Just a Thought

By Thomas Merton

I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible, with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever. Always, “after just one more war” it will dawn, the new era of love: but first everybody who is hated must be eliminated. For hate, you see, is the mother of their kind of love.

Unfortunately the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being in fighting the fiction which it calls “the enemy.” For humans are concrete and alive, but “the enemy” is a subjective abstraction. A society that kills real humans in order to deliver itself from the phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love. It refuses, a priori, to love. It is dedicated not to concrete relations of human with human, but only to abstractions about politics, economics, psychology, and even, sometimes, religion.

Source: Seeds of Contemplation, 1949

--Inward/Outward