One
hundred years ago this past December 24, many soldiers in the trenches of
Western Europe started singing Christmas carols and stopped killing one another
for at least a day. Despite the different
uniforms that they wore, they knew that the birthday of the Prince of Peace was
no time to engage in gruesome slaughter.
Popular enthusiasm for a quick, decisive victory had given way by then to
a stalemate that would continue for years,
take millions of lives, and sow the seeds of even worse conflicts. The spontaneous Christmas truce was surely
not in keeping with military discipline and did not happen again on such a
large scale, but it has gone down in history as a sign that the way of Christ
contradicts the ways of worldly powers.
With the exception of the Ottoman Empire, the major
players in the Great War were thought of as Christian nations, whether
primarily Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox.
It was not their theological disagreements that led to the senseless
conflict; nonetheless, their leaders did their best to use the faith to support
their respective war efforts. The late
American entry into the war in 1917 had the flavor of a messianic crusade as a
war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. Wilson learned in
France, however, that America’s allies had not fought for such high-minded ideals,
as though any nation in any war—including the United States-- ever had. It is one thing finally to take up arms after
the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping, for
example, but quite another to do so in order to usher in a western democratic millennium
of peace. One would hope that nations
influenced by even mildly historic forms of Christianity would see the folly of
secular salvation by warfare, but the crusading spirit apparently does not die
easily.
The
Swiss Calvinist theologian Karl Barth was profoundly disillusioned when his
German theological mentors supported the Kaiser’s war effort. He saw the global conflagration as the end of
the easy identification of God’s Kingdom with the advance of modern western
culture. Barth was among the first to
recognize an even more perverse idolatry in the rise of the Nazis, whose
heretical distortion of Christianity made pagan nationalism and racism their
true lords in the aftermath of the Great War and its resolution at
Versailles. Before the collapse of
imperial Germany, the Russian Revolution had led to a separate peace on the
Eastern front and the rise of a bloodthirsty and godless Communist regime that
made countless martyrs and confessors, eventually played a leading role in
destroying the Nazis, and then enslaved Eastern Europe for decades.
The
Great War’s impact on the Middle East was no less profound, as the victorious
European powers dismembered the Ottoman Empire, sometimes creating nations out
of whole cloth. If you have ever wondered
why jihadist terrorists hate western influences, why certain Middle Eastern
nation states have so much trouble holding together competing ethnic and
religious groups, and why brutal dictators often seem fairly successful in that
part of the world, the answers lie at least in part with the legacy that the
outcome of World War I left that region.
Contradictory promises to Arabs and Zionists concerning Palestine are
part of the story also, as is the West’s thirst for oil. The Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides
at the hands of the Turks, as well as many other humanitarian disasters, find
their place in the trajectory of the Great War.
The
deadly conflicts of our time have their roots in the deadly conflicts of
earlier times, which is nothing new. It is has been that way since Cain and
Abel. Nations and cultures often place
these conflicts—and the sacrifices they require-- in the context of happy
narratives about progress or virtue. Yes,
things can get relatively better in various ways due to the
outcome of a war in this way as opposed to that. While some people display the worst human
qualities in these tragic situations, others display the very best. However, our Lord’s teaching that those who
live by the sword will die by the sword remains all too true. And the sins of the parents are visited upon
the children for many generations, as the resentment and vengeance sparked by
past outrages—whether recent or ancient—bear witness to this day
We
live in the tension between the heavenly peace that we celebrate in the Divine
Liturgy and the broken, imperfect peace of a world in which we must also pray in
the Liturgy for the tranquility and salvation of our civil authorities and
armed forces. That is not because
politicians and armies will ever save us, but because those who bear the
spiritual burdens of sustaining a tolerable level of peace in the world as we
know it especially need our prayers for guidance, healing, and mercy. The risks
to the soul in these matters are great and the more realistic we are about
them, the better. We cannot undo World
War I or any other historical event, but we can learn what not to do from its
many bad examples and draw inspiration from the prophetic witness of the
Christmas Truce of 1914.
Had
the Great War not sown the seeds of so many later conflicts, surely some other
course of events would have done something similar. But near the beginning of that paradigmatic
catastrophe of this age, soldiers on different sides of the trenches paused to
praise a King Whose peace is of a different kind than that of an uneasy armistice
between powers exhausted from years of pointless slaughter that in turn sowed
the seeds of countless other blood baths. In memory of the men in the trenches who
broke out spontaneously in Christmas carols a hundred years ago, we must pray
and work for ongoing epiphanies of Christ’s peace that provide ways to prevent
mass slaughter in the name of ideologies of whatever kind, for even the best
among them so easily become false gods that require unholy sacrifices from
generation to generation.
No comments:
Post a Comment