With so many wars going on we don’t need violent movies. But then the wars in the movies are easily resolved by super- heroes. Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy… a neurotic mental state! The world is living in fastasy, believing its problems can be solved by shuttling diplomats in the person of a wonder-woman or by a lone-ranger. The world has gone insane.
Perhaps this insanity began in Heaven when, at the beginning, there was a great war, Michael and the good angels warring against Lucifer and the fallen angels rebelling against God. Since then, there have always been wars. And the cause of them all? Man’s rebellion to the will of God.
Here is where I can compare my work as a psychologist years ago and my work as a priest-confessor. In the former it is almost an impossible task to convince a patient that he is not Napoleon Bonaparte. In the confessional it is easier to convince a penitent that he is a sinner, going against God’s will. That is the big difference. The world lives in fantasy, the true Christian lives in reality. The imagination of the neurotic runs wild, the realist Christian remains stable. It is easy to teach a child who is quietly sitting down than one who is running around. Today, both the child and the teachers are shuttling around.
Wars continue, and there seems to be no end to them because no one seems to know the cause. As a consequence, no one seems to know the remedy. All the man-made peace-solutions show gross ignorance, and merely show vested interests in peace-makers. Human solutions have blind spots because of their vested interests. As such they won’t work. In the good book, it is said “God’s ways are not man’s ways.” Shall we not try God’s ways? A priest, supposedly an expert in Middle-East problems (Gilbert Chesterton frowned at this overused word ‘expert’) gave ten pointers to solve the problem. They were all man-made solutions: he spoke of an arrangement based on international law. He should have gone higher and proposed Divine law. A former Secretary of State of the Vatican also spoke as a private person: his solution was also lop-sided.
Pope Benedict XVI has already given the solution. But the world has not listened to him, just as it had never listened to his predecessors. He said, the Gospel is the solution. The Catholic Church has been saying that for the last 2,000 years. She has never been proved wrong but nobody has ever tried her solution, as Chesterton has said.
All wars have its origin from that great war in heaven between the forces of good and evil. We are just pawns. But wars are started by those under the spell of original sin, the cause of all wars, sparked by that spiritual war within man, between our concupiscence and the faculties of the soul. It is a vicious spritual warfare where the stakes are eternal. And the wars we see around us are but a mere shadow of that battle.
But, even Christians go to war against Christians. Why? Because they are not Christian enough.
There was a great war in heaven; the Angels against the fallen ones. That war was transfered into the hearts of men. And it is that unresolved war that made Cain kill his brother Abel and makes a man kill another who has done him no wrong. We have returned to the worst kind of paganism, Hilaire Belloc once said; the paganism of Carthage, Chesterton would add, where we worship the devil. (Painting by Luca Giordano, 1634, “The Archangel Michael Hurls the Rebellious Angels into the Abyss.”)