Peace is the opposite of war — but not merely its absence. Peace is a positive condition grounded in the recognition of the personhood and dignity of every human being. Where persons recognize one another as what they are — as someone, not as something — there arises the foundation for real peace.
Peace and the Personalist Norm
True peace presupposes the personalist norm: the affirmation of the person for their own sake. A peace that rests only on fear, oppression, or exhaustion is not a real peace — it is merely deferred war. Real peace demands the insight that the other human being may never be used merely as a means, and the readiness to follow this insight in action.
Peace as a Task of the Third Dimension
Peace belongs essentially to the third dimension of personhood: it is not a natural given, but the result of free, conscious, responsible decisions. It demands love, justice, and a wakeful conscience. Oblivion of the person — the forgetting of what the human being is — is the deepest root of discord. Where power is not limited by the recognition of dignity, the relapse into violence is always a threat.
Ways of Nonviolence
The peace researcher Johan Galtung distinguishes negative peace (the absence of direct violence) from positive peace (the absence of structural and cultural violence). This distinction is akin to personal ontology: structural violence — when institutions, economic structures, or technological systems systematically prevent the unfolding of personhood — is a form of practical oblivion of the person, even when no one directly exercises violence.
From the standpoint of personal ontology, the way of nonviolence demands not only the renunciation of war and physical violence, but the active recognition of dignity in all the structures of communal life: in the economy (no instrumentalization through money), in politics (no subjugation through power), in technology (no reduction of the person to data). Positive peace is the societal realization of the personalist norm.
Nonviolence is in this sense no passive acquiescence, but an act of the third dimension: the conscious, free decision to grant the other their dignity even where they have themselves forgotten it. It presupposes insight, freedom, and conscience — and is thus a deeply personal act.
Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 271–289 (the third dimension and moral perfection), pp. 293–306 (oblivion of the person as the root of discord).
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 29 (On peace as the fruit of justice and love). Transl. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros., 1947.
See also: