The tragic events of recent months have led to, and almost imposed, the subject of this edition of Oasis: violence and in particular religiously motivated violence.
Last update: 2024-12-16 15:46:08
The tragic events of recent months have led to, and almost imposed, the subject of this edition of Oasis: violence and in particular religiously motivated violence.
In order to clear the field immediately of useless and false guilt complexes, it is advisable to observe that the religious component did not have during the last century that preponderant role that a certain ideological reading persists in giving it. Neither the First World War, whose centenary we have just celebrated, nor the Second World War or the Cold War had religious origins and the worst forms of totalitarianism of the last century were purposely atheistic in nature. It is, therefore, profoundly wrong to attribute to religions – a term for that matter which is too generic – the responsibility for every explosion of violence, in opposition to the healthy and peaceful rationality of purported secular reason.[1] Nor can one arbitrarily divide the category of religions in two, establishing a structural link between monotheism and violence as opposed to a tolerant polytheism of values.
However, the events of recent months remind us with painful confirmatory evidence how much religious motivations can become factors for violence. The thesis that has been so often repeated, namely that religions are always elements for peace and the responsibility for their transformation into factors for war is unfailingly that of politicians or capital, in essential terms does not hold up, although it contains obvious elements of truth. Rather one should speak about a continuous intertwining where it is difficult to establish who exploits whom, between politicians who don religious symbols in which they do not believe and men of religion who try to use the state to pursue their own personal agendas.[2]
A Troubling Tenant of the Human Heart
It is probably the anthropological approach that is most suited to exploring an aggressiveness that expresses itself in a worrying cyclical way and which at the same time has its roots to a great extent in the depths of the human heart. In this sense, and without taking on the entire approach of Girard, it appears correct to discern in religions an original tendency to contain violence. The function of retaliation in the Old Testament is paradigmatic: revenge is allowed but it must be kept within strict limits, as the much reviled principle of ‘eye for an eye’ teaches in a non-banal way. But to control violence does not mean to eliminate it. Thus the ancient cultures retained a deep ambiguity as regards violence, from which not even the experience narrated in the pages of the Old Testament was exempt. At the same time, however, there was an insistent resurfacing of the wish for an ultimate haven here there is a solution to this drama. At the beginning of the Old Testament the story of Cain and Abel certainly describes the tragic irruption of violence on the earth, but at the same time it proclaims its extraneousness to the design of God. ‘Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from under the ground’ (Gen 4:10) God declares to Cain. The word ‘blood’ is in the plural and this detail would offer to Jewish exegetic tradition the point of departure to state that ‘whoever destroys a human life, it is as if he destroyed an entire world’, and vice versa ‘whoever saves a human life, it is as if he saved an entire world’.[3]
‘Suffering, he did not Threaten Revenge’
The event of Christ appears as a super-abundant response to this hope that the religious history of man expresses. It constitutes an objective overcoming of the spiral of revenge and as such measures the past and the future of human history (‘I came into this world to judge’, Jn 9:39). This is the mysterious ‘sword’ (Mt 10:34) that the Nazarene came to bring, ‘and so reveal their secret thoughts’ (Lk 2:35). And thus it is that the commonest objection that from that moment onwards was made did not concern so much the goodness of the new principle introduced by Christ as its practicability, which was said to be denied, first of all, by the numerous examples of unfaithfulness of Christians themselves. Without underestimating the importance of this appeal to a consistent personal and community life, Christian tradition saw, instead, the non-practicability of this idea at a purely human level as supreme witness (‘martyrdom’) to the divine at work in the world. It thus remains convinced that, with the grace of God, it is truly possible to ‘follow in the footsteps’ (1PT 2:21) of the Crucified Christ who rose again. We are here truly at the heart of undivided faith, of that ‘ecumenism of martyrdom’ which Pope Francis has talked about, seeing it as ‘a powerful call to journey along the pathway of reconciliation of the Churches’.[4]
The definitive dismissal of the logic of violence that the paschal event brought with it is also the principal contribution which we as Christians believe that we can offer today to inter-religious dialogue. This was the great insight of Assisi and the message that Pope Francis has repeated in the Holy Land, and also in Albania and Turkey, launching from the esplanades of mosques ‘a heartfelt plea to all people and to all communities who look to Abraham: may we respect and love one another as brothers and sisters! May we learn to understand the sufferings of others! May no one abuse the name of God through violence! May we work together for justice and peace!’.[5] A peace that is not a mere truce between armed opponents who accept a precarious modus vivendi because of the physical impossibility of destroying each other: authentic and cordial reconciliation can only be invoked as a gift of God and is therefore a privileged setting of dialogue between believers of different religions. Along the same wavelength echoes with especial force the address that John Paul II gave in Sarajevo to the representatives of the Muslim community at the end of a terrible war fought along ethnic-religious lines. ‘All human beings’, said John Paul II, ‘are placed by God on the earth so that they may walk a pilgrimage of peace, each starting from the situation he finds himself in and the culture that concerns him’.[6]
The Paroxysm of a Crisis
It does not escape me how distant these statements sound from the events of recent years. Never before has there been so much talk about peace and dialogue and never before have wars and oppositions been so frequent. Like Oasis in particular we cannot accept as normal the fact that many Muslim societies are today jeopardised by violence, beginning with what is happening in Syria and Iraq but without forgetting about other centres of tension such as Nigeria, Libya or Pakistan (and the list is here far from being complete). This phenomenon has in recent years taken on extremely worrying levels, generating an unstoppable exodus which is depriving many of these countries of their best resources. Oasis, which was born to be near to Eastern Christians, cannot ignore their cry of pain and the cry of pain of entire peoples, everywhere that terrorism, and in particular Islamist terrorism, rages.
It is perhaps not mistaken to depict the current crisis, whose epicentre is Iraq and Syria, as a form of paroxysm where various chickens have finally come home to roost. Our task is to denounce evil, without yielding, and also its collusions, without ever forgetting the situations and political decisions that have led to the present crisis but at the same time not turning away from raising the most disconcerting questions that bear upon the very foundation of religiously motivated violence. Each person can provide their own answers. At a practical level it is also incumbent upon the international community to protect the defenceless, as the Holy Father has observed on a number of occasions, ‘stopping an unjust aggressor is a right of humanity, but it is also a right of the aggressor to be stopped as not to do wrong’.[7] And, lastly, every form of moral and material solidarity with the victims and millions of refugees should be activated.
The Space of a Commitment
If the will to power is a constant of war, the growth of technology places a new variable today in the equation. What is at risk, indeed, is not this or that life, but life itself. Our thoughts go instinctively to the unsolved atomic threat. But perhaps there is an even greater danger: at work, indeed, is an economic competition that expresses itself in the wild exploitation of the resources of the planet. One could perhaps speak in provocative fashion about a new world war in the sense of a war launched against the world and in which, once again, individuals ‘are reduced to being the bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves’.[8] In the future, therefore, it will be increasingly necessary to connect the subject of ecology to that of anthropology in order to go beyond a vision of the world as an arsenal (the choice of this word is not accidental) of resources to use as one pleases. Today we understand perhaps better the mysterious words of St. Paul about the creation that ‘groans’ and ‘waits with eager longing for God to reveal his children’ (Rom 8:19-22). The topic of peace is thus opened to an eschatological dimension. As indeed the Psalm tells us: ‘The righteous’ – and who is righteous if not those who at peace with themselves? – ‘will possess the land’ (Ps 36:29). And these are the only words in the Bible that the Koran quotes literally: ‘For We have written in the Psalms, after the remembrance, ‘The earth shall be the inheritance of My righteous servants’’ (21:104). It seems to me difficult to think that such an exceptional convergence is without meaning.
But between the suffering caused by evil endured and the hopeful waiting for revelation of the righteous there is immense work to be done: our task as men of good will. Thus that programme remains completely valid which as early as 1999 formulated the insight that led to the birth of Oasis: ‘To bear witness to God as the principle of peace, source of thought and action of peace: this is the narrow passage to go beyond the alternative of secularism/ideology-utopia’.[9] This witness, however – we cannot but take this last step – requires an attitude, the courage to forgive. This was observed by John Paul II in another of his extraordinary addresses given in Sarajevo. After recommending a dialogue built upon an ‘absence of discrimination’, ‘work for everyone’ and the ‘return of refugees’, this great saint of the twentieth century proceeded to add: ‘Building a true and lasting peace is a great task…while largely entrusted to institutional formulations, which have to be effectively drawn up by means of sincere dialogue and in respect for justice, depend no less decisively on a renewed solidarity of minds and hearts. It is this interior attitude which must be fostered, both within the frontiers of Bosnia-Herzegovina and also in relations with neighbouring States and the Community of Nations. But an attitude of this kind can only be established on the foundation of forgiveness. For the edifice of peace to be solid, against the background of so much blood and hatred, it will have to be built on the courage of forgiveness. People must know how to ask for forgiveness and to forgive!’[10]
In truth there is no peace without justice, there is no justice without forgiveness.[11] We should never forget this last truth, in our humble attempt to construct the edifice of peace.