Reading the Aeneid

 

I sing of arms and of a man displaced                                                                                          by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy                                                                                    for Italy and its Lavinian shores:                                                                                                  the power of the gods and vicious wrath                                                                                      of unforgetting Juno hurled him far                                                                                            across the sea and lands, and he endured                                                                                    still further pain in war - the price to found                                                                                    his city and install his gods in Latium.                                                                                      The Latin race, the Alban lords, the walls                                                                                   of soaring Rome: from here they all began.

Virgil, Aeneid (Book 1, 1-10).

Homer's Odyssey is everywhere right now, thanks to Christopher Nolan's entertaining - if also problematic - portrayal of it on screen this summer. I first read the Odyssey in high school; the Iliad later. Until this week, however, I had never actually read Virgil's venerable Latin classic, the Aeneid, his late first-century B.C. account of the Trojan prince Aeneas' escape from the calamity of the Trojan War's end and his Odyssey-like journey across the Mediterranean, harassed by the vengeful goddess Juno, until he eventually settled in Italy and became the putative ancestor of the Romans. Being about Rome and having been written in Latin, Virgil's Aeneid may have been the most influential literary work of all the Greek and Roman classics.I knew about the Aeneid, of course, but it remained among the many classics which one ought to know something about without ever actually getting around to reading it. 

Once upon a time, however, the world was very different, and the Virgil-Homer hierarchy was reversed. As Bryn Mawr classicist Catherine Conybeare has noted, Latin-speaking Roman schoolboys "learned to read by sounding out syllables from the Aeneid. The Aeneid taught them to scan lines of poetry, and moreover to interpret them. Children learned swaths of the poem by heart. Later on boys would begin the rhetorical studies on which an imperial career was based by entering imaginatively into the characters from the Aeneid and composing appropriate speeches for them to declaim at crucial moments of choice or crisis. Wherever in the empire their careers took these young men, an apposite quotation form the Aeneid thrown casually into their conversation or their correspondence would immediately establish them as a member of the educated ruling classes" [Augustine the African, Liveright, 2025, p. 5].

Having been energized by all the renewed classical hype engendered by Christopher Nolan's on-screen Odyssey this summer, I have - with somewhat surprising enthusiasm - returned to the sources, the Iliad itself and the Odyssey itself (albeit in English translations), and I now find myself emboldened to tackle Virgil's Roman-centric sequel - in the 2025 translation by Scott McGil and Susannah Wright (Norton Liveright), which includes a superb Introduction by the famous Homeric translator Emily Wilson. (All references here are to that translation.)

The Aeneid - 9,896 Latin lines written (like the Iliad and the Odyssey) in dactylic hexameter - was composed by Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) in the last decade of his life (29-29 B.C.) It is thought that the poem may have actually been left unfinished - as evidenced by the presence of several metrically incomplete verses. Virgil's hero, Aeneas, was already familiar from the Iliad as a Trojan prince and a son of Aphrodite (Venus). The first six of Aeneid's twelve books recount the story of Aeneas' Odyssey-like wandering from Troy to Italy, including in Book 2 Virgil's violent account of the actual fall of Troy, a grief no words can tell (2.4), returning the reader to the blood-soaked, heroic world of the Iliad. The remaining six books recount the Trojans' ultimately victorious Iliad-like wars with the Latins, with whose name and language Aeneas and his Trojan followers have been destined to assimilate. The poem served as a founding myth for the city (and later empire) of Rome, connecting Rome back to the heroic age of Troy and promoting the legitimate rule of the Julian dynasty as the descendants of the goddess Venus and the Trojan hero Aeneas. Already, almost at the poem's beginning, notwithstanding Juno's hostility, Jupiter had promised Venus, Aeneas' mother, regarding his descendants: I set no bounds of space or time for them; I have bestowed dominion without end (1. 332-333.)

Juno's hostility, however, is a constant reminder that with Virgil (as with Homer, who had Odysseus forever afflicted by Poseidon's wrath), we are in a very different moral universe from our own. We are in a world of capricious gods and goddesses, who exercise control over human affairs in unpredictable ways and who can sometimes be appeased but sometimes not. As Virgil himself expressed it, what offense, what painful insult led the queen of heaven to drive a man renowned for faithfulness through such ordeals, such endless miseries? Do gods have so much anger in their hearts? (1. 11-15).

Nor are the gods alone when it comes to complex and intense emotions!

"Hector fights for his country. Achilles fights only for himself." So said Agamemnon in the 2004 film Troy. As Hector's tear-inducing farewell conversation with his wife in Book 6 of the actual Iliad illustrates, Hector was not immune from Bronze Age heroic vainglory akin to that of Achilles, but neither was the movie version of Agamemnon all that wrong in the important personal differences which Agamemnon noted between the two heroes. Ascribed ancestry aside, this was undoubtedly another reason why the civic-minded Romans would have wanted to identify themselves with the Trojan cause and would have taken pride in their supposed Trojan ancestor, Aeneas. And, unlike Achilles or Odysseus, Aeneas' most outstanding trait is not some manifestation of physical or mental superiority but his piety. This too would appeal strongly to the Romans, because piety highlights the hero's relationship with and devotion to both the gods and the hero's human communities (e.g., family and city). Unlike the Greeks', the unique artistry of the Romans was political - as foretold by the ghost of Aeneas' father, Anchises, in Book 6: Remember, Roman, to rule the world (for these will be your arts) and to impose on it an ordered peace. (6. 1023-1026). Of course, it would be precisely this passage - reimagined as arrogance - which Saint Augustine would later directly attack in his de-mystification of Roman imperialism in his monumental anti-Aeneid, The City of God!

There is, of course, quite a cost in human terms to dominion without end, to which the women characters - whether Andromache in the Iliad or Dido in the Aeneid - are especially poignant witnesses. Interestingly, the Iliad, dominated by Achilles' seemingly unquenchable rage and filled with destructive battle-after-battle, ends on a humane note as an angry Achilles shows mercy to Priam, Hector's grieving father. In the Aeneid, however, Aeneas in his fury considers but then rejects Turnus' plea for mercy, and the poem ends in violent death - a fitting foreshadowing, perhaps, of the enormous human cost to be exacted in producing the Augustan pax romana, the high price to be paid for empire. He burned with anger as he plunged his blade into his rival's breast. The chill of death made Turnus' limbs go slack, and with a groan, his spirit fled in protest to the shades (12. 1142-1145).

Mother and Son - Saints for the Ages

 

Tomorrow, on the anniversary of his death, the Church will commemorate one of its greatest saints and Doctors of the Church, Saint Augustine (354-430). Today, as if in anticipation, the contemporary calendar commemorates Augustine's mother, Saint Monica (331-387), thus connecting their veneration as saints, as they were so closely united in life. (The exact date of Monica's death in 387 is unknown. For many centuries, prior to the adoption of the contemporary calendar, Monica was commemorated on May 4.)

One of the highlights of Augustinian Pope Leo XIV's recent visit to Algeria was his pilgrimage to Annaba, where he celebrated Mass in the 19th-century French colonial Basilica of Saint Augustine, which overlooks the archeological site of Hippo Regius, the coastal city where Augustine served as Bishop, lived in community, preached, and wrote, from 396 until his death during the Vandal invasion of Roman North Africa. (The Roman province of Africa corresponded to the territory south of the Mediterranean, north of the Sahara, and west of Egypt, i.e, much of modern Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). 

Monica never made it with Augustine to Hippo. After a famous conversation, which Augustine describes in Book 9 of his Confessions, Monica died at Ostia in Italy. Augustine, his son Adeotatus, and others (among them Augustine's lifelong friend Alypius) were all there en route back home to Africa after their baptism by Saint Ambrose in Milan at Easter, April 24-25, 387. The connection with Monica highlights Augustine's spiritual journey prior to his later ministry as bishop, and it reminds us that Augustine's "conversion" was really his return - and full adult commitment - to the religion of his childhood, the religion of his mother.

The transition from Augustine as spiritual wanderer to Augustine as committed man of the Church also marked the culmination of Monica's presence in his life, her role having been completed as she herself acknowledged. Thus, in that last conversation, Monica said to her son, "I did have one reason for wanting to live a little longer: to see you become a Catholic Christian before I died. God has lavished his gifts on me in that respect, for I know that you have even renounced earthly happiness to become his servant" (Confessions, 9:10). Saint Monica is thus rightly remembered in the Church as a model of virtuous motherhood and persevering prayer. 

Augustine had been the product of a religiously and culturally "mixed marriage." That "mixed marriage" represented the two different directions then still actually available to Augustine  - the old Roman civic tradition that represented the best of the past and was coming to an end, and the new tradition of Christian faith that represented hope in the future. In Augustine's personal experience, his pagan father, Patricius, personified the former, and Monica the latter. Monica, moreover, didn't just represent residual impressions from Augustine's childhood religious experience. She served as a bridge connecting those impressions (and that childhood experience) with his active adult re-immersion in the public life of his time in the context of his increasing involvement in the communal life of the Church. 

As Paul Tillich pointed out, in A History of Christian Thought, Monica's influence on Augustine meant the influence of Christian tradition. Tillich compared Augustine with Plato, who had written out of the tradition of the Athenian gentry to which he belonged, but which was coming to an end, whereas with Augustine the tradition was new. Thus, Karl Adam, in Saint Augustine: the Odyssey of his Soul, described Augustine's youthful religious conflicts as a fight against the Church already in his heart.

The relationship between Monica and Augustine illustrates the importance in life of what a social scientist might call primary socialization. Having sampled everything late Roman antiquity had to offer in terms of intellectual and spiritual options, Augustine in the end returned to the faith of his childhood, to which he had long before been introduced by his mother. 

Infatuated as we moderns erroneously are with individual autonomy, we are more likely to emphasize how we grow and change physically, intellectually, and spiritually, and how we keep growing and changing throughout our lives. Yet what we learn and experience as children - in the family and in our early social surroundings - may be what sticks with us most in both acknowledged and unacknowledged ways. How we are formed in the home may have more to do with who we are and what we become and how we turn out than almost anything else that happens later. Augustine's effusive tribute to his mother, Monica, highlights how important such socialization is and how essential it is for society (and the Church community) to nurture that.

Max Weber, in The Sociology of Religion, once observed that no religion ever resulted from intellectuals' chatter. Saint Monica's role in Augustine's transformation substituted for what was religiously defective amid the admitted attractions of philosophy. She represented the alternative Augustine found in the authentic piety of the faith community. (Hence the symbolic appropriateness  of Monica's role in Augustine's early dialogue De beata vita, IV, 35, where she invoked Saint Ambrose, who, perhaps more than anyone else in Augustine's experience, personally modeled Christian faith's transformative effect on classical romanitas.) The absence of such traditional familial and communal bonds for so many in our society makes one wonder how something resembling Augustine's "conversion" can occur in a world unmoored from the hold of tradition and popular piety, and what, if anything, can take their place.

Meanwhile, Monica's famous son still stands out as one of the most towering figures from the Church's history and one of those ancient figures who still speaks directly to today. Augustine's spiritual journey was also an intellectual and cultural one, in that he grappled with the leading ideas of his time both in philosophy and in heretical forms of Christianity. How equipped are we today to do that? Or are we tempted instead to hide from this challenge?

As Bishop of Hippo, Augustine ended up as a leading figure in the somewhat self-enclosed province of Roman North Africa. Augustine's youthful spiritual journey had led him to attempt a heroic break from the world, but then the Church pulled him back even deeper into engagement with the Roman and African world. As H.W. Coates, who credits the great Augustine biographer Peter Brown for having "pulled Augustine out of modern Protestant abstractions and put him back in the complicated Roman world he actually inhabited," has emphasized, "Augustine does not stand outside the ancient world looking backward at it. He belongs to it."

Within that ancient Roman and African world, Augustine experienced the historical process in which the Catholic Church became the established Church of Latin Western civilization, powerful in practice as well as in theory. Meanwhile, thanks to the pressure of unexpected historical events, Augustine articulated a Christian philosophy of history, which challenged and broke with what was then the conventional wisdom, what we might call "Roman imperial exceptionalism," thereby definitively demystifying politics for Christian theology and spirituality. How have we fully appreciated and appropriated that important lesson in the face of the moral threat today of a certain sort of renewed Catholic "integralism" and the perennial problem of American religious "exceptionalism"? These characteristics of the transitional time in which Saint Augustine lived and in which he became one of the Church's dominant voices have a lot in common with our contemporary era in ways most other historical periods do not and hence provide ample opportunities for renewed reflection.

Augustine is rightly remembered as the Doctor gratiae ("Doctor of Grace"), because of his emphasis on our fundamental need for God's gratuitous grace - in opposition to the heresy of Pelagius. He could also be called a Doctor of Unity because of his tireless advocacy of the unity of the Church against the schismatic Donatist church. This aspect of Augustine's pastoral ministry particularly resonates with the challenges facing today's politically polarized and fractured Church and world, in which the Gospel is increasingly overshadowed and disfigured by partisan identifications.

Saint Augustine also wrote a Rule, which has historically been adopted and adapted as a basis for the common life of many Catholic religious communities. After his return to Africa, Augustine created his first quasi-religious community in his hometown of Tagaste (Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 388, only a year after his baptism. He did the same in Hippo in 391 after his relocation there as a presbyter. Then a few years later, after being ordained bishop, he set up a similar community for fellow clergy in his house. There, around 397, he wrote the Rule that bears his name. This relatively short, biblically based text, reflecting some of the earliest experiences of cenobitic religious life in the Latin Church, was inspired by Luke's image of the Jerusalem community in Acts.

According to a famous 8th-9th-century legend (attested to by Hincmar of Reims), after Augustine's baptism Ambrose and his new neophyte spontaneously composed and sang alternate verses of what became the Church's great hymn of Thanksgiving, the Te Deum. While there may be no historical basis for this legend, if one were ever to pick an event which called for a Te Deum to be sung in thanksgiving, surely Saint Augustine's return to his childhood religion at that pivotal point in the history of the Latin Church would be on the short list of finalists! And, thanks to his own account in his justly famous Confessions, Monica and Augustine's story is one of the best known and most influential in the history of the Church and in Western literature.

So much of our appreciation of Monica and Augustine - a mother and her son, both Roman African Christians and saints for the ages - is flavored by Augustine's monumental work of self-exploration, his Confessions, which broke new ground in the ancient art of biography and still speaks to us about how a person's past experiences remain an active aspect of one's present personality. In his own late-life Retractationes, Augustine spoke of his "Thirteen books of my Confessions, which praise the just and good God in all my evil and good ways, and stir up towards him men's mind and feelings," which, "had this effect on me when I wrote them, and they still do this, when I now read them." 

May they continue to have such effects in us today!

Image: "St. Augustine's Vision and the Death of Monica," painted by well-known Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497),  based on his reading of Augustine's Confessions. This is one of several such frescoes in the Church of Saint Augustine, in San Gimignano, Italy. After his baptism at Easter 387, Augustine and Monica went to Rome's port city of Ostia to prepare for their journey back to Africa. There Monica became ill. In the center of the fresco, is Monica on her deathbed, with Augustine standing by her side. Augustione's friend Alypius is also there.  The fresco alos portrayse Monica and Augustine looking out over the garden, an event recounted in the Confessions, just before Monica's illness. There is also a ship, taking Augustine and Alypius back to Africa. A woman with some children in the foreground represent the local Christians in Ostia, who comforted Augustine. 

45 Years in Religious Life

 

Forty-five years ago, I entered the Paulist Fathers' Novitiate, then located at Mount Paul, Oak Ridge, NJ, on some 1100 or so acres of rocks and trees (and a lake) in a beautiful, then still semi-rural locale in northern New Jersey, some 50 or so miles from New York city on the way to the Delaware Water Gap. Sadly, like so much of what was once American Catholic religious life, that novitiate is gone, but the incomparable experience of that year remains alive in my memory and enshrined in my heart.

Religious Life has taken many forms throughout the Church's history, but it has from its origin been an important, even integral part of the Church's life. The American Catholic Church I grew up in would not have been possible - or even imaginable - without the country's wide network of Catholic schools and the Religious Sisters who staffed them. The ubiquity of Religious Life throughout the Church's history was recognized by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. According to Perfectae Caritatis, 1:

Indeed from the very beginning of the Church men and women have set about following Christ with greater freedom and imitating Him more closely through the practice of the evangelical counsels, each in his own way leading a life dedicated to God. Many of them, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, lived as hermits or founded religious families, which the Church gladly welcomed and approved by her authority. So it is that in accordance with the Divine Plan a wonderful variety of religious communities has grown up which has made it easier for the Church not only to be equipped for every good work (cf. 2 Timothy 3:17) and ready for the work of the ministry-the building up of the Body of Christ (cf. Ephesians 4:12)-but also to appear adorned with the various gifts of her children like a spouse adorned for her husband (cf. Revelation 21:2) and for the manifold Wisdom of God to be revealed through her (cf. Ephesians 3:10).

Thus far, the theory. The practice, of course, is inevitably somewhat more complicated, for the obvious reason that religious life is about calling very ordinary people to do something somewhat surprising and extraordinary, while remaining their ordinary selves, equipped - for the most part - with still very ordinary means.

Such were the eight of us who assembled on that August afternoon 45 years ago, a very diverse group united only by our still dimly appreciated perception of a common calling. Of those eight, four of us were eventually ordained priests. Three of us four are still alive and active in ministry, but only I (perhaps the one once least likely to succeed) am still in religious life. Such are the strange ways of Providence!

Servant of God Isaac Hecker's vocational journey also had its ups and downs. He came to believe that "Divine Providence had led [him] as it were by the hand, through the different ways of error," to discern his vocation. His formation too was a baffling period of "abasement and helplessness," leading eventually to "great consolation" in the "duties of the sacred ministry." He too experienced severe setbacks, "the source of the deepest affliction" [Narrative of His Life," Rome 1858]. Through it all, he found in religious life meaning, purpose, and fulfillment - as have so many others before and since, myself included. His advice to his fellow Religious remains as relevant now as then: "Let us be thankful to God, humble towards each other and everyone else, and more than ever in earnest to do the work God demands at our hands" [Letter to the American Fathers, Rome, March 11, 1858]. 

Photo: Former Mount Paul Novitiate, Oak Ridge, NJ. 

"You Are Christ ... You Are Peter"

 

 

I had just finished my physical therapy session on May 8, 2025, when one of the therapists asked, “So, will this be the day you get your new boss? Who do you predict it will be?” I answered that I had no idea, that the only thing one could say for sure was that the new pope would certainly not be an American. In just a couple of hours, I was again rightly reminded me that I, at least, am not infallible!

Speaking of popes, past as well as present, among the many wonderful things which one can watch on YouTube is a series of videos from the Italian TV coverage of the coronation of Pope Saint John XXIII on November 4, 1958. (TV was still very new then, and that showed in the utterly unself-conscious way the ceremony unfolded and how Italian TV showed it. Unlike then, today it would all be carefully choreographed. Everyone on screen would appear exactly where he is supposed to be, when and only when he is supposed to be there, doing just what he is supposed to do, with nobody else in the TV frame.)

 

Several times during that ancient ceremony, the Choir chanted Jesus’ words we just heard in today’s Gospel [Matthew 16:13-20]: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam (“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”).  The full Gospel was also chanted, not once but twice – first by a Latin deacon, and then by a Greek deacon. Repetition is basically one way we say: Hey, pay attention. This is important!

 

Today’s Gospel takes us back in time - from the baroque splendor of Saint Peter’s Basilica and the modern papacy to Peter himself and the region of Caesarea Philippi. Some 20 miles north of the Sea of Galilee, Caesarea Philippi was in territory ruled by King Herod’s son Philip - hence its name. It is now known as "Banias," a deformation of its pre-Roman name, referring to the Greek god Pan. In Jesus’ time, there was a pagan temple to Pan at this location at Israel’s northern border at the foot of Mount Hermon.

That border was a lot more peaceful and easier to cross then than now; but it was still a border of sorts, laden with symbolic spiritual significance. Not only was it a Gentile place, but it was also a place probably previously a focus of pre-Israelite Canaanite worship.

 

It was to that faraway, somewhat pagan place that Jesus took his disciples to ask them the basic Christian question: Who do you say that Jesus is? As befits the prominent role he was being prepared for, Peter answered on behalf of the disciples – on behalf of the entire Church: You are the Christ [that is to say, the Messiah, the Anointed One], the Son of the living God. Not only does Peter proclaim that Jesus is Israel’s hoped-for Messiah, but – in that site sacred to Pan, the son of Zeus – he proclaims Jesus as the Son of the living (that is, the one, only true) God.

 

Now as then, Peter speaks for the Church – not just for his fellow apostles, but for all of us. In response, Jesus assures us that Peter’s profession of faith was not some mere human opinion, one option among many in the global religious marketplace, but a revelation from God – one which Peter himself, at that stage, still at best only poorly understood. (Hence, the temporary prohibition on telling anyone.) From such a modest beginning in such an oddly out-of-the-way place, Peter’s profession of who Jesus is, has been the center of the Church’s proclamation – as Peter’s role has since likewise remained central to the Church’s identity and mission.

 

Fast forward to the baroque basilica built above Peter’s tomb, where, for centuries since, Peter has continued to speak - on behalf of the Church for the sake of the whole world. In a Church that right now, as so often in her past, seems sometimes more divided than united, the papal office (and, in our modern media age, the person of the Pope himself) continue to serve as the visible source of the Church’s unity across space and time. Across space, “people of every nation, culture, and tongue” (as we say in the Eucharistic Prayer) are “gathered as one,” so that “in a world torn by strife and discord,” a Universal Church “may stand forth as a sign of oneness and peace.”

Such a unity across space is, in turn, uniquely possible because of the Church’s unity across time - our unity with Peter in his profession of faith in the Christ, the Son of the living God, whose own victory over death has definitively guaranteed that the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against the Church.

 

The activities of the papacy have changed over the centuries. When I was growing up in the 1950s, no one would have imagined that popes would travel all over the world, which has now become a routine expectation. Nowadays, much papal teaching takes place personally in homilies and General Audiences and, more formally, in encyclical letters addressed to the entire world. One of the most famous papal letters was that of Pope Leo the Great to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, outlining the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ, to which the assembled bishops supposedly responded: “Peter has spoken to us through Leo.” The external activities of popes change with times and circumstances, all as expressions of the pope’s ministry as the visible source of the Church’s unity across space and time. Our unity across time in professing the ancient apostolic faith of Peter, makes possible our present unity across space as Christ’s Church in our world, which in turn fosters – for both the Church and the world - our future hope for both space and time in the kingdom of heaven. Meanwhile, in our time and place, Peter continues to speak through Leo!

 

Homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, August 23, 2026.

Photo: Statue of Saint Peter, Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome.

No War, No Peace

 

Historically, the slogan "No War, No Peace" refers back to Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the Bolshevik leader of the Soviet negotiating team, trying at Breat-Litovsk in early 1918 to end the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Refusing to accede to Imperial Germany's severe territorial demands, Trotsky simply announced on February 10, 1918, that the Russian war was over and that the Soviets would cease active fighting. Trotsky's Bolshevik boss, Vladimir Lenin, initially went along with the "No War, No Peace" approach. After Germany resumed its military advance, however, Lenin pragmatically insisted that the Russian negotiators immediately agree to sign the treaty accepting Germany's harsh terms. So much for "No War, No Peace" as a strategic policy!

It is a very imperfect analogy, of course, but "No War, No Peace" is not an altogether inadequate description of the present impasse in the misbegotten war between the U.S. and Iran. Whatever the slogan's strategic limitations, Trotsky's "No War, No Peace" was at least a  policy of sorts. On the other hand, it is hard - on any given day - to divine what U.S. policy regarding Iran actually is, or indeed what the state of the conflict actually is. Are we negotiating? If so, with whom? Are we threatening "prompt and utter destruction" (as the world War II allies famously threatened Japan at Potsdam)? If so, with whom? Are we doing both at the same time? Or something else? Who knows? How would one know? 

Like so much of what the U.S. has done (or failed to do) in this war, Trotsky's "No War, No Peace" was an ad hoc adjustment to an uncontrollable reality. In fairness to Trotsky, however, the war was not one which the Bolsheviks had started, although, of course, they had benefited enormously from its traumatic effects on Russia. The Revolution had inherited the war from the Tsarist Regime, which shared responsibility for that colossal failure of European civilization with the other belligerent Powers on both sides. In contrast, the Iran War is entirely the result of U.S. decisions, a wholly self-induced foreign-policy debacle.

According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's Regime Change (Simon and Schuster, 2026), the Administration's previous attack on Iran - the June 2025 "Operation Midnight Hammer" - began with Mass offered in the Vice President's office, attended by the Secretary of State and the White House Chief of Staff, who later said it was "to pray for the people." One wonders whether any comparable prayers were offered the following February when the current war was being launched?

All of which, of course, brings us back to the original mistake, the misbegotten character of the conflict, displayed in the problematic decision-making recently described so poignantly, for example, in Haberman and Swan's same riveting account and which continues to bedevil the U.S. today. It is widely alleged that the Administration would like just to be able to quit the war somehow. One is reminded of October 1966, when Senator George Aiken of Vermont famously suggested that the United States should just unilaterally declare that it had won the Vietnam War, using this "victory" as an excuse to de-escalate American involvement in Vietnam. But unilaterally declaring "victory," would not open the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians just don't seem to want to cooperate with American face-saving - unsurprisingly, given their long history of malevolent anti-Americanism and their past success at humiliating American presidents. Meanwhile, the war continues to take a terrible toll on the world economy, on American military resources, and on our on-site personnel (as evidenced by the recent revelations about conditions on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which themselves highlight the defective nature of American war planning). 

Perhaps, prayers really are what the situation calls for. But divine intervention to bail us out - what the ancients called a Deus ex machina -  cannot be counted on. At the end of The Odyssey (Homer's, not Nolan's modernized version), when Odysseus and his rivals seemed stuck in a pattern of further fighting that threatened almost unending civil conflict in Ithaka, Athena herself intervened. She "cried with her clarion voice and forced the whole host to stop," and Zeus reinforced her intervention with a decisive thunderbolt. Odysseus "obeyed, his heart rejoicing. They were made to swear oaths to each other, to endure for all time to come" (tr. Daniel Mandelsohn, U. of Chicago Pr., 2025, 530, 545-546).

Would a clarion call to "Stop," backed by a thunderbolt or two make a difference in this war? Actually, one might suggest that more than a few such thunderbolts have metaphorically already been hurled as warnings both before and during this conflict, to little or no avail. So, on it goes, "No War, No peace." 

Photo: Leon Trotsky and his fellow Bolshevik negotiators arriving and meeting their German counterparts at Brest-Litovsk station on January 15, 1918.