I. The Church consecrates the Martial Ideal of Knighthood

Introductory

From the third to the ninth century the ideal of asceticism absorbed a great part of the moral enthusiasm of Christendom. During the later part of this period, however, as we have noted, there was growing up alongside the ascetic ideal another of a very different character—the martial ideal of knighthood. In the present chapter we shall first make a brief survey of the various causes that gave this new trend to the moral feelings and convictions of the age, and then shall glance at some of the more important historical outcomes of the vast enthusiasm evoked by this new ideal of character.

The ideal of knighthood, a product in the main of feudalism, grew up outside the Church, and only later was recognized by ecclesiastical authority and approved as compatible with the ethical spirit of Christianity. Had not the ideal been thus approved by ecclesiastical authority, and advantage taken of the enthusiasm it evoked to promote through it the cause of the Church, it would never have become the significant force it did in European history. Therefore we must first inquire what were the influences that engendered a military spirit in the Church and led it to approve the martial ideal of the knight and give the consecration of religion to the institution of chivalry which was its embodiment.

The genius of Christianity opposed to the war spirit

If at the advent of Christianity one reflecting upon the genius of the new religion and the teachings of its Founder had ventured to forecast the influence of the new faith upon the different departments of morality, he would almost certainly have predicted that this influence would be felt most decisively upon the ethics of war. The attitude assumed by the early Christians toward the military life would have justified this forecast, for Christianity brought into the world the new principle of nonresistance.[672] This teaching made the primitive Christian community almost a Quaker body; but barely three centuries had passed before this religion which had entered the world as a gospel of peace and good will had become a martial creed and its emblem been made a battle standard.

Causes which fostered the war spirit in the Church: (a) the heritage of the war ethics of the ancient world of culture

The causes that produced this amazing transformation in the Christian Church were various and so interrelated as to make it difficult to determine just what influence was exercised by each. Yet it is possible to note the character of the different agencies at work, and to form at least some general idea of the way in which the transformation was wrought.

First, there was the inheritance from the past. War had always been one of the leading occupations of men. It had scarcely ever occurred to any one to question its legitimacy. It was looked upon as a part of the constitution of things. The ideas, feelings, habits, engendered by its practice through uncounted millenniums of history had become ingrained in every tissue and fiber of man’s being. Set in the midst of the world, the Church yielded to the influence of this baneful pagan heritage. It incorporated with its own moral code, wholly alien to the essential spirit of Christianity as these elements were, the war ethics of the pre-Christian world, and thus made this pagan international morality a permanent part of Christian ethics.[673] It will be instructive for us to follow somewhat closely this reaction upon the ethics of the Church, first of the war code of the civilized world of the south, and then later of the war spirit of the barbarian world of the north.

The early Fathers of the Church in general condemned the military service as incompatible with the Christian life.[674] Not till the second century of the Empire do we find any record of Christian soldiers serving in the Roman armies. By this time the early rule of the Church forbidding a member to serve in the army had become relaxed; but members of the Christian body who entered the Roman legions were required to undertake a prescribed penance and to seek absolution before partaking of the Eucharist. By the time of Diocletian Christians appear to have entered with little or no scruple upon the military life.[675] A significant waymark of this gradual transformation is the great victory won by the Emperor Constantine over his rival Maxentius at the battle of Milvian Bridge, 312 A.D. Upon that field the soldiers of Constantine fought beneath the Labarum, a standard which bore as an emblem the Christian cross. The fortunate issue of the battle for Constantine seems to have greatly confirmed the feeling in the Christian community as to the legitimacy of war. The Church conformed more and more positively its teachings and discipline to the requirements of the military service. Saints Augustine (354–430 A.D.) and Ambrose (340–397 A.D.), in opposition to most of the earlier Fathers, were open apologists and defenders of war and of the military life.

Thus during the very period when the Church was putting under its ban the cruel and sanguinary amusements of the Romans by the suppression of the gladiatorial games,[676] and thus lifting domestic morality to a new and higher plane, through a strange inconsistency it was first condoning and then finally consecrating the international pagan war system of which these sports were only a mild imitation.

(b) The war spirit of the German race

After the fifth century the influence upon the ethics of the Church of the war system of the civilized world of the south was reënforced by the martial spirit of the barbarian world of the north. That world was now, largely through the missions of the monastic Church, being rapidly brought within the pale of Christianity. But all these northern peoples were the very incarnation of the war spirit. Their favorite deities were gods who delighted in battle and bloodshed. Fighters these men were, and fighters they remained even after conversion and baptism. The mingling of moralities which followed their conversion is well illustrated by the passionate outburst of the Frankish chieftain Clovis as he listened to the story of the Crucifixion: “Oh,” he exclaimed, “if only I could have been there with my trusty warriors!” The soul of Clovis lived on in his race. Four centuries later these Frankish warriors, as knight crusaders, were on the spot of the Crucifixion, redeeming with lance and sword the tomb of the slain Christ from the hands of infidels. It was this ineradicable war spirit of the northern barbarians to which was due, perhaps more than to any other agency, the infusion of a military spirit into that church of which the Founder was the Prince of Peace.

Among the customs of the early Germans there was one which had such a positive influence upon the evolution we are tracing in Church morality that we must here make special note of it. This was the ordeal by fire, by water, or by wager of battle to determine the guilt or innocence of an accused person. The prominent place held by this institution among savage or semicivilized peoples is familiar to the student of primitive society. Now the German folk brought with them this institution, and with it the belief which made the ordeal, and particularly the ordeal by combat, a solemn judicial matter in which God rendered decision and gave victory to the one whose cause was just. This barbarian conception of the wager of battle between individuals became incorporated with the common body of Christian ideas and beliefs. The same manner of thinking was perforce applied to war. A conflict between great armies was conceived as a wager of battle in which God gave victory to the right. Thus was war consecrated and made an agency whereby God executes judgment among the nations.

This interpretation of the nature and mission of war was reënforced by a like unfortunate interpretation of the records of the Old Testament. The good bishop Ulfilas was right when, in translating the Hebrew Bible into the Gothic tongue, he omitted the war chronicles through fear that these records of wars and massacres would fan into too fierce a flame the martial zeal of his Gothic neophytes. To these terrible chronicles, which represent God as commanding the Israelites to wage war against his enemies, and even as ordering the most horrid atrocities upon war captives, is due in large part the idea so dominant even to-day among Christian nations that God is a God of War, and that through the ordeal of battle he gives judgment on the earth.[677]

(d) The armed propaganda of Islam

The transformation taking place in the ethical standard of the Church under the various influences we have named was hastened and completed by the reaction upon Christian ethics of the martial ethics of Islam.[678] This new influence began to be exerted in the seventh century. By infection the crusading spirit of the Mohammedan zealots was communicated to the Christian Church. Toward the close of the eleventh century the spiritual head of Christendom, Pope Urban II, summoned the Christian nations of Europe to arms for the recovery of the Holy Sepulcher from the hands of the unbelievers.

Feudalism by this time had flowered in chivalry. The Christian lands were filled with brave young knights, especially knights of Norman descent, aflame with martial enthusiasm and eager for warlike adventure. It was the ancestors of these very men, instinct with the military spirit, that Rome had once enlisted in her legions to fight the battles of the Empire; it is the children of those legionaries that the Christian Church now summons in the name of Christ to her standard to fight the battles of the Cross.

The transformation of that Church was now complete. The age of the Crusades had opened. Christ and Mars were co-sovereigns in Christian Europe. The teachings of the Prince of Peace and the war spirit of the civilization of antiquity and of the German barbarians were reconciled.[679] As Lecky finely portrays it, “At the hour of sunset when the Christian soldier knelt down to pray before his cross, that cross was the handle of his sword.”[680]