Paul F. Crawford debunks four myths about the Crusades:
Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and even a cursory chronological review makes that clear. In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.
By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula. Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.
What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors.
See also: Thomas F. Madden, “Inventing the Crusades”
(Via: Insight Scoop)
April 4th, 2011 | 10:15 am
I’ve read this and thought it was fantastic. Talk about debunk.
April 4th, 2011 | 11:52 am
On the other hand, for a complete story, you might want to consider something more than a one-sided presentation. We take Mr Crawford’s word that these four myths are in fact mainstream thought. He could provide references.
As for the “myth” that the Crusades created Muslim antagonism to Christianity, I imagine that Muslims who lost loved ones to Christian soldiers, that their experience of a 3-4 century stasis was superceded by a certain hatred for the invaders.
If crusaders had battled the first armies of Islam–well, that might have been another story. I suppose if Native Americans decided in a few centuries to make war on white Americans and reclaim tribal lands, they would be justified according to Mr Crawford, even if they were helped, say, by Brazilians or the Chinese.
April 4th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Todd, Do the references in his end-notes not count? Also, I believe he is talking about the mainstream popular imagination (e.g. the 2005 film and Clinton’s speech, which are rather typical of current popular notions about the Crusades), not necessarily the mainstream of medieval historians. The mythical view of the Crusades Crawford addresses also seems to be the mainstream view in the Middle East (again, that would be the popular mainstream) as evidenced by jihadists’ tendency to call the West “Crusaders.” I believe Crawford is offering a bit of a corrective to the Western popular conception.
April 4th, 2011 | 12:33 pm
It is not clear why it is necessary to go to an effort either to condemn or condone the Crusades. Our ancestors were humans. Humans fight wars.
April 4th, 2011 | 12:48 pm
“On the other hand, for a complete story, you might want to consider something more than a one-sided presentation. We take Mr Crawford’s word that these four myths are in fact mainstream thought. He could provide references.”
The other side of the presentation is all around us in popular culture and in ignorant statements like those by Clinton.
You want scholarly references that refute common wisdom on the issue? Take a look at books by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Thomas Madden, John France, Thomas Asbridge, and Jonathan Phillips.
“As for the “myth” that the Crusades created Muslim antagonism to Christianity, I imagine that Muslims who lost loved ones to Christian soldiers, that their experience of a 3-4 century stasis was superceded by a certain hatred for the invaders.”
If their loved ones were killed fighting against the First Crusade, I guess you have a point. But how does that explain the modern jihadists?
“If crusaders had battled the first armies of Islam–well, that might have been another story. I suppose if Native Americans decided in a few centuries to make war on white Americans and reclaim tribal lands, they would be justified according to Mr Crawford, even if they were helped, say, by Brazilians or the Chinese.”
Christian armies did fight the invading Islamic armies. Most of them lost. Until the Eleventh-Century, Christendom did not have the ability to start driving the invaders back. And are you really trying to compare the Eleventh-Century to the world of modern nation states?
April 4th, 2011 | 1:32 pm
“I believe he is talking about the mainstream popular imagination”
Point taken, but I think the Crusades are way out of view of most people these days. Personally, I take less stock in what celebrities have to say about issues. Mr Clinton is a serious politician, granted. But as a font of historical advice, he may likely be a celebrity.
“But how does that explain the modern jihadists?”
The post-Great War Brits? US policy with Israel? US interventionism in Iran, Chile, Vietnam, etc.? Lonely and bored neo-cons looking to get rich after the fall of communism?
“And are you really trying to compare the Eleventh-Century to the world of modern nation states?”
I hope not. But the justification is a rather modern one isn’t it? Was the 10th century Jerusalem Muslim aware in any way of the conquest of his forebears? Was the 10th/11th century prelate or monarch aware of the Christian culture of Africa and Arabia from the time before Mohammed?
It’s like Jason said, “Humans fight wars.” Sometimes they invent justifications before they fight, like Mr Bush. Sometimes they invent them afterward. Like Crusade apologists.
I prefer a more dispassionate history, including all the ugly stories like 1204.
April 4th, 2011 | 1:54 pm
Great article. Clarifying and better grounded in history and psychology than the popular view it critiques and the secular, material theories that undergird that popular view.
In one respect, however, this new view is more chilling than the old: “The charity of St. Francis may now appeal to us more than that of the crusaders, but both sprang from the same roots.”
The replacement of the faith of St. Martin, who understood that becoming Christian meant quitting the army, with the faith of St. Louis, who believed that being Christian meant sacrifice on the battlefield, has distorted the faith ever since. Sometimes it is necessary to defend one’s home and country, but it is never necessary to defend Christianity itself by force of arms.
The linked article on First Things, “Inventing the Crusades,” illustrates the problem when Madden promotes the idea that the Crusades met the criteria of “just wars.” We don’t need and have never needed more reasons to go to war. Israel wanted a messiah, a new David or Judas Maccabeus, who would throw out the Romans and establish a kingdom, but they got Jesus instead, who launched no revolution and established no earthly kingdom. It’s a hard lesson to remember.
April 4th, 2011 | 1:57 pm
re Jason Taylor’s comments: because such historical lies and half truths are having real consequences in peoples lives and in the fates of nations even as we speak. Such a no-nothing view as yours is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
April 4th, 2011 | 2:25 pm
“I hope not. But the justification is a rather modern one isn’t it? Was the 10th century Jerusalem Muslim aware in any way of the conquest of his forebears? Was the 10th/11th century prelate or monarch aware of the Christian culture of Africa and Arabia from the time before Mohammed?”
You don’t think people were aware that Jerusalem and the Holy Land had once been Christian?
Read Jonathan Riley-Smith’s book The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading and then get back to me on this being a modern justification.
Do you also actually think people were unaware of the constant Muslim attacks from the sea and pirate bases, including an attack on Rome in 846?
Do you actually think people were unaware of the attacks on pilgrims and the ongoing attacks on the Byzantines?
“I prefer a more dispassionate history, including all the ugly stories like 1204.”
(1) But what does 1204 have to do with Christian-Muslim relations?
(2) I bet you think 1204 is a lot uglier than it actually was from the Church’s perspective.
(3) Do you know where the 1204 Crusade was actually headed?
April 4th, 2011 | 3:22 pm
“Sometimes [humans] invent justifications [for war] before they fight, like Mr Bush. Sometimes [humans] invent [justifications for war] afterward. Like Crusade apologists. I prefer a more dispassionate history, including all the ugly stories like 1204.”
“Dispassionate” indeed. 450 years of Muslim aggression and conquest pre-dating the crusades is a fact. The brutalities/atrocities that transpired prior to and during these campaigns are facts. A claim that those historians who use these facts to set straight contemporary misinterpretations of the Crusades are “inventing justifications” for such, while brandishing one’s “objectivity” card, is absurd.
April 4th, 2011 | 3:51 pm
Todd
You cite the usual “causes” for today’s jihadism. But you’re wrong. Today’s jihadism can be laid directly at the feet of Sayed Qutab of the Muslim Brotherhood, who first planted the seeds of today’s jihadis before Israel was ever a modern state, before the U.S. was involved in Chile, Vietnam, or anywhere else.
Yours is the usual blame-the-victim mentality that one finds all too often on the Left.
April 4th, 2011 | 7:50 pm
On the other hand, for a complete story, you might want to consider something more than a one-sided presentation. We take Mr Crawford’s word that these four myths are in fact mainstream thought. He could provide references.
Which fact are you disputing?
That Christians were in possession of that territory?
Or that Muslims took it by force?
I didn’t think either fact was actually in dispute. I thought both facts were just sort of buried under political correctness and/or ignorance.
April 4th, 2011 | 9:00 pm
“The replacement of the faith of St. Martin, who understood that becoming Christian meant quitting the army, with the faith of St. Louis, who believed that being Christian meant sacrifice on the battlefield, has distorted the faith ever since. Sometimes it is necessary to defend one’s home and country, but it is never necessary to defend Christianity itself by force of arms.”
So it has been all downhill since the Fourth Century? Good grief. I suppose you consider it a good thing that all we have to offer the Catholics being slaughtered in the Ivory Coast are our best wishes?
April 4th, 2011 | 9:13 pm
He’s right on #1, wrong on 2 and 3, and partially wrong on 4.
Not that it matters any. Now I will just sit back and wait until 6 August, when we can all have a nice, rational discussion of the bombing of Hiroshima.
April 4th, 2011 | 9:39 pm
“You don’t think people were aware that Jerusalem and the Holy Land had once been Christian?”
Some people, yes. But the average citizen of Jerusalem who probably couldn’t read or write and never saw a book? Didn’t FT quote some study that said that 50-some percent of Americans thought that health insurance reform was repealed? Did commoners have a knowledge of four centuries into the past? How much can the average American tell you about the French-and-Indian War, the Spanish colonization of North America, or the early English colonies? The image of oppressed Jerusalem Christians as poor victimized neo-cons is almost hilarious.
“Yours is the usual blame-the-victim mentality that one finds all too often on the Left.”
The US is far from being a victim. I pretty much reject the whole notion of victimhood as a sign of weakness and passivity.
As far as recent history is concerned, the Muslim World were largely our ready allies in WWII and in the Cold War. Leave it to bumbling foreign affairs folks in the 1920′s Britain and 1950′s US to alienate broad factions within Islam.
Can you date radical Muslims to before the Jewish State? Sure. Same could be said for Terry Jones’ Christian pedigree. And the antagonism of some crusaders against Jews, Orthodox, and pagans.
I wish more conservatives were clear thinkers. Of course Muslim armies swept through Christian Africa, the Middle East, and the Iberian Peninsula. And of course the US is not trusted because of our interventionist policies that favored dictators and tyrants: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc..
A dispassionate view of history means we don’t select and choose particular defeats as a justification for immoral acts. Or the whining about past injustices. It’s a lot more complicated than good Christians versus Bad Muslims. This wasn’t comic book violence. This was attempted Christian restoration by means of killing off non-Catholics rather than attempting to evangelize them. Really effective, that.
April 4th, 2011 | 10:13 pm
It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.
Will Rogers
April 4th, 2011 | 11:24 pm
“But the average citizen of Jerusalem who probably couldn’t read or write and never saw a book? ”
In 1099, when the First Crusade began, Christians were still a majority in Syria and Palestine, the Muslims very much a thin veneer of imperial overlords. They knew very well that Jerusalem was once Christian, because they were Christians, and there were still there.
“The image of oppressed Jerusalem Christians as poor victimized neo-cons is almost hilarious.”
If you are going to voice an opinion, try to make it an informed one. You could start by reading the works of Bat Ye’or on the topic of Dhimmitude and the myth of Islamic toleration. As a member of a Middle Eastern Church, I know the history, and it is increasingly clear that you do not.
“As far as recent history is concerned, the Muslim World were largely our ready allies in WWII and in the Cold War. Leave it to bumbling foreign affairs folks in the 1920′s Britain and 1950′s US to alienate broad factions within Islam.”
See what I mean? Just which parts of the Muslim world were our willing allies in World War II and the Cold War? During World War II, the Egyptians were passively pro-Axis, the Iraqis and Syrians overtly so. The Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an honored guest of Adolph Hitler in Berlin, where he helped the SS recruit Muslim legions that fought both on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. It was through Haj Amin that modern Islamic anti-semitism gets its pedigree, one that leads right back to the Third Reich. Also note that Britain and the U.S. had to invade and occupy the oil fields of Iran in order to keep them out of the hands of Axis sympathizers.
In the Cold War period, Egypt, Syria and Iraq were all firmly in the Soviet camp; Algeria was one of the “non-aligned” (passively pro-Soviet), and much of the rest of the Islamic world sat on the fence.
Oh, yes indeed. The Muslim Brotherhoods date to the 1920s, but the antecedents of radical Islam–Wahabbism–date to the 17th century.
” This was attempted Christian restoration by means of killing off non-Catholics rather than attempting to evangelize them. Really effective, that.”
As an Eastern Christian, I have my fair share of bones to pick with Western apologists for the Crusades, which, of course, were devastating for Eastern Christianity, but your assertion is patently absurd, as the survival of Eastern Christians in the Middle East indicates. There were never enough Franks in Outremer to exterminate the indigenous Christian population, most of whom were quite willing collaborators with the Crusaders. In fact, in Outremer, relations between Latin and Eastern Christians were probably better than anywhere else in the world–something the Mameluks figured out when they took over the neighborhood. Fearing the indigenous Christians constituted a “fifth column”, they forcibly removed many from the land and resettled the area with Yemeni fellahin. Arab (i.e., ethnic Arab) dominance of the Holy Land and Egypt dates only to the later 14th century, at the tail end of the Crusades.
Again, I strongly recommend you study your subject before sticking your foot so deeply into your mouth.
April 4th, 2011 | 11:57 pm
Brian,
Do you believe God has forgotten the Catholics in the Ivory Coast?
Yes, it has been downhill in the sense that ever since Christians began to believe that the state was also somehow Christian some Christians leap too quickly to arms rather than trusting in God.
Before the fourth century, the great Christian martyrs never fell on the battlefield. In fact, Christians in those early days bragged that only pagans thought that warfare was noble.
April 5th, 2011 | 8:25 am
“Before the fourth century, the great Christian martyrs never fell on the battlefield. In fact, Christians in those early days bragged that only pagans thought that warfare was noble.”
You are rather quick of the mark endorsing for others a path I would reckon you would be none too willing to accept yourself.
April 5th, 2011 | 9:16 am
“There were never enough Franks in Outremer to exterminate the indigenous Christian population.”
Stuart, before you start talking about other people’s feet and mouths, you might consider reading a little more carefully.
My point here is that Crusade apologists are spending a lot of heat to justify something that happened eight to ten centuries ago.
“You are rather quick of the mark endorsing for others a path I would reckon you would be none too willing to accept yourself.”
It’s another modern myth that the only courageous people in the world are to be found on the battlefield. Stick with dismantling the pro-Crusade schtick, if you please. More on the devastation between East-West relations, please.
April 5th, 2011 | 9:18 am
Michael
For those who think nothing is worth fighting or dying for, there is no one or no cause they would not therefore betray to save their own skin.
April 5th, 2011 | 9:32 am
St. Paulinus of Nola (353-431):
“Therefore, no longer love this world or its military service, for Scripture’s authority declares that ‘whoever is a friend of this world is an enemy of God.’ Whoever serves as a soldier with the sword is the servant of death, and whenever he sheds his own blood or that of another, this will be his reward: he will be regarded as guilty either because he caused his own death or because of his sin.”
April 5th, 2011 | 10:04 am
“My point here is that Crusade apologists are spending a lot of heat to justify something that happened eight to ten centuries ago.”
Don’t confuse “attempting to bring more accuracy to the popular view of history” with “justifying” anything.
I realize that historians could be out solving world hunger or finding a practical source of clean energy, but then they wouldn’t be historians. Since they’re historians, it’s their job to care about how history is understood, and it’s neither strange nor foolish for them to attempt to promote a better grasp of it than most people have, and to spend time writing to that end.
April 5th, 2011 | 10:05 am
Todd: “…Crusade apologists…”
I thought they were trying to get at the truth, but I guess you’ve got them judged before they start.
Todd “More on the devastation between East-West relations, please.”
And, in the end, change the subject.
April 5th, 2011 | 10:46 am
Michael
Again, if nothing is worth fighting, dying, or killing for, then there is no person and no cause you will not betray to save your own skin.
April 5th, 2011 | 10:50 am
“I thought they were trying to get at the truth, but I guess you’ve got them judged before they start.”
They were just starting? What’s this I’ve been reading for the last ten years on St Blog apologist sites? Spinning the Crusades is almost as popular as JP2 with some Catholic bloggers.
“And, in the end, change the subject.”
Hardly. The damage done to East-West relations at a time when it might possibly have been healed is undeniable. What’s the myth on 1204, I wonder?
April 5th, 2011 | 11:31 am
“My point here is that Crusade apologists are spending a lot of heat to justify something that happened eight to ten centuries ago.”
Because there are far more people who mindlessly condemn something that happened eight or ten centuries ago, and an even larger group who feel its influence, even though it happened eight or ten centuries ago. One cannot escape the heavy hand of history, therefore one is obliged to view history as objectively as possible. That means one should neither condemn nor condone the Crusades, but recognize them as an historical event and attempt to understand them as fully as possible.
“It’s another modern myth that the only courageous people in the world are to be found on the battlefield.”
I am not opposed to pacifism as a personal code of ethics, nor would I ever condemn someone who laid down his life for Jesus Christ. I was baptized into a Slavic Church whose members were martyred in the tens of thousands by the Soviets; I now belong to a Middle Eastern Church whose long martyrdom extends back sixteen centuries. I honor the martyrs and pray for their intercession.
But I have no time whatsoever for those who desire others to pick up the cross of martyrdom that they themselves would never dare to touch. Pacifism is a doctrine that one can only assume personally. It cannot be imposed upon others.
Note also that Christ did not condemn the centurion, nor demand he leave his profession; neither did Peter demand that of Cornelius. Yes, the early Church prohibited its members from serving in the armies of a pagan empire, in large part because doing so required one to sacrifice to pagan gods. But the early Church also prohibited its members from holding any civil office, for the same reason. So, if Michael feels the Christian ideal prevents one from serving in the military, should he not, in order to be consistent, demand that Christians withdraw from government service and political life altogether?
April 5th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
Thanks for engaging, Stuart.
“That means one should neither condemn nor condone the Crusades, but recognize them as an historical event and attempt to understand them as fully as possible.”
Well, that would be my take, too. I probably read more on Catholic conservative sites than liberal ones, so I’ll admit my reading slants more toward the apologist view. After awhile it all starts looking the same.
“I am not opposed to pacifism as a personal code of ethics …”
While I admit to being a sympathizer of pacifism, and of having a deep distrust of modern war, I was thinking more broadly. People outside the military have moments of courage. I was thinking of Japanese nuclear workers, or that father who rescued his son from a septic tank at the cost of his own life. The notion that a soldier is somehow more courageous, well–coming from a family with many who served in the military, I still wouldn’t put them on a pedestal automatically higher than others.
In many ways, pacifism demands more courage of its adherents than people who have guns in hand and billion-dollar technology at their back.
I think we’ve ended this Crusade, at least for today and for my point of view. Apologists, take the last word, if you please.
April 5th, 2011 | 12:18 pm
So by the logic of this article, indians in American west will be justified in rising against whites who stole their lands just 150 years ago (if christians were justified in rising against for invations commited 2 or 3 centuries before…). I wonder if the author of this article will agree….
April 5th, 2011 | 12:18 pm
Or palestinians will be justified in rising against israelites who took their lands 60 years ago…etc…
April 5th, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Todd,
Others have responded more than adequately to your statement about “justifying” the Crusades. I responded to one of your earlier posts about the “ugly” events of history, but for some reason, my comment didn’t get posted. So I’ll try again. In regards to history, if some on the right have an unfortunate tendency to “Parson Weemsism,” many more on the left have an equally, if not more, unfortunate tendency to see history “warts and all” without the “and all.” Unfortunate things happen in human history, and even the greatest human beings occasionally do unfortunate things. But to assert our superiority by abstracting those from their historical context and the cultural, social, political, and spiritual milieu in which they happened, to indulge in what Gary Saul Morson calls “chronocentrism” distorts history every bit as much as indulging in whitewashing or hagiography.
April 5th, 2011 | 1:31 pm
Buzz,
“For those who think nothing is worth fighting or dying for, there is no one or no cause they would not therefore betray to save their own skin”
Actually, St. Martin was accused of this very cowardice and was imprisoned when he, a soldier, refused to fight. He then offered to go to the front unarmed, but peace was declared before he arrived.
But more to your point, I said in my first post that “Sometimes it is necessary to defend one’s home and country, but it is never necessary to defend Christianity itself by force of arms.”
So yes, there are some things that are worth fighting for, but the list is shorter and the occasions fewer than many Christians think. The fact is that it is pretty easy to get enough people excited to start a war. Any pretext will do, and groupthink is a powerful force. Christ asked us to think harder and more critically about war and violence. It’s worth rereading the Sermon on the Mount almost every night.
Look at Christianity’s first four centuries, and you’ll see a long list of martyrs but no soldiers. Read the Church Fathers, and you’ll find at least ten who wrote against war—Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian Hippolytus, Origen, Cyprian, Arnobius, Lactantius, Athanasius, and Paulinus of Nola—but you’ll find only Augustine writing for it.
It’s not necessary to become fully pacifist to acknowledge and, more importantly, take to heart the early Christian understanding that war is way down the list of options and is always a sin, a necessary sin sometimes but a sin nonetheless. If Christians are quick to war, then we are no better than pagans, Muslims, or atheists. And if you think Christians have been slow to war, then you’ve bought too much pro-war propaganda. We can talk ourselves into anything.
“Again, if nothing is worth fighting, dying, or killing for, then there is no person and no cause you will not betray to save your own skin”
Notice that on this second time around, you place much more emphasis on killing than on dying. You mention killing twice and dying only once. Christ loved the world so much that he was willing to die for us, and he told us our love for each other would be expressed in our willingness to die for each other, but he never killed for us nor did he ask us to kill or fight. That we sometimes decide to kill rather than die is always a falling off from the Christian ideal. At the center of Christianity lies the cross, not a sword.
In my first version of that last sentence, I wrote, “That we sometimes must kill.” I changed it to “decide to kill” because it is that notion of the necessity of killing that is missing from the gospel and is all too prevalent in the Qur’an.
—
Stuart,
“You are rather quick of the mark endorsing for others a path I would reckon you would be none too willing to accept yourself”
Please read more carefully. I did not say what you imply I said.
“In each case, the faithful went to war to defend Christians, to punish the attackers, and to right terrible wrongs.”
—
Todd,
I think you’re right to observe a note of apology that runs through this new history. That note doesn’t discredit the history, but it is something to be on guard against. Riley-Smith might be right in saying that “crusading was seen as an act of love,” but that hardly means that we should follow suit and think of our wars that way.
—
Fred,
“Unfortunate things happen in human history”
“Unfortunate” seems the wrong word to use for decisions to kill other humans.
“But to assert our superiority by abstracting those from their historical context and the cultural, social, political, and spiritual milieu in which they happened”
First, the perspective Todd urges is not necessarily something that comes after the Crusades. The early Fathers themselves preached against war, and Christians didn’t join either revolt against Rome (70 or 132).
Second, the perspective Todd urges also arises out of the bitter experience borne when the “acts of love” that killed Muslims during the Crusades were then turned against fellow Christians in the religious wars that tore the Continent apart.
—
In his epistle to Donatus, St. Cyprian (d. 258) describes the errors of this world and asks Donatus to “Consider the roads blocked up by robbers, the seas beset with pirates, wars scattered all over the earth with the bloody horror of camps. The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale. Impunity is claimed for the wicked deeds, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but because the cruelty is perpetrated on a grand scale.”
Becoming Christian meant seeing war not as a “virtue” but as “wicked deed,” full of “cruelty.”
April 5th, 2011 | 1:38 pm
‘Becoming Christian meant seeing war not as a “virtue” but as “wicked deed,” full of “cruelty.”’
This is, of course, the classic Byzantine/Orthodox perspective on war. The Christian East never elaborated a theory of “just war”, on the grounds that no war can possibly be just–though some wars may be necessary. As a concomitant, the Christian East never adopted the position that fighting in war under certain conditions absolved one of personal responsibility for killing human beings. Despite being asked by the Emperors on several occasions (e.g., Heraclius during the Persian Wars) to do so, the Church of Constantinople insisted that soldiers who killed the enemy in combat had to undergo the canonical penance for murder (prayer, fasting and two years of abstinence from communion).
April 5th, 2011 | 2:37 pm
Michael,
The quote you include from Paulinus of Nola is hardly representative of all the Fathers, nor does it conform with the apostolic tradition, Gospels, or Acts of the Apostles. Dare I say Paulinus was guilty–in this case–of distorting the gospel of Christ?
I certainly do. Just because someone is a saint doesn’t mean they are infallible.
Consider the following:
Peter baptizes his jailer in Acts 16: 25-33, stopping the man from killing himself with his own sword. Nowhere does it mention the apostle demanding the man leave military service.
Earlier, in Acts Ch. 10 Peter baptizes the centurion Cornelius. There too we see that the Spirit comes to a soldier, without demanding he give up his profession.
In the Gospels, Jesus praises a centurion, saying “in all of Israel I have not found such faith” (Matt Ch. 8 & Luke Ch. 7). In previous encounters with sinners, Christ always calls them on their sin and tells them to commit it no more (think of the adulteress he saves from stoning). No such words are said concerning the profession of the centurion.
In Luke 22: 35-38, Jesus literally instructs his followers, “…one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one,” and the presence of swords among the apostles means he has not forbidden them previously.
Someone previously mentioned St. Martin as the model for the early Church and intimated he must have represented it’s stance on war and use of force. What the writer failed to mention is that Martin and his Christian companions were disobedient or left only because the Roman military oath of the time demanded that soldiers publicly declare the emperor to be a god. Early Christian objections to military service were not on the grounds of non-violence, but as an objection to idolatry and blasphemy.
Furthermore, Just War Theory begins with St. Augustine, a Father far more prominent than the obscure Paulinus of Nola (might he be obscure for a reason?).
There are several paths to holiness in the Christian tradition. The best path for some is pacifism and strict non-violence. But it isn’t the only legitimate path. Many saints have been made through soldiering (male and female, I might add).
April 5th, 2011 | 3:08 pm
Interesting discussion. I want to thank Stuart in particular for a new viewpoint for me.
What Todd is missing is something simple. No one here is arguing that war is not horrible. No one is arguing that pacifism is a bad thing. (Todd, if he really believes what he is saying, would need to be a pacifist.)
To sum up the myth breaking: the Crusades were not unique but part of a larger pattern. In this pattern, both Moslems and Christians acted like the fallen human beings we are. The Moslems were winning, for the most part, and continued winning through and after the Crusades. In the end, the Crusades all failed. Though in some few places the Christians managed to push back the Moslems. I think specifically about the Reconquista in Spain. Why be surprised when individual leaders in the Crusades believed they were doing it for love? That’s how we humans think.
The one who fell into the religion leads to wars meme would seem to think history ended in the mid-18th Century when that meme originated. That is, before the French and later Russian Revolutions showed that secularists were human too.
April 5th, 2011 | 3:37 pm
Sergio — again, you’re assuming that accurately describing history in a way somewhat less negatively toward some of the actors constitutes a “justification.”
But think of it this way — in order to answer your question about whether a parallel situation (insofar as it truly is parallel) would be justified today, you have to at least know the facts you’re comparing. You can’t make an accurate positive *or* negative judgment about history if you simply rely on the canards of popular opinion rather than seek to keep the record straight.
April 5th, 2011 | 5:05 pm
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April 5th, 2011 | 6:26 pm
Stuart,
“the Christian East never adopted the position that fighting in war under certain conditions absolved one of personal responsibility for killing human beings. Despite being asked by the Emperors on several occasions…the Church of Constantinople insisted that soldiers who killed the enemy in combat had to undergo the canonical penance for murder (prayer, fasting and two years of abstinence from communion)”
It’s a pleasure to agree with you for a change!
I admire the consistency of the Orthodox with the gospel on this point. Still, the insistence on penance in war has been abused by the East as much as the just war theory has been abused by the West. The impulse of most humans remains taking to war, and Christianity has not done as thorough a job as it might of pushing us to consider whether war really is the right thing at any particular time.
—
Artaban,
“The quote you include from Paulinus of Nola is hardly representative of all the Fathers, nor does it conform with the apostolic tradition, Gospels, or Acts of the Apostles. Dare I say Paulinus was guilty–in this case–of distorting the gospel of Christ?”
Paulinus is hardly alone. He’s joined by nine other fathers who wrote against war. Only Augustine favored it, and he was one of the later fathers.
The examples you and Stuart give are the usual ones offered to support war, and yet it is striking that no early Christians cited them to support war. They knew the gospel’s message lay elsewhere.
“Someone previously mentioned St. Martin as the model for the early Church and intimated he must have represented it’s stance on war and use of force. What the writer failed to mention is that Martin and his Christian companions were disobedient or left only because the Roman military oath of the time demanded that soldiers publicly declare the emperor to be a god. Early Christian objections to military service were not on the grounds of non-violence, but as an objection to idolatry and blasphemy”
That someone was me. You’re right that one theory is that Christians refused military service on the grounds of idolatry but another, and more likely, theory is that they recognized the gospel’s profound opposition to violence. The ten church fathers I refer to all attack violence itself, not idolatry. It is murder they decry, not idolatry.
Furthermore, Martin belonged to the Roman army after it had been Christianized. He left the army because he understood that the gospel required a higher standard. He was one of the most well known and beloved of Western saints, though he was later turned into a martial figure. In his life, however, he encouraged others to leave the army.
“Furthermore, Just War Theory begins with St. Augustine, a Father far more prominent than the obscure Paulinus of Nola (might he be obscure for a reason?)”
Well, there’s no one bigger than Augustine, but the other ten are no slouches—Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Cyprian, Arnobius, Lactantius, and Athanasius. Six of these men remain as influential as Augustine and are not obscure at all. Paulinus, by the way, was a friend of Augustine’s, and his letter was written to a soldier who had become Christian. Remember, too, that Augustine was only feeling his way toward a just war theory. His tentativeness suggests that he understood that the weight of the gospel lay toward nonviolence.
“There are several paths to holiness in the Christian tradition. The best path for some is pacifism and strict non-violence. But it isn’t the only legitimate path. Many saints have been made through soldiering”
I have to disagree. I can’t think of a warrior saint that I respect for his soldiering itself. Their canonizations all smack of mere patriotism rather than true holiness. And by mere patriotism, I don’t mean to dismiss patriotism but only to put it in its proper place. All religions and secular codes call for patriotism, but Christianity calls us to the service of God.
Why all this energy expended on glorifying and excusing war. Pagans, Muslims, and humanists alike value war, but Christians are called to something higher. The Sermon on the Mount is a good reminder.
April 6th, 2011 | 2:53 am
Stuart-
It’s good to see someone from the Church on this site. I am curious – have you read “The Virtue of War” by Alexander F.C. Webster and Darrell Cole? It is the only book I’ve read on the subject that attempts to treat this issue from the Orthodox perspective. I’ll admit to not being familiar enough with the Church’s view on being a soldier or war to contribute with anything meaningful as far as this conversation is concerned.
Though, I will agree wholeheartedly re: the so-called Crusades – I have no doubt there was a mixture of motivations, and all to varying degrees with each individual that participated. The idea that it was some “unprovoked attack” on Islam or Muslim lands is nonsense – there had been centuries of Muslim “crusades” into Christian (and non-Christian lands – the Hindus weren’t even given the option to “pay tribute,” live as a dhimmi, originally; it was convert or die) lands and unprecedented slaughter by the Muslims. There were cyclical periods of relative (and I do mean relative) peace, but the dhimmis were always the dhimmis, that was never gonna change.
I’d also say that viewing the Crusades as eeeeeevil “Christian imperialism,” as it is often presented today (and not just by celebrities, Todd, but by jihadists – traditional Muslims – who use them as fodder for recruitment as much as anything we allegedly do today) is completely contradicted by the Fourth Crusade. That, in and of itself, shows that the Crusades were neither purely “holy” nor purely commercial, or political.
In any event, I am compelled to agree with those who attempt to correct the historical inaccuracies of the revisionists who want to paint any and all Christian acts as, first, coming from Rome and, second, as eeeeeevil.
Sorry to ramble, late and the boy has a cold.
the sinner,
Patrick
April 6th, 2011 | 7:23 am
“The examples you and Stuart give are the usual ones offered to support war, and yet it is striking that no early Christians cited them to support war. They knew the gospel’s message lay elsewhere.”
Well, whatever they thought they “knew”, the Church reached a different conclusion. And thank God for that, or the Ottoman Sultan who boasted that he was going to use St. Peter’s as a stable would have achieved his dream.
“the Christian East never adopted the position that fighting in war under certain conditions absolved one of personal responsibility for killing human beings. Despite being asked by the Emperors on several occasions…the Church of Constantinople insisted that soldiers who killed the enemy in combat had to undergo the canonical penance for murder (prayer, fasting and two years of abstinence from communion”
Villifying those who defend you is not a particularly bright idea, and is certainly part of the reason the Byzantines relied so heavily on mercenaries as time went on.
“Second, the perspective Todd urges also arises out of the bitter experience borne when the “acts of love” that killed Muslims during the Crusades were then turned against fellow Christians in the religious wars that tore the Continent apart.”
You mean the “religious wars” where the Catholic French were allied with the Protestants, and in some instances with the Turks? The ideology underlying the Crusades was not involved in those “Wars of Religion.”
April 6th, 2011 | 9:27 am
“Was the 10th century Jerusalem Muslim aware in any way of the conquest of his forebears?”
So you’re saying they were complete morons? That the presence of all those Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and even pagan temples escaped their notice?
Or do you believe that the Muslim suppression of pre-Muslim history was so effective that it only took a couple hundred years?
“Was the 10th/11th century prelate or monarch aware of the Christian culture of Africa and Arabia from the time before Mohammed?”
Absolutely. They had not only piles of written history, but also popular stories like “Prester John” about the Christian kingdoms “just over the horizon”.
The Roman emperor (popularly called the “Byzantine” emperor, but if you had asked him…) knew perfectly well that just a few hundred years ago, Egypt, North Africa, and the Holy Land had been under his predecessor’s rule.
April 6th, 2011 | 9:37 am
“So by the logic of this article, indians in American west will be justified in rising against whites who stole their lands just 150 years ago (if christians were justified in rising against for invations commited 2 or 3 centuries before…). I wonder if the author of this article will agree….”
Another one who wants to compare the Eleventh Century to the age of modern nation states. But when you get right down to it, I really couldn’t blame the Indians for trying, I just don’t think they would do very well.
April 6th, 2011 | 9:49 am
“Why all this energy expended on glorifying and excusing war. Pagans, Muslims, and humanists alike value war, but Christians are called to something higher. The Sermon on the Mount is a good reminder.”
We are clearly not called to the Manichean pacifism you advocate. I see this view growing in the Church, and it really could not come at a worse possible time.
April 6th, 2011 | 9:50 am
I hope no one minds my intruding on a discussion here, but I’ve always thought a few of the arguments for specifically Christian pacifism aren’t persuasive, even if specific pacifists could be commended for the courage of their convictions.
There are already a few good responses to Michael’s claims here, but I’d like to add a point or two that I think is worth consideration.
Michael writes, “Christ asked us to think harder and more critically about war and violence. It’s worth rereading the Sermon on the Mount almost every night.”
I agree that the Sermon is worth careful and repeated study, and it’s one of my favorite passages, but I don’t think it’s plausible to point to Matthew 5-7 as relevant to the question of war — or if it’s relevant to war, it’s relevant to far more than that.
I believe that, in Mt 5:38-42, Christ teaches the principle of personal non-retaliation, as none of his five other “you have heard / but I say” teachings have any obvious bearing on public policy (unless the condemnation of divorce implies its legal prohibition). And it doesn’t appear that He opposes the lex talionis (the principle of proportional punishment, “eye for an eye”) per se, but the interpretation justifying personal vendettas: Christ wasn’t overturning the clear teachings of Scripture (what is written) but was instead opposing to errant interpretations (it was said), and He explicitly claimed to fulfill Scripture.
But if turning the other cheek applies to the state in regards to war, it doesn’t stop at war: it must logically extend to domestic matters, keeping the government from using force to arrest and imprison lawbreakers. One cannot MERELY argue that Christ was a pacifist from the Sermon on the Mount; the logic leads to the belief that He is an anarchist.
–
Michael writes that war is “always a sin, a necessary sin sometimes but a sin nonetheless.”
I don’t understand how an act can be simultaneously sinful and yet truly necessary — necessary for what? required by whom? — but the Bible simply doesn’t support the notion that war is always a sin.
Paul wrote, in Romans 13, that the government is God’s agent of wrath which doesn’t bear the sword in vain. And if war is always sinful, why would we be encouraged to wear the armor of God? Nowhere else does the Bible analogize sin to faithful reliance on God — or any other virtue, for that matter.
And then we have Ecclesiastes 3, which provides a wide-ranging list of things for which there is a season. Birth and death, reaping and sowing, laughter and mourning, speech and silence are included — and alongside these acts we find hatred and war, but not idolatry, blasphemy, theft, perjury, or adultery. (Even the “harag” of killing in this passage isn’t the “ratsach” of Exodus 20, an act that was condemned as a capital offense in the very next chapter, and even earlier, immediately after the flood.)
–
As individual Christians and as a church, we are to foreswear vendettas, but remember why: “vengeance is MINE,” sayeth the Lord, not “vengeance is wrong.” It’s His prerorgative to repay, and biblically speaking, a partial and imperfect repayment is to be provided by the state, in anticipation of His final and perfect repayment.
“At the center of Christianity lies the cross, not a sword.”
That’s a true statement, but it can be misused. After all, Christ is coming again, and He is bringing a sword. War isn’t always a sin, and so the martial imagery of Revelation 19 isn’t blasphemous.
–
Generally, I put very little stock in those teachings of early church leaders that seem to contradict Scripture itself. I have no problem with giving tradition the benefit of the doubt, but from Mark 7:9, we have it on very good Authority that we should not allow merely human traditions to trump the word of God, and it’s clear from His own example that Christ esteemed the written Scripture as authoritative.
April 6th, 2011 | 11:47 am
Brian,
“Well, whatever they thought they “knew”, the Church reached a different conclusion. And thank God for that, or the Ottoman Sultan who boasted that he was going to use St. Peter’s as a stable would have achieved his dream”
If Christians wage war in defense of their lands, launch interventionist wars to protect Christians in other lands, and protect their business interests overseas in the name of national security, then how exactly are they different from Muslims? What difference does the gospel make if it only justifies what humans like to do anyway, which is to war against others?
Self-defense is justified, intervention can be justified, and national security only sometimes and barely, but the truth is that humans like to pretend every war is justified. We rarely ask the hard, gospel-authorized questions about whether we should be going to war and killing God’s children.
Before 380, Christians had no access to state power. They understood themselves to be a people apart and lived in anticipation of the day. Afterwards, they succumbed to the temptations of state power like any other pagan.
Although I’m glad Europe didn’t fall to the Muslims, the gospel asks us to recognize that occupation by a foreign power isn’t the worst thing. Jesus’s Israel, after all, was occupied by Rome, and the first three centuries of Christians suffered persecution. Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, provided instructions on how to live through occupation and persecution.
It’s important that at no point Christians believed that the right response to occupation or persecution was the taking up of arms. They knew that Jesus had taught them a different way.
Today, Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere live as minorities and without access to state power. Can you say, in God’s terms and not our worldly terms, that they are not as well cared for as we who live in liberty? Didn’t Jesus teach us to look at the world, at worldly success and failure in a different way?
“You mean the “religious wars” where the Catholic French were allied with the Protestants, and in some instances with the Turks? The ideology underlying the Crusades was not involved in those “Wars of Religion.”
I think it was the same ideology. Christians killed other Christians professing love of God and desiring to defend the faith just as they did during the Crusades. They told themselves that they were protecting innocent Christians from heresy and persecution just as they had during the Crusades.
“We are clearly not called to the Manichean pacifism you advocate.”
I am not advocating any Manichean pacifism. In fact, you and others keep insisting that I’m pushing pacifism when I’ve made very clear that I am not. Right from my first post, I’ve said that self-defense is justified and that Christianity itself doesn’t require defense (Christians might but not Christianity itself, the Word can’t be destroyed). All I’ve tried to argue is that we are too quick to justify and leap into war. That’s not the same thing as being anti-war or a pacifist, but when some Christians love war so very much, it can be hard to tell the difference.
—
Lawrence,
“I agree that the Sermon is worth careful and repeated study, and it’s one of my favorite passages, but I don’t think it’s plausible to point to Matthew 5-7 as relevant to the question of war — or if it’s relevant to war, it’s relevant to far more than that”
I’m in part thinking of the kinds of questions Jesus asks, “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
This is why I ask us to think more carefully whether war is really necessary in any particular instance. Are we doing something more than tax collectors and Gentiles, or are we behaving just like everyone else? The early Church Fathers knew that we thought about war differently than others, but I don’t hear many Christians today thinking that way. War has become habitual and expected, even, in some quarters, routinely urged.
“I don’t understand how an act can be simultaneously sinful and yet truly necessary”
It’s a broken world, and sin is everywhere. I can’t imagine Christ on horseback with a spear (as he’s depicted at Auxerres), or St. Paul with a machine gun.
“Generally, I put very little stock in those teachings of early church leaders that seem to contradict Scripture itself. I have no problem with giving tradition the benefit of the doubt”
These are not merely church leaders. They are those who first transmitted the bible you hold. Their experience of Christianity as a minority religion in a hostile world tells us more about the meaning of Christian faith than the medieval and modern notion of Christendom as a state religion where there’s little difference between church and state and much confusion of the two.
April 6th, 2011 | 12:38 pm
Michael,
It is quite telling that you make no attempt to refute the passages from the Gospels and Acts that prove my point concerning the absence of a requirement of pacifism.
If the best you can do is cite a ten church fathers, then I’m sorry, but I’ll stick with the teachings of Christ himself on this one.
I’d also point out that John the Baptist–the man Christ said was greater than any other born of woman–preached a message of repentance (the word “repent” is a military term; an “about-face”). Not only did he preach repentance, but he was asked by soldiers what they needed to do to repent. If ever there was a time for a prophet to say “war is evil, get a new job”, this was it. What does he say?
He doesn’t tell them to quit being soldiers, or never to kill.
He says, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, be satisfied with your wages.” (Luke 3: 14).
Now if John was so wrong to allow them to continue being soldiers, why didn’t any of the gospel writers call him out on it? Why didn’t Jesus? Why include this story that’d lead many to believe one can be a follower of God and a soldier?
Finally, regarding the soldier-saints (who include quite a few nuns who never fought, but said in prayer they felt the vocation of soldier), you defy the tradition of the Church in your scorn. I value those who individually felt called to pacifism, while acknowledging not all (or even most) are called to that extreme. What hardness is in your heart that you can’t acknowledge other paths to holiness?
April 6th, 2011 | 12:40 pm
“If Christians wage war in defense of their lands, launch interventionist wars to protect Christians in other lands, and protect their business interests overseas in the name of national security, then how exactly are they different from Muslims? What difference does the gospel make if it only justifies what humans like to do anyway, which is to war against others?”
So if we fight wars that means we are like Muslims in every other way?
“Today, Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere live as minorities and without access to state power. Can you say, in God’s terms and not our worldly terms, that they are not as well cared for as we who live in liberty? Didn’t Jesus teach us to look at the world, at worldly success and failure in a different way?”
I do not presume to know God’s mind with regard to the persecution of Christians all over the world. Are you so sure that you know God’s mind that you are positive that He is not disappointed that we do not lift a finger to defend those being persecuted?
“I think it was the same ideology. Christians killed other Christians professing love of God and desiring to defend the faith just as they did during the Crusades. They told themselves that they were protecting innocent Christians from heresy and persecution just as they had during the Crusades.”
No, they were generally fighting over: (1) whether the various Protestant German principalities had to listen to the Emperor; and (2) whether the Protestant German principalities would have to give back any of the Church property they seized during the Reformation. The Catholic French sided with the Protestant Germans and Swedes against the Catholic Empire because the French wanted to make sure the Hapsburgs didn’t get too powerful (which was also the reason the Catholic French would enter into alliances with the Muslim Turks against the Catholic Empire).
“I am not advocating any Manichean pacifism. In fact, you and others keep insisting that I’m pushing pacifism when I’ve made very clear that I am not.”
It is not at all clear that you are not, and I would submit that your various comments are the best advertisement I have seen in years for why we need the Magisterium. Christ was not Gandhi, despite your prooftexting to the contrary.
April 6th, 2011 | 1:16 pm
“Villifying those who defend you is not a particularly bright idea, and is certainly part of the reason the Byzantines relied so heavily on mercenaries as time went on.”
The Byzantines did not vilify those who defended them–quite the opposite, in fact. But the Byzantines never lost sight of the truth that their defense, ultimately, was in the hands of God, and to God above all they must answer.
Now it seems to me you response is based on a misapprehension of the Eastern Christian concept of sin, and of the concept of salvation as theosis. In simple terms, while the West tended to think of sin in juridical terms (violation of divine law exacts divine punishment), the East tended to understand sin according to the meaning of the word used in the New Testament: hamartia, a term that means, literally, “missing the mark” (as in archery), a falling short of perfection.
Similarly, though the concept of deification can be found in the West, it is central to Eastern Christian soteriology: we are meant to become partakers of the divine nature, becoming by grace what Christ is by nature. To that end, we must strive for perfection, a process that continues beyond the grave.
Now, in Eastern Christian theology, all men are made in the image and likeness of God, so that the killing of a man, under any circumstances, is the defacing of the divine image itself. Though the killing may have been necessary, the effect on the soul is the same, and so the killer must undergo a turn of heart, a healing of the wound he inflicted upon himself–hence the need for prayer, fasting and abstention from the Chalice.
The Byzantine Empire did not rely heavily on mercenaries until the late 11th century, after it lost most of its Anatolian recruiting grounds to the Seljuk Turks. Prior to that time, the Byzantines had a very well organized and professional national army, once which managed, despite numerical inferiority, to maintain the borders of the Empire (and occasionally to reclaim lost territories) due to its superior tactical and strategic acumen. That the Empire survived as long as it did is testimony to its underlying strength.
If you are interested in this, I suggest John Haldon’s “State, Army and Society in Byzantium” and “Recruitment and Conscription in the Byzantine Army, ca. 550-950″; and Edward N. Luttwak’s magnificent “Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire”.
April 6th, 2011 | 1:18 pm
“Christ was not Gandhi, despite your prooftexting to the contrary.”
Not only was Christ not Gandhi, Gandhi (the man) was not Gandhi (the legend). I’m quite sure there is a particular circle of hell reserved for men whose pursuit of peace results in the needless deaths of millions of innocent people. And in it, if there is any justice, you will find the shriveled soul of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
April 6th, 2011 | 1:19 pm
Artaban,
“It is quite telling that you make no attempt to refute the passages from the Gospels and Acts that prove my point concerning the absence of a requirement of pacifism”
And I find it quite telling that you make no attempt to understand that I am not a pacifist. Can you recognize the difference between pacifism and the strong insistence that we go to war too quickly, too eagerly, and with too little thought to the way that Christ asked us to think about the world differently?
“What hardness is in your heart that you can’t acknowledge other paths to holiness?”
There is holiness in the willingness to die on the battlefield, but I don’t see holiness when a sword is driven through another man’s body or when a drone shreds bodies with metal. When is killing anything less than a sign of our desperate brokenness?
Necessary, yes. Even an “act of love,” yes. But holy, no, not that. One of God’s children lies dead there.
—
Brian,
“So if we fight wars that means we are like Muslims in every other way?”
Tell me what difference you find. What is the difference between the Muslim and the Christian way of war?
“Are you so sure that you know God’s mind that you are positive that He is not disappointed that we do not lift a finger to defend those being persecuted?”
No, I’m not. That’s why I said, “intervention can be justified.” I’m not sure, however, that God asks us to protect Christians more than He asks us to protect anyone else.
“No, they were generally fighting over: (1) whether the various Protestant German principalities had to listen to the Emperor, etc.”
You list the material reasons they had for going to war. If you listen to their rhetoric, however, they give the same reasons the Crusaders did for going to war. The point of Crawford’s article is to get us to stop reducing the Crusades to material accounts and to start taking seriously the religious faith that drove them. Similarly, I take seriously the religious faith that drove Christians to kill each other. They believed they were serving the Lord. God and country.
“your various comments are the best advertisement I have seen in years for why we need the Magisterium”
I think John Paul would agree. He, after all, urged the US not to start the Iraq war. Perhaps he read the church fathers, too. I’m no more pacifist than John Paul, nor did I claim Christ was Gandhi, though I think Christ probably approves of Gandhi more than He does of George Bush.
Now that you know that I’m not a pacifist, maybe you can stop arguing against me as if I were. If it wasn’t clear at first, it should be now. Perhaps you can even reread my first comment and understand it a little better.
April 6th, 2011 | 1:22 pm
“I’d also point out that John the Baptist–the man Christ said was greater than any other born of woman–preached a message of repentance (the word “repent” is a military term; an “about-face”).”
To be fair, the words the Forerunner used were “metanoite te”, the word metanoia meaning “a change of nous”, or more explicably in English, a change of heart: turn your heart around, a call for conversion.
When in doubt, go back to the Greek.
April 6th, 2011 | 1:56 pm
“I’m no more pacifist than John Paul, nor did I claim Christ was Gandhi, though I think Christ probably approves of Gandhi more than He does of George Bush.”
Michael puts me in mind of Albert Schweitzer’s remarks concerning the quest for the historical Jesus: it’s like looking down a dark well, and seeing our own reflection looking back at us. Michael looks down the well, and sees a Jesus who looks just like him.
April 6th, 2011 | 2:07 pm
Michael:
About war, you ask, “Are we doing something more than tax collectors and Gentiles, or are we behaving just like everyone else?”
I’ll reiterate that, if Christ’s teaching applies to the state, the application cannot stop with war. When we apply force and the threat of force to arrest and imprison people, are we not behaving just like publicans, Gentiles, and everyone else?
The logic of your thinking leads to anarchy, not just pacifism or a more deliberate militarism.
The mistake you’re making is applying Christ’s pointed questions and teachings to matters of public policy, when they really ought to be limited to Christians as individuals and as the church. (Who’s really conflating church and state, here?)
–
Revelation 19 actually depicts the returning Christ as a fierce warrior (on horseback, no less), leading armies from heaven, posed to smite the nations and rule with a rod of iron: the chapter ends with Christ’s slaying those who were not already thrown into the lake of fire.
But never mind: “I can’t imagine Christ on horseback with a spear (as he’s depicted at Auxerres), or St. Paul with a machine gun.”
Well, I can’t imagine the Apostle Paul patroling a beat as a police officer, or running a prison as its warden. (Or giving birth.) Therefore… what? What conclusion are we supposed to draw? Christians can’t serve as soldiers or cops or prison guards?
Are we supposed to be anarchists, then, or should we hypocritically enjoy the benefits of civil society while sneering at the sins of those who get their hands dirty providing for our security?
Or does the question not imply an overly literal application of WWJD?
–
About the ancient Christian writers you quote, you write:
“These are not merely church leaders. They are those who first transmitted the bible you hold…”
That may not be literally true unless they were the scribes who copied manuscripts, but even so: so what? We know from the epistles that even local congregations founded by the Apostles themselves quickly strayed without their immediate leadership. “They copied the Bible’s manuscripts” does not convince me that they understood and conformed to its every teaching.
“…Their experience of Christianity as a minority religion in a hostile world tells us more about the meaning of Christian faith than the medieval and modern notion of Christendom as a state religion where there’s little difference between church and state and much confusion of the two.”
Even if that’s true (and I think you present a straw man alternative), we still have an even better source of authority about the meaning of the Christian faith: the Bible itself.
The arguments of those early leaders don’t seem to be rooted in Scripture itself, and your appeals, e.g., to the Sermon on the Mount involve the erroneous — and inconsistently followed — application of Christ’s teachings to public policy.
You write, earlier, that “We rarely ask the hard, gospel-authorized questions about whether we should be going to war and killing God’s children.”
The Bible is actually pretty clear, at least on the principle. The state has the God-given authority to apply lethal force in certain circumstances. That authority was given in Genesis 9:6 for the crime of murder, expanded throughout the law of Moses for other offenses, and (lest one think the authority ended with the Old Testament) even reaffirmed in Romans 13.
If the state is God’s servant to execute wrath on wrongdoers — not bearing the sword in vain — even when being managed by pagans, I do not see how it can be that this authority is lost when a Christian serves as a governor, soldier, police officer, or prison guard.
April 6th, 2011 | 2:18 pm
One other thing, Michael:
“And I find it quite telling that you make no attempt to understand that I am not a pacifist. Can you recognize the difference between pacifism and the strong insistence that we go to war too quickly, too eagerly, and with too little thought to the way that Christ asked us to think about the world differently?”
In Artaban’s defense, you don’t make the difference clear when a lot of what you argue seems to support pacifism more easily than… what would you call it? Contemplative militarism?
You say that nine out of ten dentis–I mean, church fathers agree in that they “wrote against war” — NOT that they wrote against rash, hasty war.
“The ten church fathers I refer to all attack violence itself, not idolatry. It is murder they decry, not idolatry.”
Violence itself, not intemperate violence: murder, not rash murder.
You quote St. Paulinus of Nola: “Whoever serves as a soldier with the sword is the servant of death, and whenever he sheds his own blood or that of another, this will be his reward: he will be regarded as guilty either because he caused his own death or because of his sin.”
That doesn’t help your case if your position REALLY is that it’s okay to serve as a soldier, as long as you thought long and hard about it.
April 6th, 2011 | 2:46 pm
“There is holiness in the willingness to die on the battlefield, but I don’t see holiness when a sword is driven through another man’s body or when a drone shreds bodies with metal. When is killing anything less than a sign of our desperate brokenness?
Necessary, yes. Even an “act of love,” yes. But holy, no, not that. One of God’s children lies dead there. ”
On this, Michael, we quite agree. Thank you for clarifying your position. I have encountered rabid pacifists who are all too willing to condemn to Hell soldiers or anyone who’d dare use force to protect an innocent human being. Perhaps the strong response you’ve gotten from some like myself is founded not in a “love for war”, but an objection to those who’d judge wrongly and severely.
April 6th, 2011 | 3:00 pm
Also, consider that those who are promoting absolute pacifism are just as guilty of the unnecessary deaths of God’s children–perhaps more so, if the Communist revolutions of last century are evidence–as those too eager to go to war.
April 6th, 2011 | 3:39 pm
“Now, in Eastern Christian theology, all men are made in the image and likeness of God, so that the killing of a man, under any circumstances, is the defacing of the divine image itself. Though the killing may have been necessary, the effect on the soul is the same, and so the killer must undergo a turn of heart, a healing of the wound he inflicted upon himself–hence the need for prayer, fasting and abstention from the Chalice.”
I understand your point, but I think treating your soldiers as “untouchables” for a certain period of time after they had been in battle had to have had a negative impact on morale. By the way, it was always my understanding the Byzantines had a strong tradition of venerating warrior saints. How was that reconciled with the doctrine you describe above?
“The Byzantine Empire did not rely heavily on mercenaries until the late 11th century, after it lost most of its Anatolian recruiting grounds to the Seljuk Turks. Prior to that time, the Byzantines had a very well organized and professional national army, once which managed, despite numerical inferiority, to maintain the borders of the Empire (and occasionally to reclaim lost territories) due to its superior tactical and strategic acumen. That the Empire survived as long as it did is testimony to its underlying strength.”
Well, I think you are generalizing a bit here because we are dealing with a long period of time. The Byzantine Army that collapsed before the Arab Conquests hardly conducted itself in a professional fashion (the conquest of Egypt was downright embarrassing). The famous defense of Constantinople in 717-718 was almost completely the navy.
Now the army of the revival in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries had a high degree of professionalism (have you read Haldon’s book, The Byzantine Wars? Highly recommended). But those armies also included the Varangian Guard, so there were also questions of loyalty, even then.
But I think the question your comment leads to is how did the Byzantines lose their recruiting territories in Anatolia in the first place, which resulted in them having to rely so heavily on mercenaries?
“That the Empire survived as long as it did is testimony to its underlying strength.”
And the timeliness of the First Crusade.
April 6th, 2011 | 4:36 pm
“I understand your point, but I think treating your soldiers as “untouchables” for a certain period of time after they had been in battle had to have had a negative impact on morale. By the way, it was always my understanding the Byzantines had a strong tradition of venerating warrior saints. How was that reconciled with the doctrine you describe above?”
I think it impossible to explain how mistaken this concept is, unless you are familiar with the spiritual disciplines of the Byzantine-Orthodox Churches. As a Melkite Greek Catholic, I can tell you this is not a matter of “ritual purity”, nor were soldiers treated as “untouchables”. Indeed, since the Emperor himself usually led the army in battle, he would be under the same discipline himself. Temporary excommunication is quite common in the canons of the Eastern Churches, for a wide range of sins and transgressions, beyond which, it is not uncommon for one’s spiritual father to direct one not to receive if he thinks this is a necessary prophylactic step in one’s theosis.
“Well, I think you are generalizing a bit here because we are dealing with a long period of time. The Byzantine Army that collapsed before the Arab Conquests hardly conducted itself in a professional fashion (the conquest of Egypt was downright embarrassing). The famous defense of Constantinople in 717-718 was almost completely the navy.”
Even during the Byzantine dark ages (650-750), the Army retained a great deal of continuity with its Roman forebears and in general performed at a much higher standard than any of its enemies. There are any number of histories available that document this statement. Haldon is considered the leading Byzantinist of our era. He has several books on the Byzantine wars and the Byzantine army which will serve.
“Now the army of the revival in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries had a high degree of professionalism (have you read Haldon’s book, The Byzantine Wars? Highly recommended). But those armies also included the Varangian Guard, so there were also questions of loyalty, even then.”
Haldon’s Osprey books are useful introductions, but it’s his scholarly books that fill in the blanks. With regard to the Varangian Guard, all Roman emperors from Tiberias onward had “barbarian” bodyguards; the Variangians are just one of a long line of such units, and they represented just a small portion of the Byzantine army, most of whose troops continued to be made up of Anatolian levies (see Haldon’s book on recruitment and conscription). Indeed, the Thematic system was one of the strengths of the Byzantine army, since it allowed soldiers to train most of the year with minimal cost to the central government.
“But I think the question your comment leads to is how did the Byzantines lose their recruiting territories in Anatolia in the first place, which resulted in them having to rely so heavily on mercenaries?”
The loss of Anatolia was the result of the loss of the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and the ensuing succession crisis caused by the capture of the Emperor Romanos Diogenes. Manzikert was lost not due to the performance of the army but the treachery of one of its subordinate commanders. If Manzikert illuminates anything, it is succession as the fundamental weakness of the Imperial system: the military preferred hereditary succession, but this did not ensure ability at the top; conversely, talented leaders were always tempted to usurp the throne, but found it difficult to rule legitimately.
Instead of pointing to the loss of Anatolia, one should look at how rapidly most of it was regained by Alexios Comnenos, who came to the thone in 1081.
“And the timeliness of the First Crusade.”
The First Crusade did very little to help the fortunes of the Byzantines, considering that the Crusaders spent most of their time fighting the Fatamids and not the Seljuks. Indeed, Byzantium and Christendom in general would have been better served had Urban II actually done what Alexios Comnenos requested–the recruitment of troops to serve under Byzantine command to recapture territory lost since 1071. Instead, the First Crusade became very much a sideshow, a strategic cul de sac that created the kingdoms of Outremer, none of which was ever viable as a political or military entity.
And, of course, the subsequent Crusades were all failures to one extend or another, with the Fourth Crusade being an unmitigated catastrophe for Christendom (to say nothing of Byzantium and the Orthodox Church). If, in 1685, the Turks were at the doors of Vienna, the fault lies in the behavior of the Franks in the Sack of Constantinople in 1204.
April 6th, 2011 | 5:00 pm
Stuart,
“I’m quite sure there is a particular circle of hell reserved for men whose pursuit of peace results in the needless deaths of millions of innocent people. And in it, if there is any justice, you will find the shriveled soul of Mohandas K. Gandhi”
What would you have had him do? Lead a revolution? Continue to accept British rule?
What do you see at the bottom of the well?
—
Lawrence,
“The mistake you’re making is applying Christ’s pointed questions and teachings to matters of public policy, when they really ought to be limited to Christians as individuals and as the church.”
Fascinating. I didn’t know that we were supposed to stop being Christians when we thought about public policy. Perhaps abortion is none of our business after all.
Surely war differs from the threat of force used by the police.
“Revelation 19 actually depicts the returning Christ as a fierce warrior (on horseback, no less), leading armies from heaven, posed to smite the nations and rule with a rod of iron: the chapter ends with Christ’s slaying those who were not already thrown into the lake of fire”
At the end of time. Not now.
“Are we supposed to be anarchists, then, or should we hypocritically enjoy the benefits of civil society while sneering at the sins of those who get their hands dirty providing for our security?”
Show me where I recommended anarchism or sneered at soldiers. I questioned our too easy readiness to go to war, and I did so in terms much less severe than the early fathers.
“We know from the epistles that even local congregations founded by the Apostles themselves quickly strayed without their immediate leadership.”
Do you know who the early church fathers were? Have you read them? I ask only because you don’t seem to know who they were. Perhaps you’re not Catholic.
“If the state is God’s servant to execute wrath on wrongdoers — not bearing the sword in vain — even when being managed by pagans, I do not see how it can be that this authority is lost when a Christian serves as a governor, soldier, police officer, or prison guard”
Why did Augustine and Aquinas both to formulate the just war theory at all if they didn’t feel that the gospel placed some special burden on war? After all, they didn’t write manuals for cops.
“In Artaban’s defense, you don’t make the difference clear when a lot of what you argue seems to support pacifism more easily than… what would you call it? Contemplative militarism?”
I take your point, but it’s a measure of how much has changed that Christians assume is just fine while the early church was torn over it.
“That doesn’t help your case if your position REALLY is that it’s okay to serve as a soldier, as long as you thought long and hard about it”
Paulinus’s words are quite tough, as are the others. The fathers weren’t known for pulling punches. My own comments have not been directed to soldiers but to civilians who call for war. As I said in one of my first posts, “there are some things that are worth fighting for, but the list is shorter and the occasions fewer than many Christians think.”
—
Artaban,
“On this, Michael, we quite agree. Thank you for clarifying your position.”
You’re welcome, and thanks for your kind words.
“I have encountered rabid pacifists who are all too willing to condemn to Hell soldiers or anyone who’d dare use force to protect an innocent human being. Perhaps the strong response you’ve gotten from some like myself is founded not in a “love for war”, but an objection to those who’d judge wrongly and severely”
I’ve encountered the same, but their voices at least make us question what we’re all too easily prone to.
“consider that those who are promoting absolute pacifism are just as guilty of the unnecessary deaths of God’s children”
It depends on who the promoters are and what their relationship is to the innocents who die. An especially sobering example is the fate of the Ukrainian Mennonites during the Russian Revolution. These pacifists were slaughtered and raped; some turned to self-defense and succeeded for a time. I’m not ready to say they modeled Christianity for all of us. Nor am I ready to deride them as foolish. I can say that I am awed by their Christian witness. If anyone deserves the title of saint, surely they do.
April 6th, 2011 | 5:38 pm
I’m now going to do what I did in Reader’s Digest format above: evaluate the claims of Mr. Crawford’s article through dispassionate, rational, historical analysis:
Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
This one Crawford got right. Since Islam irrupted out of the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century, it had been aggressively waging war against all contiguous non-Muslim states in accordance with the the dictates of the Quran to bring the whole world into the Dar al-Islam, the World of Submission. By the end of the 8th century, Muslims had conquered most of the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula, and were raiding the Cote d’Azur and north of the Pyranees. In the Levant, the Byzantine Empire managed to stabilize the situation and recover some lost territories by the end of the 8th century, but Muslim forces continued to wage low intensity war (mainly raiding and pillaging) across the breadth of the Mediterranean down to the 11th century.
After the Byzantines lost Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks in 1071, the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Comnenos asked Pope Urban II for troops to help him win back the Anatolian plateau, which would have allowed Byzantium to recover its critical recruiting ground. Instead, Pope Urban called for a holy war to recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Fatamids who had closed down the (highly lucrative) pilgrim trade. So the West had casus belli against the Muslims on several grounds, and the Crusades have to be evaluated in light of five centuries of unrelenting aggression on the part of the various Islamic powers.
Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
Crawford is partially right. Most of the Crusaders–at least on the First Crusade–were motivated by religious fervor. On the other hand, they were not opposed to “doing well by doing good”, and in 11th century France and Germany, there were large numbers of land-poor nobles who were quite willing to fight for the Holy Land, and if they happened to get some land and plunder out of it, so much the better. It’s not a question of “either/or” but “both/and”. In this, they were no different than soldiers in any other time or place.
Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
Again, “both/and”. The certainly believed their own religious propaganda (at least until the got to Outremer and had lived there for a while, after which they developed a more nuanced, dare I say, Byzantine view of the situation), but they were also a hard-headed lot (the Normans most of all) who were not averse to lining their pockets in the name of Christ. After all, God helps those who help themselves. On the other side of the hill, Muslims waged jihad with just such mixed motives (and the Quran has quite a few suras on how the booty collected on razzia is to be divided).
The later Crusades were a bit more jaded. Philip Augustus of France certainly went on the Third Crusade for the purpose of keeping an eye on Richard the Lionhart, who in turn was in search of military glory and extending the influence of the Angevin Empire across Europe. Of the Fourth Crusade, what can one say? Not one Muslim was killed in that endeavor, which managed only to loot the richest city in the world and destroy the bulwark of Christendom, the only force keeping the Muslims out of central Europe. And the Fifth and Sixth Crusades are barely worthy of notice–the farce following the tragedy.
Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.
Only partly correct. It is certainly true that Muslims had been attacking Christians since the 7th century. On the other hand, by the 10th century, the Byzantines, at least, had worked out a modus vivendi that permitted trade, pilgrimage and fairly normal diplomatic relations in between periods of hostility. This managed approach had allowed the Empire to reclaim much of the territory lost in the initial wave of conquests, and but for the calamity of Manzikert, might have seen Islam pushed out of Syria and Palestine by the end of the 11th century–a far more permanent expulsion than that managed by the Crusaders.
The Crusaders had nothing but contempt for the “effeminate” way in which the Byzantines waged war–until they had to live in that neighborhood for a while, at which point, they found themselves pursuing the same policies they had condemned the Byzantines for following. Oh, well–where you stand depends on where you sit.
The problem was, the Frankish kingdoms never had enough fighting men to maintain themselves. Knights came over on Crusade, fought for a while, went home. Each new wave of Crusaders committed the same mistakes as those made by their predecessors, in the process alienating and radicalizing Muslim rulers. Put another way, as long as the Crusaders pursued policies of total warfare, it played into the hands of the most militant Muslim leaders.
The net effect for Middle Eastern Christians was catastrophic. Though they had been reduced to dhimmitude since the 7th century, and subjected to periodic harassment and persecution (see Bat Ye’or, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity: from Jihad to Dhimmitude”), they remained the majority of the population down to the 13th century. With the extirpation of the last Crusader strongholds by the Mameluks, the Christians (who, contrary to popular belief, got on well with the Latins–or at least those who took up permanent residence in Outremer) found themselves without protectors. The Mameluks, for their part, saw the Christians as a potential “fifth column”, and systematically sought to break their hold on the land by dispossessing them and giving their lands to Arab fellahin, mostly from what is now Yemen. Arabs only become a majority in the region from this point onward–a point confirmed by genetic analysis of Arab natives living in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Israel (in contrast, “Arab Christians” are ethnically descended from the Greco-Sryrian population of the Byzantine period, because Islamic law prohibits both apostasy from Islam and the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian man; Coptic Christians are for their part descended from the indigenous population of Pharonic Egypt).
It’s futile to play “what if” games, but in light of history, it seems fair to say that the Crusades did little good for the peoples of the Middle East, but did accelerate the rise of the West through the scientific and cultural contacts made with both Muslim and Byzantine civilization (and the migration of thousands of Greeks into Italy as the Byzantine Empire collapsed, which helped spark something called “the Renaissance”).
Would Muslims still be fighting Christians in the absence of the Crusades? Probably, because Islam has certain “truth claims” and moral imperatives that inevitably put it at odds with other religions and cultures. Of course, they would have to find another excuse to blame us for their intransigence and intolerance, but that is another story.
April 6th, 2011 | 5:43 pm
“Temporary excommunication is quite common in the canons of the Eastern Churches, for a wide range of sins and transgressions, beyond which, it is not uncommon for one’s spiritual father to direct one not to receive if he thinks this is a necessary prophylactic step in one’s theosis.”
I will take your word for it as far as what the doctrine is, but you seriously believe that differentiating a soldier who killed someone in battle from the rest of the population, specifically because of that act, is not condemning the soldier for being a soldier?
“Even during the Byzantine dark ages (650-750), the Army retained a great deal of continuity with its Roman forebears and in general performed at a much higher standard than any of its enemies.”
Your 650 start date conveniently avoids the Arab Conquests. What was the explanation for the Byzantine’s dismal performance in that conflict?
“The loss of Anatolia was the result of the loss of the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and the ensuing succession crisis caused by the capture of the Emperor Romanos Diogenes.”
But the Byzantine Army at Manzikert contained large numbers of mercenaries, so there was already a recruiting problem.
“Instead of pointing to the loss of Anatolia, one should look at how rapidly most of it was regained by Alexios Comnenos, who came to the thone in 1081.”
Alexios had gained back nothing prior to the First Crusade. The Turks held Nicea, less than 50 miles from Constantinople. Alexios needed the Crusaders to lay siege to it and defeat a Turkish relief army before the garrison would take his bribe and surrender the city. His subsequent conquests took place after the Crusaders had forced the Turks back. I believe it was Gibbon who described Alexios as a “vulture” following along after the First Crusade.
“The First Crusade did very little to help the fortunes of the Byzantines, considering that the Crusaders spent most of their time fighting the Fatamids and not the Seljuks.”
That is completely inaccurate. The siege and battle at Nicea, the Battle of Dorylaeum, the Lake Battle at Antioch, and the siege and final battle outside Antioch, were all fought against the Seljuks. The only engagements fought against the Fatimids were the siege of Jerusalem and the Battle of Ascalon.
“Instead, the First Crusade became very much a sideshow, a strategic cul de sac that created the kingdoms of Outremer, none of which was ever viable as a political or military entity.”
The Byzantines were very lucky such a “sideshow” existed, because if it didn’t, Constantinople would have probably fallen in the 1125-1150 time period.
“And, of course, the subsequent Crusades were all failures to one extend or another, with the Fourth Crusade being an unmitigated catastrophe for Christendom (to say nothing of Byzantium and the Orthodox Church). If, in 1685, the Turks were at the doors of Vienna, the fault lies in the behavior of the Franks in the Sack of Constantinople in 1204.”
The Turks were at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683, but that had nothing to do with the Fourth Crusade (which was actually supposed to go to Egypt, but that is a long story). I know the Orthodox like to pretend that if it wasn’t for 1204, Istanbul would still be Constantinople, but after Myriokephaelon in 1176, the Byzantines were finished. It was just a matter of time.
April 6th, 2011 | 6:01 pm
[...] Here is an interesting article from First Principles Journal. (H/T First Things) [...]
April 6th, 2011 | 7:43 pm
“I will take your word for it as far as what the doctrine is, but you seriously believe that differentiating a soldier who killed someone in battle from the rest of the population, specifically because of that act, is not condemning the soldier for being a soldier?”
I have no problem with it, and I have studied more of war and know a lot more soldiers than the common lot of humanity. I’m also an Orthodox Christian (in communion with Rome) and find nothing incongruent about this doctrine, within the total structure of our Tradition. It is the West that has need to excuse soldiers from the burden of killing, because of the juridical approach to sin taken by the Western Church, which requires that all sin either be punished or redefined as not sinful. But I have not spoken to anyone who has actually killed a man in battle who did not feel the burden of taking a human life. Saying it was justified doesn’t make it just or right–it is merely tragic.
“our 650 start date conveniently avoids the Arab Conquests. What was the explanation for the Byzantine’s dismal performance in that conflict?”
You, for your part, conveniently ignored that the Arab Conquest came hard on the heels of the Sassanid War, a conflict between the two superpowers of late antiquity that lasted from 602 to 628, and which ended with the Emperor Heraclius bypassing the Slav-Avar-Persian army besieging Constantiople, making a lightning descent on the Persian homeland, capturing the Persian capital Ctesiphon, deposing the Persian king, installing a puppet regime, reclaiming all lost territory AND restoring the True Cross to Jerusalem (celebrated in our Churches on 14 September) and riding in triumph back to Constantinople.
However, the conflict exhausted both Rome and Persia. Moreover, the Persian occupation of Egypt and Syria sowed divisions in the Church between the Cyrilian “Jacobites” and the Chalcedonian Byzantines, which undermined the social cohesion of the restored Empire. When the Arabs came charging out of the desert, it is no surprise that both the Byzantines and the Persians were defeated in short order. But the Byzantines recovered and the Persians never did.
“Alexios had gained back nothing prior to the First Crusade. The Turks held Nicea, less than 50 miles from Constantinople. Alexios needed the Crusaders to lay siege to it and defeat a Turkish relief army before the garrison would take his bribe and surrender the city. His subsequent conquests took place after the Crusaders had forced the Turks back. I believe it was Gibbon who described Alexios as a “vulture” following along after the First Crusade.”
Gibbon no doubt has answered for his calumny of the Byzantine Empire. Since you are so big on Haldon, I suggest you read his big books on the subject. And Luttwak is very good as well.
“The Byzantines were very lucky such a “sideshow” existed, because if it didn’t, Constantinople would have probably fallen in the 1125-1150 time period.”
Another woulda-coulda-shoulda situation. Once can as easily say (and I have) that, had the Crusaders instead fought as auxiliaries of the Byzantine army, a more systematic reduction of the Muslim conquests of Anatolia would have provided the strategic springboard for a permanent restoration of both Syria and Egypt.
“I know the Orthodox like to pretend that if it wasn’t for 1204, Istanbul would still be Constantinople, but after Myriokephaelon in 1176, the Byzantines were finished. It was just a matter of time.”
Now, that’s a silly assertion.
April 6th, 2011 | 7:43 pm
By the way, did you ever read Runciman on the Crusades?
April 7th, 2011 | 7:41 am
Well to those who dont the real history, it is very sad. However to those who delibrately miscontrude about the history of the crusades isnt wise move. Truth will be known very clearly one day. let me give some some accounts written about the atrocites of the crusaders by thier own chroniclers.
Radulph of Caen, christian chronicler, wrote: “In Ma`arra our troops boiled pagan (muslims) adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.” [1]
Robert the Monk, christian chronicler, wrote: “Our men walked through the roads, places, on the roofs and feasted on the slaughter just like a lioness who had her cubs taken from her. They cut into pieces, and put to death childeren, young , and the old crumbling under the weight of the years. Our men grabbed everybody who fell in their hands. They cut bellies open, and took out gold coins. Oh destestable cupidity of Gold! Streams of blood ran on the road of the city; and everywhere lay corpses. Oh blinded nations and destined to death; none of that multitude accepted the christian faith.” [2]
I can give you the accounts of the crusaders deeds recorded by their own chroniclers who travelled with them to record the attrocites. The chroniclers are glorifying about the horrible killings as good things, unfortunatley current historians suppress these terrible accounts from people knowldegde. I have so many thing to reply about regarding the crusaders, but i think what i have written above is enough to show that the crusdaers were barabric people and did nothing but a disater. People must condemn what they did.
Reference.
1. R.Finucane “Soliders of the Faith” 1983, p. 106.
2. J. Riley Smith “Crusading as an act of love” 1980, pp. 177-92
April 7th, 2011 | 10:18 am
“I have no problem with it, and I have studied more of war and know a lot more soldiers than the common lot of humanity. I’m also an Orthodox Christian (in communion with Rome) and find nothing incongruent about this doctrine, within the total structure of our Tradition.”
That is fine, and maybe it makes sense within your tradition, but I think someone being told their act was justified is going to have a different perspective than someone told their act was sinful and that they had to atone for it.
“You, for your part, conveniently ignored that the Arab Conquest came hard on the heels of the Sassanid War,”
No, I wasn’t ignoring it. That is the reason most often given, although I think the second rationale, religious conflict among the Byzantines, was very important as well. But even allowing for all of that, the Byzantine performance against the Arabs, at Yarmuk and especially in Egypt, is perplexing in light of their exploits against the Persians.
“Gibbon no doubt has answered for his calumny of the Byzantine Empire. Since you are so big on Haldon, I suggest you read his big books on the subject. And Luttwak is very good as well.”
There are many things Gibbon had to answer for, but that is not one of them. Alexios was so dependent on the Crusader’s success that when he was told by some deserters from the Crusader army outside Antioch that the Crusaders were about to be destroyed, he didn’t even bother checking to see if that was true, but simply turned tail and raced back to the safety of Constantinople.
I am sure the books by Haldon and Luttwak are great reading, but they can’t change the reality of what actually happened.
“Another woulda-coulda-shoulda situation. Once can as easily say (and I have) that, had the Crusaders instead fought as auxiliaries of the Byzantine army, a more systematic reduction of the Muslim conquests of Anatolia would have provided the strategic springboard for a permanent restoration of both Syria and Egypt.”
(1) Why should the Crusaders have agreed to fight as auxiliaries?
(2) The Byzantines had already advanced as far as Antioch before, and been driven back.
(3) My scenario is much more likely, because without help from the West, the Seljuks of Rum would have still had their capital at Nicea, less than 50 miles from Constantinople. They controlled the territory between there and the Bosphorus. In the absence of Western help, what would have kept the Turks from crossing over in the early-12th Century?
“Now, that’s a silly assertion.”
Did the Byzantines ever try to take the interior of Anatolia again? And they regarded themselves as being in such a weak position that they entered into a mutual defense treaty with Saladin, which led to the shameful spectacle of the Byzantines actually attacking the German contingent of the Third Crusade.
And look at what happened in 1204 itself. A Latin Army, betrayed by Alexios IV, whom it had placed on the throne, was now cut-off from food by Alexios’ successor. Without money or food, in a camp filled with Latin civilians who had fled Constantinople in fear of a massacre by the Byzantines like the one in 1182, really had no choice but to force their way into the city. Taking the city was not very difficult, which calls into question the whole “bulwark against Islam” claim.
April 7th, 2011 | 10:30 am
“By the way, did you ever read Runciman on the Crusades?”
Yes. Have you ever read anything other than Runciman on the Crusades? There has been a mountain of scholarly work done on this subject since Runciman wrote in the 1950s, especially on the Crusaders’ motivations (Jonathan Riley-Smith is the leader in that area).
Jonathan Riley-Smith and Thomas Madden have both done short general histories of the Crusades. Thomas Asbridge and Christopher Tyerman have done more detailed histories.
John France’s, Victory in the East – A Military History of the First Crusade, is a great book. Thomas Asbridge’s, The First Crusade, is also very good.
Kenneth Setton’s six-volume History of the Crusades is now available on-line, and that is another excellent source.
April 7th, 2011 | 10:45 am
“The chroniclers are glorifying about the horrible killings as good things, unfortunatley current historians suppress these terrible accounts from people knowldegde.”
Well, since your quotes come from books, including one by arguably the leading historian on the Crusades, I hardly would consider these “hidden history.” The alleged incident outside Maarra is also a History Channel favorite because of its lurid nature.
Turning to the incidents themselves, the alleged cannibalism outside Maarra was by the Tafirs, vagrant camp followers, and the activity certainly was not being noted with approval.
With regard to the account by Robert the Monk, read any chronicle where a city is taken by storm and you will read basically the same thing.
In addition, as noted by historian David Nicolle, certainly no friend of Western Christianity, many of the accounts from the Crusades appear to be exaggerated.
April 7th, 2011 | 11:17 am
@ “Hidden History”, you would do well to heed your own words concerning the peril of misrepresenting history.
You note the cannibalism that took place at Ma’rra, but omit the reality that the Crusaders were literally starving to death when they finally took the city. I think the fact that they had the choice between starvation and cannibalism reduces their culpability. Many, many armies (if not all) have done the same in similar situations.
You claim the chroniclers of the Crusades gloried in the atrocities. That doesn’t seem to be born out by the evidence you quote from Robert the Monk.
It is not born out by the excommunications issued to Crusaders who committed atrocities (including the uniform excommunication of all the Crusaders who sacked Constantinople). Nor is it supported by the records of monks, saints, and archbishops and priests who protected Jews and others from those who tried to use the Crusades as a pretense for persecution.
April 7th, 2011 | 11:31 am
Oh, and your one-sided account of atrocities fails to mention those committed by Muslims. Before and throughout the Crusades Muslims continued raids on Christian kingdoms, killing and selling into slavery (sexual and “mundane”) women, children, and non-combatants. It was so bad that during the 9th and 10th century some historians estimate 1 in 10 Europeans were enslaved.
Examination of the records of the “enlightened” Saladin’s court scribe also show Muslims reveling in the sexual violation of “proud Christian women”.
The Crusades, like all wars, saw atrocity. Not because of religion, but because the participants were fallen human beings, and we all sin.
April 7th, 2011 | 12:14 pm
“Yes. Have you ever read anything other than Runciman on the Crusades? ”
Oh, scads (though I will stay away from Rodney Stark on general principle). Aside from Runciman, I have read both Harris and Reilly-Smith’s overviews of the Crusades; Gabrielli on Arab historians of the Crusades; Harris and Haldon on Byzantium and the Crusades; Mark Whittow on the emergence of Byzantium in the 7th-8th centuries; Kaegi on Heraclius and the Persian war; Smail on Crusader warfare; Reston on the Third Crusade; Phillips and Angold on the Fourth Crusade, and even Christiansen on the Northern Crusades of the Teutonic Knights. All these books are within arms reach as I sit here in my well appointed study.
April 7th, 2011 | 12:20 pm
“With regard to the account by Robert the Monk, read any chronicle where a city is taken by storm and you will read basically the same thing.”
I concur. It was a long standing convention of warfare that a city which refused to surrender before the walls were breached and the attacking army stormed in was subject to sack with all that entailed. The reason was two-fold: on the one hand, storming a city was a dangerous and bloody business, and commanders preferred if they could negotiate a surrender beforehand, which would spare their army and the inhabitants of the town; on the other hand, as a practical matter, troops storming a town have their blood up (it is, after all, a bloody and dangerous business), and commanders could not have kept their troops under control even if they had wanted.
Whenever a city was stormed, lots of women were raped, lots of civilians died. Happened when Christians stormed Muslim cities, when Muslims stormed Christian cities, when Muslims stormed Muslim cities, and when Christians stormed Christian cities. “War is cruelty; you cannot refine it”–William Tecumseh Sherman.
April 7th, 2011 | 1:03 pm
Hugh Kennedy’s book, the Great Arab Conquests, is also very good.
If you liked Smail’s book, Christopher Marshall did a continuation of it a few years back, taking the subject to 1291.
April 7th, 2011 | 4:43 pm
Smail needs revision, as our understanding of the psychology of combat and its effects on tactics at the micro-level is now much better than it was in the 1930s and 40s. I first read Smail in my Introduction to Strategy course at Georgetown, which was taught by Ed Luttwak. That class started me on my professional career.
April 8th, 2011 | 9:33 am
The Crusades never ended on the Muslim end. It won’t end until the whole world is Islamic.
April 10th, 2011 | 3:52 am
Artaban-
If I’m not mistaken, those excommunications were withdrawn by Innocent III, weren’t they?
April 10th, 2011 | 4:14 am
Michael,
Much earlier, you wrote that during the first four centuries of the Church, there were man martyrs but no soldiers. That simply is not true. Here is a partial list:
St. Maurice, 3rd Century (leader of the Roman Theban Legion, made up of all Christians, who did, in fact, fight for Rome. Only when called to harass fellow Christians did they refuse).
The very famous St. George the Trophy-Bearer (of St. George and the Dragon), who had a military career during his life but, again, was executed for refusing to persecute fellow Christians, not because he refused to fight.
St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, martyred around 305 AD, executed for being Christian (he was “outed,” so to speak).
St. Vartan the Warrior, though that was the 5th century and just outside the stated first four century mark you stated.
April 10th, 2011 | 10:48 pm
Thanks, Patrick. There were indeed Christian soldiers who served in the military before Constantine, but they appear to be rare while the bulk of Christian commentary was anti-military. The story of St. Maurice is probably fabricated, St. Demetrius likewise. George was sainted not for his military service, as Louis was, but for his unwillingness to deny Jesus. St. Vartan, as you say, appears after Constantine.
The point remains that after Constantine, Christians are quite happy to go to war and think that killing in service to the country is tantamount to killing in service to God. Before Constantine, Christians were at least conflicted about military service but were predominantly negative toward it because Christ taught the way of peace.
April 11th, 2011 | 8:42 am
Michael,
To answer your earlier question, I do know about the early church fathers, but I’m not Catholic. I tend not to put a lot of stock in any position that depends on their writings to the neglect of Scripture, especially when the argument seems not to fit with the clear teachings of Scripture. After all, we have it on good authority that we should not set aside God’s word for the tradition of men.
About Scripture, you brought up the Sermon on the Mount, and I simply don’t think Christ’s command there of non-retaliation applies to the state. That position is difficult to reconcile, not only to the absence of any censure for soldiers and to Paul’s teaching about the state in Romans 13, but to the IMMEDIATE context of the sermon itself.
None of the other five “you have heard / but I say” statements have obvious political implications, but we’re supposed to conclude that this one does; none of the others overturn an actual teaching of Scripture, but we’re supposed to conclude that this one does — overturning “eye for an eye” rather than limiting it to the function of the state where it belongs.
You write, “Surely war differs from the threat of force used by the police,” and I agree, but the difference isn’t significant enough that only the former is inconsistent with the Sermon on the Mount. After all, Christ addresses the principle of proprotional punishment, and in the Old Testament, “eye for an eye” isn’t taught in the context of war: in Exodus 21, Leviticus 24, and Deuteronomy 19, the context is CONSISTENTLY one of crime and punishment.
–
You originally wrote, “Christ asked us to think harder and more critically about war and violence. It’s worth rereading the Sermon on the Mount almost every night.”
In the Sermon, Christ address the Old Testament principle of lex talionis. My belief is that Christ wasn’t contradicting the teaching itself — since He just affirmed the authority of Scripture to the smallest penstroke, and since He has already alluded to extrabiblical rabbinical tradition (“you have heard” to “hate your neighbor,” which is found nowhere in Scripture) — but was instead contradicting the interpretation that applied to personal affairs what belonged to public policy, specifically vendettas in the place of criminal justice.
But you think the teaching applies to “war and violence” — war, but not criminal justice, because “Surely war differs from the threat of force used by the police”, even though, biblically speaking, “eye for an eye” has NOTHING to do with the former and EVERYTHING with the latter.
I never said that you recommended anarchism.
(For that matter, I don’t believe my position entails the belief that “we [are] supposed to stop being Christians when we thought about public policy.” It’s just that the state and the church have different roles in society, and, per Romans 13, the state’s role involves the sword.)
But I don’t see why you don’t support de facto anarchism, because the logic of your position seems to require it. You’re not an anarchist because you’re not being consistent.
April 11th, 2011 | 11:39 pm
Lawrence,
“I tend not to put a lot of stock in any position that depends on their writings to the neglect of Scripture, especially when the argument seems not to fit with the clear teachings of Scripture.”
Since the fathers were the ones who selected which texts were scripture, their opinion is fairly important. In addition, the “clear teachings” of scripture often turn out not to be so clear. People of good faith can end up quite divided over issues of clear teaching. Just look at the career of the idea of justification by faith. Just recently, an ecumenical body of Roman Catholics and Lutherans decided that they weren’t divided over that issue after all.
There were two centuries of Christians who had sat at the feet of those who had sat at the feet of the apostles and declared that war was not the Christian way. That’s too important a witness to merely discard.
“For that matter, I don’t believe my position entails the belief that “we [are] supposed to stop being Christians when we thought about public policy.” It’s just that the state and the church have different roles in society, and, per Romans 13, the state’s role involves the sword”
Thanks for this clarification. The key change since Paul is that Christians now have a role in the state they did not have before Constantine. How a Christian wields the sword of state is simply not a matter Paul discusses.
“But I don’t see why you don’t support de facto anarchism, because the logic of your position seems to require it. You’re not an anarchist because you’re not being consistent”
The gospel tells us what to value. In this case, for example, peace, the nonviolent witness to God’s perfect love, on the one hand, and on the other, obedience to the state. But the gospel doesn’t tell us how to reconcile these values when they conflict. This is why I keep observing that Christianity doesn’t ask us to be pacifists, but it does ask us to question war and not merely succumb to it. The fathers knew this, and so they denounced war instead of justifying it the way too many do today.
April 12th, 2011 | 7:28 am
Michael,
We’re getting to the fundamental divide between Catholics and Protestants, the issue of authority. It suffices to say that I do not believe the church determined the canon; instead, I believe the church merely discovered the canon. The church did not grant or give authority to the individual books that became the New Testament, it merely recognized the authority that these books already had.
After all, the Apostles themselves recognized that their writings were Scripture, with Paul commanding congregations to read his letters as if they were Scripture and Peter being pretty explicit in asserting that Paul’s letters were Scripture (Col 4:16, I Thess 5:27, II Pet 3:16).
Nevertheless, I don’t think the non-canonical writings of the second- and third-century church are worthless. I don’t suggest that we “merely discard” them, only that we shouldn’t emphasize them “to the neglect of Scripture, especially when the argument seems not to fit with the clear teachings of Scripture.”
Indeed, Scripture isn’t always clear, but I think the contentious issues are more frequently about whether Scripture has unique authority, not about what it teaches.
But let’s set all that aside.
Paul wrote that the state is God’s servant to approve those who do good and execute wrath on the wrongdoer: it does not bear the sword in vain. Paul wrote this when most of the known world was ruled, not only by a pagan Caesar, but by a government that persecuted Christians. If God gave such authority to THEM, it boggles the mind that He does not give the same authority to Christians when they serve as governors, soldiers, police officers, or prison guards.
(That’s like saying that God commanded parents to discipline disobedient children, but the command applies ONLY to pagans, not Christians.)
If Paulinus argued from the text that that’s the position Paul took, I’d love to see that argument.
You keep implying that these early writers took their cues from Christ Himself — that Christians before Constantine were “predominantly negative toward [military service] because Christ taught the way of peace,” never mind that this stance is not seen from Peter, Paul, or Christ Himself — so I think we should look closer at His teachings.
In the Sermon on the Mount, which you think is very relevant to this issue, Jesus said nothing about war, but He did mention a principle that the Old Testament CONSISTENTLY applied to matters of criminal justice: the lex talionis, “eye for an eye.”
If that sermon leads to a negative attitude towards serving the state as a soldier, why does it NOT lead to a similar negative attitude towards serving as a cop?
I think that’s a difficult question to answer with any credibility. It’s easier to go back to the church fathers and say that they MUST have been on to something, to assume the connection between Christ’s teachings and their position. But, once again, we have it on good authority not to let human tradition trump God’s word.
April 13th, 2011 | 1:49 pm
Lawrence,
You’re right we don’t want to wade very deeply into the waters of scriptural authority, but it’s not just an issue of Catholic vs. Protestant. For Methodists and some other Protestants, it’s prima and not sola scriptura. The role of the fathers and early councils was enormously important.
It may be true in general that “the contentious issues are more frequently about whether Scripture has unique authority, not about what it teaches,” but it’s not here. There’s no clear scriptural case for either pacifism or holy war. There is instead of preponderance of scripture that suggest that peace is better than war and that war, however justified, corrupts the soul. The fathers elaborated on just this preponderance and made explicit claims about it.
“If God gave such authority to THEM, it boggles the mind that He does not give the same authority to Christians when they serve as governors, soldiers, police officers, or prison guards”
You make a great point here, but I’d add that once Christians received that authority there is surely a responsibility to wield it differently than pagans did. There should be a significant difference in the willingness to war, in the seeking of alternatives to it, and in the waging of it. Conversations about war should be harder, longer, more nuanced, less self-directed or nationalistic. But Christians seem eager to war.
While self-defense is surely warranted, Americans have waged only one such war. The Indian wars were an aggressive sort of self-defense. The Revolution wasn’t justified nor was 1812. The Mexican and Spanish wars were imperial adventures. The First World War was unnecessary. The Second was the only war justified by self-defense. The various proxy wars conducted during the Cold War can possibly be justified as defenses of liberty in other lands, but they were not wars of self-defense.
“You keep implying that these early writers took their cues from Christ Himself — that Christians before Constantine were “predominantly negative toward [military service] because Christ taught the way of peace,” never mind that this stance is not seen from Peter, Paul, or Christ Himself — so I think we should look closer at His teachings”
The fact is that we cannot know for certain whether the fathers learned this lesson directly from the apostles or not, so I’d put it this way: The people closest in time to the apostles taught us that Jesus taught that war was wrong. People in later centuries, people who had gained the reins of power, taught us that Jesus taught that war, especially just or holy war, was right.
What’s more likely: That early Christians let “human tradition trump God’s word”? Or that pro-war Christians like Augustine succumbed to the temptation of earthly power? After all, “human tradition” favors war, while Jesus overturns the world’s logic.
April 13th, 2011 | 5:57 pm
Michael:
First, it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve yet to grapple with what the Sermon on the Mount actually teaches: if the sermon is relevant to public policy regarding war (as you seem to believe; you’re the one who first mentioned the sermon), then it is at least as relevant to matters of criminal justice.
–
Even setting aside the absurdities of taking your approach to the extreme, your argument from mere chronology — older equals more faithful — doesn’t have nearly as much weight as you give it. The New Testament is evidence enough against it. Paul routinely corrected individual congregations in his letters, and they had the DIRECT benefit of living Apostles. Christ Himself made clear how unfaithful the church was even in the Apostles’ day: in Revelation, He was critical of five of the seven churches He mentioned, reserving unqualified praise only for Smyrna and Philadelphia.
We can put it even more simply.
You write, “The people closest in time to the apostles taught us that Jesus taught that war was wrong.”
There were plenty of people in the same era who attributed to Jesus the heresy of gnosticism, too.
But you say that these early Christians taught that Jesus taught that war was wrong. I note that they made a second-hand assertion instead of pointing to the canonical records of His teachings. I likewise note how odd it is, that such an important teaching would go unmentioned by all four evangelists and by every Apostle, despite passages that argue against its existence.
(Again, no soldier in the New Testament was told to quit his day job, either by the Apostles or by Christ Himself.)
But you don’t stop at hearsay.
You write, “There’s no clear scriptural case for either pacifism or holy war. There is instead of preponderance of scripture that suggest that peace is better than war and that war, however justified, corrupts the soul.”
Just where in the Bible, exactly, is this preponderance of teachings that war “corrupts the soul”?
Even when David was denied the privilege of building the temple in I Chr 28:3, it wasn’t implied that his being a warrior corrupted his soul, that it was some sort of sin for which he needed to repent. He was still a man after God’s own heart, for whom God had promised an everlasting throne.
And note that David’s most spectacular failure was when he didn’t join his troops in battle. Had he been a responsible warrior, he wouldn’t have spied Bathsheba on the rooftop.
I know of no passage that justifies the claim that war corrupts the soul, much less a preponderance of passages.
Instead, in Ecclesiastes 3, the Bible teaches that there is indeed a time for war: surely it doesn’t teach that there’s a time for one’s soul to be corrupted.
In Ephesians 6, the Bible urges us to wear the armor of God — a wholly inappropriate metaphor if war is inherently corrupting.
And, in Revelation 19, the Bible portrays Christ as a fierce warrior coming with His armies to smite whole nations and slay those who were not already thrown into the lake of fire. Even if it is at the end of history, such a portrayal borders on the blasphemous if war always corrupts.
I cannot fathom what justifies your claim that the Bible itself teaches that war corrupts the soul, much less can I fathom the claim that it does so with a preponderance of evidence.
I’d personally appreciate some real substance behind that claim.
April 14th, 2011 | 7:54 am
I will add, Michael, that war is medicine, not food. A perfectly healthy person still needs food; medicine is only for the sick. In the same way, war won’t be appropriate for creation when it has been fully redeemed, but it’s a moral and even virtuous necessity while we live in a fallen world.
Indeed, “peace is better than war,” and we should look forward to the complete and eternal peace of the new heaven and new earth, but we shouldn’t pretend that Christ has yet brought that peace. To do so isn’t to cause peace, but to surrender unilaterally to evil.
And, most certainly, we should wage war in a way that glorifies God, fighting for just causes with just means.
In the realm of spiritual warfare, that means depending on God through Christ for His righteousness and power; it means refusing to retaliate against anyone who sins against us personally, not because retribution is intrinsically evil, but because it’s not our responsibility (“Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord; Deut 32:35 and Rom 12:19); and yet it also means standing up for His revealed word, and refusing to turn a blind eye to flagrant, unrepentant sin within His house or within His family.
(Remember that, in Matthew 18, Christ taught that eventually an unrepentant sinner may need to be essentially excommunicated from the church, and in Matthew 21 He drove from the Temple the moneychangers whose work had apparently crowded out the Gentiles. The evangelist saw no contradiction in setting these passages alongside the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5-7. Even within chapter 5, we’re taught not to neglect teaching a single commandment, even as we’re told to turn the other cheek.)
And, in the matter of temporal warfare, if one has the honor and obligation of serving as a soldier, police officer, or governor of the state, he must remember that he’s really serving God, that he has been given authority from God to approve those who do good and punish those who do evil — albeit in the very limited degree that is appropriate to fallen man, with more authority given only to the singularly unqiue theocracy of ancient Israel, led by prophets who were given direct revelation from God.
That official should be humble about his ability to discern and carry out that which is truly just, but a humble spirit isn’t necessarily an enervated spirit.
You write, “Christians seem eager to war,” but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. A recognition that war can be a moral good doesn’t imply a craving for it, anymore than it does for a similar recognition about the amputation of a gangrous limb (even in the absence of anasthetic) measured against the fatal alternative.
For all that you insist that you’re not a strict pacifist, you continue to write things that betray a strict pacifist’s contempt for the use of force (e.g., that war “corrupts the soul”). If your position is justifiable, disagreement could be seen as an eagerness for war, but if it’s not, perhaps it’s your position that is in the wrong for being reckless, irresponsible, unbiblical, and a poor reflection of the Lion of Judah.
April 14th, 2011 | 2:17 pm
Lawrence,
“First, it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve yet to grapple with what the Sermon on the Mount actually teaches: if the sermon is relevant to public policy regarding war (as you seem to believe; you’re the one who first mentioned the sermon), then it is at least as relevant to matters of criminal justice”
I haven’t grappled with it because I’m tired of talking about it. This is not your fault; it just comes up every time, and so it becomes tiresome to rehash the same old argument. But since you’ve asked several times, I’ll oblige. There are several contexts for the sermon, but one of them is the occupation of Israel and the growing desire among the zealots to repeat the Maccabees’ success in throwing out an occupying power. The idea that a messiah would deliver a political victory was strong in those years.
In the sermon, Jesus offers an alternative to the political solution of revolution—and that is peaceful nonresistance. If the old way was to demand rightful vengeance, then the new way is to not resist evil people, even when hit, sued, or forced into labor. It is no longer enough to hate your enemy; we must love them, pray for them, and greet them as friends.
Later, in Luke, when Jesus describes how hard it is to be a disciple, he explains that he is like a king with a weak army of 10,000 who, when he faces a large army of 20,000, sends a peace delegation. Disciples are thus not to expect political success in this world. We are to expect political occupation.
Early Christians took this message of political nonviolence to heart when Jerusalem rose in revolt both in 70 and in 132. Each time, Christians fled the city rather than fight. Jesus had taught them that political violence was not the answer, a lesson the fathers took to heart.
“There were plenty of people in the same era who attributed to Jesus the heresy of gnosticism, too”
The fathers weren’t ordinary people. These are recognized saints and doctors.
“I note that they made a second-hand assertion instead of pointing to the canonical records of His teachings.”
But they did point to scripture, both old and new.
Isaiah 2:4—And he will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Isaiah 9: 5-6—For all the armor of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall be for burning, for fuel of fire. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Zechariah 9: 9-10—Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy king cometh unto thee; he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt the foal of an ass. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off; and he shall speak peace unto the nations: and his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.
In each case, it is clear that Jesus will end war, and as the Sermon on the Mount demonstrates, Jesus had his disciples end it in their day and time by not joining any revolution. And in each case, it is clear that war is not something to value. It is not ennobling but something to be spurned. When Jesus then says that even anger makes us guilty, how are we to think that war does not corrupt?
“Again, no soldier in the New Testament was told to quit his day job, either by the Apostles or by Christ Himself.”
Arguments from silence are tough to prove. Perhaps they didn’t need to be told to quit if they had been listening all along. When James in his epistle praises the faith of Rahab, he didn’t say he disapproved of her prostitution, but we can safely assume he did.
“In Ephesians 6, the Bible urges us to wear the armor of God — a wholly inappropriate metaphor if war is inherently corrupting….Even if it is at the end of history, such a portrayal borders on the blasphemous if war always corrupts.”
Yes, there’s lots of war imagery, but there’s also a recognition that peace is even better. We don’t get pictures of Christ on horseback until the Crusades. The most common early Christian symbol instead is the good shepherd, a peaceful image.
“To do so isn’t to cause peace, but to surrender unilaterally to evil”
But in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ taught us to “resist not him that is evil.” Those are strong words.
“You write, “Christians seem eager to war,” but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. A recognition that war can be a moral good doesn’t imply a craving for it”
But look at the long list of wars I provided in my last post and then count the number of Christians who refused to participate in them as the early Christians refused to participate in the revolts against Rome. How often do you hear Christian arguments against war in the build up to any of the wars we’ve waged?
“For all that you insist that you’re not a strict pacifist, you continue to write things that betray a strict pacifist’s contempt for the use of force (e.g., that war “corrupts the soul”).”
One doesn’t have to be a pacifist to believe that war—the deliberate taking of another’s God-created life—is corrupting. As Stuart explained above, the Orthodox have fought more than their share of wars, but their soldiers ask for forgiveness every time no matter how just their cause. I would add that many Orthodox practices are older than those found in the West. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this practice goes very far back.
“If your position is justifiable, disagreement could be seen as an eagerness for war”
I wouldn’t see disagreement as an eagerness for war. People disagree all the time. They can disagree angrily as they would with an enemy or lovingly as they would with a friend.
“perhaps it’s your position that is in the wrong for being reckless, irresponsible, unbiblical, and a poor reflection of the Lion of Judah”
For whatever reason, you want my position to be worse and dumber than it is. My point is rather simple, modest, and, I would hope, non-controversial. Christians should not rush to war as others do. The gospel, the early fathers, and the early martyrs all suggest that Christians should value and work for peace more than war and that Christians should look suspiciously and long at any particular war that is claimed to be a justified one. War is necessary, but the list of necessary and just wars is much, much shorter than presumed.
To give you a taste, here are selections from ten church fathers. Notice how frequently they allude to the Bible:
St. Justin Martyr (died 165), “We who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making war upon our enemies, but also, that we may not lie nor deceive our examiners, willingly die confessing Christ.”
St. Irenaeus (died 202), “The word of God, preached by the apostles (who went forth from Jerusalem) throughout all the earth, caused such a change in the state of things, that these [nations] did form the swords and war-lances into ploughshares, and changed them into pruning-hooks for reaping the corn, [that is], into instruments used for peaceful purposes, and that they are now unaccustomed to fighting, but when smitten, offer also the other cheek.”
St. Clement of Alexandria (died 215), “For it is not in war, but in peace, that we are trained. War needs great preparation, and luxury craves profusion; but peace and love, simple and quiet sisters, require no arms, nor excessive preparation. The Word is their sustenance.”
Tertullian (died 220), “The Lord, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier. No uniform is lawful among us, if assigned to any unlawful action.”
St. Hippolytus (died 236), “A soldier of the civil authority must be taught not to kill men and to refuse to do so if he is commanded, and to refuse to take an oath; if he is unwilling to comply, he must be rejected. A military commander or civic magistrate that wears the purple must resign or be rejected. If a catechumen or a believer seeks to become a soldier they must be rejected, for they have despised God.”
Origen (died 254), “For we no longer take up sword against nation, nor do we learn war any more, having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus, who is our leader, instead of those who our fathers followed, among whom we were strangers to the covenant.”
St. Cyprian (died 258), “Consider the roads blocked up by robbers, the seas beset with pirates, wars scattered all over the earth with the bloody horror of camps. The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale. Impunity is claimed for the wicked deeds, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but because the cruelty is perpetrated on a grand scale.”
Arnobius (died 330), “We have learned from His teaching and His laws that evil ought not to be requited with evil, that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it, that we should rather shed our own blood than stain our hands and our conscience with that of another.”
Lactantius (died 320), “Thus it will be neither lawful for a just man to engage in warfare, since his warfare is justice itself, not to accuse any one of a capital charge, because it makes no difference whether you put a man to death by word, or rather by the sword, since it is the act of putting to death itself which is prohibited.”
St. Athanasius (died 373), “When they have come over to the school of Christ, then, strangely enough, as men truly pricked in conscience, they have laid aside the savagery of their murders and no longer mind the things of war: but all is at peace with them, and from henceforth what makes for friendship is to their liking.”
April 15th, 2011 | 7:02 am
Michael:
I agree that the first-century Jews were mistaken in expecting the Messiah to be a military leader, but I believe you’re missing the boat by concluding that the Messiah was a political revolutionary, just a non-violent one.
The Jews weren’t expecting Patton and got Gandhi: they got the Suffering Servant by whose wounds they were healed. Recall that Pilate found Jesus guilty of absolutely no crime, not even sedition through unconventional and non-violent means: and recall that Jesus Himself claimed that His kingdom is not of this world.
But I bring up the Sermon on the Mount, NOT to ask about why you think Jesus changed the basic earthly rules about war and peace, but why you don’t ALSO think the same thing about crime and punishment.
AFTER ALL, in the Sermon Jesus preached that we should turn the other cheek, not in the context of a discussion of military policy, but in the context of “eye for an eye” — an Old Testament principle about punishment in the legal system.
–
What you now quote doesn’t prove what you asserted earlier. I believe what you quote from the Old Testament is largely eschatological: Christ’s judgment is obviously an event to occur with His second coming, not an event that already happened in His first; and it’s clear that He didn’t bring about a pervasive earthly peace the first time around, not when He promised that His followers would be persecuted and bitterly divided even from their own families. Regardless, NONE OF IT teaches that war corrupts the soul.
Peace is good, peace is better than war, and God will bring a lasting peace to those who love Him. On this we all agree, but you didn’t stop at arguing this. You claimed that Scripture provided a “preponderance” of evidence that war corrupts the soul, and you didn’t quote one passage — not one single passage — that plausibly leads to that contentious conclusion.
You also claimed that the second- and third-and fourth-century Christian leaders quoted Christ directly about the immorality of war: they “taught us that Jesus taught that war was wrong.”
But of everything you quote from them, not ONCE do they cite a teaching from Christ that leads inexorably to that conclusion. At the most, they beg the question by citing “turn the other cheek,” when it’s not clear that that teaching applies to military matters — not when the Apostle Paul taught that government does not bear the sword in vain.
–
You write:
“For whatever reason, you want my position to be worse and dumber than it is. My point is rather simple, modest, and, I would hope, non-controversial. Christians should not rush to war as others do. The gospel, the early fathers, and the early martyrs all suggest that Christians should value and work for peace more than war and that Christians should look suspiciously and long at any particular war that is claimed to be a justified one. War is necessary, but the list of necessary and just wars is much, much shorter than presumed.”
ALL OF THIS is pretty reasonable, but what you claim about the Bible’s contents, and what you’ve been quoting from these early writers, is far more contentious and far less modest than what you claim is your position.
You say that we shouldn’t rush to war, but then you quote Hippolytus saying that soldiers should be rejected because they despise God. You say that war is only sometimes necessary, but then you claim (implausibly) that the Bible teaches that war corrupts the soul.
There’s a huge, huge disconnect between your core position and everything else you’ve written: there’s a reason that others in this thread assumed you’re a strict pacifist.
–
A few more quick points, and then I’m done.
1) For what it’s worth, you call these early Christian writers “recognized saints,” but that’s using a nomenclature that’s contrary to Scripture, which teaches that all Christians are saints. When Paul wrote to the saints in Rome, Cornith, Ephesus, and Colosse, he wasn’t just addressing some super-Christian elite.
2) You write, “One doesn’t have to be a pacifist to believe that war—the deliberate taking of another’s God-created life—is corrupting,” but that conclusion is extra-biblical at best and contrary to the Bible at the worst.
The deliberate taking of human life for truly heinous crimes (like murder) was ordained by God after the Deluge, expounded upon in His law to Moses, and WAS NOT rescinded by Christ’s coming: after the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentacost, Paul still wrote to the Romans that the state “does not bear the sword in vain.”
3) Finally, you write, “We don’t get pictures of Christ on horseback until the Crusades.”
This claim wasn’t accurate the first time you made it. Martial imagery of the Messiah is biblical, Michael, as in Revelation 19.
Indeed that image is eschatological, but you seem to have no problem citing end-times imagery when you find it agreeable. If it’s important that the Bible teaches that God will bring a comprehensive and eternal peace, it’s equally important to note that He will wage war (and win, decisively) in order to secure that peace.
Christ doesn’t bring an end to the cosmic conflict by turning the other cheek: He ends the war by winning it, by crushing Satan and his infernal forces, and by holding no quarter.
We have no right to dismiss or even diminish a particular aspect of how the Bible portrays Christ. It’s the difficult passages and the hard sayings that probably deserve the most attention, and the fierce warrior of Revelation 19 obliterates the notion that war is — always and intrinsically — a corrupting and ignoble endeavor.
April 20th, 2011 | 5:03 pm
Lawrence,
“I believe you’re missing the boat by concluding that the Messiah was a political revolutionary, just a non-violent one”
I didn’t come to that conclusion. I explained that there are “several contexts” for the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’s message was far larger than politics.
“AFTER ALL, in the Sermon Jesus preached that we should turn the other cheek, not in the context of a discussion of military policy, but in the context of “eye for an eye” — an Old Testament principle about punishment in the legal system”
I think your approach is reductive. The passage addresses more than one context. When Jesus speaks of an eye for an eye, he is discussing punishment, but when he discusses going an extra mile, he is talking about the political oppression of Jews by the occupying Roman army who had the power to arbitrarily require Jews to carry things for them.
“I believe what you quote from the Old Testament is largely eschatological”
Certainly, but the kingdom is also here when we live perfectly in imitation of Christ, which is why the passages I’ve quoted so frequently appear in the fathers’ understanding of what it means to be Christian today, in the here and now. You can’t simply cut off how we will live from how we are to live.
“Regardless, NONE OF IT teaches that war corrupts the soul”
That teaching is strongly implied in everything I’ve quoted. How could killing something made in the image of God not corrupt us? Every way we have of serving God in this life, we will have in the next. Is war the only exception?
“But of everything you quote from them, not ONCE do they cite a teaching from Christ that leads inexorably to that conclusion.”
But the teachings they quoted from Old and New Testaments did lead “inexorably” to this conclusion for them. That’s important, and something to ponder deeply.
“You say that we shouldn’t rush to war, but then you quote Hippolytus saying that soldiers should be rejected because they despise God.”
There’s no contradiction between quoting St. Hippolytus and having a different position from his. I quoted him as evidence that the fathers had a different attitude toward Christians waging war than we do.
“You say that war is only sometimes necessary, but then you claim (implausibly) that the Bible teaches that war corrupts the soul”
Again, there’s no contradiction here. I can’t do a better job of explaining it than Stuart, so I encourage you to reread his posts. Remember that the Orthodox frequently have older practices than found in the West. Their practices often take us very close to the origins of Christianity.
“For what it’s worth, you call these early Christian writers “recognized saints,” but that’s using a nomenclature that’s contrary to Scripture, which teaches that all Christians are saints. When Paul wrote to the saints in Rome, Cornith, Ephesus, and Colosse, he wasn’t just addressing some super-Christian elite”
Yes, all Christians are saints, but only some Christians have become teachers or models for all, and the honorific “saint” recognizes that fact. I still get the impression that you don’t know who these figures are. Seeing Justin, Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, Origen, and Athanasius all on the same list should prod you into taking their position a good bit more seriously. So much of what Christians believe about their faith goes back to these men.
“This claim wasn’t accurate the first time you made it. Martial imagery of the Messiah is biblical, Michael, as in Revelation 19”
By pictures, I meant “pictures,” pictorial representations. Not written imagery. It’s meaningful that, for our first millennium, Christians could read Revelation 19 and still not literally picture Christ leading Christians into combat either against infidels or against each other.
Since then, Christians have been happy to go to war at the drop of a hat.
April 23rd, 2011 | 1:35 am
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