Sample Content from Our Latest Issue
Sample Article
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?
Leave a Reply