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Nothing evokes more constant blame from St. Paul in his epistles than the dissensiones et contentiones arising in the Christian communities. Again and again he urgently admonishes the faithful to keep peace among one another: “I beg of Evodia and I beseech Syntyche to be of one mind in the Lord” (Phil. 4:2). It is a specific stigma of abysmal separation from God to maintain a quarrelsome and cantankerous attitude, a morbid delight in conflicts and bickerings, a perverse pleasure derived from disharmony.

However, an essential love for peace and aversion to strife is not enough. It does not by itself vouch for our being actually able to behave as peacemakers and to overcome the temptations of enmity in the evolving situations of life. The immanent logic of various events and relationships, with their autonomous demands and the interests implied in them, are only too apt to entangle in discords and conflicts even such men as essentially love and seek peace.

To begin with, we must make a fundamental distinction. The dangers to peace arising from a multiplicity of social contacts and oppositions require a different treatment, according as they originate in a situation whose theme is supplied by our interests as such (even though taken in a wide sense) or in a situation in which we are striving for some high objective value—in the extreme case, the kingdom of God itself. Let us next consider the first type of situation.

Dangers lie in a peace rooted in our own interests

There is a kind of people who, though by nature peaceloving and far from quarrelsome, are so touchy as to feel insulted and wronged on the slightest provocation. The sense of being injured will incite them to acute outbreaks of anger or to more latent reactions of ill temper and sulking, and thus involve them in clashes and disagreements.

Against this susceptibility, which is wholly incompatible with a life conceived in the spirit of Christ, we must wage a relentless fight. Whenever we feel offended, we should at once examine before God whether we are not really only indulging our susceptibility, without having suffered any objective wrong at all.

Perhaps the “offender” has done no worse than tell a truth which irritates us because it is unpalatable to our pride. Or again, it may be our jealousy that makes us fretful. Our egocentric squeamishness, too, may often present other people’s actions or utterances in a false and distorting light. Sometimes, again, it is our distrusting disposition that incites us to look for a sting of insult or an edge of malevolence in whatever people say. It may also happen that a stranger’s words unintentionally strike upon a sore spot in our emotional system, an inferiority complex for instance. We then feel offended and unjustly put him down as tactless.

In view of these numerous possibilities of error, it is a Christian’s duty always to examine, with a wholesome mistrust of himself, the objective side of the question when he feels wronged or insulted. Confronting his feelings and their occasion with God, he must attain to a freedom of mind enabling him to ascertain, with his vision unblurred by any subjective biases, whether he has suffered any wrong in the objective sense of the term. If this proves not to be the case, he must wholly and thoroughly dissolve his rancor—have it “shattered upon Christ,” as the Rule of St. Benedict puts it—and approach the misjudged “offender” with particular friendliness.

A great many people shirk this duty because, in their general reliance upon their nature, they implicitly trust its reactions and unquestioningly interpret their moods as the index of an objective fact. They deem their subjective state of mind the more sensitive instrument, whose findings cannot be tested and corrected by the clumsier methods of intellectual analysis. This overvaluation of one’s subjective impressions is a tremendous mistake; for in truth, their legitimate role is not to outrun or supersede objective thinking but merely to provide it with initial stimuli and with