Too many innocent victims in human history
Victim. The word evokes images of pagan rituals: an animal is captured, bound, disemboweled, burned, sacrificed for the benefit of others, whether an individual or a community. A life stolen for a cause in which it has no part. The sacrificial victim (sometimes human) is part of a ruthless and chilling exchange with the divine, whose acceptance is hoped to bring about some beneficial effect.
Etymologically, the term, laden with as much innocence as powerlessness, seems to derive from the Indo-European root weik, meaning exchange. In these miserable times, we watch helplessly as countless images flash before our eyes of people losing arms, legs, heads, homes, and lives in wars where both indifference and horror erase humanity. And they are all victims: defenseless civilians and young soldiers alike, sent by force to fight wars born of decisions not their own, sacrificing their bodies, their youth, their dreams, and their hopes. The ruthlessness of those who unleash war ignores Abraham’s anguished question to God in Genesis (18:23): “Will you really destroy both the guilty and the innocent?” Too many victims continue to bleed in what Pope Francis called “the third world war fought in pieces.” They are the young sent to the front lines, wearing uniforms of different colors, swept into the bloody spiral of violence and domination ignited by the cold, calculated madness of war, with no escape. They are women, children, and men driven from their lands, bombed, starved, struck down in the name of a savage revenge that turns them into innocent targets, with only one destiny: to perish. Their suffering is no different from that expressed by Giulio Romano in the 16th century in The Fall of the Giants at Palazzo Te in Mantua, or by Picasso in Guernica: violence, massacre, devastation.
Common sense tells us that just as “you can’t dry water with water, or extinguish fire with fire,” so too “you can’t fight evil with evil” (R. Saviano), but the logic of power has nothing to do with common sense.
“Art is a wound turned into light” (L. Bourgeois), and it can strike the viewer with flashes of indignation turned into vision. No one can forget Marina Abramović, who in 1997 in her performance Balkan Baroque brushed bloody piles of bones, at the Venice Biennale. Horror cannot be washed away, it floods the world.
Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac, housed in the Uffizi, stages the victim who embodies all victims across time: the son whom the father is ready to sacrifice. We are all waiting for the angel to stay the knife.
Habemus papam.The first words spoken by the newly elected Leo XIV were: “Peace be with you all.” He speaks of a peace to be sought always, by building bridges, together, with the pontiff who, already in the etymology of his title, carries the mission of being a bridge-builder. A peace that is “disarmed and disarming, humble and persevering,” standing against evil in its most devastating form: war. “Evil will not prevail.” His words are a pope’s caress.
Suggested listening:
Antonio Vivaldi, Stabat Mater
Karl Jenkins, L’homme armé
