The War and the Churches

by Joseph McCabe

Now this was plainly impossible in the early centuries of the present era, and it is therefore foolish to ask why Pagan moralists did not do what we expect Christian moralists to have done. I have already mentioned, and have fully described elsewhere, how humanitarian sentiments were generally diffused throughout the old Græco-Roman world. There is not a phrase of the New Testament which has not a parallel among the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The great fusion of peoples in the Roman Empire begot a feeling of brotherhood, and, by a natural reaction on years of vice and violence, there was a considerable growth of lofty and tender, and often impracticable, sentiments. Moralists urged men to avoid anger, to bear blows with dignity, to greet all men as brothers, even to love their enemies. Plato and Epictetus and Plutarch and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius urged these maxims as forcibly as Christ did. The Stoic religion or philosophy, which guided Emperors and lawyers, and had a very wide influence in the Roman world, was intensely and quite modernly humanitarian. Its principal exponents condemned slavery and promoted a remarkable spread of philanthropy.

It was, however, not possible for the Stoics to condemn war. Some of the more ardent and less practical humanitarians of the time did this, but no alert Roman citizen could advocate the abolition of the legions. The Empire was completely surrounded by barbarians who would rush in and trample on its civilisation the moment the fence of spears was removed. From the turreted walls in the north of England, where men watched the Picts and Scots, to the deserts of Mesopotamia—from the banks of the Danube and Rhine to the spurs of the Atlas—it was essential to maintain those bronzed legions who guarded the civilised provinces from marauders. With those outlying barbarians no treaty was possible or sacred; no legal tribunal would have protected those frontiers from the men who looked covetously on the fertile fields and comfortable cities of the Roman provinces. From the first to the fourth century Rome fought, not for its expansion, but for its preservation against these increasing enemies; and it was the final intensification of the pressure in the Danube region by the arrival of enormous hordes of barbarians from Asia which precipitated the final catastrophe. Paganism had never the slightest opportunity to abandon the military system, and only those who are totally unacquainted with Roman history can wonder why it did not make the attempt. It would have been a crime to abandon the civilised provinces to barbarism.

This was the essential position of the Roman Empire: the civil wars of the fourth century, by which its military system was abused, need not be considered here. And the student of history must recognise with equal candour that the new Christianity, which succeeded Paganism in the fourth and fifth centuries, was equally powerless to abolish warfare. What we may justly blame is that the triumphant Christianity of the fourth century did not merely sanction the use of arms in defence of civilisation; it employed them in its own interest. The earlier Christians had exasperated the Romans by refusing to bear arms in the service of the Empire, plain as the need was. To a slight extent this was due to an aversion from the shedding of blood; for the most part military service was refused because it was saturated with Pagan rites. When the Empire became Christian, this objection was removed, and the Christians freely entered the army. Unhappily, the Christian body deteriorated with the new prosperity and base instincts were indulged. It is an undoubted historical fact, recorded by St. Jerome himself, that the election of Pope Damasus, his friend and benefactor, was accompanied by bloody and fatal riots. From undoubted historical sources we know that the Christian mob compelled the Prefect of Rome to fly from the city, and there is very serious evidence (in a document written by two Roman priests) that Damasus employed the swords and staves of his supporters to secure his position. Damasus and subsequent Popes then obtained or sanctioned the use of the Roman soldiers for the suppression of heresy and schism and Paganism, and Christianity was installed by violence throughout the Empire. In the Eastern Roman Empire things were even worse. Violence became the customary device in the seething religious quarrels of the time, and, literally, tens of thousands lost their lives. The Byzantine or Greek Christianity entered upon a record of crime and violence which disgraced it for many centuries.

This development did not augur well for the application of Christian principles to warfare. We may, however, observe at once that for many centuries the Roman Church had not the slightest chance of establishing peace in Europe. The destruction of the Roman Empire and disbanding of its armies made an entirely new situation in Italy. The Popes were, for the most part, good men, but they did not dream at that time of controlling the counsels of kings and dictating affairs of State. Even the story of Pope Leo the Great overawing the King of the Huns, Attila, and turning his army away from Italy, is a mere legend of medieval writers, and is at variance with the nearer authorities. The northern tribes themselves were to a great extent, and for some centuries, of the Arian faith, and took no advice from Rome. In a word, it would be stupid to expect Christian leaders of the early Middle Ages to press the cause of peace. The northern peoples, who would in time form the nations of Europe, were essentially violent and warlike, and would have recognised no pacific counsels in that imperfect stage of their religious development.

Where the historian may and must censure the Church is in its adoption of militarism for its own purposes. Pope Gregory the Great found Italy in a chaotic and pitiful condition, and no doubt he acted, on the whole, rightly in organising its military defence. The more serious circumstance was that he began to receive immense estates, as gifts or legacies, in all parts of Italy as the property of the Roman Church, and from that time either a Papal army or the employment of the army of some friendly monarch was necessary in order to protect these estates. With the confirmation and consolidation of these estates into a kingdom under Charlemagne in the ninth century the Papacy completed its moral aberration. Most of the Popes were still men of good character, and they no doubt persuaded themselves that, since the income of these estates was needed for the fulfilment of their spiritual task, it was proper to defend them by the sword. But casuistry of this kind has never prospered indefinitely, and few historians will doubt that this temporal development led directly to that degradation of the Papacy which rendered it unfit to exercise moral influence on Europe. The Papacy became a princedom to attract the covetous and the ambitious, and the line of Popes sank so low by the tenth century that the grossest characters were able to occupy the chair of Peter at a time when the nations of Europe were sufficiently advanced to be susceptible of a sincere moral influence. The record of the Papacy, from the ninth century to the nineteenth, contains on almost every page a bloody struggle for the temporal power. The most religious and most eminent of the Popes, such as Gregory VII and Innocent III, were the most prompt to set in motion the machinery of war in defence of their territories or in punishment of rebels against their authority. Not one of them was in a position to bid kings disband their armies, or ever dreamed of enjoining them to do more than observe a few days' truce or keep their swords from each other in order to save them for the common enemy of Christendom.

It would be useless to speculate about the date when the new nations of Europe had become sufficiently civilised to hear a gospel of peace. The idea of superseding the military system of Europe by a juridical system occurred to no Christian leader, and therefore we need not consider what prospect it might have had of realisation. The Christian gospel of meekness had become a mockery: even the great abbeys, in which the gentler and more religious were supposed to be immured, had their troops, and abbots and bishops, and very often Papal Legates, appeared at the head of armies. Two Popes, John X and Julius II, marched themselves at the head of their troops. Cardinals had their suites of swordsmen, and the castles of the Roman aristocracy were at times strong fortifications from which war of the most ferocious and unscrupulous character was waged. Christendom was steeped in violence; only a gentle saint or bishop here and there caught a futile vision of a world of peace. Every man was armed against possible trouble with his neighbour; every noble had his retainers and kept them well exercised; every prince was free, as far as the spiritual authorities were concerned, to covet and bloodily exact the lands of his neighbour. The noble, of either sex, found supreme delight in jousts which the modern sentiment finds as inhuman as a sordid quarrel of Apaches over a mistress; the peasants found a corresponding pleasure in the play of quarter-staves or the combats of dogs and cocks.

It is, as I said, little use to speculate about the chances of a gospel of humanity in such a world. The overwhelming majority of priests and prelates made no effort whatever to restrain the prevailing violence. The elementary duty of any profound moral agency was to protest without ceasing, even if the protest was unavailing. It is not at all clear that it would have been unavailing. The power of the Popes was beyond that of any other hierarchy known to history, and at least the moral education of Europe would have proceeded less slowly, and war would have been abolished centuries ago, if there had been any serious, collective, and authoritative enforcement of Christian principles. There was not, and to this silence of the clergy during those long ages of their power we owe the maintenance in Europe to-day of the regime of violence. They were so far from enjoying moral inspiration in this respect that they were amongst the first to bless the banners and swell the coffers of an aggressive monarch, and they gave the military system a final consecration by employing it repeatedly in the interests of the Church.

All that one can plead in mitigation of this deep historical censure of the medieval Church is that the frontiers of Christendom were for centuries threatened by the Turk and the Saracen. The old need of protecting civilisation by arms had almost disappeared. Few and feeble peoples remained outside the range of Christian civilisation after the tenth century. Armies were maintained only in the interest of criminal ambition or for the settlement of disputes which ought to have been submitted to judges. The menace of the Turk, with his hostile religion, was, of course, a just ground for armaments, but a few nations generally bore the whole brunt of his onset. Whatever religious feeling may make of the great Crusades, which drew to the east armies from all parts of Europe, secular history must dismiss them as appalling blunders. The few advantages they brought to European culture cannot seriously be weighed against the terrible sacrifice of lives and the even more terrible consecration of militarism. In a word, the menace of the Turk could have been met admirably by such an arrangement as we are advocating in Europe to-day: the maintenance of a small force by each nation for common action, under the direction of a supreme legal tribunal, against nations which would not obey the common law of peace. But we need not seriously discuss the influence of the Turk on the system. The last phases of the struggle, when the selfish nations and the ambitious Papacy spent their time in idle mutual recrimination and left the Hungarians and Poles to do all the work, justify us in dismissing that element. Kings and republics maintained armies for purely selfish purposes, for brutal aggression and defence against aggressors; and not a prelate in Europe had any moral repugnance to the system, or ventured to condemn it, especially as the Church used the same agency in defence of its own temporal interests.

With the development of the Papal power and the advance of the peoples of Europe the opportunity of peace became greater, but the spiritual authority pledged itself more and more deeply to the military system. The Popes aspired—as Gregory VII and Innocent III repeatedly state—to control the temporal as well as the spiritual affairs of Europe, to transfer crowns when they thought fit, to direct invasions and military expeditions against any who questioned their authority. Hildebrand boasts (Ep. vii, 23) that, when William of Normandy sent envoys to ask Pope Alexander to sanction his unscrupulous invasion of England, and the Papal Court was itself too sensible of the enormity to give its sanction, he (Hildebrand) overbore the wavering Pope and forced him to bless the enterprise; and, when he had in his turn mounted the Papal throne, he vehemently claimed that his action had made England a fief for ever of the Holy See! Gregory VII and Innocent III are the two greatest and most sincerely religions of the medieval Popes, and they carried the power of the Papacy to a height which excites the amazement of the modern historian. But they were at the same time the most militant of the Popes, and on the least provocation they set armies—even the most barbaric and ferocious troops in Europe—in motion to carry out their imperial commands. They arrogated the power of deposing monarchs, and thus encouraged civil war and the ambitions of neighbouring kings.

The rise of heresy and of protests against the corruption of the Papacy was another very grave pretext of the Church to support the military system. In the days of Gregory VII a body of Puritans known as the Patareni spread over the north of Italy, and Rome encouraged a few soldiers to lead armed mobs against them and drown their idealism in blood. Innocent III has a more terrible stigma on his record. The Albigensians, an early type of Protestants, were spreading in the south of France, and the Pope sanctioned a "crusade"—an expedition, largely, of looters and cut-throats—against them from all parts of France. The appalling deceit practised by the Papal Legate and sanctioned by the Pope, the ferocity of the campaign, and the desolation brought on one of the happiest and most prosperous provinces of France, may be read in any history of the thirteenth century. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children were savagely put to death. And this was only the beginning of the Papal war on heresy, which from the thirteenth century never ceased to spring up in Europe until it won its right of citizenship in the Reformation. Even more vehemently was war urged against the Moors, then the most civilised people in Europe.