The St. Austin Review

Sample Article The Desert’s Ancient Peace: Christendom from Homer to Eliot

The Desert’s Ancient Peace: Christendom from Homer to Eliot

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water

only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the

pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

There is an ancient human longing, as deep as time itself, as deep as every mortal heart, for the good that men call peace. This longing has roots as deep as the mystery of the cherubim and the flaming sword preventing man’s return to the primordial Garden from which he was exiled after the Fall. In modern times peace has sometimes gotten a bad name, where peacenik rhymes with beatnik, tokens of The Purple Decades of the 1960s and ‘70s, often marked by anti-war movements of hippies holding up two fingers in a V sign which paradoxically also represents victory in war. They certainly had it right that war is the opposite of peace, and War and Peace is Tolstoy’s title for his greatest novel built upon a dichotomy as ancient as Good and Evil. But is all war evil, and is all peace good? The ancient Greek philosophers understood that the answer to any question must begin with the definitions of the terms involved. For what is war after all, and what is peace?