I’m in the first stages of a new project that, if all goes as planned, should have ramifications for “political theology.” With this in mind, I’ve starting reading War, Armed Force, and the People: State Formation and Transformation in Historical Perspective (2016) by Walter Opello, Jr. A longtime professor of political science at SUNY Oswego, Opello identifies himself with the “bellicist” school of statecraft. Thus he believes that pundits and scholars often misinterpret the nature and purpose of war, treating it as an aberration rather than as a socio-political convention. The current war in Ukraine serves as a case in point. Recently, Roseanne McManus suggested in The Washington Post that Russian president Vladimir Putin may be suffering from mental illness due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Depression and madness, in other words, seem to be the best explanation for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Choosing war is a fundamentally irrational decision.
But Opello would argue otherwise. As he sees it, war is ultimately a consequence of and an influence on the political order. Hence, in a clear echo of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, Opello refuses to draw a sharp distinction between war and politics: “The war vs. peace dichotomy is a philosophical construct,” Opello writes, “Peace is a fiction because war is always present in one mode or another.” What he means, in the bluntest possible terms, is that war is just what nation-states do. And yet, if this is true, why is war so shocking? Why are we caught off-guard when war breaks out, so much so that we seek to account for war by speculating about psychotic leaders? Opello maintains that we have been conditioned to think this way:
The American academy has been strongly shaped by the pacific and rational principles of the Enlightenment. Many Enlightenment thinkers saw violence and war as pathologies of unenlightened peoples and saw rational inquiry and debate as the chief instruments of progress to civilization.
I suspect this is true, now matter how one views the “rational principles of the Enlightenment.” Still, Opello’s claims leave me with a question: since we know that Enlightenment ideals spawned at least two world-changing revolutions (in America and in France), isn’t it the case that the Enlightenment itself contains a bellicose element? What, then, is to be gained by acting as if war is fundamentally transgressive? Who wins, and who loses?
From an 1851 journal entry by Søren Kierkegaard: “Force ought never be used; this is the mind of Christianity. Instead one ought to endure injustice in suffering, witnessing also to the truth until the other party
cannot hold out in doing wrong and voluntarily gives up doing it. This suffering battle also has a paralyzing effect. Just as a hypnotist puts his subject to sleep, and one limb after another loses its vitality, so suffering endurance paralyzes injustice; no evil can hold out against it.”
I would suppose that Christ taking upon Himself the sins of the world is the ultimate example of this principle. I love this quotation from Fleming Rutledge’s book, “The Crucifixion.”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is the cry of dereliction, more like a shriek than a cry. A shriek of utmost abandonment. On the cross, Jesus the Messiah experienced hell, the absence of God, the ultimate judgment, and in so doing he appeared to suffer ultimate defeat at the hands of the evil one, the demonic usurper, the power set against God and all that God created. There is no hell that Jesus has not entered, no demon that he has not confronted, no abandonment or despair that he has not felt. He experienced the great nihilistic swallowing up of all goodness. The Resurrection on Easter Day means nothing if it does not mean this; the conquest of nothingness, the victory over ultimate, complete, and final darkness and obliteration. - Rev. Fleming Rutledge
I've never encountered that quotation from SK about enduring injustice. Thank you! I tripped a bit over the very last sentence in the quotation, "so suffering endurance paralyzes injustice"? It would seem more expected diction to put "enduring suffering" rather than "suffering endurance" - any significance to that sequence, do you think?