What More Can I Say?

                I was absolutely stunned when I signed on to the internet this morning to learn that there had been yet another senseless terrorist attack in the world – this time in Brussels.  My heart went out to the victims and their families.  I prayed for them, and I prayed for an end to such horrific violence.  I felt an urge to blog to try to address violence in the context of our faith, but I didn’t know what to say.  In the past six months alone, I’ve blogged twice about terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, about the need to pray, about the power of prayer and about trusting that God will keep his promise of an eternal life of perfect love and happiness.  What more can I say?

                Later in the day, I came across Anthony Esolen’s commentary on the Inferno that discusses Dante’s understanding of violence.  The premise of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the unique opportunity given to a sinner (Dante himself) to get a glimpse of hell, purgatory and heaven so that he can make his earthly choices more wisely before his time is through.  In canto twelve of the Inferno, Dante visits the seventh circle of hell, the circle reserved for the violent, who float along in a boiling river of blood.  They are guarded by the Minotaur and centaurs, who are shooting arrows at the sinners as they try to escape from the river.  The Minotaur and the centaurs are apt images for the bestiality of violence.  As Esolen explains it, “[t]o kill, rape, maim, and pillage is to be as heartless and ferocious as a tiger.  It is unworthy of man.  For the Christian, it violates the rights of God (as all sin does), for it turns the created world into an arena of destruction.”[1]  This is especially true when violence begets violence.

                Faced with violence, we often feel the urge to respond in kind.  This response reflects our bestial nature at work.  Violence is contrary to human nature and human dignity, and it flies in the face of our creation in the image and likeness of God.  Violence can never conquer violence; it simply encourages more violence.  Now I’m not saying that we don’t have a right, indeed, an obligation, to defend ourselves against violence, perhaps even with the use of force, and to bring the perpetrators of violence to justice.  But we have no right to indiscriminate violence against the perpetrators of violence and certainly not against innocent classes of people with whom the perpetrators of violence may be associated.

               So what’s the proper response to violence?  Love.  God became man to free us from the beastly ways of sin and return us to his image and likeness.  God became man to teach us that “love conquers all.”[2]  We conquer violence when we love our neighbor.  We conquer violence when we feed the poor, clothe the naked, comfort the ill and visit the imprisoned.  We conquer violence when we pray for the victims of violence and their families.  We conquer violence when we pray for the violent.  Our reaction to violence must always be horror, because violence is unworthy of man.  But our response to violence must always be love.  As we remember during Holy Week, when faced with violence and death, Jesus loved, and in loving, he conquered sin and death.  What more can I say?

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[1] Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, notes to canto 12, trans. by Anthony Esolen (New York, Random House, 2005) at 451.

[2] Virgil, Ecologue X.