he endured after his release. But he went to his grave believing that “either Christ is a liar or war is never necessary”—and Christ is no liar.
16 February
Simone Weil
3 February 1909—24 August 1943
War Transforms Us into Things
Philosopher, political radical, classicist, factory worker, mystic, author: Simone Weil is hard, and perhaps impossible, to pin down. In her short lifetime, she journeyed from a youthful commitment to revolutionary Marxism to religious mysticism. But if there’s a unifying theme that runs throughout her activities and her writings, it’s her denunciation of the dehumanizing effects of violence.
Born into a solidly middle-class French family, Weil was a brilliant student who early on lived the double life of an intellectual and an activist. She taught school and wrote learned papers, but she also agitated for workers’ rights and offered free classes to farm, railroad, and factory hands. She helped organize marches and demonstrations aimed at securing higher wages and better working conditions for manual laborers, and even left her teaching job to labor in a factory alongside the men and women whose courage and endurance she so admired. In 1937, she traveled to Spain to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Although she tried hard to be a soldier, she was so inept that she put others at risk and was soon sent home. A Jew, she fled France in 1942, worked for the French Resistance from England, and died from a combination of tuberculosis and ascetic fasting.
Weil left behind dozens of published and unpublished essays. In one of them, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” she offers her most thorough defense of the claim that any form of violence, but especially the kind exemplified in war, dehumanizes. Her selection of the Iliad as the text around which her essay revolves intentionally challenges the widespread belief, exemplified in the ancient poem, that war is a glorious and heroic affair that brings out the best in combatants. On the contrary, Weil insists, glory and heroism are rendered irrelevant by war.
Violence, she argues, is a force “that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense; it makes a corpse out of him.” But even short of killing, martial violence saps humanity. It possesses “the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive.” The person who is attacked becomes so focused on the dread of dying and the animal urge to remain alive that his soul disappears. He becomes an automaton. The aggressor is so focused on killing that his soul likewise disappears. He becomes an automaton as well. Like chess pieces, combatants forget their own and one another’s humanity during the heat of battle. Minutes earlier, they were “thinking, acting, hoping.” But in the clash of arms, they become “simply matter,” stripped of autonomy and propelled hither and yon by the same laws of action/reaction that dictate the motion of any kind of matter.
For Weil, this robbery of humanity takes place wherever humans are forced into situations—the battlefield, the factory, the overly regimented schoolroom—that make them anonymous and dispensable. Before violence kills the body, it kills the soul.
17 February
Jonah Jones
17 February 1919—29 November 2004
Jonah Wrestles the Angel
The son of Welsh parents, Jonah Jones knew about the brutality of war from an early age. His father, a coalminer, was invalided in World War I, and Jones’s earliest memories were of the suffering his father endured from his wounds. When the next world war erupted, Jones declared himself a conscientious objector. But even though he refused to kill in war, he volunteered for medical service with a parachute field ambulance. He was with the Allied troops who liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945. Although he never abandoned his personal commitment to pacifism, the horror of the camp persuaded him that some evils were so powerful that violence might be needed to defeat them. Jones was never comfortable with this possibility, especially after his conversion to Catholicism in 1955 following a near-fatal bout with tuberculosis. But he believed it couldn’t be ignored.
As a youth, Jones had dropped out of school at the age of sixteen and attended night classes in the art of lettering. Later he studied sculpting and the art of staining glass. After the war he returned to his craft, specializing in church decorative art. His religiously themed carved stone and wooden statues and windows can be found throughout England and Wales, but he was especially known for his skill in lettering.
Jones often said that he was intrigued as both a man and an artist by “that great, flawed [biblical] character,” Jacob. In Jacob, Jones sensed someone who shared his own ambivalences and struggles. Jones too had wrestled with an angel when it came to remaining loyal to pacifism in the face of the unmitigated evil he had encountered at Bergen-Belsen. Like Jacob, he came away wounded from the experience; nevertheless, he spent the rest of his artistically fruitful life trying to give expression to the peace and tranquility of God in wood, stone, and glass—and, toward the end of his life, in novels and memoirs as well.
One of Jones’s loveliest pieces is a 1989 marble sculpture called And David Danced before the Lord. A young David, in the middle of a flowing pirouette, looks heavenward with an expression of longing expectancy, as if he waits for God to reveal a great secret to him. Perhaps in capturing David’s deep need for a sign of assurance from God, Jones was also communicating his own tension between his dismay at the evil humans commit and his longing to stay the pacifist course. It is a tension that all peacemakers surely feel from time to time.
18 February
Julia Butterfly Hill
18 February 1974—
Friend of a Beautiful, Sacred Planet
A horrible car accident changed Julia Butterfly Hill’s life when she was twenty-two. Rear-ended by a drunk driver, she was thrown so violently against the steering wheel that its column penetrated her skull. It took a year of daily physical therapy before she could speak and walk properly again. But her convalescence gave her plenty of time to think about what she wanted to do with her life. “The steering wheel in my head, both figuratively and literally, steered me in a new direction.”
Julia had always loved nature. (She gave herself the nickname “Butterfly” when she was six years old.) So when she recovered from her accident, she resolved to devote herself to protecting the environment. She headed to California and joined a group of environmental activists struggling to protect virgin redwood forests from clear-cutting by the Pacific Lumber Company. Petitions, litigation, and public demonstrations had been tried and had fallen short. The timber company was determined to cut. So Julia decided on a course of action that demanded a major lifestyle change on her part.
On the night of 10 December 1997, she climbed a 180-foot redwood that she named “Luna.” Hoisting up a bag of food, a sleeping bag, and two six-by-six-foot wooden platforms that she secured in Luna’s branches, Julia kept vigil in the redwood for the next 738 days and nights. Her presence in the tree not only prevented the Pacific Lumber Company from cutting it down; it drew national media attention and focused the public on the conflict between environmentalists, who sought to preserve the beauty of nature, and industrialists, who preferred to exploit nature for profit.
Julia’s public witness, supported by a team of activists who regularly supplied her with food and water, paid off. In December 1999, an agreement was reached with the Pacific Lumber Company that spared Luna and surrounding redwoods. But Julia’s yearlong nonviolent campaign had far-reaching effects. Besides saving Luna, it also drew attention
