A Unique Moral Grammar: How Great Religious Traditions Treat War Violence

The last idealist was lynched this morning

Brotherhood of the Cathedral of Beelzebub -

an extremely striking and appropriate warning

to all who would tame the Nation.

(News from the next war, Zigfrid Sason)

Religions are part of every serious discussion about war, intimidation, and the political designation of death as "necessary" - the very moral theater that mocks Zigfrid Sason with its bitter irony. The reason is simple: war is never sustained by weapons alone; it is sustained by meaning. Contemporary states and movements justify killing through narratives of necessity, honor, sacrifice, destiny, and collective identity: it is in these registers that religions have operated for millennia, shaping what communities consider legitimate, sacred, and worth suffering.

Whether a society is pious or formally secular, its public rhetoric still borrows religious patterns, reaching for the absolutes of purity versus impurity, martyr versus enemy, and indulging in the desire for redemptive violence, chosen peoples, promised lands, and final victories. Viewing war through the prism of religion, then, is not a pious addition, but a way to examine the moral grammar that can either make domination sacred by turning loss into fuel for revenge, or restrain it, transforming it into humility, responsibility, and peace.

The four great religions - Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - offer different but fundamentally similar critiques of the myths of victory and the moral glamour of war violence.

Inevitability of loss

If war is nourished by meaning, the first step towards its dismantling is to question the rhetoric of victory, which promises societies that, by overcoming the enemy, they will protect what time threatens and transform vulnerability into control - a promise that history repeatedly exposes as an illusion. It is here that the political imagination collides with the most basic fact of existence.

Before we start discussing borders, enemies, or deterrence, we should confront the deeper condition that makes every ideology of triumph both seductive and dangerous: nothing that lives escapes limitation and change. That is why all order is temporary, and all security is like holding one's breath. Religions teach us that beneath both politics and spirituality lies the same ground, and it has one inevitable name: loss.

Loss is a law that does not require ideology to confirm itself. It is not an accident of existence; it is its fabric. Everything that is born begins to be consumed by the very fact that it exists in time. Every balance and every possession is temporary, and certainty is nothing more than a fragile agreement between us and reality. Time erodes bodies, empires, reputations, borders, and even the very stories with which we try to feel safe.

Judaism points to this sober, unsentimental truth when it observes in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is “a time to seek and a time to lose,” and that life involves a moment when what we hold on to must be let go. Christianity and Islam reach a similar conclusion in a different vocabulary, affirming that the human desire for permanence is the source of many spiritual delusions, which become political when society attempts to perpetuate itself through domination. Buddhism goes further, arguing that impermanence is not a tragic exception but the basic texture of interdependent existence, and that any attachment—including the impulse to conquer and dominate—turns that texture into suffering.

Loss should therefore not be thought of merely as pain, but as the fundamental structure of life. It is the way in which existence both emerges and recedes, enabling change and transformation. Rejecting loss does not abolish it; it only pushes us towards compensations, one of the most dangerous of which is the cult of victory. It teaches societies to see dominance as salvation, concessions as weakness, and to believe that security can only be achieved by forcing others into submission. In such a way of thinking, supremacy is supposed to avoid decay, and glory is supposed to justify the sacrifice of human lives.

The illusion of victory

In practice, “glory” today carries with it the terminology of security policy, such as strategic necessity, the imperative of defense, or the requirement of territorial integrity—labels that translate killing into the language of responsibility and make escalation sound prudent. This fantasy is metaphysical rather than political, for it transforms transitory security into something that seems guaranteed, offering hope for a final solution that reality itself cannot provide.

Judaism counters this seduction by realistically limiting human action and placing life as the highest immediate priority. In rabbinic law, the principle of saving life (pikuach nefesh) overrides even important ritual obligations when life is at stake. Rabbinic tradition recalls the commandment in Deuteronomy that, even when war is waged, one should first offer peace to the enemy before attacking. A community shaped by this priority has a built-in resistance to turning “victory” into a cult of necessity that justifies sacrifice as a means of overcoming.

A similar grammar appears in Islam: the Quran commands that if the enemy inclines to peace, peace should be accepted. The Quran also recalls the provision given to the Children of Israel, according to which the killing of one person constitutes a catastrophe that reverberates throughout all humanity, while saving one life is considered the saving of all. The point of Islam is not that force should never be used, but that life should not be turned into a means of collective pride.

Christianity makes this ethical inversion startlingly clear in Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” This may sound like a slogan, but it is an identity claim, affirming that those who create peace resemble God’s very purpose for the world. The paradox of strength through the renunciation of violence is clearly seen in Matthew 26:52: “Put up your sword into its place; for all who draw the sword will perish by the sword.” Buddhism further sharpens this inversion as a psychological analysis of conflict, arguing that victory and defeat bind both sides to suffering: “Victory breeds hatred,” says the Dhammapada, “the vanquished lie in pain; happy are those who are at peace, who have abandoned both victory and defeat.”

Through these traditions emerges a hard truth: victory is a fantasy that goes beyond the mind, demanding a body, a confirmation, a sacrifice, and an enemy. Where there is no enemy, it invents one; where there is one, it is often a former victim who returns as a threat; where there is no border, it draws one, then proclaims a line on the map as sacred, a moral absolute. At that moment, suffering is no longer a warning but proof, and the price becomes a merit, so that bloodshed is transformed into honor, destruction into success, and death itself into a supposed necessity that is no longer questioned.

In a broader religious sense, it is not “power” - it is a modern form of idolatry, a demand that history be subjugated to a manufactured absolute.

Consider what happened after Versailles. Germany was defeated, politically unstable, and subject to severe military and financial constraints. In the following decade, economic shocks and political violence made extremist movements viable. The treaty was supposed to provide lasting security through punitive measures that would deter future aggression. Instead, it helped to entrench the politics of resentment that extremist movements later exploited, especially when economic crises struck. Humiliation became a rallying cry. A generation later, Europe’s “victory” returned as a new war, paid for by the young.

Or take the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which operated between 1995 and 2003. The apartheid regime had maintained power for decades through institutionalized domination and violence. When the system finally collapsed, the country faced a stark dilemma: whether to pursue maximum accountability through general trials and reprisals, or to try a different path. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, drawing on Christian ethics and the African humanistic tradition, which is often expressed through the concept of ubuntu, advocated for a process based on truth-telling, recognition of suffering, and conditional amnesty. Not a victory for one side over the other, but a process that acknowledges suffering without seeking revenge.

The system was not perfect - no political solution is - but it sought to limit cycles of retaliation and reduce the risk of further irreversible damage. A generation later, South Africa still faces deep inequalities and unresolved tensions, but it avoided the large-scale civil war and state collapse that have accompanied other transitions shaped by projects of ethnic or political dominance.

Priority of peacekeeping

This suggests that the remedy is not passivity, but clarity. Recognizing that loss is universal and belongs to all, not as a misfortune but as a condition of life, changes the frame of the discussion. When loss becomes conscious, it ceases to be just a wound and becomes a criterion, a measure that disciplines our rhetoric and weakens manipulation. This is precisely why religious traditions, at their best, are not escapes from reality, but schools of realism that shape perception and desire.

The same insight appears in classical and scholastic philosophy. Aristotel expressed it through the concept phronesis, practical wisdom that seeks the “golden mean” between destructive extremes. Thomas Aquinas later he developed the same idea as prudent, one of the four cardinal virtues of the Christian tradition. In both cases, the point is the same: prudent action requires judgment in real and uncertain circumstances.

We find a similar realism in Buddhism, which recognizes the root of conflict in attachment, i.e. Upādāni, the habit of appropriation by which we try to preserve what is transient, confusing control with security. Because we attach ourselves, we project permanence onto what cannot last; because we project permanence, we fear loss as scandal. Because we fear loss, we strive for control; and since control is never enough, we move into dominance. The “illusion of victory” is one of the most socially contagious forms of attachment: it promises that if we defeat the other, we will finally be protected from our own vulnerability.

Judaism and Islam offer a parallel realism through law, communal practice, and the moral shaping of everyday life. In the Jewish tradition, peace is not just a mystical idea; it is a way of life. Learning Hillel "To love peace and strive for peace" is not a private feeling, but a discipline of social action, in which peace is sought as a task, because conflict is easy and reconciliation is difficult.

Islam makes a similar practical claim when it states that “reconciliation is better.” The Quranic phrase (4:128) is brief, but its implications are far-reaching, for it places a negotiated solution as morally preferable to a proud insistence on complete justification. If a society adopts such a valuation, compromise ceases to seem like shameful weakness and becomes a reasonable form of humility, a recognition that no victory can cancel out mortality and that every additional day of violence produces losses that no subsequent victory can make up for. The hadith that Abu Darda records that the Prophet said: “Shall I not tell you what is more valuable than additional fasting, prayer and charity? (…) Reconciliation between people, for the corrupt relations between people are a razor” - thus elevating peacemaking above voluntary worship and warning of the destructive nature of discord.

Christianity places this paradox at its very center (Matthew 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24): whoever tries to save his life by grasping it will lose it; whoever “loses” his life, in the sense of giving up the compelling need for self-preservation at all costs, will find it. Read politically, this becomes a warning about collective behavior. When a nation tries to save itself by total victory, it can lose itself—not just in lives and resources, but in its moral grammar, social cohesion, and capacity for truthful speech. To give up the false salvation of domination is to reject the intoxication that gives violence a semblance of meaning. It is to break the bond between blood and honor.

Here, the strategic use of loss becomes a technology of peace. The point is not to romanticize defeat or glorify humiliation, but to redefine success. Since every human community is fragile and time-limited, the rational goal cannot be maximum superiority, but minimum irreversible damage. Religious ethics constantly returns to this asymmetry: what we preserve may still be lost, but what we destroy is gone forever. The use of force as a last resort, in defense of life, may sometimes be unavoidable, but war and the escalation of intimidation should not be easily treated as ordinary tools of geopolitics. Leaders who speak as if losses were an acceptable “cost” act as if life were recoverable. It is not. The dead do not return, the crippled do not regain their limbs, and trauma does not reset. A civilization that learns to suffer such irreversible damage, whether in the name of glory or strategic necessity, risks becoming an idolater.

The claim that the fundamental priority should be the defense of life must not be dismissed as simplistic, but must be considered in relation to the reality of our fragile and short existence. The logic of national and territorial defense, by contrast, has always glorified paying the debt to the Fatherland, as if victory were not always, for fathers, sons, and mothers, a Pyrrhic victory.

The preciousness of peace

Religions warn us. Throughout Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, the same realistic thought recurs: talk of victory easily turns harm into moral credit, while preserving life, reconciliation, and peacemaking are treated as higher forms of power than domination. In this sense, the delusion that victory can undo loss is not only a spiritual error, but also a political mechanism of escalation.

This gives rise to a different image of strength - as the ability to accept limits without turning them into anger. It means being able to endure partial loss in order to prevent total loss, and to understand compromise not as humiliation but as a mature recognition that life itself is a continuous compromise: with time, with the body, with others, and with the fact that we do not own the world. Peace, in this light, is not the absence of conflict, but the active refusal to make conflict "final" through violence. It is the acceptance of partial loss and the refusal to turn the other into the enemy that our rhetoric of indeterminacy and glory requires.

In this sense, “winning by losing” takes on a precise meaning. It means giving up the fantasy that domination gives meaning to life, giving up the hunger for supremacy that requires sacrifice to feel real, and rejecting the intoxicating narrative that convinces us that war can buy the ultimate resolution. And we do this not through moralistic preaching, but through ethical realism: we allow an awareness of transience to shape our politics, the priority of life to discipline our rhetoric, reconciliation to become honorable again, and peacemaking to reclaim its status as the highest form of collective wisdom.

By developing an awareness of our shared existential defeat, we can begin to recognize with clarity the universal law of loss and refuse to multiply it needlessly. It is the kind of clarity that Judaism, in its language, associates with the pursuit of peace, Christianity with bliss, Islam with reconciliation, and Buddhism with the renunciation of both victory and defeat. Such clarity sees defeat not as the outcome of some particular decision, but as the fundamental condition of our lives and actions. It does not have to mean doom, sorrow, or despair; on the contrary, it constantly reminds us of how precious each moment is and how senseless it is to waste it by creating more suffering. The peace that results from it is the only kind of victory that does not require ruins and corpses to prove itself.

(Glif editorial team; source: abc.net.au; translation: Danilo Lučić)