayer Book, 11.
27 Latin for “peace.”