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A Terrible Love of War
Homily and Notes
September 26, 2004
by John Ashenhurst
Welcome
Good morning and welcome. Another wonderful Sunday morning to be together.We're Orcas UU Fellowship, when meet, how to “join,” mailing list, name badgesMeet 2nd and 4th Sundays, 11 am, WSCHSounder ad Wednesday, postcards a few days beforeWill do Web site with Chris ThomersonInvite ideas for programs, speakersUU denomination, movement, UUA, UUA.orgFamous UUs: Pete Seeger, Carl Sandburg, Elliot Richardson, William Cohen, Adlai Stevenson, e. e. cummings, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath, Margaret FullerResource table, readingsUUA Covenant on order of serviceShared Responsibilities - basket - pay expenses of room, publicity, sometimes programFeeding the hungry - food bankNext time: October 10th, Jazz Theology; Martin Lund and friends, stay for potluck lunchToday: A Terrible Love of War - from a new book by James Hillman, student of Jung and teacher of Thomas More (Care of the Soul)Opening Words
Why talk about war right now? Unpleasant topic, vast, very difficult to make sense of.
The US is at war and it looks like we're finally going to have a national discussion about it
James Hillman's new book “A Terrible Love of War”; offers a different perspective from what I've seen, has given me some insight
I know very little about war directly. War hasn't been much part of my family history. On my father's side - English, Scotch-Irish, German: My great grandfather served in the civil war and came home a broken man. My uncle volunteered at the end of WWI when his fiancée's brother war killed at Belleau Wood but he never saw action. On my mother's side, the last relative to serve in the military was a Karl Birchman, a Swede captured in the Battle of Potalva in Russia in 1709. After 10 years in Russian prison, he was released and returned to Sweden and married a gypsy. My father wasn't drafted for WW II. I wasn't drafted for Viet Nam. The lottery passed me by.
When I was 13 - in 1956 - I remember vividly watching the film Friendly Persuasion - the story of a Quaker family in Indiana during the civil war. I could imagine myself into the poignant struggle between the commitment to non-violence and the demands of the community.
As a teenager I was a member of a quasi-military organization, the Boy Scouts, and enjoyed the structure and camaraderie it provided until girls became more interesting.
In high school, I remember being struck by Sandburg's poem, Grass. You may remember it:
Grass
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work-
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres [IPREE] and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
In high school I read Tolstoy's War and Peace and Neville Shute's On the Beach. Later, when my sister got married, the best man, a marine back from Viet Nam bragged about throwing Vietnamese out of helicopters. I worked in Eugene MaCarthy's Wisconsin primary campaign. I sat-in at the University of Chicago administration building dermonstration. I sang anti-war songs. I discussed the Chicago Seven with my students in the introduction to philosophy class I taught. Al Jaffee, a friend told me how he poured honey into National Guard files. Jerry Griffin told me about his two years as a sniper in Vietnam, a dream time when getting through each day alive his anxious focus. My first real girl-friend, Viola was German. Her father, Art, had served in the German army and had been captured and held in Russia for several years. We talked about the holocaust. He would bring the discussion back to what the Americans did to the Indians.
Now we're deep into another war, this time in Iraq, a war that makes no sense to me, no matter how generously I consider the rationale. Yet many Americans vociferously support the war and from my point of view ignore common sense and compassion. What's going on? How can this happen? Again and again and again. In the words of the song we sang in the 1960s, “Why can't we ever learn?” What is it about human beings that make them eager or at least complicit about going to war? What is it about the United States, the most Christian country in the world, that makes it so eager to go to war? Are we stupid and easily fooled by the politicians or do we really love going to war? Are we infected by what James Hillman calls a terrible love of war?
Homily:
A Terrible Love of War - James Hillman on Mythology, Religion, and War
Talks about war can be upbeat, encouraging, and well intentioned - suggesting, for instance, that if we could make certain that every person's basic needs were met, or women were in charge, or all countries had democratic governments - we could prevent war. Or talks about war can be depressing, discouraging and hopeless. - suggesting, for instance, that humans are naturally warlike, God likes war, or war is the natural result of capitalism. I hope this talk will be both cautiously hopeful while also soberly realistic.
Here are the opening paragraphs from Hillman's book:
“One sentence in one scene from one film, Patton, sums up what this book tries to understand. The general walks the field after a battle. Churned earth, burnt tanks, dead men. He takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc and says `I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life.'
Hillman goes on, “We can never prevent war or speak sensibly of peace and disarmament unless we enter this love of war. Unless we move our imaginations into the martial state of the soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This means `going to war.' And this book aims to induct our minds into military service. We are not going to war `in the name of peace' as deceitful rhetoric so often declares, but rather for war's own sake: to understand the madness of its love.”
Hmmmm….
But war is clearly horrible isn't it? Wasn't Patton crazy? Wouldn't human beings be better off if there were no wars? Isn't war caused by circumstances that humans can change? Don't we need to do some social engineering or have a world government? Thus the need for a strong U.N. Or is Hillman right in claiming that the love of war is built into human nature, a dark side that we cannot ever hope to vanquish? Is war a bad thing?
Or is war ultimately a good thing, paradoxically the prime mover in the evolution of civilization over chaos and human's animal nature? Is war a heightening of consciousness, an occasion for true, altruistic love and transcendence among comrades in arms? Is everyday life a somnambulant banality and war the cure?
Hillman wants us to confront a very difficult and soul-searching question: is war the result of circumstance - that is some cause external to ourselves and fixable - or is it the result of a tendency smoldering in every human soul, not with Patton's bonfire perhaps, but nonetheless in a way that can be stoked into a mighty conflagration. I certainly don't want to believe I have a terrible love of war - but I suspect that Hillman is on to something we should pay attention to. Here's a sketch of his argument.
Is War Normal?
Hillman claims that war is normal, not in the sense of ideal but in the sense of common and expected. If war is normal, that is common at all times in history with all social and political arrangements, in times of scarcity and plenty, in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, then we must suspect that a propensity to war is part of human nature.
“Is war abnormal?”, Hillman asks. “I find it normal in that it is with us every day and never seems to go away….During the last five thousand six hundred years of written history, fourteen thousand six hundred wars have been recorded. Two or three wars each year of human history…Though `war is normal' shocks our morality and wounds our idealism, it stands solidly as a statement of fact.”
Not surprisingly then, the thought patterns of war seem to influence our thinking about the universe, religion, ethics, evolution, history, business, sports, psychology, politics, economics, and the relation between the sexes. Hillman says, “We think in warlike terms, feel ourselves at war with ourselves, and unknowingly believe predation, territorial defense, conquest, and the interminable battle of opposing forces are the ground rules of existence.”
So then can we understand what causes war, that is, when X happens war always follows? In his postscript to War and Peace Tolstoy writes “Why did millions of people begin to kill one another? Who told them to do it? It would seem that it was clear to each of them that this could not benefit any of them, but would be worse for them all. Why did they do it? Endless retrospective conjectures can be made, and are made, of the causes of this senseless event, but the immense number of these explanations, and their concurrence to one purpose only proves that the causes were innumerable and that not one of them deserves to be called the cause.” Hillman says we will never be able to convincingly find a cause of war - any more than we can convincingly explain our action or anyone else's.
Rather than look for a cause or causes or explain war we might be better off trying to understand war - that is reveal its patterns in consciousness and action. So Hillman goes about cataloging and describing some elements of war, some symptoms of its presence in the mind. Once we see these elements, he thinks, we can make out the psychic pattern that lies behind them.
One characteristic is that war is always associated with a division between good and evil. And it is an act of the community, not random or individual violence but good combating evil. In war, normal men, not pathological murderers are willing to kill one another because the other is evil and any means to oppose evil are ipso facto good.
In addition, war is inhuman - in three different respects: it is subhuman, it is autonomous, and it is trans human, War is subhuman because it leads to deliberate cruelty, coercion, impersonalization, disfiguring the human frame, deranged behaviors, inhuman weaponry, accoutrements, and symbolic abstractions. Think of Mai Lai or Abu Gharib.
Shakespeare captures this wanton energy when he writes in Julius Caesar
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry `Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war….
War is autonomous, that is it seems to arise of its own accord contrary to the wishes of human beings. One war seems to breed another. If you read accounts of the beginning of the First World War, what's especially striking is how the German, English, Austrian, French, and others all felt that the war somehow began on its own.
And war has a trans human aspect. It isn't really below but above human beings. Shakespeare has Lear say “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,/They kill us for their sport.” It's not us that makes war but something higher.
Further, war can be looked at as a creative force. Kant and other writers see in the history of war not merely destruction but the emergence and evolution of civilization. For Heraclites war is the father of all things - not random destruction but rather a generative principle.
And battle can be a transcendental or spiritual experience. War is sometimes described as being sublime in the sense of being both terrible and beautiful at the same time. Graham Greene writes, “I felt a terrible joy and exultation at the sight and sound and taste and smell of all this destruction.”
Some soldiers report a heavy, fateful feeling of necessity, where neither they nor any human being is really in charge. And they sometimes report a higher state of awareness and altruistic love that is missing from the sleepwalking of everyday life. Sometimes they report being more alive in battle than they ever were before or after.
So here are some of the things we've noticed about war: it is normal in the sense of being pervasive; no one has had real success in finding a convincing cause; it's closely tied to the identification of good and evil; its autonomous and it's transcendental in some respects.
With these clues it's obvious to Hillman where to look to understand war; it's built into the human psyche and the best way to understand the human psyche is to look at its projection in classical mythology.
Ares/Mars and Aprodite/Venus
You remember that the Greeks identified a god of war, Ares, the Romans, Mars. Ares was an unusual god in that no image was associated with him. Ares was the battle itself, not a separate entity watching it, as Pallas Athena might be. Ares was considered very dangerous because he was pure action with no component of thought or reflection; he was always in a rush to get going and not very bright. Once Ares came to dominate a situation, it wasn't possible to predict what would happen and he couldn't be stopped until his energy dissipated.
Hillman writes: “The violence of Ares is a sacred violence because authorized by its inhuman proponent and ritualized in the altered states of the battlefield which displays the conjunction of good and bad violence within the sacred. Ares is no less divine for being cruel and brutal. The battlefield is a place of sacrifice; participation in a sacrament. The whole bloody business reveals a god, therewith placing war among the authentic phenomena of religion. And that is why war is so terrible, so loved, and so hard to understand.”
Hillman says that unless we imagine war as inhuman in the transcendent sense…war as god [we] cannot imagine and we cannot understand… This trans human figure shows up in the frenzy of combat, in berserkers. It shows up in the eerie mood that can come over people in battle, a kind of transcendent despair. They feel something in their soul surrender and they give in to everything they've been most afraid of. It's like a glimpse of eternity. We need to think of war as an emanation of a god, that is, as an archetypal impulse.”
If war is a god, that is, a pattern of the human psyche, we will never be able to entirely rid ourselves of war. One of the mysteries of modern times is why religion persists - after the influence of Copernicus, Gibbon, Hume, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Hilter, Pol Pot, and Osama bin Laden. Religion persists because it is an outward expression of elements of the human psyche. War is one of those religious or mythic elements. And we can't have some, for instance, Zeus and Athena, without others, like Ares. All the gods come together - as a package. The psyche is not monotheistic but thoroughly polytheistic.
And it is in this connection among the gods of the psyche that some hope lies for mitigating the influence of Ares/Mars. Ares has important links to Aphrodite, Mars to Venus, and war and destruction to love and creativity. We see that link, Hillman points out, when an unsurpassing love opens in the heart of war. We see altruistic love, tenderness, mourning, bravery, love for a leader. Unlike civilian life, soldiers don't die alone, they do not depart, their spirits are not buried and in fact often rally the troops and call for more sacrifice. Some survivors insist that their war experience was sublime in its transcendence of their usual feelings and sense of themselves. There is a sense that death is powerless because life receives meaning from the infinite responsibility toward ones comrades. Battle becomes the paradigm of the ethical, of altruism, of love.
When I talked about Walt Whitman earlier this year in the context of his radical idea of democracy and its connection to Unitarian Universalism, I described his deeply loving response to the pain and suffering of the young men he tended to in the Civil War hospitals in Washington D.C. Even in the face of all this suffering and bloodiness, Whitman never abandoned his commitment to the Civil War. But his nursing brought Aphrodite/Venus/love to those shattered young men and his poetry about the war the influence of those goddesses to America.
Religion as war
We can see, I think, how war is a kind of religion but Hillman thinks it is also very important to understand that some religions, especially Christianity, and especially in the United States, is also war. Here in America religion itself is war, actively, unremittingly, and often unconsciously.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are monotheistic, revealed religions. Unlike natural religions or mythologies that arose out of the experience of a people and whose origins are lost in time, revealed religions focus on specific narratives that were revealed by God to specific human beings.
Mythologies can be challenged, adopted or not based on their usefulness, attractiveness, tradition, or insight into the human experience. Revealed religions on the other hand can be challenged on the basis of whether or not they are really true. Followers of natural religions don't need to have faith, they don't need to believe propositions that seem counterintuitive, and no new scientific development or historical research can challenge them.
That Christianity is highly sensitive to challenges to its truth claims was evident over the last year or so with the vehement reaction to Dan Brown's book, The DaVinci Code, as well as in the interest caused by Elaine Pagel's book Beyond Belief.
Jews, Muslims, and Christians each react differently to the challenges posed by non-believers. Judaism is not a universal religion. Their revelation is for themselves and thus ,it doesn't much matter what gentiles, non-believers think about the truth-value of Jewish scripture. What matters is the political question of whether Jews will be left alone to practice their faith. But for Christianity and Islam, universal religions, every non-believer is a challenge, a threat to the their truths - and thus their need to convert by missionary or sword. Hillman suggests that because they are universal, revealed religions, Christianity and Islam are by nature religions of war - they have a perpetual need to convince or force all people to agree that their revelations are true.
That doesn't mean that followers of natural religion aren't war-like. Hillman tells us all human beings have that in their nature. But it does means that they aren't likely to feel a pressing need to either convert others to their beliefs or destroy them.
Though alike in some ways, Christianity and Islam have an important difference. Christianity is the only major religion that claims that God himself, not just a representative - holy man, prophet, or saint - came to live with us and then was sacrificed for our benefit - at a specific time and place. For those that believe it, this story isn't mythology, it's historically true and it's heretical to describe it as a projection of the psyche. It's not. It's fact. Note that the Christ story is quite different from God speaking to Moses or to Mohammed. For Christians Jesus Christ was and is God, not merely a man touched by God.
Christianity differs from Islam in another important way; its public focus is peace and love, symbols associated with Jesus. Islam on the other hand is associated with war, Mohammad himself a warrior. If Hillman is right about the connection between love and war, we shouldn't be surprised to see Christianity historically espousing peace and love and then using those principles to rationalize war. Mars and Venus must both be served. What looks like Christian hypocrisy is actually the impossibility of excluding Mars when Venus is called forth.
What to do
Hillman says that by understanding war as the emanation of Mars we can be more sensitive to the formation of a war mentality in society. Mars shows himself by a demand for action without thought, of haste instead of reflection. When we see this haste we can be certain that Mars is trying to take control, as he did two years ago with the rush to invade Iraq. If all of us, including the administration, had been more sensitive to Mars, we would have welcomed the delays inspections and United Nations deliberations were imposing. Hillman says that if we know that Mars is around, it's at least possible to delay and redirect his energy.
In the Greek or Roman worlds or during the Renaissance or even until quite recently, it wouldn't have taken a James Hillman to reeducate us about Mars, his influence and how to sense him. But classic education recedes and is discredited as just myth - not true and a challenge to Christianity. Our leaders have no interest in understanding Mars, though one could imagine someone popularizing a book series that looked at Mars and Venus from the point of view of war and peace rather than the relations between men and women
If Hillman is right, when Mars is ascendant in our psyches, Venus will be as well. Venus is the source of culture and civilization. Thus we should expect to see an outpouring of cultural artifacts associated with the Iraq war. And in fact we do. An unprecedented number of books have been and are being published that analyze the situation from every angle. Virtually all point to the stupidity of the Iraq invasion. They are a rational critique of an irrational phenomenon and thus, if Hillman is right, are not likely to bring Mars to heel. Mars will only be tamed once he is sufficiently tired out, spent, not because his actions make no sense. Perhaps that is already happening. We'll know with the results of the November election. Then we can hope that the analysis done now helps us recognize and slow down Mars when he gets his wind back.
It's interesting to note that the neocons, those enthusiasts for American pre-emptive war, are sometimes called Vulcans. Vulcan is the Roman equivalent of Hephaistos, the Greek god of technology and husband to Aphrodite who he discovered in bed with Ares. Technology, war, and love - a powerful trio.
Finally, if Hillman is right that Christianity, especially of the literalist variety, is inherently warlike, then we would expect America to become more warlike as that group had more influence. That certainly has happened in the conduct of Congress - which now operates like a highly disciplined troop.
What do you think? Is war normal? Is a terrible love of war part of the human psyche? Are we in this room infected by it or just other people? Is Christianity, especially the strong American version, an especially toxic partner to Mars? Do you feel better or worse than you did 20 minutes ago?
Meditation
War Is Kind
by Stephen Crane (1899)
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind,
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them.
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--
A field where a thousand corpses lie.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbles in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.