169. Peace
169. PEACE
What is peace and how do we attain it?
Peace implies a twofold union. . . . The first is the result of one’s own appetites being directed to one object, while the other results from one’s own appetite being united with the appetite of another. And each of these unions is effected by charity: the first, in so far as man loves God with his whole heart, by referring all things to Him, so that all his desires tend to one object; the second, in so far as we love our neighbor as ourselves, the result being that we wish to fulfill our neighbor’s will as though it were ours (II-II,29,3).
As St. Augustine famously said over 800 years before St. Thomas, peace is not merely the absence of war. Its essence is positive, not negative. It is the satisfaction of desire (“appetite”). Augustine called it “the tranquility of order”, i.e., the perfect order or relation (1) between our desires and their proper object, the Good, which is first and last of all God, (2) among our desires themselves, and (3) between our desires and those of others. Thus peace is the unity (1) between ourselves and God, (2) within ourselves, and (3) between ourselves and others.
The first two go together as inseparable parts of what St. Thomas calls “the first” half of the “twofold union” that is peace. They necessarily go together because there is only one God. Only if there is only one object of desire (will, appetite, longing) can there be one will. Monotheism is a psychological revolution as well as a theological one, because it unifies all human desires. As Kierkegaard titled one of his books: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.
The fruit of this unity is unity with neighbors, who also will this same Good, the true God. Thus Thomas Merton unifies and orders these three kinds of peace in the same way St. Thomas does when he says that “we cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”
Love is the essential act of the will. Only love (charity) can effect these three unions.
The summary of all the commandments, of God’s will for us, is to love God with our whole heart and our neighbors as ourselves. In this life we only partly, not fully, attain to this love, and also, therefore, to this peace. When, in Heaven, we have learned to love God with absolutely our whole heart, with nothing left over; when we will have exorcised absolutely all selfishness and fear from our hearts; when we have learned to hold nothing whatsoever back from God, “referring all things to Him”, even the smallest detail; and when we have learned to want our neighbor’s will not only as much as our own but as our own; then we will experience a revolutionary transformation within our consciousness that we can hardly imagine now. “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9).
To our present sin-darkened minds, “peace” often seems dull. (After all, war is the most interesting thing in life. Surely that is one reason why war has always been so popular. No one is bored when they are about to kill or be killed.) But this illusion is the exact opposite of the truth: true, Heavenly peace is the only thing in human life that is never boring, even in eternity, because this peace is caused by love, the true love of charity; and that love, even in this life, is the only thing that never gets boring. And that is not merely a matter of faith but is proved by experience.
T. S. Eliot says that the profoundest line in all of human literature is Dante’s: “In His will, our peace.”