God for a moment

Anyone who knows the collective experience of death over many years of suffering knows the purest form of irrationalism. In the madness of nations, unleashed on a land chosen by proxies to settle their conflicts, life becomes the most precious of possessions. When one spends a large portion of one's existence in flames, entire months without water, without light, and without work, the notion of revolution, of a just cause, inspires mad hilarity. The only goal to be achieved is existence itself... The torn body is the only trace of the soul. The murdered body knows the futility of things, the absence of God... But if the witness of the cross is perceived as vain, others will have to be crucified: their death will prove our existence.

Here is the most poisonous of the fruits of war according to Georges Khodr (photo), now 103, Metropolitan of Mount Lebanon and of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. He wrote this in 1991: at the time of Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Madrid Conference that ended the conflict, the fall of Gorbachev, the end of the USSR, and the many uprisings that broke out in Iraq and the countries of the former Soviet Union. A handful of Christian writers published a booklet of reflections on the meaning of conflict in human history, Peace as a Method and Not as a Desirable End.
Why such a title? At the beginning of Christian history, there was no discussion: God is the only source of true peace; the peace of Christ is that life stronger than death that leads to resurrection.

Peacemakers will be called children of God (Mark 9:10), the purpose of humanity is communion (John 17:1), without an attitude of peace no one can be a Christian (Saint Basil), Christians are the "peaceful race" on earth, eirenikòn genos (Clement of Alexandria), a Christian who wages war declares himself against God (Saint John Chrysostom) and must be expelled from the Church (Tertullian). After the 4th century, Christianity became the religion of the empire, therefore of power. The climate changed. Saint Augustine, not coincidentally often cited by George Bush, accused of Manichean heresy anyone who said that war in itself is evil and contrary to the Christian spirit: it is a necessary evil, sometimes a minor one, in the case of a defensive or liberating war. From here, over time, we will have "holy wars," "holy crusades," "holy alliances," Gott mit uns, In God we trust, while the West works to develop a theology of "just war."

So, what kind of peace should we seek? Not the peace that is the idolatry of biological life, replies Olivier Clément: "The warrior of life is not a pacifist, he is a peacemaker." Nor the peace that seeks to quickly end a war, to avoid the accumulation of inextinguishable hatreds. Christians can only have in their hearts an "ontological" peace (the human unity established by Christ) and Jesus' command ("love your enemies"). The method? It is the constant exercise, or rather "struggle," to become aware, as Saint Maximus the Confessor said: in recognizing that every private disagreement, every public war, conceals "the unspoken fear of death and the need for enemies: to project my anguish onto them, making them my slaves. As long as, at least for a moment, I am free from the thought of death. To finally feel like a god."

Flaminia Morandi
NP December 2025