Authors: Mark Kurlansky
The early Christians are the earliest known group that renounced warfare in all its forms and rejected all its institutions. This small and original group was devoted to antimilitarism, another concept, like nonviolence, that has no positive word. This anti-militarism was never expressed by Jesus, who, in fact, did not much address the issue of warfare, though he did denounce the violent overthrow of the Romans. Warmongering Christian fundamentalists have always clung to the absence of a specific stand on warfare, ignoring the obvious, which is that the wholesale institutionalized slaughter of fellow human beings is clearly a violation of the precise and literal teachings of Jesus. In the days of the great Western debate on slavery, slave owners used a similar argument—that Jesus had not said anything about slavery. But obviously the buying and selling of human beings would not constitute treating others as you would have them treat you.
For 284 years, roughly the same span of time as from the end of Louis XIV's reign in France to the beginning of the twenty-first century, Christians remained an antiwar cult. Christian writers emphasized the incompatibility of warfare with Christian teachings. Some characterized warfare as the work of evil spirits and weapons as cursed. They labeled the taking of human life in warfare murder. The Jewish War of
A.D.
66–71 was viewed as God's punishment of the Jews for sinful ways, and the pursuit of war, and by extension the pursuit of power politics, was said to be activity for “the Gentiles,”
unworthy of a Christian. They attacked the pomp of Rome as a glorification of warfare.
The first-century Christian writer Ignatius called for an abolition of warfare. This would happen, according to him and other Christian writers, once the world embraced the teachings of Jesus Christ—to love one's enemies, to do good even to those who do evil, to respond to evil with goodness. Such determined love and goodness was not meant to be pacifistic but a program for actively fighting evil. Given their stance against soldiers and soldiering, even against police work, it is striking that Christians sought and got converts among the Roman Legions. Some historians believe that it was converted Roman soldiers who first brought Christianity to Britain.
Origenes Adamantius, popularly known as Origen, the second-to-third-century Christian philosopher from Alexandria, clearly stated, “We Christians do not become fellow soldiers with the Emperor, even if he presses for this.” Christians would be loyal to the emperor, but they would not fight his wars. According to Origen, a Christian might pray for the success of a military state, even pray for the success of a military campaign, but could never participate in the military or in the government of a state that used military power. He did not condemn the military but only believed that it was forbidden for a Christian to participate. Christianity was about the promotion of love, and early Christians believed that love and killing were incompatible.
Though no one doubted Origen's sincerity—after all, he had castrated himself in pursuit of personal purity—his was a dangerous position in a militarized state. Like many subsequent states, the Roman Empire was so invested in its military might that it found it difficult to conceive of a loyal citizen who would not participate in the central program—warfare. Origen understood this, since his father had been put to death for beliefs similar to his own. Origen himself, the most influential Christian thinker of his time, author of some 800 works, was imprisoned and tortured and died from his mistreatment shortly after being released, in about
A.D.
254.
Not all Christians were good Christians. Some were described
by other Christians as “behaving like Gentiles.” Starting in the mid-second century, under the reign of Marcus Aurelius, a notable persecutor of Christians, some Christians did become soldiers and others became magistrates. Apparently there was an attempt to force Christians into the military, for about this time the first evidence is found of Christians refusing to serve—Western history's first conscientious objectors.
In general, Christians were becoming more troublesome rather than less. Their habit of seeking converts among the legions was a direct threat to empire building. Most soldiers, upon converting, refused to continue military service. Tertullian, a Roman centurian's son who converted to Christianity in 197, openly spoke of converting soldiers so that they would refuse to fight.
Active practitioners of nonviolence are always seen as a threat, a direct menace, to the state. The state maintains the right to kill as its exclusive and jealously guarded privilege. Nothing makes this more clear than capital punishment, which argues that killing is wrong and so the state must kill killers. Mozi understood that the state's desire to kill had to do with power. He wrote: “Like unto these, too, are state officers and princes who make war on other countries—because they love their own country but not other countries, and so seek to profit their own country at the expense of others.”
To those who govern, the citizen who questions the right of the state to kill is attempting to impinge on the government's ability to further the nation's interests at the expense of other, hopefully weaker, states. Thus the nonviolent activist is seen as a threat to the state.
In 274 in Numidia, where Algeria is today, a soldier of the Roman Empire, Fabius Victor, had a son named Maximilianus who, like all sons of military men, was drafted into service when he turned twenty-one. But instead of reporting for duty, he told Cassius Dion, the proconsul of Africa, that he was a Christian and therefore could not enter the military because he owed his first duty to the teachings of Christ. His father the veteran did not entirely agree with his son but was supportive. Maximilianus insisted, “I cannot serve as
a soldier. I cannot do evil. I am a Christian.” Dion countered that there were Christians in military service throughout the empire. “What evil do they do who serve?”
To which Maximilianus answered, “You know what they do.”
The young man was taken away and executed.
Historians have had some problems with the story, including a lack of records to verify the existence of a proconsul in Numidia named Cassius Dion, but the stance and punishment of Maximili-anus is recorded and he is remembered as the first martyred conscientious objector.
Toward the end of the third century, the Roman military further distanced itself from Christianity by requiring officers to practice the Roman religion, which to Christians was paganism. This led to more Christian officers resigning from the military. The desertion of Christians and Christian converts was a growing problem.
Then came the triumph of Christianity, a calamity from which the Church has never recovered.
Constantine I, son of Constantinus Chlorus, caesar of the Roman Empire, the number-two position of power beneath emperor, struggled to advance to emperor. In 312 Constantine's army was to fight a decisive battle against his principle competitor, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber. The early fourth century was a time of great belief in magic, spells, dark powers, and unseen forces, and Constantine, according to the chronicler Eusebius, had felt the need for something greater than military might to defeat the rulers of Rome, whom he was convinced had rallied forces of black magic. Constantine had a dream in which Christ had appeared, commanding him to carry the sign of the cross into battle. By this time Constantine had numerous Christian soldiers in his ranks, and for the first time in history they went into battle with an emblem of Christianity, the cross, painted on their shields. Just a generation earlier, to have placed a symbol of Christianity on a weapon would have been an outrage for Romans and an unthinkable blasphemy for Christians. Before the battle, Constantine was said to have seen a flaming cross in the sky with the words “In this
sign thou shalt conquer,” words that were in complete contradiction to Christianity and would have been unutterable for Jesus.
Unfortunately for Christianity, Constantine and his Christian warriors won the battle, establishing him as ruler of the western half of the Roman Empire, but also establishing a new role for the Christian and for Christ, a God who now would not only sanction killing but would take sides to help one band of killers triumph over another. The following year, Constantine met in Milan with his co-emperor in the East, Licinius, to issue the Edict of Milan. The Edict of Milan reiterated what Galerius, yet another rival to the throne, had already decreed in 309, the year before he died, that Christianity would no longer be illegal in the Roman Empire. It did not, as is commonly believed, make Christianity the official state religion.
The move was cheered by Christians, even those who had reservations about the new Christian soldier, because the edict meant an end to their persecution. In the remaining twenty-five years of his life, Constantine built grand churches, including three of the grandest—St. Peter's in Rome, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Constantine became the Christian emperor, the defender of Christianity, and, as such, forever changed the character of the religion as he promoted it and used it to solidify his power. Whether he himself embraced the religion or simply used it politically has been debated by historians ever since. He empowered the Church as an instrument of state-craft, spending a large part of state funds in the establishment and control of clergy. He declared his prayer day, Sunday, as an official day of rest and prayer for the entire empire. By enforcing this one edict, the Church became a major force in everyone's daily lives.
One of history's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace. The state must make war, because without war it would have to drop its power politics and renege on its mission to seek advantage over other nations, enhancing itself at the expense of others. And so a religion that is in the service of a state is a religion that not
only accepts war but prays for victory. From Constantine to the Crusaders to the contemporary American Christian right, people who call themselves Christians have betrayed the teachings of Jesus while using His name in the pursuit of political power. But this is not an exclusively Christian phenomenon. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism—all the great religions have been betrayed in the hands of people seeking political power and have been defiled and disgraced in the hands of nation-states.
Christianity began to change immediately upon the warm embrace of Constantine's empire. The year after Christianity became a legal religion, a Church synod at Arles ruled that conscientious objection would only be acceptable in time of war. Any Christian who refused military service in peacetime was to be excommunicated from the Church. Significantly, during this period, in
A.D.
326, the empress Helena announced that buried deep in the hillside at Calvary she had discovered the “True Cross,” the gruesome implement of torture used to kill Jesus, supposedly made of wood from the Garden of Eden. And this bloodstained implement of violence, the image of which had been woven into banners and painted on shields at the Milvian Bridge, now became the official symbol of the Church.
A permanent split developed between the impassioned followers of Jesus and the official Church, which, having a pro-state bias, compromised on principles with legalistic arguments to allow states to continue functioning the way they always had. The assumption was that this was the only way a state could operate.
Some Christians continued to refuse military service. In 336 another son of a soldier suddenly put down his arms before a battle and refused to fight. The young man, Martin, had served in the military for two years after his conversion to Christianity. One day Martin said, “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight.” He was accused of cowardice, to which he responded by offering to go unarmed in front of the troops onto the battlefield. The emperor decided a fitting end to Martin would be to take him up on his offer, but before this could happen peace was negotiated with the Gauls.
The battle never took place, leaving Martin to die a natural death sixty-one years later at the age of eighty-one.
But others refused service, too, including Martin's friend Victricius. The Church addressed this Christian urge toward conscientious objection later in the century, declaring that a Christian who had shed blood was not eligible for communion for three years. Thus did the Church acknowledge an objection to warfare, but not an insurmountable one. Then in the fifth century an Algerian bishop, Augustine of Hippo, wrote the enduring apologia for murder on the battlefield, the concept of “just war.” Augustine, considered one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, declared that the validity of war was a question of inner motive. If a pious man believed in a just cause and truly loved his enemies, it was permissible to go to war and to kill the enemies he loved because he was doing it in a high-minded way.
The Catholic Church turned Maximilianus into Saint Maximilian of Tebessa. Jesus Christ, whose teachings had been dismantled by everyone from Constantine to Augustine, was much more than a saint; Christians declared him a deity, the son of God. Martin, who refused to go into battle against the Gauls, is now Saint Martin of Tours. Martin did not really qualify for sainthood, since, according to the original rules of the Catholic Church, one of the requirements was martyrdom. Martin would have been a fine saint if it weren't for the last-minute peace with the Gauls. He would have marched unarmed across the field, been cut down and chopped up for sainthood. The later Church, not the one Martin knew, needed martyrs, because extolling martyrdom is a way of promoting warfare—the glory of being slaughtered. Needing Martin safely as a saint on their side and not as an unclaimed rebel conscientious objector, the Church turned Martin of Tours into the first unmartyred Catholic saint.
Saint Martin has become a kind of military figure, usually portrayed in armor. The U.S. Army Quartermasters Corps awards a medal named after him, “The military order of Saint Martin.” Saint
Martin is supposed to have died on November 11, 397. Historians say that the day is uncertain, but the date has taken on absolute certainty as the Feast of Saint Martin, because it coincides with the date of the armistice ending World War I. It is difficult to know what to do with rebels, but saints have a thousand uses.