The Once and Future King

I have been enjoying over the last few weeks T.H. White's Arthurian classic The Once and Future King. In it there is a fascinating discussion of what it is that causes man to suffer injustice at the hands of other men - and what keeps peace at bay.

At the epic's end, Authur realizes that his life's work, to end the feudal barbarism and wanton injustice of the middle ages, has all been based on the assumption that man is essentially good. It begins to dawn on him, after a lifetime of fighting and feuds and betrayal, that, try as he might to channel those dormant noble energies out into the world, evil and pain and injustice will continue to rear their horrible heads.
He reflects that man's torment is rooted solely in the past - in his insistance on an endless feud of reprisals that begins with Cain's murder of Abel and spreads and complicates itself beyond extrication or repair. At first, he suspects the answer to this is "not to act at all, to draw no swords for anything, to hold oneself still, like a pebble not thrown [whose circles cannot spread across the pond]" - but quickly realizes that stillness - passivity - in itself is a kind of hate, a kind of revenge, an action of inaction.
The answer, he realizes, is first in "the blessing of forgetfulness" - putting the past unequivocally away, never to be looked to again. And, in fact, men often plan to do just that - in the future, as soon as the present wrong has been righted. We cannot start with a clean slate because we will all forever see certain wrongs as inexcusable, as demanding of justice - justice itself binds us to the endless circle.
Again, the king reflects that the solution is with the Church's idea that men are no longer to think of themselves as I but as we - to share, not only possessions, but their very selves with one another. The moment this ideal is achieved any idea of hurts done to oneself vanish and with it, the need for revenge. But it is an ideal, he muses, and not a simple reality. Men are not capable of trusting one another to that extreme extent.
As the book closes, we see Authur, facing his death, looking back to his boyhood training in which Merlyn turned him into an ant - whose kind fought and killed each other mindlessly over territory - and a goose, whose "people", like all the birds, had no sense of territory at all and could maintain their own cultures side-by-side with others of a different species without the slightest discord. He understands with sudden clarity that the imagined reality of boundaries, of personal space and possession, are near the root of the problem and that man's ant-like perspective is what keeps him from seeing it: "how mad the frontiers had seemed to [the geese], and would to man if he could learn to fly."

All the fighting and fighting for peace and hurling of insults and mistreatment of "innocents" and mistreatment of the mistreaters and aggressive aggression and passive aggression that has been flying back and forth in the Western world of late is, to me, an absurd ignorance of the transcendent perspective God has offered humanity. So often the deity is called to task for ruling over an injust world, of allowing atrocity and war and deception (and stupidity) to go on forever. But an end cannot be made of these things until we are ready to accept the utter dissolution of the past and the imagined boundaries that separate us as individuals who protect ourselves and our space from one another. God has offered us these seeds of a peaceful and painless world - he himself has absolved the universe of its most heinous sins against him, surrendered to mankind his own life doing it, and availed himself to the souls of every man. He has shown us how to fly - if only we will join him - and to put an end to everything that we blame on him.