WAR AND CHRISTIANITY.
_Etsi adierant milites ad Joannem et formam observationis
acceperant, si etiam centurio crediderat, omnem postea militem
Dominus in Petro exarmando discinxit._--TERTULLIAN.
The war question at the time of the Reformation--The remonstrances
of Erasmus against the custom--Influence of Grotius on the side of
war--The war question in the early Church--The Fathers against the
lawfulness of war--Causes of the changed views of the Church--The
clergy as active combatants for over one thousand years--Fighting
Bishops--Bravery in war and ecclesiastical preferment--Pope Julius
II. at the siege of Mirandola--The last fighting Bishop--Origin
and meaning of the declaration of war--Superstition in the naming
of weapons, ships, &c.--The custom of kissing the earth before a
charge--Connection between religious and military ideas--The Church
as a pacific agency--Her efforts to set limits to reprisals--The
altered attitude of the modern Church--Early reformers only
sanctioned just wars--Voltaire’s reproach against the Church--Canon
Mozley’s sermon on war--The answer to his apology.
Whether military service was lawful for a Christian at all was at the
time of the Reformation one of the most keenly debated questions;
and considering the force of opinion arrayed on the negative side,
its ultimate decision in the affirmative is a matter of more wonder
than is generally given to it. Sir Thomas More charges Luther and his
disciples with carrying the doctrines of peace to the extreme limits
of non-resistance; and the views on this subject of the Mennonites
and Quakers were but what at one time seemed not unlikely to have been
those of the Reformed Church generally.
By far the foremost champion on the negative side was Erasmus, who
being at Rome at the time when the League of Cambray, under the
auspices of Julius II., was meditating war against the Republic of
Venice, wrote a book to the Pope, entitled ‘Antipolemus,’ which, though
never completed, probably exists in part in his tract known under the
title of ‘Dulce Bellum inexpertis,’ and printed among his ‘Adagia.’
In it he complained, as one might complain still, that the custom of
war was so recognised as an incident of life that men wondered there
should be any to whom it was displeasing; and likewise so approved of
generally, that to find any fault with it savoured not only of impiety,
but of actual heresy. To speak of it, therefore, as he did in the
following passage, required some courage: ‘If there be anything in the
affairs of mortals which it is the interest of men not only to attack,
but which ought by every possible means to be avoided, condemned, and
abolished, it is of all things war, than which nothing is more impious,
more calamitous, more widely pernicious, more inveterate, more base,
or in sum more unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.’ In a
letter to Francis I. on the same subject, he noticed as an astonishing
fact, that out of such a multitude of abbots, bishops, archbishops, and
cardinals as existed in the world, not one of them should step forward
to do what he could, even at the risk of his life, to put an end to so
deplorable a practice.
The failure of this view of the custom of war, which is in its essence
more opposed to Christianity than the custom of selling men for slaves
or sacrificing them to idols, to take any root in men’s minds, is a
misfortune on which the whole history of Europe since Erasmus forms
a sufficient commentary. That failure is partly due to the unlucky
accident which led Grotius in this matter to throw all his weight into
the opposite scale. For this famous jurist, entering at much length
into the question of the compatibility of war with the profession of
Christianity (thereby proving the importance which in his day still
attached to it), came to conclusions in favour of the received opinion,
which are curiously characteristic both of the writer and his time.
His general argument was, that if a sovereign was justified in putting
his own subjects to death for crimes, much more was he justified in
using the sword against people who were not his subjects, but strangers
to him. And this absurd argument was enforced by considerations as
feeble as the following: that laws of war were laid down in the Book
of Deuteronomy; that John the Baptist did not bid the soldiers, who
consulted him, to forsake their calling, but to abstain from extortion
and be content with their wages; that Cornelius the centurion, whom St.
Peter baptized, neither gave up his military life, nor was exhorted by
the apostle to do so; that the Emperor Constantine had many Christians
in his armies, and the name of Christ inscribed upon his banners; and
that the military oath after his time was taken in the name of the
Three Persons of the Trinity.
One single reflection will suffice to display the utter shallowness of
this reasoning, which was after all only borrowed from St. Augustine.
For if Biblical texts are a justification of war, they are clearly a
justification of slavery; whilst, on the other hand, the general spirit
of the Christian religion, to say nothing of several positive passages,
is at least equally opposed to one custom as to the other. If then the
abolition of slavery is one of the services for which Christianity as
an influence in history claims a large share of the credit, its failure
to abolish the other custom must in fairness be set against it; for
it were easier to defend slave-holding out of the language of the New
Testament than to defend military service, far more being actually said
there to inculcate the duty of peace than to inculcate the principles
of social equality: and the same may be said of the writings of the
Fathers.
The different attitude of the Church towards these two customs in
modern times, her vehement condemnation of the one, and her tolerance
or encouragement of the other, appears all the more surprising when
we remember that in the early centuries of our era her attitude was
exactly the reverse, and that, whilst slavery was permitted, the
unlawfulness of war was denounced with no uncertain or wavering voice.
When Tertullian wrote his treatise ‘De Corona’ (201) concerning the
right of Christian soldiers to wear laurel crowns, he used words on
this subject which, even if at variance with some of his statements
made in his ‘Apology’ thirty years earlier, may be taken to express his
maturer judgment. ‘Shall the son of peace’ (that is, a Christian),
he asks, ‘act in battle when it will not befit him even to go to
law? Shall he administer bonds and imprisonments and tortures and
punishments who may not avenge even his own injuries?... The very
transference of his enrolment from the army of light to that of
darkness is sin.’ And again: ‘What if the soldiers did go to John
and receive the rule of their service, and what if the Centurion did
believe; the Lord by his disarming of Peter disarmed every soldier
from that time forward.’ Tertullian made an exception in favour of
soldiers whose conversion was subsequent to their enrolment (as was
implied in discussing their duty with regard to the laurel-wreath),
though insisting even in their case that they ought either to leave the
service, as many did, or to refuse participation in its acts, which
were inconsistent with their Christian profession. So that at that time
Christian opinion was clearly not only averse to a military life being
entered upon after baptism (of which there are no instances on record),
but in favour of its being forsaken, if the enrolment preceded the
baptism. The Christians who served in the armies of Rome were not men
who were converts or Christians at the time of enrolling, but men who
remained with the colours after their conversion. If it is certain that
some Christians _remained_ in the army, it appears equally certain that
no Christian at that time thought of _entering_ it.
This seems the best solution of the much-debated question, to what
extent Christians served at all in the early centuries. Irenæus
speaks of the Christians in the second century as not knowing how
to fight, and Justin Martyr, his contemporary, considered Isaiah’s
prophecy about the swords being turned into ploughshares as in part
fulfilled, because his co-religionists, who in times past had killed
one another, did not then know how to fight even with their enemies.
The charge made by Celsus against the Christians, that they refused
to bear arms even in case of necessity, was admitted by Origen, but
justified on the ground of the unlawfulness of war. ‘We indeed,’ he
says, ‘fight in a special way on the king’s behalf, but we do not go
on campaigns with him, even should he press us to do so; we do battle
on his behalf as a peculiar army of piety, prevailing by our prayers
to God for him.’ And again: ‘We no longer take up the sword against
people, nor learn to make war any more, having become through Jesus,
who is our general, sons of peace.’ Nothing could be clearer nor more
conclusive than this language; and the same attitude towards war was
expressed or implied by the following Fathers in chronological order:
Justin Martyr, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian,
Lactantius, Archelaus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Cyril. Eusebius
says that many Christians in the third century laid aside the military
life rather than abjure their religion. Of 10,050 pagan inscriptions
that have been collected, 545 were found to belong to pagan soldiers,
while of 4,734 Christian inscriptions of the same period, only 27 were
those of soldiers; from which it seems rather absurd to infer, as a
French writer has inferred, not that there was a great disproportion
of Christian to pagan soldiers in the imperial armies, but that most
Christian soldiers being soldiers of Christ did not like to have it
recorded on their epitaphs that they had been in the service of any
_man_.[252]
On the other hand, there were certainly always some Christians who
remained in the ranks after their conversion, in spite of the military
oath in the names of the pagan deities and the quasi-worship of the
standards which constituted some part of the early Christian antipathy
to war. This is implied in the remarks of Tertullian, and stands in
no need of the support of such legends as the Thundering Legion of
Christians, whose prayers obtained rain, or of the Theban legion of
6,000 Christians martyred under Maximian. It was left as a matter of
individual conscience. In the story of the martyr Maximilian, when Dion
the proconsul reminded him that there were Christian soldiers among the
life-guards of the Emperors, the former replied, ‘They know what is
best for them to do; but I am a Christian and cannot fight.’ Marcellus,
the converted centurion, threw down his belt at the head of his legion,
and suffered death rather than continue in the service; and the annals
of the early Church abound in similar martyrdoms. Nor can there be
much doubt but that a love of peace and dislike of bloodshed were the
principal causes of this early Christian attitude towards the military
profession, and that the idolatry and other pagan rites connected with
it only acted as minor and secondary deterrents. Thus, in the Greek
Church St. Basil would have excluded from communion for three years
any one who had shed an enemy’s blood; and a similar feeling explains
Theodosius’ refusal to partake of the Eucharist after his great victory
over Eugenius. The canons of the Church excluded from ordination all
who had served in an army after baptism; and in the fifth century
Innocent I. blamed the Spanish churches for their laxity in admitting
such persons into holy orders.[253]
The anti-military tendency of opinion in the early period of
Christianity appears therefore indisputable, and Tertullian would
probably have smiled at the prophet who should have predicted that
Christians would have ceased to keep slaves long before they should
have ceased to commit murder and robbery under the fiction of
hostilities. But it proves the strength of the original impetus, that
Ulphilas, the first apostle to the Goths, should purposely, in his
translation of the Scriptures, have omitted the Books of Kings, as too
stimulative of a love of war.
How utterly in this matter Christianity came to forsake its earlier
ideal is known to all. This resulted partly from the frequent use of
the sword for the purpose of conversion, and partly from the rise of
the Mahometan power, which made wars with the infidel appear in the
light of acts of faith, and changed the whole of Christendom into a
kind of vast standing military order. But it resulted still more from
that compromise effected in the fourth century between paganism and
the new religion, in which the former retained more than it lost, and
the latter gave less than it received. Considering that the Druid
priests of ancient Gaul or Britain, like those of pagan Rome, were
exempt from military service,[254] and often, according to Strabo, had
such influence as to part combatants on the point of an engagement,
nothing is more remarkable than the extent to which the Christian
clergy, bishops, and abbots came to lead armies and fight in battle,
in spite of canons and councils of the Church, at a time when that
Church’s power was greater, and its influence wider, than it has ever
been since. Historians have scarcely given due prominence to this
fact, which covers a period of at least a thousand years; for Gregory
of Tours mentions two bishops of the sixth century who had killed
many enemies with their own hands, whilst Erasmus, in the sixteenth,
complains of bishops taking more pride in leading three or four hundred
dragoons, with swords and guns, than in a following of deacons and
divinity students, and asks, with just sarcasm, why the trumpet and
fife should sound sweeter in their ears than the singing of psalms or
the words of the Bible.
In the fourteenth century, when war and chivalry were at their
height, occurred a remarkable protest against this state of things
from Wycliffe, who, in this, as in other respects, anticipated the
Reformation: ‘Friars now say that bishops can fight best of all men,
and that it falleth most properly to them, since they are lords of
all this world. They say, Christ bade his disciples sell their coats,
and buy them swords; but whereto, if not to fight? Thus friars make
a great array, and stir up men to fight. But Christ taught not his
apostles to fight with a sword of iron, but with the sword of God’s
word, which standeth in meekness of heart and in the prudence of man’s
tongue.... If manslaying in others be odious to God, much more in
priests who should be vicars of Christ.’ And Wycliffe proceeds not only
to protest against this, but to advocate the general cause of peace on
earth, on grounds which he is aware that men of the world will scorn
and reject as fatal to the existence of kingdoms.[255]
It was no occasional, but an inveterate practice, and, apparently,
common in the world, long before the system of feudalism gave it
some justification by the connection of military service with the
enjoyment of lands. Yet it has now so completely disappeared that--as
a proof of the possible change of thought which may ultimately render
a Christian soldier as great an anomaly as a fighting bishop--it is
worth recalling from history some instances of so curious a custom.
‘The bishops themselves--not all, but many’--says a writer of King
Stephen’s reign, ‘bound in iron, and completely furnished with arms,
were accustomed to mount war-horses with the perverters of their
country, to share in their spoil; to bind and torture the knights whom
they took in the chance of war, or whom they met full of money.’[256]
It was at the battle of Bouvines (1214) that the famous Bishop of
Beauvais fought with a club instead of a sword, out of respect for
the rule of the canon which forbade an ecclesiastic to shed blood.
Matthew Paris tells the story how Richard I. took the said bishop
prisoner, and when the Pope begged for his release as being his own
son and a son of the Church, sent to Innocent III. the episcopal coat
of mail, with the inquiry whether he recognised it as that of his son
or of a son of the Church; to which the Pope had the wit to reply that
he could not recognise it as belonging to either.[257] The story also
bears repeating of the impatient knight who, sharing the command of a
division at the battle of Falkirk with the Bishop of Durham, cried out
to his slower colleague, before closing with the Scots, ‘It is not for
you to teach us war; to your Mass, bishop!’ and therewith rushed with
his followers into the fray (1298).[258]
It is, however, needless to multiply instances, which, if Du Cange
may be credited, became more common during the devastation of France
by the Danes in the ninth century, when all the military aid that was
available became a matter of national existence. That event rendered
Charlemagne’s capitulary a dead letter, by which that monarch had
forbidden any ecclesiastic to march against an enemy, save two or
three bishops to bless the army or reconcile the combatants, and a few
priests to give absolution and celebrate the Mass.[259] It appears that
this law was made in response to an exhortation by Pope Adrian II.,
similar to one addressed in the previous century by Pope Zachary to
Charlemagne’s ancestor, King Pepin. But though military service and the
tenure of ecclesiastical benefices became more common from the time of
the Danish irruptions, instances are recorded of abbots and archbishops
who chose rather to surrender their temporalities than to take part in
active service; and for many centuries the whole question seems to have
rested on a most uncertain footing, law and custom demanding as a duty
that which public and ecclesiastical opinion condoned, but which the
Church herself condemned.
It is a signal mark of the degree to which religion became enveloped
in the military spirit of those miserable days of chivalry, that
ecclesiastical preferment was sometimes the reward of bravery on the
field, as in the case of that chaplain to the Earl of Douglas who, for
his courage displayed at the battle of Otterbourne, was, Froissart
tells us, promoted the same year to a canonry and archdeaconry at
Aberdeen.
Vasari, in his ‘Life of Michael Angelo,’ has a good story which is
not only highly typical of this martial Christianity, but may be also
taken to mark the furthest point of divergence reached by the Church in
this respect from the standpoint of her earlier teaching. Pope Julius
II. went one day to see a statue of himself which Michael Angelo was
executing. The right hand of the statue was raised in a dignified
attitude, and the artist consulted the Pope as to whether he should
place a book in the left. ‘Put a sword into it,’ quoth Julius, ‘for of
letters I know but little.’ This was the Pope of whom Bayle says that
never man had a more warlike soul, and of whom, with some doubt, he
repeats the anecdote of his having thrown into the Tiber the keys of
St. Peter, with the declaration that he would thenceforth use the sword
of St. Paul. However this may be, he went in person to hasten the siege
of Mirandola, in opposition to the protests of the cardinals and to
the scandal of Christendom (1510). There it was that to encourage the
soldiers he promised them, that if they exerted themselves valiantly
he would make no terms with the town, but would suffer them to sack
it;[260] and though this did not occur, and the town ultimately
surrendered on terms, the head of the Christian Church had himself
conveyed into it by the breach.
The scandal of this proceeding contributed its share to the discontent
which produced the Reformation; and that movement continued still
further the disfavour with which many already viewed the connection of
the clergy with actual warfare. It has, however, happened occasionally
since that epoch that priests of martial tastes have been enabled
to gratify them, the custom having become more and more rare as
public opinion grew stronger against it. The last recorded instance
of a fighting divine was, it would seem, the Bishop of Derry, who,
having been raised to that see by William III. in gratitude for the
distinguished bravery with which, though a clergyman, he had conducted
the defence of Londonderry against the forces of James II., and for
which the University of Oxford rewarded him with the title of Doctor
of Divinity, was shot dead at the battle of the Boyne. He had, says
Macaulay, ‘during the siege in which he had so highly distinguished
himself, contracted a passion for war,’ but his zeal to gratify it on
that second occasion cost him the favour of the king. It is, however,
somewhat remarkable that history should have called no special
attention to the last instance of a bishop who fought and died upon a
battle-field, nor have sufficiently emphasised the great revolution of
thought which first changed a common occurrence into something unusual,
and finally into a memory that seems ridiculous. No historical fact
affords a greater justification than this for the hope that, absurd as
is the idea of a fighting bishop to our own age, that of a fighting
Christian may be to our posterity.
As bishops were in the middle ages warriors, so they were also the
common bearers of declarations of war. The Bishop of Lincoln bore, for
instance, the challenge of Edward III. and his allies to Charles V.
at Paris; and greatly offended was the English king and his council
when Charles returned the challenge by a common valet--they declared
it indecent for a war between two such great lords to be declared by a
mere servant, and not by a prelate or a knight of valour.
The declaration of war in those times appears to have meant simply a
challenge or defiance like that then and afterwards customary in a
duel. It appears to have originated out of habits that governed the
relations between the feudal barons. We learn from Froissart that when
Edward was made Vicar of the German Empire an old statute was renewed
which had before been made at the emperor’s court, to the effect that
no one, intending to injure his neighbour, might do so without sending
him a defiance three days beforehand. The following extract from the
challenge of war sent by the Duke of Orleans, the brother of the King
of France, to Henry IV. of England, testifies to the close resemblance
between a declaration of war and a challenge to a deed of arms, and to
the levity which often gave rise to either: ‘I, Louis, write and make
known to you, that with the aid of God and the blessed Trinity, in the
desire which I have to gain renown, and which you likewise should feel,
considering idleness as the bane of lords of high birth who do not
employ themselves in arms, and thinking I can no way better seek renown
than by proposing to you to meet me at an appointed place, each of us
accompanied with 100 knights and esquires, of name and arms without
reproach, there to combat till one of the parties shall surrender; and
he to whom God shall grant the victory shall do with his prisoners as
he pleases. We will not employ any incantations that are forbidden by
the Church, but make use of the bodily strength given us by God, with
armour as may be most agreeable to everyone for the security of his
person, and with the usual arms, that is lance, battle-axe, sword, and
dagger ... without aiding himself by any bodkins, hooks, bearded darts,
poisoned needles or razors, as may be done by persons unless they are
positively ordered to the contrary....’[261] Henry IV. answered the
challenge with some contempt, but expressed his readiness to meet
the duke in single combat, whenever he should visit his possessions
in France, in order to prevent any greater effusion of Christian
blood, since a good shepherd, he said, should expose his own life for
his flock. It even seemed at one time as if wars might have resolved
themselves into this more rational mode of settlement. The Emperor
Henry IV. challenged the Duke of Swabia to single combat. Philip
Augustus of France is said to have proposed to Richard I. to settle
their differences by a combat of five on each side; and when Edward
III. challenged the realm of France, he offered to settle the question
by a duel or a combat of 100 men on each side, with which the French
king would, it appears, have complied, had Edward consented to stake
the kingdom of England against that of France.
In the custom of naming the implements of war after the most revered
names of the Christian hagiology may be observed another trace of
the close alliance that resulted between the military and spiritual
sides of human life, somewhat like that which prevailed in the sort of
worship paid to their lances, pikes, and battle-axes by the ancient
Scandinavians.[262] Thus the two first forts which the Spaniards built
in the Ladrone Islands they called respectively after St. Francis
Xavier and the Virgin Mary. Twelve ships in the Armada were called
after the Twelve Apostles, and so were twelve of his cannons by Henry
VIII., one of which, St. John by name, was captured by the French in
1513.[263] It is probable that mere irreverence had less to do with
this custom than the hope thereby of obtaining favour in war, such as
may also be traced in the ceremony of consecrating military banners,
which has descended to our own times.[264]
To the same order of superstition belongs the old custom of falling
down and kissing the earth before starting on a charge or assault
of battle. The practice is alluded to several times in Montluc’s
Commentaries, but so little was it understood by a modern French editor
that in one place he suggests the reading _baissèrent la tête_ (they
lowered their heads) for _baisèrent la terre_ (they kissed the earth).
But the latter reading is confirmed by passages elsewhere; as, for
instance, in the ‘Memoirs of Fleurange,’ where it is stated that Gaston
de Foix and his soldiers kissed the earth, according to custom, before
proceeding to march against the enemy;[265] and, again, in the ‘Life
of Bayard,’ by his secretary, who records it among the virtues of that
knight that he would rise from his bed every night to prostrate himself
at full length on the floor and kiss the earth.[266] This kissing of
the earth was an abbreviated form of taking a particle of it in the
mouth, as both Elmham and Livius mention to have been done by the
English at Agincourt before attacking the French; and this again was an
abbreviated form of receiving the sacrament, for Villani says of the
Flemish at Cambray (1302) that they made a priest go all over the field
with the sacred elements, and that, instead of communicating, each man
took a little earth and put it into his mouth.[267] This seems a more
likely explanation than that the custom was intended as a reminder to
the soldier of his mortality, as if in a trade like his there could be
any lack of testimony of that sort.
It is curious to observe how war in every stage of civilisation has
been the central interest of public religious supplication; and how,
from the pagans of old to modern savages, the pettiest quarrels and
conflicts have been deemed a matter of interest to the immortals. The
Sandwich islanders and Tahitians sought the aid of their gods in war
by human sacrifices. The Fijians before war were wont to present their
gods with costly offerings and temples, and offer with their prayers
the best they could of land crabs or whales’ teeth; being so convinced
that they thereby ensured to themselves the victory, that once, when
a missionary called the attention of a war party to the scantiness of
their numbers, they only replied, with disdainful confidence, ‘Our
allies are the gods.’ The prayer which the Roman pontifex addressed
to Jupiter on behalf of the Republic at the opening of the war with
Antiochus, king of Syria, is extremely curious: ‘If the war which the
people has ordered to be waged with King Antiochus shall be finished
after the wish of the Roman senate and people, then to thee, O Jupiter,
will the Roman people exhibit the great games for ten successive days,
and offerings shall be presented at all the shrines of such value as
the senate shall decree.’[268] This rude state of theology, wherein
a victory from the gods may be obtained for a fair consideration in
exchange, tends to keep alive, if it did not originate, that sense of
dependence on invisible powers which constitutes the most rudimentary
form of religion; for it is a remarkable fact that the faintest
notions of supernatural agencies are found precisely among tribes
whose military organisation or love for war is the lowest and least
developed. In proportion as the war-spirit is cultivated does the
worship of war-presiding deities prevail; and since these are formed
from the memories of warriors who have died or been slain, their
attributes and wishes remain those of the former earthly potentate, who
though no longer visible, may still be gratified by presents of fruit,
or by slaughtered oxen or slaves.
The Khonds of Orissa, in India, afford an instance of this close and
pernicious association between religious and military ideas, which may
be traced through the history of many far more advanced communities.
For though they regard the joy of the peace dance as the very highest
attainable upon earth, they attribute, not to their own will, but
to that of their war god, Loha Pennu, the source of all their wars.
The devastation of a fever or tiger is accepted as a hint from that
divinity that his service has been too long neglected, and they acquit
themselves of all blame for a war begun for no better reason, by the
following philosophy of its origin: ‘Loha Pennu said to himself, Let
there be war, and he forthwith entered into all weapons, so that from
instruments of peace they became weapons of war; he gave edge to the
axe and point to the arrow; he entered into all kinds of food and
drink, so that men in eating and drinking were filled with rage, and
women became instruments of discord instead of soothers of anger.’ And
they address this prayer to Loha Pennu for aid against their enemies:
‘Let our axes crush cloth and bones as the jaws of the hyæna crush
its prey. Make the wounds we give to gape.... When the wounds of our
enemies heal, let lameness remain. Let their stones and arrows fall
on us as the flowers of the mowa-tree fall in the wind.... Make their
weapons brittle as the long pods of the karta-tree.’
In their belief that wars were of external causation to themselves,
and in their endeavour to win by prayer a favourable issue to their
appeal to arms, it could scarcely be maintained that the nations
of Christendom have at all times shown any marked superiority over
the modern Khonds. But in spite of this, and of the fierce military
character that Christianity ultimately assumed, the Church always kept
alive some of her earlier traditions about peace, and even in the
darkest ages set some barriers to the common fury of the soldier. When
the Roman Empire was overthrown, her influence in this direction was
in marked contrast with what it has been ever since. Even Alaric when
he sacked Rome (410) was so far affected by Christianity as to spare
the churches and the Christians who fled to them. Leo the Great, Bishop
of Rome, inspired even Attila with respect for his priestly authority,
and averted his career of conquest from Rome; and the same bishop,
three years later (455), pleaded with the victorious Genseric that
his Vandals should spare the unresisting multitude and the buildings
of Rome, nor allow torture to be inflicted on their prisoners. At the
instance of Gregory II., Luitprand, the Lombard king, withdrew his
troops from the same city, resigned his conquests, and offered his
sword and dagger on the tomb of St. Peter (730).
Yet more praiseworthy and perhaps more effective were the efforts of
the Church from the tenth century onwards to check that system of
private war which was then the bane of Europe, as the system of public
and international wars has been since. In the south of France several
bishops met and agreed to exclude from the privileges of a Christian
in life and after death all who violated their ordinances directed
against that custom (990). Only four years later the Council of Limoges
exhorted men to swear by the bodies of the saints that they would cease
to violate the public peace. Lent appears to have been to some extent
a season of abstinence from fighting as from other pleasures, for one
of the charges against Louis le Débonnaire was that he summoned an
expedition for that time of the year.
In 1032 a Bishop of Aquitaine declared himself the recipient of a
message from heaven, ordering men to cease from fighting; and, not
only did a peace, called the Truce of God, result for seven years,
but it was resolved that such peace should always prevail during
the great festivals of the Church, and from every Thursday evening
to Monday morning. And the regulation for one kingdom was speedily
extended over Christendom, confirmed by several Popes, and enforced by
excommunication.[269] If such efforts were not altogether successful,
and the wars of the barons continued till the royal power in every
country was strong enough to suppress them, it must none the less be
recognised that the Church fought, if she fought in vain, against the
barbarism of a military society, and with an ardour that is in striking
contrast with her apathy in more recent history.
It must also be granted that the idea of what the Papacy might do
for the peace of the world, as the supreme arbiter of disputes and
mediator between contending Powers, gained possession of men’s minds,
and entered into the definite policy of the Church about the twelfth
century, in a manner that might suggest reflection for the nineteenth.
The name of Gerohus de Reigersperg is connected with a plan for the
pacification of the world, by which the Pope was to forbid war to
all Christian princes, to settle all disputes between them, and to
enforce his decisions by the greatest powers that have ever yet been
devised for human authority--namely, by excommunication and deposition.
And the Popes attempted something of this sort. When, for instance,
Innocent III. bade the King of France to make peace with Richard I.,
and was told that the dispute concerned a matter of feudal relationship
with which the Pope had no right of interference, he replied that he
interfered by right of his power to censure what he thought sin, and
quite irrespective of feudal rights. He also refused to consider the
destruction of places and the slaughter of Christians as a matter of no
concern to him; and Honorius III. forbade an attack upon Denmark, on
the ground that that kingdom lay under the special protection of the
Papacy.[270]
The clergy, moreover, were even in the most warlike times of history
the chief agents in negotiations for peace, and in the attempt to
set limits to military reprisals. When, for instance, the French and
English were about to engage at Poitiers, the Cardinal of Perigord
spent the whole of the Sunday that preceded the day of battle in
laudable but ineffectual attempts to bring the two sides to an
agreement without a battle. And when the Duke of Anjou was about to
put 600 of the defenders of Montpellier to death by the sword, by the
halter, and by fire, it was the Cardinal of Albany and a Dominican monk
who saved him from the infamy of such a deed by reminding him of the
duty of Christian forgiveness.
In these respects it must be plain to every one that the attitude
and power of the Church has entirely changed. She has stood apart
more and more as time has gone on from her great opportunities as a
promoter of peace. Her influence, it is notorious, no longer counts for
anything, where it was once so powerful, in the field of negotiation
and reconcilement. She lifts no voice to denounce the evils of war, nor
to plead for greater restraint in the exercise of reprisals and the
abuse of victory. She lends no aid to teach the duty of forbearance
and friendship between nations, to diminish their idle jealousies, nor
to explain the real identity of their interests. It may even be said
without risk of contradiction, that whatever attempt has been made to
further the cause of peace upon earth or to diminish the horror of the
customs of war, has come, not from the Church, but from the school of
thought to which she has been most opposed, and which she has studied
most persistently to revile.
In respect, too, of the justice of the cause of war, the Church within
recent centuries has entirely vacated her position. It is noticeable
that in the 37th article of the English Church, which is to the effect
that a Christian at the command of the magistrate may wear weapons
and serve in the wars, the word _justa_, which in the Latin form
preceded the word _bella_ or wars, has been omitted.[271] The leaders
of the Reformation decided on the whole in favour of the lawfulness of
military service for a Christian, but with the distinct reservation
that the cause of war should be just. Bullinger, who was Zwingli’s
successor in the Reformed Church at Zurich, decided that though a
Christian might take up arms at the command of the magistrate, it
would be his duty to disobey the magistrate if he purposed to make
war on the guiltless; and that only the death of those soldiers on
the battle-field was glorious who fought for their religion or their
country. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, complained of
the utter disregard of a just and patriotic motive for war in the code
of military ethics then prevalent. Speaking of the fighters of his day,
he thus characterised their position in the State: ‘The rapacity of
wolves, the violence of lions, the fierceness of tigers is nothing in
comparison of their furious and cruel tyranny; and yet do many of them
this not for the safeguard of their country (for so it would be the
more tolerable), but to satisfy their butcher-like affects, to boast
another day of how many men they have been the death, and to bring
home the more preys that they may live the fatter ever after for these
spoils and stolen goods.’[272] From military service he maintained
that all considerations of justice and humanity had been entirely
banished, and their stead been taken by robbery and theft, ‘the
insatiable spoiling of other men’s goods, and a whole sea of barbarous
and beast-like manners.’ In this way the necessity of a just cause as
a reason for taking part in actual warfare was reasserted at the time
of the Reformation, and has only since then been allowed to drop out
of sight altogether; so that now public opinion has no guide in the
matter, and even less than it had in ancient Rome, the attitude of the
Church towards the State on this point being rather that of Anaxarchus
the philosopher to Alexander the Great, when, to console that conqueror
for his murder of Clitus, he said to him: ‘Know you not that Jupiter is
represented with Law and Justice at his side, to show that whatever is
done by sovereign power is right?’
Considering, therefore, that no human institution yet devised or
actually in existence has had or has a moral influence or facilities
for exercising it at all equal to that enjoyed by the Church, it is all
the more to be regretted that she has never taken any real interest
in the abolition of a custom which is at the root of half the crime
and misery with which she has to contend. Whatever hopes might at
one time have been reasonably entertained of the Reformed Church as
an anti-military agency, the cause of peace soon sank into a sort
of heresy, or what was worse, an unfashionable tenet, associated,
condemned, and contemned with other articles of religious dissent.
‘Those who condemn the profession or art of soldiery,’ said Sir James
Turner, ‘smell rank of anabaptism and quakery.’[273]
It would be difficult to find in the whole range of history any such
example of wasted moral force. As Erasmus had cause to deplore it in
the sixteenth century, so had Voltaire in the eighteenth. The latter
complained that he did not remember a single page against war in the
whole of Bourdaloue’s sermons, and he even suggested that the real
explanation might be a literal want of courage on the part of the
clergy. The passage is worth quoting from the original, both for its
characteristic energy of expression and for its clear insight into
the real character of the custom of war:--‘Pour les autres moralistes
à gages que l’on nomme prédicateurs, ils n’ont jamais seulement osé
prêcher contre la guerre.... Ils se gardent bien de décrier la guerre,
qui réunit tout ce que la perfidie a de plus lâche dans les manifestes,
tout ce que l’infâme friponnerie a de plus bas dans les fournitures des
armées, tout ce que le brigandage a d’affreux dans le pillage, le viol,
le larcin, l’homicide, la dévastation, la destruction. Au contraire,
ces bons prêtres bénissent en cérémonie les étendards de meurtre; et
leurs confrères chantent pour de l’argent des chansons juives, quand
la terre a été inondée de sang.’[274]
If Voltaire’s reproach is unjust, it can of course be easily refuted.
The challenge is a fair one. Let him be convicted of overstating his
charge, by the mention of any ecclesiastic of mark from either the
Catholic or the Protestant school within the last two centuries whose
name is associated with the advocacy of the mitigation or the abolition
of contests of force; or any war in the same period which the clergy
of either denomination have as a body resisted either on the ground
of the injustice of its origin or of the ruthless cruelty with which
it has been waged. Whatever has yet been attempted in this direction,
or whatever anti-military stimulus has been given to civilisation,
has come distinctly from men of the world or men of letters, not from
men of distinction in the Church: not from Fénelon or Paley, but from
William Penn, the Abbé St.-Pierre (whose connection with the Church
was only nominal), from Vattel, Voltaire, and Kant. In other words,
the Church has lost her old position of spiritual ascendency over
the consciences of mankind, and has surrendered to other guides and
teachers the influence she once exercised over the world.
This is especially the case with our own Church; for before the most
gigantic evil of our time, her pulpit stands mute, and colder than
mute. Whatever sanction or support a body like the Peace Society has
met with from the Church or churches of England during its seventy
years’ struggle on behalf of humanity has been, not the general rule,
but the rare exception; and recent events would even seem to show that
the voice of the pulpit, so far from ever becoming a pacific agency, is
destined to become in the future the great tocsin of war, the loudest
clamourer for counsels of aggression.
This attitude on the part of the Church having become more and more
marked and conspicuous, as wars in recent centuries have become more
frequent and more fierce, it was not unnatural that some attempt should
at last have been made to give some sort of justification of a fact
which has undoubtedly become an increasing source of perplexity and
distress to all sincere and reflective Christians. In default of a
better, let us take the justification offered by Canon Mozley in his
sermon on ‘War,’ preached before the University of Oxford on March 12,
1871, of which the following summary conveys a faithful, though of
necessity an abbreviated, reflection. The main points dwelt upon in
that explanation or apology are: That Christianity, by its original
recognition of the division of the world into nations, with all their
inherent rights, thereby recognised the right of war, which was plainly
one of them; that the Church, never having been constituted a judge
of national questions or motives, can only stand neutral between
opposing sides, contemplating war as it were forensically, as a mode
of international settlement that is amply justified by the want of
any other; that a natural justice is inherent not only in wars of
self-defence, but in wars for rectifying the political distribution of
the world’s races or nationalities, and in wars that aim at progress
and improvement; that the spirit of self-sacrifice inseparable from war
confers upon it a moral character that is in special harmony with the
Christian type; that as war is simply the working out of a problem by
force, there is no more hatred between the individual combatants than
there is in the working out of an argument by reasoning, ‘the enmity
is in the two wholes--the abstractions--the individuals are at peace;’
that the impossibility of a substitution of a universal empire for
independent nations, or of a court of arbitration, bars all hope of the
attainment of an era of peace through the natural progress of society;
that the absence of any head to the nations of the world constitutes
a defect or want of plan in its system, which as it has been given to
it by nature cannot be remedied by other means; that it is no part
of the mission of Christianity to reconstruct that system, or rather
want of system, of the world, from which war flows, nor to provide
another world for us to live in; but that, nevertheless, Christianity
only sanctions it through the medium of natural society, and on the
hypothesis of a world at discord with itself.
One may well wonder that such a tissue of irrelevant arguments could
have been addressed by any man in a spirit of seriousness to an
assembly of his fellows. Imagine such utterances being the last word of
Christianity! Surely a son of the Church were more recognisable under
the fighting Bishop of Beauvais’ coat of mail than under the disguise
of such language as this. Why should it be assumed, one might ask,
that the existence of distinct nations, each enjoying the power, and
therefore the right to make war upon its neighbours, is incompatible
with the existence of an international morality which should render the
exercise of the war-right impossible, or very difficult; or that the
Church, had she tried, could have contributed nothing to so desirable
a result? It is begging the question altogether to contend that a
state of things is impossible which has never been attempted, when
the very point at issue is whether, had it been attempted, it might
not by this time have come to be realised. The right of the mediæval
barons and their vassals to wage private war together belonged once
as much to the system, or want of system, of the world as the right
of nations to attack one another in our own or an earlier period of
history; yet so far was the Church, even in those days, from shrinking
from contact with so barbarous a custom as something beyond her power
or her mission, that she was herself the main social instrument that
brought it to an end. The great efforts made by the Church to abolish
the custom of private war have already been mentioned: a point which
Canon Mozley, perhaps, did wisely to ignore. Yet there is, surely, no
sufficient reason why the peace of the world should be an object of
less interest to the Church in these days than it was in those; or
why her influence should be less as one chief element in the natural
progress of society than it was when she fought to release human
society from the depraving custom of the right of private war. It is
impossible to contend that, had the Church inculcated the duties of
the individual to other nations as well as to his own, in the way to
which human reason would naturally respond, such a course would have
had no effect in solving the problem of enabling separate nationalities
to coexist in a state of peace as well as of independence. It is at
least the reverse of self-evident that the promotion of feelings of
international fraternity, the discouragement of habits of international
jealousy, the exercise of acts of international friendship, the
teaching of the real identity of international interests, in all of
which the pulpit might have lent, or might yet lend, an invaluable
aid, would have had, or would still have any detrimental effect on
the political system of distinct nationalities, or on the motives and
actions of a rational patriotism. It is difficult to believe that
the denunciations of a Church whose religious teaching had power to
restrain the military fury of an Alaric or a Genseric would have been
altogether powerless over the conduct of those German hordes whose
military excesses in France, in 1870, have left a lasting blot on
their martial triumph and the character of their discipline; or that
her efforts on behalf of peace, which more than a thousand years
ago effectually reconciled the Angles and Mercians, the Franks and
Lombards, would be wasted in helping to remove any standing causes of
quarrel that may still exist between France and Germany, England and
Russia, Italy and Austria.
There are, indeed, hopeful signs, in spite of Canon Mozley’s apology
of despair, that the priesthood of Christendom may yet reawake to a
sense of its power and opportunities for removing from the world an
evil custom which lies at the root of almost every other, and is the
main cause and sustenance of crime and pauperism and disease. It is
possible that we have already passed the worst period of indifference
in this respect, or that it may some day prove only to have been
connected with the animosities of rival sects, ever ready to avail
themselves of the chances that war between different nations might
severally bring to their several petty interests. With the subsidence
of such animosities, it were reasonable to expect the Church to
reassert the more genuine principle of her action and attitude--that no
evil incident to human society is to be regarded as irremediable till
every resource has been exhausted to cope with it, and every outlet of
escape from it been proved to be a failure. Then, but not till then, is
it becoming in Christian priests to utter the language of helplessness;
then, but not till then, should the Church fold her hands in despair.