Hard Hearts: Reflections on Human Nature in the Context of the Gaza War

KING LEAR: Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
— The Tragedy of King Lear, III:vi:76-77

The Tragedy of King Lear is one of several plays by William Shakespeare to address the subject of human nature and moral folly. As in all great literature which examines moral conflicts, it grapples with the central theme of the nature of nature. It is the contention of this essay that normative nature is rooted in the Sacred, and that the source of evil – not as suffering, whose existential source is privation, but as sin, which is the transgression of the soul – resides in the metaphysical deviation from that norm which binds humanity to the sacred order. It is a spiritual failing, modeled in the egoic disobedience of Iblis to God’s commandment to bow to Man, and in the disobedience through temptation that led to Man’s Fall and expulsion from the Garden.

The unfolding events in the Middle East call to mind Lear’s great question about nature and evil: Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? It is a recurring question in literature, history and scripture.

Much evil has indeed been carried out in the name of religion, though many such actions conflate ideologies of political violence with religion, and are in fact defamatory of the true spirit of religion, which is founded in the Sacred and is based on a respect for life and human dignity. But religion itself, like reality, can be interpreted in ways that lose sight of the universal bond of the Sacred, focusing instead on narrowly defined interests. The current war in Gaza, for example, is driven, in part, by far-right Jewish extremists, pursuing a Zionist ideology that seeks to assert sovereignty over the “Greater Israel,” lands it views as promised to their Biblical forbears, the Israelites, by God, and referred to as “the Promised Land.” We will examine this claim in more detail later. Other examples of religious violence include nationalistic and retributive wars in the Balkans, which were blessed by some Church authorities, and which led to ethnic massacres; jihadist wars by organizations such as ISIS, and the establishment of theocratic regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, which have engaged in coercive and repressive policies in the name of Islam; the oppression of Muslims by Hindu fundamentalists in India and by Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar. These, and other similar examples, raise legitimate questions about whether religion itself is to blame.

Yet, many other conflicts that have led to atrocities have been rooted simply in political and ideological differences and secular power-struggles with no overt religious impetus. Examples include Nazi fascism, which led to the profound human tragedy of the Shoah; Stalinism, which led to the death, torture, and imprisonment of millions in the dreaded Gulags, about which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written; the Cambodian genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot regime; and the ethnic cleansing of Tutsis by Hutu militias in the Rwandan genocide. These were not religious, but ideologically driven, conflicts.

Ideologies are often offered as the justification for inhumane conduct because they value ideals over humanity. The ends are claimed to justify the means, forgetting that (to paraphrase Frithjof Schuon) the ends can never justify the means if the means vilify the ends. Ideologues, by reducing reality to abstract ideals removed from the sacredness of life, become morally blind. Refusing to “love one’s neighbour,” to be one’s “brother’s keeper,” creates a moral blindness in which it becomes possible to dehumanize the “other” and ourselves from the love that connects us all. The “other” is then either to be removed or to be used in the service of the greater ideal. This is the basis for the dehumanizing social engineering experiments in the pursuit of Utopian ideals, such as the man-made famines created in the former Soviet Union and China under Stalin and Mao, respectively, or the notorious medical experiments in pursuit of the eugenic goals of Aryan purity under the Nazis, and their diabolical logic of the efficiency of the gas ovens.

Names like Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Deir Yassin, Hiroshima, Rwanda and Srebrenica, dates like “9/11,” “7/7,” or “October 7th,” and monikers like the “Holocaust” or the “Nakba,” and now “the Gaza War,” all attest to human conflicts and tragedies whose impacts are still raw. They point back to Lear’s question.

If that question is not being asked more urgently today, it is not because of moral apathy. There is also a sense of powerlessness in the face of the juggernauts of power which appear to have been wrested away from the reach of ordinary humans and vested instead in impersonal bureaucracies and soulless and predatory technologies directed by algorithms that polarize opinion. Even consciences nowadays have to contend with the effectiveness of propaganda. Modern technologies not only facilitate mass killing and torture but also provide mechanisms for their concealment. In many cases, despite the evidence of the horrors that stare in our faces, we rationalize them because perpetrators of evil use political machinery to deny, deflect from and camouflage their responsibility for crimes against humanity, and to whitewash their evil deeds. Justice in such cases is seldom to be found. As Lear observed, “Robed and furred gowns hide all.” (see King Lear, IV:vi:180-183)

Although international institutions have been created, and laws enacted, to prevent or regulate conflicts and to ensure conformity to universal humanitarian norms, the lack of political will or power to implement these protective laws does indeed contribute to a sense of one's impotence, even apathy. Bulwarks against abuses are cynically manipulated to permit brutal aggression and self-interest, ignoring the common good. Ironically, this is done often to further the exploitation of some in the name of nationalist and tribalist aims instead of promoting equitable and humane coexistence. In this climate, one's principles are given no more than lip-service, and are all-too-often abandoned in a miasma of “spin” and double-standards.

Human conflicts hold up a mirror to humanity, demanding us to anatomize not only those who commit evil acts, but our own natures.

Evidently, religion and ideology are not the causes but the pretexts for evil. Is there, then, something in human nature which is the actual cause of evil? Is nature inherently evil itself, one may ask, knowing even as we pose the question that our consciences do innately discern right from wrong, however we might seek to rationalize our unconscionable desires. We can see this because even perpetrators of evil often resort to justifications for their transgressions, couched in language that rationalizes unethical behaviors as necessary for some greater good. Utopian ideals of ‘Progress’ or utilitarian justifications, for example, are used to sanitize a multitude of sins. Inevitably, politics dictates that the interests of the powerful eclipse the common good, seemingly in the name of some other good. Regulation based on humane norms to reverse the effects of environmental degradation, or to prevent the proliferation of potentially harmful technologies and weapons, becomes a contest between powerful economic or political interests and humanitarian values. While debates over such priorities can and do involve appeals to the greater good, they often engage in a calculus that ignores the need to sacrifice selfish interests for the common good. At root, the choice of priorities involves ethical questions that require an exercise of political will, and the choices we make and the integrity with which we make them may tell us something about human nature.

Human conflicts hold up a mirror to humanity, demanding us to anatomize not only those who commit evil acts, but our own natures. While the outer motives of conflicts are often analyzed psychologically or in ideological terms, they also have deeper inner causes that bear examination. The Gaza War does indeed have much to do with matters such as religion, ethnicity, power, and colonialism, but these are based on choices informed by one's vision of reality. Evil acts have more to do with hardened hearts and spiritual forgetfulness, and the consequent neglect of the empathetic bonds that bind us to one another, than with the ideologies themselves. This essay contends that political or religious ideologies are unsustainable unless they conform to a pattern of order rooted in the sacred ground of primordial human nature. To understand that ground, we turn briefly to Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear.

King Lear, Nature and Moral Folly

One of the principal themes explored by Shakespeare in King Lear is that of the nature of nature. It demonstrates that the Outer Man (selfishly craven and desiring power) possesses an egoic nature which is at war with the Inner Man (conformed to his spiritual, loving core or Heart).

A brief metaphysical explanation: The Scholastic Latin maxim ‘duo sunt in homine’ refers to two contending natures in Man, one represented by the spiritual inclinations of the Inner Man, and the other by the worldly and egoic inclinations of the Outer Man. Far from conceding a Manichean dualism at the expense of the spiritual integrity that is taught by the wisdom traditions, the maxim references the spiritual contest between the “two natures” of the soul – one receptively compliant, the other rebellious – and so, between remembrance and forgetting, between conforming to one’s integral nature or opposing it. This is the battleground of the contest between the Inner Man who is Self-aware and centered in the Sacred, and the Outer Man who is distracted, disintegrated or Promethean. The soul must make a choice in this contest because “No man can serve two masters.” (Matthew, 6:24)

The scriptures teach that Man is the Imago Dei because the soul possesses a Primordial Nature (al-fitra, Holy Qur’an, 30:30), the sacred ground which is the inner prototype of natural order and the criterion of objective Truth and moral conscience. The Inner Man places the soul in alignment with the Divine Will by operating within the remit of Heaven, the Norm or limit recognized by her moral conscience, and one which accords with her Primordial Nature. The Outer Man does not do so, seeking instead to rely on “self mettle” to pursue his own desires and to feed his own appetites even if it harms others. From the point of view of the Outer Man, the moral scruples of the Inner Man to use power for selfish ends amounts to folly, while from the point of view of the Inner Man it is folly to barter one’s soul for the world. Those two perspectives constitute the central contest of the soul in the world.

By the time that Lear asks his question about what creates “hard hearts,” both he and the Earl of Gloucester have experienced betrayal and cruelty from their respective families. Each of them has misjudged his own children. Lear, succumbing to the flattery of his two “unnatural” daughters, has divided his kingdom among them, reserving to himself only the right to be cared for by them. He has repudiated his loving daughter, Cordelia, who, as her name suggests (Coeur de Lear), denotes his own cardial centre, his Heart. He has disowned and disinherited Cordelia for her refusal to flatter him in a public spectacle he has staged as a display of how much he is loved by his children. Upon receiving their public flattery, he plans to reward them by dividing his kingdom among the three daughters.  Cordelia’s refusal to make a public display of her love to accommodate her father’s charade ("my love's/ More ponderous than my tongue") (“I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth”) (King Lear, I:i:77-78; and 91-92) prompts Lear to liken her non-response to a lack of true love. Lear chooses to judge only by its outward appearances of nothingness and silence, stating "Nothing will come of nothing" (King Lear, I:i:90). Looking only with his outer eyes, not with his inward eye, he misses that nothingness and silence are the qualitative markers of something beyond the worldly measure he vainly prizes. Love’s abode, its true core, which Cordelia represents, is the metaphysical "nothingness" or "Nihil" and loving receptivity in which Nature’s true spiritual substance rests. Lear’s moral blindness and self-assertiveness cuts him off from perceiving the true quality of his favorite daughter’s love, seeing in her silence a rejection of his due as king and as father. He demands that she voice her love (Lear is seeking a measure and public display of something beyond measure and mere show) and when Cordelia does not accede, he disowns her, thereby closing off his Heart from the sap of her nourishing love, setting in motion the tragedy which unfolds.

Soon after this spectacle, Lear discovers that Goneril’s and Regan’s displays of love for him were indeed false. He is cruelly cast out by them, left to spend the night on the heath under a pelting and pitiless storm, while the daughters plot to kill each other and take over his entire domain. Reduced to an abject state, Lear is an outcast in his own kingdom. By the time he poses his question about why hearts can harden, his wits have begun to turn and he is on the verge of madness.

In a parallel unfolding, Gloucester, Lear’s faithful courtier, is deceived by his bastard son, Edmund, who has schemed to convince his father of the villainy of his innocent brother, Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son and heir, in order to rob him of his rightful inheritance. Like Lear, Gloucester disbelieves the evidence of his own heart, and thereby both Lear and Gloucester become prey, in a world of pretense and “seeming,” to evil contrivances and scheming.

Goneril and Regan violate the norms of nature which govern how a father or a King (who is the symbolic head of the natural order) should be treated. By effectively turning Lear away from their homes and their hearts, they have broken both their natural bond of love and filial duty, and their contracted bond with him as their paternal and symbolic regal authority. Subverting nature, they drive Lear to madness, making him, in the words of Gloucester, a “ruin’d piece of nature” (King Lear, IV:vi:134); in a world where the Outer Man supplants the authority of the Inner Man, the natural order represented by the King is reduced to disorder. Gloucester, himself, is physically blinded in a heinous act of treachery by Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, an act in which his own villainous son, Edmund, was complicit. Gloucester’s physical blindness reflects a spiritual blindness remarked in his words, “I stumbled when I saw.” (King Lear, IV:i:19)

When Lear is at his most pitiable, abandoned by his daughters, sheltering from the storm in a hovel with his disguised servant, Kent, his court Fool, and the fugitive Edgar in the guise of a Bedlam beggar, he despairingly asks the question quoted in the epigraph, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” The idea of petrified hearts anticipates what he says later, when his beloved Cordelia, who has been murdered on Edmund's orders, lies lifeless in her father's arms. At that point, Lear utters these harrowing words at the injustice of it all, calling the murderers and onlookers “men of stones.”

Howl, howl, howl, howl!
Oh, you are men of stones.
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth. (V:iii:314-318)

When Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, learns of how the evil daughters have mistreated Lear, he strongly disapproves of what they have done. In a key exchange between Albany and Goneril (King Lear, IV:ii), he likens his heartless wife to a “devil” and a “fiend” (lines 59 and 60), and refers to her as a “self-covered thing” (line 62). She has repudiated her humane nature by covering it up with her false self, her grasping ego. Albany remarks that her deformed nature is self-centered, cut off from its vital soil, and from the sap of grace that can only flow from its natural connection. Fearing his wife’s disposition, he apprehends that such unnaturalness will, like a withering branch, “come to deadly use” (see the lines 32 to 36, quoted below):

That nature, which contemns its origin
Cannot be bordered certain in itself.
She that herself will sliver and disbranch
From her material sap perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.

Goneril scoffs at her husband’s preachiness: “No more. The text is foolish” (line 37). The “text” is an allusion to the scripture which teaches of the Tree of Life. Like any ordinary tree in the natural world, which is sustained only by the soil from which it springs, and the sap which sustains it, Man has an intrinsic dependence on God. Man is not bounded in himself but is rooted in the sacred soil of Transcendence within a larger cosmic and spiritual order to which he must conform. It is folly, therefore, to act as though one’s existence was independent of its sustaining source. To do this would be unnatural, a violation of the natural order.

Calling the text “foolish”, Goneril also accuses her husband of being “a moral fool” (line 58). In a play where Shakespeare uses the trope of “Fool” to denote, among other things, the natural conscience of the spiritual Man, the term bears some examination. In the eyes of one such as Goneril who possesses no moral scruples about engaging in villainy to pursue worldly ends, her husband is indeed a fool, a “moral fool” for having such scruples. She calls her husband a coward, a "Milk-liver'd man!" (line 50), too paralyzed by pity for Lear to pursue his own advantage. Clearly, conscience, for such “self-covered” creatures as Goneril, is an inconvenient truth best ignored or concealed.

But are moral scruples truly foolish? Shakespeare’s language poses a deeper spiritual question (adapting Hamlet): to be or not to be the moral fool? Is it better to suffer a metaphysical death or “sacrifice” for a greater Good? The answer to this depends on one’s understanding of the underlying nature of nature.

As we have seen, Albany depicts human nature as intimately dependent on its nurturing elements. This is contrasted with the self-bordering and deracinated nature which rejects its sustaining Origin, disbranching from its life-giving moral source, prompting and enabling it thereby to commit selfish, unnatural acts which upset the natural order and the Heavenly Norm. Albany foresees that when people act only from unbridled freedom, forsaking natural love, humanity will prey on itself like monsters, a condition which only a restoration of the natural order can restore. Thus, he states (lines 46-50),

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
It will come:
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

Those, like Goneril, Regan and Edmund, who seek worldly power and self-advancement at the cost of their souls, operate from a spiritually illegitimate understanding of Nature. The deformed vision of nature is epitomized in Edmund’s soliloquy (King Lear, I:ii:1-22) which ends with the lines that reveal that the “base,” illegitimate brand of nature, unconcerned with moral scruples when engaged in subverting the natural order, pursues its own legitimacy by any means of self-assertion in order to "prosper":

Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow: I proper:
Now, gods. Stand up for bastards!

Albany recognizes that the unbound freedom which results from a Promethean rebellion against the Transcendent order is unnatural. It separates humanity from the metaphysical order and operates outside the remit of Heaven. “If God does not exist, everything is permitted,” claims Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, but freedom unconformed to the Divine Will dehumanizes Man insofar as it licenses not only wantonness but monstrous predation. As Shakespeare’s play shows, it leads ultimately to self-destruction.

From Goneril’s perspective, whosoever hesitates for moral reasons to grasp the brass ring of worldly power is indeed, in a certain sense, a “moral fool.” But the price for such spiritual folly is, from Albany’s perspective, to become a devil, to be a deluded “self-covered thing,” and to lose one’s soul in the exchange. This is the choice which lies at the heart of the Faustian bargain, and about which the “text” is clear: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark, 8:36, KJV)

The Inner Man connects to a metaphysical order that respects natural bounds. Human integrity and dignity are rooted in a respect for the sacred ground that connects all life. Its life-giving sap of wisdom and love is vital for the soul’s spiritual sustenance, which grows in the Heart, the receptive core of Man.

In Shakespeare’s play, this core, symbolized by Cordelia (the Heart of Lear), represents the love beyond measure, which is whole, and which can only be intuited through empathy, receptively. The Inner Man seeks to keep open the aperture of the Heart and thereby to live in accord with the Heavenly Norm, acting in ways that respect the inherent dignity of all. Cordelia never stops loving her father, but until Lear goes through a spiritual awakening, he is not ready to perceive this. Blinded by vanity, he is not receptive to true love. In worldly terms, Cordelia too is a moral fool because she refuses to conform to the demands of display in order to prove her love to her father, and Shakespeare in fact has Lear refer to her at her tragic end as “my poor fool” (King Lear, V:iii:306).

The Inner Man connects nature to a metaphysical order that respects natural bounds. Human integrity and dignity are rooted in a respect for the Sacred ground that connects all life.

Hard hearts are not natural. The natural state of the Heart is soft and loving. Only a pliant Heart is receptive to its sustaining Source, and is conscious of its true spiritual Origin and End. The soul is called upon to be receptive to its spiritual nature, and to cultivate this pliancy and loving nature through remembrance and conformity. Remembrance: that “the soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love… By its very nature, it must seek God, who is love.” (Mechthild of Magdeburg). Conformity: to submit to the Spirit instead of adopting the veil of the ego and bartering love for lust and worldly riches. The Spirit responds only to the soft Heart, to the receptive soul of the pining Lover who seeks the Beloved, ever-mindful that “God guides him who wants to be guided, and He is fully aware of who would let themselves be guided” (Holy Qur’an, 28:56). Pliant Hearts belong to souls “who would let themselves be guided” and not to the obstinate who let themselves be led astray. By the grace of the Spirit, receptive souls become like “stones out of which rivers gush forth” (Holy Quran, 2:74). By contrast, a soul that distractedly forgets or pridefully scorns her true nature, becomes calcified. The Light does not reach those who willfully turn away from it. God is not responsive to those who are determined to go astray, who harden their own hearts by following their own whims in defiance of their consciences. “So, if they fail to respond to you, then know that they only follow their desires. And who could be more astray than those who follow their desires with no guidance from Allah? Surely Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people” (Holy Qur’an, 28:50).

An example of this principle is expressed in the scripture, “And he hardened Pharaoh's heart, that he hearkened not unto them; as the Lord had said. And the Lord said unto Moses, Pharaoh's heart is hardened, he refuseth to let the people go.” (Exodus 7:13-14) One must not misinterpret this to absolve Pharaoh of responsibility. If God caused Pharaoh’s heart to harden, as the Book of Exodus states in several instances (for example, see also 9:12), it is not because God is the originator of evil. The great Midrashic scholars, like Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi) and Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (Ramban), have pointed to the sequence of the Ten Plagues unleashed by God against the Egyptians, noting that in each of the five initial instances, the scripture explicitly attributes to Pharaoh the hardening of his own heart. Only when Pharaoh repeatedly rejects God’s commandments, ignores the opportunities to act humanely by freeing the enslaved Israelites from bondage, does God take over, stiffening Pharaoh’s hard heart in order to display His signs. Only then did God command Moses to “Go in unto Pharaoh: for I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, that I might shew these my signs before him” (Exodus, 10:1, KJV). It is only humanity’s own repudiation of virtue that shuts the soul off from grace. A soul that transgresses the Heavenly Norm but is repentant is always capable of spiritual transformation.

By the time Lear asks the question about hard hearts, he has undergone an outward experience which readies him for his spiritual transformation. The King has been stripped bare of his regalia, his pomp and accoutrements of vanity. Thus abased, in a Job-like state and exposed to the elements, he begins to empathize with the “poor naked wretches” of his kingdom who have no protection from the storms, and he realizes he has taken “too little care” of their needs (King Lear, III:iv:28-36). He also appreciates that the vanities he had previously prized are not enough to satisfy one’s “true need” (King Lear, II:iv:264-271). Reduced by circumstances from being a "sophisticated" man to being an “unaccommodated man” (King Lear, iii:iv:103-109), realizing that the excesses of the Outer Man are superfluous, he can now look at himself and others with the Eye of his Heart. He can begin to assess humanity by a different standard, through empathy.

Like Gloucester who had initially misjudged the moral qualities of his own children, but had reformed his vision after being outwardly blinded (his physical blinding is the catalyst for Gloucester’s own spiritual transformation), Lear too now sees the world in a truer way, in Gloucester’s language, “feelingly” (King Lear, IV:vi:149). Their experience teaches them that men are not what they seem. Most are flatterers, deceivers, unjust and untrue. Lear himself had misjudged his daughter Cordelia’s own true worth. Unlike the Duke of Burgandy, who rejected Cordelia as a bride when Lear rashly denied her a regal inheritance as a dowry, the King of France took Cordelia as his wife, noting “She is herself a dowry” (King Lear, I:i:241). France prized Cordelia for her inner qualities, with regard to which her outer poverty was irrelevant: "Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;/ Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised!" (King Lear, I:i:25-251). The play points to the need to look at the world with true spiritual insight, by which the true Inner Man is distinguished from the false Outer Man. To access that place of insight requires the soul’s egoic shell to break. The suffering of Lear and Gloucester serves as a spiritual death of the ego, and the transforming rebirth of the soul in the Spirit; it serves to mortify the Outer Man and to revive the Inner Man through a spiritual rebirth and redemption.

One answer to Lear’s question about what makes “hard hearts” is: spiritual blindness or the loss of the Sacred. When human beings look into the Gorgon-like mirror of the world, they become blind to their true natures, and their hearts consequently harden. No mere laws, rules, human ideologies or institutions can then save us from ourselves. People in positions of power will not necessarily act conscionably, in a way that reflects their innate nature. On “this great stage of fools,” Lear tells Gloucester, the “great image of authority” is that “a dog’s obeyed in office” (King Lear, IV:vi:157-159). True authority derives from the Font of all authority, the sovereign Spirit whose seat is the Heart, and not from the worldly idols and apparatuses of authority. As we know all too well from horrors that have been depicted by Kafka, Orwell, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, among others, even though we may establish courts and laws and outwardly legitimate means of human governance, if these are not operating with the wisdom of the Heart, neither truth nor justice will prevail. Governments and institutions will not necessarily work as they are meant to in a world peopled by "rascal beadles," "usurers" and "scurvy politicians." In such a world, justice favors the powerful, not the right (King Lear, IV:vi:160-172):

Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it.

One needs to look beyond the offices of authority and influence in society to discern the true natures of human beings, to understand how inner failings cause tragedies. This means cleansing our own souls to be able to see what is humane and what is not.

The remedy (“physic”) lies in ourselves, in our own pride (“pomp”), which requires a dose of empathy to remain “human” (King Lear, III:iv:33-36):

Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

It requires us to search our hearts for the moral wisdom of what is happening around us and, when our leaders and institutions fail us, to have the moral courage to “speak truth to power” or, in Albany’s words at the end of the play, to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (King Lear: V:iii:325)

Lear had allowed himself to be flattered by his wicked daughters, not comprehending their deformed natures and not realizing that their showy words did not match their true inner feelings. He ignored the intelligence of his own Heart by rejecting Cordelia because she had refused to participate in his charade of speaking what she “ought to say” in order to draw a share “more opulent” than those of her sisters. And he also ignored the wise counsel of both the plain-speaking Earl of Kent and the honest Fool who acted as a check on his rashness. This failure of Lear’s insight, his inability to understand the nature of the people around him and to heed true counsel and conscience, is what permits the tragedy to unfold.

The Tragedy of King Lear reminds us that the world is a spiritual battleground between the contending natures of the soul, the one compliant to the Spirit, and the other the usurping ego that rebels. Our failure to be governed by the norms of integrity, dignity, respect for the Sacred, will lead ultimately, as Albany warns, to humanity preying on itself like “monsters of the deep.” The implication is that we must, each of us, work to restore the natural order by becoming its “visible spirits,” the Light that shines in the darkness of the disordered world.

“And the Light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John, 1:5, KJV)

The Spiritual Struggle: The Need for Chivalry

With this backdrop, we turn to a few reflections about war generally. If the aim of religion is inner and outer peace and harmony, one may ask: To what extent is warfare compatible with religious principles?