Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference,
Elizabethtown University, Elizabethtown, PA, September 29, 2007

War as Love: How the Mystic's Quest
has been Co-opted to Sell War

"When the path of morality is blocked, then we show animals the way to devour men, and sooner or later it will come to men devouring men."
- Mencius

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that war and the mystic's quest are conflated in popular culture, the media and politicians' hushed and earnest tones. After all, if you are asking young men (and more recently, woman) to sacrifice themselves to safeguard the status quo, a pretty powerful sales job is called for. And what greater inducement can there be for an action than the love of god, and perhaps even a promise of eternal life?

While this is true - that politicians and mythmakers cynically intertwine God, love and war to sell this gruesome institution - this dynamic is hardly new, or confined to the secular world of politics and power. War and the mystic's quest have been confused with each other since the beginning of human time. Virtually all-religious paths utilize war and war-like language and imagery to describe the spiritual path, and exhort followers on to religious catharsis.

For instance, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu text that pre-dates Christianity, is a morality play set on the field of battle. The duty to destroy his own kinsman and teachers is Arjuna, the main character's, task. The teacher, Krishna, convinces Arjuna of the necessity of his task, explaining the relationship between death, sacrifice and devotion.

"If you fail to wage this war
of sacred duty,
you will abandon your own duty
and fame only to gain evil.
If you are killed, you win heaven;
if you triumph, you enjoy the earth;
therefore, Arjuna, stand up
and resolve to fight the battle!"1

This intertwining of murder and religious necessity dramatizes the Hindu ideal that one must heroically confront death (even that of others, apparently) in order to transcend the limits of worldly existence.2 Underscoring the way in which war and the Hindu path are intertwined, this religious tract is subtitled, "Krishna's counsel in time of war," and is drawn from the much larger war epic, the Mahabharata, which traces a legendary confrontation that took place around 3100 B.CE.

Hardly confined to Eastern religions, conflating war and the mystical quest can be found at the core of the three Abrahamic faiths. In Islam, we read of lesser and greater Jihad - lesser Jihad being the physical battle for God (and against "infidels") in holy war, while greater Jihad represents the interior struggle that it takes to achieve a true God consciousness. It is easy to see how the two can become confused, blending together into what is today a declared worldwide "jihad" in the name of Islam, a war against idolaters and infidels across the Western World.

The Jewish Torah is riffled through with injunctions from God to smite this or that people in His name; indeed, God Himself takes part in the carnage, as seen, for instance, in the Exodus story of the flight of the Hebrews, when He Himself kills every non-Jewish, first-born son in Egypt. Christianity's bloody history needs no illumination, being the religion that gave us the "just war" theory, the Crusades and the inquisition.

Given this predilection for wrapping together war and the religious quest, it should not surprise us that today still, war is marketed in religious and even mystical terminology. The latest purveyors of mass death and destruction are simply building onto a timeless and deadly habit of conflating war and the mystical quest - to equate humanity's highest drives and our basest desires, wrapping murder and God together into an unbreakable and terrifying clench.

Of course, one central reason that politicians and other purveyors of destruction have such an easy time in foisting off war as love is because of the gruesome history of uniting physical war and the religious path. Though much of the religious language was undoubtedly meant as metaphor, the human mind always runs downhill towards the literal, leaving reams of imagery and injunctions for warmongers to insinuate into the secular culture, and unsuspecting minds of potential warriors.

The tendency to bring God and war together allows the keepers of the social status quo to "market" the institution of war to potential warriors as the ultimate manner of becoming greater than oneself, and reaching a new, mystical consciousness. War represents the glory of the mystic's path, solely for the price of signing up and going along.

Most difficult for the peace worker to understand, and most disturbing when thinking about how to stem the gruesome tide of worldwide wars, is that so much of the actual practice of war does mimic the mystic's quest. As the war correspondent Christopher Hedges noted:

"War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war, as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness, but also meaning. And tragically, war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning."

This is how it so captivates the population. War, indeed, gives humans the illusion that they are fighting for a power greater than the self, which "makes the world understandable." Before this power, "all bow and become one." Indeed, these very words could easily be applied to the mystical path towards divine realization. However, the issue tips when we look at just how war accesses the human spirit - it does so by bypassing the rational thought process and diving into the animal aspects of the human being.

Where war bleeds irrevocably into our animal nature is represented in the statement that "war suspends self-critical thought." After all, self-critical thought is the only thing that truly separates us from the animals - without it we are little more than dexterous rats, killing machines with the occasional (ineffectual) pangs of "conscience." As Thomas Merton has pointed out, "Man is the only species besides the rat, that wantonly and cruelly turns on his own kind in unprovoked and murderous hostility. Man is the only one who deliberately seeks to destroy his own kind."3 Here is the horror of the basest aspects of the human spirit, mistaking the emotional surcease provided by slaughter with spiritual realization!

It is this disconnect between self-critical thought and action that even allows for humans to entertain the political "solution" of war. Virtually all mystics from all major systems propose that the path to God leads directly through the self. Confucius said: "Attack the evil that is within yourself; do not attack the evil that is within others."4 Muhammad averred that the first stage of worship is silence. The Jewish Kabbalists believed that man is literally the microcosm of God - and that the surest way to learn about God is to learn about oneself.

It is not too difficult to discern the age-old dynamic of bypassing the true parameters of mystical realization - self-critical thought - and offering war as the quickest way to religious catharsis. In our contemporary social and political milieu, we can easily see how the gruesome history of conflating God with war continues to help brainwash every new generation of child warriors into believing that patriotism and the love of God are one and the same thing.

As was recently noted in Newsweek Magazine, in an article entitled, "God, War and the Presidency:"

"In America, God and war have a particular kinship: presidents in time of conflict invoke the Lord's name as a way to rally the people . . . Evoking God in the midst of mass killing is inspirational . . . Divine sanction has been used to give . . . license (to) genocide. The impulse to blend God and war owes much to the American temperament: Americans have always feared one (today, nine out of 10 call themselves believers) and loved the other (the United States has fought in dozens of armed conflicts in the nation's two-and-a-third centuries). Not a few old warriors have admitted to thrilling to the words of 'Onward, Christian Soldiers.'"5

In our shared reality, limned by politicians and businesspersons and amplified by the media, war and God become hopelessly entangled. After all, it is easy to sell war to a society in the name of God, when that society has grown up in religious systems that propose just the same thing.

And as war does offer so much of God to humans, through its sense of obligation, sacrifice and shared purpose - and the struggle it presents is so much more basic ("a black and white tableau") and psychologically less challenging than the true search for spirituality - individuals turn to it with an almost relieved sigh. It is far simpler to be part of this something greater (war), than to start out on the arduous path of true spiritual realization, a terrifying pursuit with virtually no visible rewards. After all, there are no "Purple Hearts" awarded to the quiet and realized mystic; no long, fawning, posthumous articles in the newspapers are limned about heroism, sacrifice and sublime love for those who yearn towards a true humility.

The media, politicians and mythmakers do everything in their power to play up the similarities, all for the poorly obscured purpose of using the human pawns to protect their own fiefdom. Perhaps, to some extent, they might even believe their own words and, if they themselves have fought in a war and come out more or less whole, they will be forced to believe in the lie of a mystical war, if only to help justify the horrors they have witnessed and perpetrated.

We need only listen in to the words of one of the Eminence Gris of contemporary American life, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), to see how war language does explicitly borrow from the religious and even mystical lexicon to describe a fallen soldier:

"He loved his country, and the values that make us exceptional among nations, and good . Love and honor oblige us. We are obliged to value our blessings, and to pay our debts to those who sacrificed to secure them for us. They are blood debts . . .The loss of every fallen soldier should hurt us lest we ever forget the terrible costs of war, and the sublime love of those who sacrifice everything on our behalf."6

Of course, one can find similar sentiments among history's greatest mystics, which helps allow this latter day death monger shill war in such a manner. For instance, Meister Eckhart, the 13th century Christian mystic stated: "True and perfect obedience is a virtue above all virtues."7 The 20th century mystic and martyr Simone Weil stated: "Where there is a need, there is an obligation."8 To the cynical, ignorant or simply uncaring, it is a small step to apply these thoughts to the lowest of human actions, war.

Our current president of the United States, hardly one to shy away from equating his own motivations with those of God, utilized this same mystical/war conflation to advance his deadly agenda:

"The president outlined a far-reaching moral-mission for his presidency: 'I will seize the opportunity to achieve big goals - there is nothing bigger than to achieve world peace. We're never going to get people all in agreement about the use of force, but action - confident action that will yield positive results - provides kind of a slipstream into which reluctant nations and leaders can get behind and show themselves that there has been - you know, something positive has happened towards peace.'"9

War is peace, murder is morality. Religious language is but another hammer in the toolbox of power - and it often becomes a deadly weapon. Of course, once the highest temporal leaders have conflated God, love and war, it is easy, and perhaps necessary, for their minions to follow in those footsteps. Within the past couple of months, this notice seeped out in the alternative press:

"A major defense contractor for the military and Homeland Security claimed that the United States is morally obliged to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq for the sake of God. 'If we stay and rebuild Iraq, we will demonstrate to the world that we remain the best force for good in the world,' Charles Patricoff, Sr. Contract Manager for Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp, said. 'More importantly, we as Christians can better influence that region for the Kingdom of God.'"10

In another instance, Lt. General William Boykin, recently put on his dress greens and spoke before an American Christian group, attacking Muslims as "idolaters" and "forces of Satan." He also averred that he knew he would beat a Muslim warlord in Somalia because, "Well you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."11

Even at the level of popular culture and entertainment, we needn't dig too deeply to see the way in which these myths are perpetrated and disseminated. Just a few weeks ago, in an article about the college football coach (and one-time NFL coach), Jerry Glanville, began with this lead:

"Jerry Glanville can pinpoint the instant his life changed forever. In March 2004, on a morale-building trip to Iraq and Kuwait set up by the NFL, he was standing in the last latrine along the Highway of Death when a sentence scribbled on the wall hit him right between the eyes: 'I'd rather live a day with the lions than a thousand years with the lambs, the American Soldier.'

'I thought, "Wow, you've got to coach these kids,"' says Glanville. 'They don't question the mission, just "Let's get it done."'12

Here, sports, leadership, unquestioning fealty to secular and worldly goals and murder are all wrapped together and presented as heroic.

This religious and even mythic presentation of war forces the general population to bypass entirely their rational, decision-making thought process - that is to say, that which makes us most human - and either throw in with the powerful (and the myth of spiritual catharsis they proffer) - which is represented as doing God's will - or become completely (spuriously) separated from their own "higher spirit." The dead soldier is held out as incontrovertible proof of the necessity and worth of the war. After all, how could one "force" the soldier to have died in vain by questioning the worth of his action? The war becomes worthwhile because someone has died undertaking it, a reversal of the normal assignation of worth, which defines an action's merit before the risk is actually taken. In a horrifying example of the "sunk costs" theory, the more people that die for a cause, however mistaken, the more valuable the action, no matter what the true human or political outlay really are.

Through the wanton sacrifice of young souls for political ends, the sublime nature of war becomes enmeshed with a true God-experience. The very real horrors of war are euphemistically referred to in the language of mysticism, "sublime love," "obligation," "good causes," "moral purpose, "save the innocent" and "sacrifice." The "fog" of war begins in the language of the powerful, and then overtakes the thought process of the general population.

Ultimately, given the historic intertwining of religious and war imagery, the easy manner in which humans turn to bellicosity and the long history of equating heroism and mass slaughter in the public square, we peace workers must ask ourselves if war is, in fact, entirely natural to the human condition. Are peace workers little more than delicate butterflies, beating hopelessly around the massive machinery of a never-ending bloody battle?

Perhaps. But as visionaries, as we in the peace community certainly are, we cannot worry about the lowest "objective" reality offered by our shared human experience. We must view the war imagery sprinkled through human religious history as metaphor, and eschew the contemporary habit of enmeshing political and state interests with those of God Itself.

It is up to us, marginalized though we may be, to propose a better way, to untangle war and God, religious metaphor from political history, and work in every way towards the goal of peace. Our job is to operate in the realm of possibility and hope, not that of a Machiavellian "realpolitik."

It might well mean that peace workers must reconsider how we package our message, or imagine our end goal. Perhaps we have to learn to use the language of God and war to speak of peace; if it works for the religious and political communities, it might resonate for ours, as well. It might also mean acknowledging the deeply ingrained manner in which humans order the world, and find meaning. If the simple act of risking one's life gives something meaning for many humans, no matter how grotesque the irony, then perhaps we might want to reconsider our work, proposing that it is more meaningful to risk one's life in the name of peace, and humanity's highest ideals, than in service to the idolatry of the state.

To truly make a difference, we peace workers must work within the boundaries of the world as it is, acknowledging the deeply ingrained manner in which mystical attraction has been used to sell war to the general population. It is only through understanding and then moving beyond this grim dynamic, that we might be able to begin re-creating religious impulse and the world in a truly peaceful, post-war image.

FOOTNOTES