Military Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

One single reflection will suffice to display the utter shallowness of this reasoning, which was after all only borrowed from St. Augustine. For if Biblical texts are a justification of war, they are clearly a justification of slavery; whilst, on the other hand, the general spirit of the Christian religion, to say nothing of several positive passages, is at least equally opposed to one custom as to the other. If then the abolition of slavery is one of the services for which Christianity as an influence in history claims a large share of the credit, its failure to abolish the other custom must in fairness be set against it; for it were easier to defend slave-holding out of the language of the New Testament than to defend military service, far more being actually said there to inculcate the duty of peace than to inculcate the principles of social equality: and the same may be said of the writings of the Fathers.

The different attitude of the Church towards these two customs in modern times, her vehement condemnation of the one, and her tolerance or encouragement of the other, appears all the more surprising when we remember that in the early centuries of our era her attitude was exactly the reverse, and that, whilst slavery was permitted, the unlawfulness of war was denounced with no uncertain or wavering voice.

When Tertullian wrote his treatise ‘De Corona’ (201) concerning the right of Christian soldiers to wear laurel crowns, he used words on this subject which, even if at variance with some of his statements made in his ‘Apology’ thirty years earlier, may be taken to express his maturer judgment. ‘Shall the son of peace’ (that is, a Christian), he asks, ‘act in battle when it will not befit him even to go to law? Shall he administer bonds and imprisonments and tortures and punishments who may not avenge even his own injuries?... The very transference of his enrolment from the army of light to that of darkness is sin.’ And again: ‘What if the soldiers did go to John and receive the rule of their service, and what if the Centurion did believe; the Lord by his disarming of Peter disarmed every soldier from that time forward.’ Tertullian made an exception in favour of soldiers whose conversion was subsequent to their enrolment (as was implied in discussing their duty with regard to the laurel-wreath), though insisting even in their case that they ought either to leave the service, as many did, or to refuse participation in its acts, which were inconsistent with their Christian profession. So that at that time Christian opinion was clearly not only averse to a military life being entered upon after baptism (of which there are no instances on record), but in favour of its being forsaken, if the enrolment preceded the baptism. The Christians who served in the armies of Rome were not men who were converts or Christians at the time of enrolling, but men who remained with the colours after their conversion. If it is certain that some Christians remained in the army, it appears equally certain that no Christian at that time thought of entering it.

This seems the best solution of the much-debated question, to what extent Christians served at all in the early centuries. Irenæus speaks of the Christians in the second century as not knowing how to fight, and Justin Martyr, his contemporary, considered Isaiah’s prophecy about the swords being turned into ploughshares as in part fulfilled, because his co-religionists, who in times past had killed one another, did not then know how to fight even with their enemies. The charge made by Celsus against the Christians, that they refused to bear arms even in case of necessity, was admitted by Origen, but justified on the ground of the unlawfulness of war. ‘We indeed,’ he says, ‘fight in a special way on the king’s behalf, but we do not go on campaigns with him, even should he press us to do so; we do battle on his behalf as a peculiar army of piety, prevailing by our prayers to God for him.’ And again: ‘We no longer take up the sword against people, nor learn to make war any more, having become through Jesus, who is our general, sons of peace.’ Nothing could be clearer nor more conclusive than this language; and the same attitude towards war was expressed or implied by the following Fathers in chronological order: Justin Martyr, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, Archelaus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Cyril. Eusebius says that many Christians in the third century laid aside the military life rather than abjure their religion. Of 10,050 pagan inscriptions that have been collected, 545 were found to belong to pagan soldiers, while of 4,734 Christian inscriptions of the same period, only 27 were those of soldiers; from which it seems rather absurd to infer, as a French writer has inferred, not that there was a great disproportion of Christian to pagan soldiers in the imperial armies, but that most Christian soldiers being soldiers of Christ did not like to have it recorded on their epitaphs that they had been in the service of any man.[252]

On the other hand, there were certainly always some Christians who remained in the ranks after their conversion, in spite of the military oath in the names of the pagan deities and the quasi-worship of the standards which constituted some part of the early Christian antipathy to war. This is implied in the remarks of Tertullian, and stands in no need of the support of such legends as the Thundering Legion of Christians, whose prayers obtained rain, or of the Theban legion of 6,000 Christians martyred under Maximian. It was left as a matter of individual conscience. In the story of the martyr Maximilian, when Dion the proconsul reminded him that there were Christian soldiers among the life-guards of the Emperors, the former replied, ‘They know what is best for them to do; but I am a Christian and cannot fight.’ Marcellus, the converted centurion, threw down his belt at the head of his legion, and suffered death rather than continue in the service; and the annals of the early Church abound in similar martyrdoms. Nor can there be much doubt but that a love of peace and dislike of bloodshed were the principal causes of this early Christian attitude towards the military profession, and that the idolatry and other pagan rites connected with it only acted as minor and secondary deterrents. Thus, in the Greek Church St. Basil would have excluded from communion for three years any one who had shed an enemy’s blood; and a similar feeling explains Theodosius’ refusal to partake of the Eucharist after his great victory over Eugenius. The canons of the Church excluded from ordination all who had served in an army after baptism; and in the fifth century Innocent I. blamed the Spanish churches for their laxity in admitting such persons into holy orders.[253]

The anti-military tendency of opinion in the early period of Christianity appears therefore indisputable, and Tertullian would probably have smiled at the prophet who should have predicted that Christians would have ceased to keep slaves long before they should have ceased to commit murder and robbery under the fiction of hostilities. But it proves the strength of the original impetus, that Ulphilas, the first apostle to the Goths, should purposely, in his translation of the Scriptures, have omitted the Books of Kings, as too stimulative of a love of war.

How utterly in this matter Christianity came to forsake its earlier ideal is known to all. This resulted partly from the frequent use of the sword for the purpose of conversion, and partly from the rise of the Mahometan power, which made wars with the infidel appear in the light of acts of faith, and changed the whole of Christendom into a kind of vast standing military order. But it resulted still more from that compromise effected in the fourth century between paganism and the new religion, in which the former retained more than it lost, and the latter gave less than it received. Considering that the Druid priests of ancient Gaul or Britain, like those of pagan Rome, were exempt from military service,[254] and often, according to Strabo, had such influence as to part combatants on the point of an engagement, nothing is more remarkable than the extent to which the Christian clergy, bishops, and abbots came to lead armies and fight in battle, in spite of canons and councils of the Church, at a time when that Church’s power was greater, and its influence wider, than it has ever been since. Historians have scarcely given due prominence to this fact, which covers a period of at least a thousand years; for Gregory of Tours mentions two bishops of the sixth century who had killed many enemies with their own hands, whilst Erasmus, in the sixteenth, complains of bishops taking more pride in leading three or four hundred dragoons, with swords and guns, than in a following of deacons and divinity students, and asks, with just sarcasm, why the trumpet and fife should sound sweeter in their ears than the singing of psalms or the words of the Bible.

In the fourteenth century, when war and chivalry were at their height, occurred a remarkable protest against this state of things from Wycliffe, who, in this, as in other respects, anticipated the Reformation: ‘Friars now say that bishops can fight best of all men, and that it falleth most properly to them, since they are lords of all this world. They say, Christ bade his disciples sell their coats, and buy them swords; but whereto, if not to fight? Thus friars make a great array, and stir up men to fight. But Christ taught not his apostles to fight with a sword of iron, but with the sword of God’s word, which standeth in meekness of heart and in the prudence of man’s tongue.... If manslaying in others be odious to God, much more in priests who should be vicars of Christ.’ And Wycliffe proceeds not only to protest against this, but to advocate the general cause of peace on earth, on grounds which he is aware that men of the world will scorn and reject as fatal to the existence of kingdoms.[255]

It was no occasional, but an inveterate practice, and, apparently, common in the world, long before the system of feudalism gave it some justification by the connection of military service with the enjoyment of lands. Yet it has now so completely disappeared that—as a proof of the possible change of thought which may ultimately render a Christian soldier as great an anomaly as a fighting bishop—it is worth recalling from history some instances of so curious a custom. ‘The bishops themselves—not all, but many’—says a writer of King Stephen’s reign, ‘bound in iron, and completely furnished with arms, were accustomed to mount war-horses with the perverters of their country, to share in their spoil; to bind and torture the knights whom they took in the chance of war, or whom they met full of money.’[256] It was at the battle of Bouvines (1214) that the famous Bishop of Beauvais fought with a club instead of a sword, out of respect for the rule of the canon which forbade an ecclesiastic to shed blood. Matthew Paris tells the story how Richard I. took the said bishop prisoner, and when the Pope begged for his release as being his own son and a son of the Church, sent to Innocent III. the episcopal coat of mail, with the inquiry whether he recognised it as that of his son or of a son of the Church; to which the Pope had the wit to reply that he could not recognise it as belonging to either.[257] The story also bears repeating of the impatient knight who, sharing the command of a division at the battle of Falkirk with the Bishop of Durham, cried out to his slower colleague, before closing with the Scots, ‘It is not for you to teach us war; to your Mass, bishop!’ and therewith rushed with his followers into the fray (1298).[258]

It is, however, needless to multiply instances, which, if Du Cange may be credited, became more common during the devastation of France by the Danes in the ninth century, when all the military aid that was available became a matter of national existence. That event rendered Charlemagne’s capitulary a dead letter, by which that monarch had forbidden any ecclesiastic to march against an enemy, save two or three bishops to bless the army or reconcile the combatants, and a few priests to give absolution and celebrate the Mass.[259] It appears that this law was made in response to an exhortation by Pope Adrian II., similar to one addressed in the previous century by Pope Zachary to Charlemagne’s ancestor, King Pepin. But though military service and the tenure of ecclesiastical benefices became more common from the time of the Danish irruptions, instances are recorded of abbots and archbishops who chose rather to surrender their temporalities than to take part in active service; and for many centuries the whole question seems to have rested on a most uncertain footing, law and custom demanding as a duty that which public and ecclesiastical opinion condoned, but which the Church herself condemned.