St. Michael's Lent 2026 - Reading #32 - Peace
Reading
Even those who make war are hunting peace — only a peace more to their mind.
Augustine begins where common life already knows: "Whoever gives even moderate attention to human affairs and to our common nature, will recognise that if there is no man who does not wish to be joyful, neither is there any one who does not wish to have peace. For even they who make war desire nothing but victory,--desire, that is to say, to attain to peace with glory. For what else is victory than the conquest of those who resist us? and when this is done there is peace."
Victory is only a name for the peace that follows conquest.
He drives it home: "It is therefore with the desire for peace that wars are waged, even by those who take pleasure in exercising their warlike nature in command and battle. And hence it is obvious that peace is the end sought for by war. For every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better. They do not, therefore, wish to have no peace, but only one more to their mind."
Not whether you want peace — which peace.
Reflection
Which means the war this season has traced — angels, cities, cultures, households — is not a war between peace and conflict. It is a war between two peaces: God's just peace, and the counterfeit, a rule of its own upon its equals — pride's peace, where everything is quiet because everything serves me. Read Augustine's brigand at home again slowly — the man whose household obeys his every look, who secures calm by storm — and let it sting: a father can build exactly that and congratulate himself on his orderly house.
The diagnostic for the week ahead: your home should be at peace, but interrogate whose peace it is. Quiet because hearts are ordered to God, or quiet because everyone has learned to manage you?
The first is what this final week builds toward. The second is a robber's den with good manners.