By Robert Royal

Let's begin with a pointed question: Are we, almost all, today, Sadducees? If your knowledge of the groups who appear in the New Testament is hazy, we might put it thus: Do almost all of us now, even Christians who claim otherwise, like the Sadducees in Jesus' day, basically discount eternal life and think physical death the absolute end, and worst of evils? If so, a war may do us a service because it reveals, in its dreadful and severe way, the state of our souls.

War is hell. But does Hell – a place of eternal war – or Heaven – the place of the only true and lasting peace – play any real role in our minds and hearts during a time like this? It may seem heartless to ask the question in the face of so much immediate suffering, but it's precisely because of those human ills that the deeper questions come to the fore.

As C.S. Lewis put it in a similar time: "The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it."

No one should want war except as an absolute necessity for the gravest reasons. Totalitarians love war because they often think it's a remedy for the flabbiness that overtakes people when things are good. Mussolini said that the modern Italians needed a "bloodbath" to recover their ancient discipline and virtue. And he tried giving them one. We know how that, like other programs of renewal through war, turned out.

Peace and prosperity are goods in themselves, but they're not always good for us. Europe's dependence on the United States for its security since World War II, for instance, made it into a continent that finds it difficult to find the will or allocate the resources to defend itself. Many Europeans – and sadly not a few Americans now – even doubt whether it's worth defending our civilization.

A Christian shouldn't be surprised. "In his riches, man lacks wisdom: he is like the beasts that are destroyed." (Psalm 49:20) It doesn't have to be this way. We may be wise even in prosperity. But reason and revelation alike warn of dangers.

Just now, we're rightly preoccupied not only about the justice of the Iran war, but also about its possible spread – along with terrorism. And we try to imagine what a "successful" end might be. We can't help but doubt what we're told by politicians and the media. But in all this, do we lose sight of the truth that neither war nor peace is the last word for us?

Our Christian forbears didn't need to ask this basic question because, until quite recently, bodily death was not considered the worst thing. Some things are worth dying for. Most people knew anyway from daily experience that our years on earth are sharply limited, war or not. And that the next life is, for good or ill, forever.

The traditional classification of sins and virtues reflected this. We cite Dante a lot on this page because. . .one just should, for many reasons. Besides the sheer imaginative beauty of his Divine Comedy, he makes it easy to see crucial distinctions, Christian distinctions, about the state of the soul, both in this life and the next.

For instance, sins of violence and murder are, of course, punished in Inferno, but only about midway down into Hell. There are good reasons in the Christian tradition for this. In the proper Christian understanding, we are a composite of body and soul. Murder or indiscriminate slaughter in war are, to be sure, horrible. But a Certain Authoritative Person made a point of saying (twice): "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Hell." (Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:4-5)

We rarely hear this these days, even from the highest authorities in the Church. Which is why both just war and capital punishment now appear "inadmissible" to some Church authorities. If you believe in eternal life and the greater importance of the soul than physical life, however, there are still plenty of worse things than the bodily death, wh...