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Finally, true peace implies a participation in the immanent harmony of values. When truly at peace, we are illuminated by the light irradiating from values; whereas our surrender to what panders to our pride and our concupiscence is bound to darken us inwardly. It is here that we touch the nerve of positive peace and gain sight of its proper quality.

By its incorporation and its habitation in the realm of values, the soul becomes, as it were, wide and luminous, soaring and lithe as these values. Its participation in the good opens it up to the virtus unitiva of values, and thus infuses into it a new principle of unity and harmony.

The spiritually unprivileged—whether depraved or merely primitive or obtuse—and those entirely concentrated on what is gratifying to their desires, do not know this peace. They allow themselves to be filled by something that, notwithstanding the moments of pleasure it procures, is utterly devoid of this principle of intrinsic harmony, which liberates and at the same time collects the soul, takes all harshness and cloddishness from it, and adorns it with a luster of supple serenity.

For what subserves the mere aim of gratification cannot give more than a dull pleasure, behind which lurks a sense of surfeit and inanity, and which renders us egocentric and heavy. The pursuit of mere subjective gratification condemns man to ever increasing emptiness and bluntness.

Wickedness is the antithesis of true peace

Even more glaring is the contrast between the last-described aspect of true peace and the inward complexion of the wicked who, in their spasm of pride, do not merely ignore the world of values in the sense of a blind indifference but scorn objective value and defy God in an attitude of hatred and resentment. These unfortunates are ridden by what might be termed the counter-principle to peace; they carry in their souls a poison which represents a radical antithesis to the immanent harmony of values. They incarnate the spirit of discord and actually hate true peace: it might be said that they live at war with true peace.

Whereas the slaves to dull concupiscence may typify the state of a false peace, characterized by the absence of true concordia—of the luminous harmony inherent in true peace—the mental complexion of the proud haters of objective value (the state of mind epitomized, at its highest, by Satanism) embodies the qualitative opposite of true peace. Men of this kind absorb and assimilate as it were, the immanent disharmony of all typical negations of value, and appear incessantly to work at the decomposition of their own souls.

True peace comes from intimate communion with God

Yet, true peace, the peace of Christ, contains more than the harmony we owe to our participation in the realm of values: it connotes, as its consummation, that entirely distinct supernatural quality which arises from our communion with God alone, “through Him, with Him and in Him.”

Just as the world of the supernatural beauty of holiness towers high above all natural values—as a thing of unimagined novelty and greatness by contrast to even the highest natural beauty—so an unmeasurable gulf yawns between the immanent harmony of all values and the infinite harmony of Christ the God-Man. Only think of the peace displayed by a lofty figure of antiquity like Socrates! Plato’s wonderful dialogue (the Phædo) portrays him, two hours before his death, peacefully meditating on the immortality of the soul, awaiting death in placid composure as the most important moment of life, serenely aware of the metaphysical situation of man (as far as it is knowable to our natural faculties), rejecting all suggestion of flight as injurious to the State.

And compare with that noble sight the peace of the Christian saints! Francis of Assisi, say, who, almost blind and his body on the verge of collapse, composed his jubilant Canticle to the Sun; or again, the behavior of the martyrs, facing a horrible death by torture, in holy peace and filled with celestial joy. Witness the epistles