Last update: 2025-01-21 15:37:34
What response can Christian thinking provide to the unreasonableness of war and violence? Every time that one is faced with the absurdity of mass destruction carried out by man, it would appear to be advisable to keep quiet, given that everyone finds out that they are involved in the will to annihilation perpetrated in the ultimate analysis against themselves.
And yet not even silence is right because to keep quiet would only be an extreme withdrawal from the involvement implied by a global world and even before that by a shared belonging to humanity. A wise outlook, however, perceives amidst the desolation a spiral of light because one can still say, like Pope Francis in
This statement is not a delegation of those who see themselves as limited and surrender to fideism but a sound perception of their size. For this reason, the clarifications made by Romano Guardini become necessary: if from the destructive consequences of power man, deduced the need to give up, he would do nothing else but abdicate his nature, wrongly understanding at the same time the nature of his Creator.
In a significant way, Guardini extends his reflections starting from two references of capital importance: the narration of the origins of the creation offered by genesis and the humility of the Son of God expressed in Phil 2:5-8. Man’s forgoing of adapting to the indiscriminate use of force is not secondary but, rather, lies in the specific form entrusted to him by his creator who was the first to experience it with humility. Otherwise, ‘the fundamental relationship of existence is disturbed. Man still has, as he had before, power and the possibility of domination. But the order in which the power given to him was not disconnected from responsibility towards the true Lord has been broken’.
That there is an order makes us dwell once again on the initial question regarding the meaning of a response, and this brings into play reason against the chaos provoked by violent action. Often humanity is deceived about the possibilities of obtaining solutions said to be derived from the use of force and does not see in them an initial mystification. In these cases it is presumed that the order that has been achieved is definitive; in reality, it is only purported because it tends to eliminate the irreducible complexity that individuals and peoples are, individuals and peoples who are inviolable in their plurality.
Drawing near to the texts that are offered here poses a further question to us. If the greatest danger after the Second World War, in the view of Guardini, derived from the technical sophistication of the atomic bomb, seventy years later we are commemorating the Great War and addressing episodes that refer from close at hand to primitive forms of violence. Thus contemporary man, who is able to ask himself about the outcomes of his power only when it does not assure him the benefits that were initially held up to the detriment of others, is obliged to review its meaning to its very roots, discovering that any instrument that fosters the recognition of otherness and his irrevocable dignity is virtuous.
This is not a matter of withdrawing fearfully from the dialectic of this world but, rather, of giving amplification to the frail appeal remembered by the Pope: ‘what does it matter to me?’; only in answering this question will the first act of responsibility towards the cry of every weak person be performed.