Wandering Stars
Wandering Stars
The Epistle of Jude is an earnest warning against false teachers with a strong denunciation of them. In Jud 1:12-13 the writer uses one metaphor after another to depict the falseness, sensuality, and apostasy of these men. The list ends with wandering stars, for whom the blackness of darkness hath been reserved for ever. are words used to distinguish the planets from the fixed stars; but the regular motion of the planets would supply no fit comparison for the authors idea, and we must rather see a reference to meteors or shooting stars, whose sudden and terrifying appearance, rapid transit, and speedy disappearance into a darkness rendered more intense by contrast would be a fitting picture of the short-lived fame and hurtful influence of the false teachers, and a prediction of that abyss of darkness into which they were hurrying.
Morley Stevenson.
WAR
Of the three great Asiatic religions which have poured into Europe, the youngest has never found any difficulty about war; to Islam war is a power, not a problem. The Qurn sanctions and enjoins warfare upon non-Muslims as part of the propaganda of the mission. To fight in Gods way, i.e. on a, jihad, or holy war, is a pious duty, and the Muhammadan who falls in battle against the infidels is ipso facto a martyr.
Say, Fighting therein [in the sacred month] is a great sin; but turning folks off Gods way, and misbelief in Him and in the Sacred Mosque, and turning His people out therefrom, is a greater in Gods sight; and sedition is a greater sin than slaughter (Quran, tr. E. H. Palmer, ii. 213); What ails you that ye do not fight in Gods way, and for the weak men and women and children? (iv. 76); O thou prophet! urge on the believers to fight. If there be of you twenty patient men, they shall conquer two hundred (viii. 67); When ye meet those who and bind fast the bonds! (xlvii. 4); O thou prophet! fight strenuously against the misbelievers and hypocrites and be stern towards them; for their resort is hell, and an evil journey shall it be (lxvi. 9).
In practice toleration of infidels has been not uncommon, partly owing to political considerations, but in theory the curse and smite policy is put forward.
Muhammad held up Joshua for the admiration of his followers as a model fighting captain of the Lord, and in ancient Israel also war was sanctioned by religion. Jahweh was a man of war, and Israel fought their way from the Red Sea into freedom. He teacheth my hands to war (Psa 18:34) is the proud, grateful word of David, or of the community voicing the Davidic ideal. But the altered political situation after the Exile had re-set the primitive and naive view of war (cf. HDB v. 635 f.). In Judaism the Semitic custom which determined the relation of the people to war as tolerated, or even under certain circumstances enjoined, by the principles of their faith, as an enterprise for which warriors were consecrated before they fought at all, had undergone a change at the period when Christianity arose in Palestine. Even earlier, in a battle-song like the 68th psalm, militarism is abjured: Scatter thou the people that delight in war (Psa 68:30). Judaism, before Christianity, abhorred aggressiveness and discouraged military rapacity. The Hebrews warred in later days for the defence of their religion and country rather than for aggrandizement. But even the older conception of a theocracy under arms for the defensive, which had flashed up brilliantly in the Maccabaean wars (cf. 2Ma 15:15 f.) against a corrupt and domineering civilization, had given place to a fairly general repudiation of revolt against the Romans-a repudiation which the authorities, who were passivists, voiced for more or less prudential reasons. The Zealot and the passivist were really agreed on the general principle, but they differed on the question of expediency. The former would exercise his military rights at once, while the latter would wait for God to take the initiative (S. J. Case, Religion and War in the Graeco-Roman World, in AJTh xix. [1915] 190). Pious Jews were not agreed whether they were bound to start the rebellion which would inaugurate the armed intervention of Messiah or whether they were to wait for His orders or even whether He would not do all the fighting for them. At the same time, the working compromise at the opening of the 1st cent. a.d. covered hot ashes, which might flame up; two elements still survived in Jewish religion-the intractable passion for national freedom and supremacy which was represented in an extreme form by the Zealots, and the strain of militant messianism which glowed in apocalyptic circles.* The problem of Christianitys relation to war, during the primitive period, is partly determined by these two factors in the contemporary situation. We must therefore begin by taking account of their bearing upon the ideas and practice of the early Church.
1. The teaching and practice of Jesus in relation to war.-The religion of Jesus was never intended to spread by force of arms. So much is clear from the teaching of the Gospels. He never aimed at heading a Galilaean revolt against the Roman power, and in fact. He explicitly discouraged all attempts to exploit His personality and influence for nationalistic ends. He deliberately disappointed such hopes. It is a fair verdict that some sections of His teaching cannot be understood (cf. H. M. Hughes, in ExpT xxvii. [1915-16] 151 f.; K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, London, 1911, p. 392 f., The Stewardship of Faith, London, 1915, p. 30 f.) apart from the theories of the Zealots or the dagger-men of the age (cf. DAC i. 103; H. B. Sharman, The Teaching of Jesus about the Future, Chicago, 1909, p. 113 f.), whom He implicitly repudiates. He is not an Essene, opposed to war, but He is not a Zealot. One of His disciples, Simon, had originally belonged to that party, but Jesus evidently had offered him a nobler outlet for his enthusiasm. The mere fact that He stood aloof from such aspirations must have seemed intensely unpatriotic, even to the Pharisees. Josephus is speaking more as a pro-Roman than as a Pharisee when he argues that, as the Jews have never succeeded in war, they are evidently meant by God to be pacifists (see below), but the Pharisaic party practically acted on a policy of inaction. They opposed the Zealots. Only, they opposed Jesus even more.
At great political crises he who opposes the patriots is not so likely to be considered their worst foe, as he who ignores them. It was not that our Lord preached submission to Rome, though no doubt the decision as to the tribute money was capable of being represented in that light-it was that He raised a spirit which moved in another plane than that of resistance or submission to imperial power. He created a weapon (it would seem) and withheld it from the service of the State. It will be found, in genera], that no other treason is felt so deadly as this. To use power against the State is penal;-to hold power, and not use it for the State, is, to the zealot for the State, far more hateful. Christ would neither join the alliance with worldly power, nor the fanaticism of revolt against worldly power.
And, as Jesus declined to be drawn into any revolutionary movement of His own nation, as He withdrew (Joh 6:15) when an enthusiastic crowd of Galilaeans would have forcibly made a king of Him, as He seems to have shown no sympathy with the Galilaeans whom Pilate had ruthlessly murdered (Luk 13:1-2), so He withheld His own party from resenting by force any attack or outrage on themselves. When the Jew would retaliate, if he could, and take up arms against any foreign power which violated his religious scruples or profaned his sacred possessions, the disciple of Jesus was to suffer patiently and passively. Neither hot word nor quick blow was to defend His faith. Like the great prototype of their Leader, who was led as a lamb to the slaughter, His followers were to let their throats be cut, unresisting sheep as they were, butchered by the cruel knife (cf. Rom 8:35-36).
In the apocalyptic address of the Synoptic tradition the disciples in Judaea are warned that they will hear of wars and rumours of wars (Mk, Mt; of wars and disturbances, Lk); but they are not to be scared. Why? Because this does not mean the end of all things yet. Mark and Matthew regard these terrors as the first stage of the end, while Luke, who omits the apocalyptic , rather suggests that they are simply prior to the end; but in either case the outlook is the same. There will be international strife as well as physical catastrophes. But Christians are never for a moment supposed to take any part in the former; it is a clash of pagan powers. In the invasion of Judaea the disciples will suffer, but they are bidden withdraw to the hills and leave Jerusalem to its fate, since the City of Peace had failed to recognize the things that belonged to her true peace. There is no active rle for them in this grim prelude of the final tragedy. It is now the period of the end, but they have no concern with the issue between Jews and Romans; it will be a miserable time, throbbing with social anarchy and the horrors of an invasion, with convulsions and delusions, but soon the Son of Man will appear to muster His non-combatant elect for safety and bliss, lifting them right out of the jarring, untoward world. It was not His design to restore the kingdom to Israel (Act 1:6). He had no faith in the nationalistic fury and programme of Judaism. He foresaw a catastrophe, and His regulations for the disciples were made in view of a crisis, not only for the Jews but for the universe.
When the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans was imminent, the local Christians did withdraw to Pella. Whether this was in consequence of the apocalyptic oracle preserved in the Synoptic tradition, or whether this oracle reflects to some extent the course of affairs, it is not easy to say. The main point of interest for us here is the interpretation of the spirit of Jesus upon which the primitive Church acted, and out of which this apocalyptic address arose. The Palestinian Christians disavowed any connexion with the national cause of Judaism. The vultures were gathering over the corpse of Jewish nationalism. Why should they linger beside it? It is possible that this policy was not adopted unanimously; the language of Mat 24:10-12 may hint at Jewish Christians who, in the excitement of the crisis, took a more popular line. The Jewish war saw at least one Essene heading the rebels, and others in the ardent ranks of the Sicarii and the Zealots (ERE v. 400). If the stress of war produced this cleavage in the ranks of the pacific Essenes, it may have had a similar effect upon the local Christians. But the majority, or at any rate the vital section, must have been those who fled to Pella and abandoned Jerusalem to its fate. That policy of abstention from the use of force in aid of Jerusalem or in defence of themselves against persecution may have been trying, but it was thoroughly consonant with the trend of the teaching of Jesus. Under no circumstances did He contemplate any active measures on the part of His disciples as patriots or as attacked persons. The position of affairs indeed ruled out a militant attitude. The eschatological outlook rendered the downfall of Jerusalem a foregone conclusion, and in this way made for quietism. Besides, His kingdom was not of this world; no Christians who had understood His instructions could dream of allying themselves with the dagger-men in Jerusalem or even with the loyalist Jews who manned the walls of the city so heroically, in the spirit, though not with the success, of their ancestors who faced pagans with the high praises of God on their lips and a two-edged sword in their hands (Psa 149:6). As for self-defence, His own word in Gethsemane (Mat 26:52-54) to the disciple who impulsively struck with a sword was sufficient: Put your sword back into its place; all who draw the sword shall die by the sword. What! do you think I cannot appeal to my Father to furnish me at this moment with over twelve legions of angels? Only, how could the scriptures be fulfilled then-the scriptures that say this must be so? He had already told the disciples that they were being sent out like sheep among wolves, defenceless against any brutal attack; He had censured the Elijah-spirit in the two disciples who were indignant at the churlish behaviour of a Samaritan village; He had bidden His followers face arrest, ill-treatment, and death itself, rather than be untrue to their confession; and the refusal of armed help for Himself was only the climax of the regulations which He had laid down for their conduct.*
These regulations were followed by the early Church. There was never any serious fear of armed rebellion on the part of Christians against the Roman power. From St. Paul onwards responsible Christian teachers inculcated submission to the legal authorities. Christians had to accept civil government as they had to accept the weather in the world of God. Towards the end of the 1st cent. the insane suspicions of Domitian led him to arrest some grandsons of Judas the brother of Jesus, on the ground that rumour connected the descendants of David with a revolutionary movement. But, when he found they were horny-handed sons of toil, simple peasants of Palestine, instead of turbulent Jews or influential agitators, and when he heard that Christs kingdom was a pious dream of the far future, he dismissed the alleged revolutionaries with contempt (Eus. HE iii. 20). Malicious cries might be raised by the Jews that these Christians were overt agitators, setting up another king, called Jesus (Act 17:7); but the conduct of the Christians disarmed suspicion as a rule. It is true that in the 2nd cent. Christianity did seem often to the authorities to be a secret, immoral, Eastern society, which might be harbouring political designs. But, whenever investigations were made, the idea of a political menace disappeared. Although the Christians were still regarded as adherents of a perverse superstitio, i.e. a religion which was not the Roman religion, they were steadily drawing away from the Jews, and this helped to clear their character, so far as the suspicion of rebellion went. Whoever were assidue tumultuantes, it was not they. The authorities did not know much about Jesus, but they knew plotters when they saw them, and Christians had little difficulty in establishing their peaceful character. To the Romans both Jews and Christians seemed obstinate creatures. Only, Jewish obstinacy would seethe into rebellion now and then; the Christians merely offered a passive resistance. When they were afterwards put to death for high treason, it was not because they rose in armed revolt. The charge of disloyalty did not rest upon their disposition to fight for themselves. Their Jesus had not come to draw the sword. What they believed about His policy is well expressed in this beautiful description from the 2nd cent. Epistle to Diognetus (7): Was He [Christ] sent, as one might suppose, to set up a sovereign rule, to make men fear and shudder? By no means. He sent Him in gentleness and meekness,* as a king might send his royal son; He sent Him as God, sent Him as a man to men, sent Him to save, to use not force but persuasion-for force is no attribute of God ( ). He sent Him to summon, not to persecute; sent Him to love, not to judge. There is a slight flavour of sentimentalism in these words, but, so far as they go, they are adequate and accurate. It is the Fourth Evangelist who says that Jesus set Himself to win the heart of the world (he that hath the bride is the bridegroom), but the truth that Jesus came to reign by other powers than those of the sword is written over all the Gospels.
It is in the Lucan writings, not only in Acts (cf. S. Buss, Roman Law and History in the NT, London, 1901, p. 322 f.) but in the third gospel as compared with Mark and Matthew, that the most numerous references to war and the army are to be met. Luke, e.g., not only omits the disarming rebuke of Jesus in Gethsemane (Mat 26:52), but (i.) preserves the tradition that John the Baptist, instead of ordering the soldiers who consulted him to leave the army, merely told them that it was their duty to abstain from what was called concussio, or the ill-treatment of civilians, i.e. from extorting money by violence and making false charges; they were also to be content with their pay (Luk 3:14). The negative part of the counsel ( ) is not quite clear. The violence may mean overbearing poor civilians, and soldiers had many opportunities of taking such unfair advantage, not only in war but in the police-duties which they discharged during a peace. If extorting money by threats is pot covered by , it is embraced by , which also could connote rough treatment, as is plain from the Passio S. Perpetuae (iii.), where the hapless martyrs are exposed not only to privations in gaol but to hard usage from their guard of soldiers ( ). The soldiers bullied the prisoners, in order to get money from them for certain privileges and slight relaxations of the prison regime. The general sense of Johns advice is therefore plain, and the point is that, if John the Baptist was not a Theudas, he was not a pacifist. Furthermore, among the special parables, or rather illustrations, of St. Lukes gospel, we find (ii.) the only military one (Luk 14:31-32) which Jesus is recorded to have spoken. It is an illustration of forethought and deliberation. What king sets out to fight against another king without first sitting down to deliberate whether with ten thousand men he can encounter the king who is attacking him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, when the other is still at a distance, he will send an embassy to do homage to him. The prudent action of Toi, King of Hamath, as told in the LXX text of 2Sa 8:9 f. (cf. H. St. John Thackeray, in JThSt xiv. [1918] 389-399), is an OT illustration, if not a source, of the parable. But this analogy is as old as Socrates. When Glaukon asked him how it was possible to enrich a State at the expense of its enemies, he replied that it was quite possible if the State first made sure that it was stronger; otherwise, it would run the risk of losing what it already possessed. Consequently, when one will consider with whom he may fight, he must find out his own States strength and the strength of his opponents, so that, if the force of his State be superior, he may counsel aggressive measures, whereas, if it be inferior to its opponents, he may advise caution (Xen. Mem. iii. 6, 8; and again in iv. 2, 29). A third item (iii.) in St. Lukes contribution to the martial aspect of the gospel-story is the detailed reference to the siege-operations of the Roman army when it invested Jerusalem in the war of a.d. 67-70 (Luk 19:39-43, a time is coming for you when your enemies will throw up ramparts round you and encircle you and besiege you on every side and raze you and your children within you to the ground, leaving not one stone upon another; also Luk 21:20, where the apocalyptic allusion of Mk. and Mt. to Dan 12:11 is replaced by the concrete and historical Jerusalem surrounded by armies). This, like the sentence in Mat 22:7 (where the Roman are agents of Gods retribution on His disobedient people, as the Assyrians had been in Isa 10:4, etc.), is a water-mark of the date of the gospels. But the outstanding item (iv.) is the puzzling bit of conversation just before Jesus and His disciples left the upper room for Gethsemane, a fragment of tradition preserved by St. Luke (Luk 22:35-38) alone. And he said to them, When I sent yon out* with neither purse nor wallet nor sandals, did you want for. anything? No, they said, for nothing (Luk 22:35). Then He said to them, But he who has a purse must take it now ( ), and the same with a wallet; and he who has no sword must sell his coat and buy one (Luk 22:36). For I tell you, this word of scripture must be fulfilled in me: he was classed among criminals. Yes, there is an end to all that refers to me ( ) (Luk 22:37). Lord, they said, here are two swords! Enough! enough! ( ), He said (Luk 22:38).
(a) The least unsatisfactory interpretation is to suppose that Jesus was speaking of the dangers that awaited the disciples in the immediate future, when His arrest and death would alter their circumstances. Formerly, they did not need to provide for themselves. Now, they must look to their livelihood and even their very existence, for neither will be secure. Take your purses and wallets with you now, and equip yourselves with swords. We can imagine Jesus uttering these words with a realistic touch of grave suggestiveness. The supreme crisis is at hand. You are going now into an enemys country, and you will need to cut your way out of the difficulties created by My death as a so-called criminal. He did not mean literally that they were to use force against force, or to defend themselves against physical attacks; His words were a proverbial and metaphorical expression for alertness in view of the critical situation ahead. But the disciples were too prosaic to catch this meaning. They evidently thought that He intended them to defend Himself and themselves against the Jews; they were armed with a couple of swords or long knives (cf. Luk 22:49), and they naively hastened to assure Him of their equipment. They pulled out the weapons. Would these do? Enough! enough! that will do! Jesus replied, with a sigh and a note of something like irony in His words. It was useless to discuss the matter any further with men who could so misunderstand Him.
This allusive interpretation (Totus hic sermo allegoricus est: quasi dicat, Vixistis adhuc in pace, commilitones, nunc vero hellum instat acerrimum, et caeteris rebus omissis de unis armis cogitandum. Quaenam autem illa sint arma, ipse, quum in horto precarctur et Petrum gladio ferientem reprehenderet, suo exemplo docere maluit, quam importune hoc loco stupidis adhuc et ad res istas non satis attentis discipulis explicare [Beza]), favoured by writers like Strauss and Keim, has been recently defended by Burkitt, in his Gospel History and its Transmission, Edinburgh, 1906, p. 140 f. The words of this passage, he observes, are among the saddest words in the Gospels, and the mournful irony with which they are pervaded seems to me wholly alien from the kind of utterance which a Christian Evangelist would invent for his Master. It is impossible to believe that the command to buy a sword was meant literally and seriously: it is all a piece of ironical foreboding. He adds that the words afford us a very welcome glimpse into the mind of our Lord. They shew us that there was in Him a vein of what I have no other name for but playfulness, a tender and melancholy playfulness indeed, but all the more remarkable that it comes to outward expression in moments of danger and despondency. But the passage, even in this light, remains unique. On any interpretation of it, the connexion of the verses is a difficulty. Luk 22:35 f. seem to refer to the future experiences of the disciples by themselves; it is almost impossible to believe that they were expected to make all these new preparations before they started for the garden of Gethsemane. Yet Luk 22:38 seems to imply that the disciples at any rate, if not Jesus Himself, thought of the imminent danger in the garden. Furthermore, Luk 22:37 comes in abruptly, although it is possible to see a link between it and the foregoing words without undue straining. This is furnished in one way by-
(b) The literal interpretation, which assumes not only that Jesus advised the disciples to defend themselves in future by force, if need be, but also that He intended to use force in order to prevent Himself from being assassinated. It was only when He found that He was to be arrested officially by agents of the government, instead of being murdered by the hired ruffians of the hierarchy, that He stopped His disciples from taking active measures in His defence (Luk 22:51). The latter verse, however, docs not fit in smoothly with this reconstruction of the scene.
(c) A more plausible modification of the literal interpretation is to suppose, with J. Weiss (Die Schriften des NT 2, Gttingen, 1907-08, i. 513 f.) and F. von Hgel, that this word of Jesus was connected with a special situation which never recurred. He went up to Jerusalem to set men ablaze (Luk 12:49 f. to kindle a fierce conflict in which He was destined to perish Himself, but out of which He hoped His disciples would be able to force a passage. His words refer to this exclusively. He is momentarily depressed, and reverses His earlier instructions to His followers. When He says, Enough!, He resigns Himself to the disciples misapprehension of the seriousness of the situation for Himself; there is no thought, in His mind, of offering any resistance to His enemies. Jesus has no illusions about His own fate; but, as to His disciples, He hopes that, they will be able to cut their way out and escape, and He feels that they will be morally free to do so. But even this much He adverts to only for a moment; since, when they offer Him the two swords, and He says It is enough, He has already dropped that passing attention to this earthly contingency, and, in a sad, ironical reference to the non-comprehension by the disciples of the magnitude of the coming trouble, and to the obvious inadequacy of these physical defences, if physical force were really to be used, He breaks off the discussion by this short, ambiguous word (F. von Hgel, in CQR lxxix. [1915] 262). This is preferable, at least, to the literal interpretation, according to which the closing words are either couched in a vein of sad, ironical resignation, as if Jesus felt how little the disciples realized that their physical preparations were quite inadequate to the crisis, or as if Jesus seriously thought that two swords would be sufficient for the defence which He intended should be made against His captors in the garden. The early Church was divided as to the meaning of the passage. Augustine (c. Faustum, xxii. 77) appears to take the words literally, though he is not clear about what the injunction meant. Peter, he thinks, was told only to carry a sword, not to use it! No doubt the intention of the Lord in ordering them to carry arms and not to make use of them was obscure. But it was for Him to give proper orders and for them to obey without any reserve. Origen, as we might expect, spiritualizes the words of Jesus. But by the middle of the 9th cent. Isho dad of Merv reports that in many copies, instead of Let him buy a sword and take it, it is written, Pray for your enemies. The text evidently was so difficult that early pacifists tampered with it. Ishodad himself spiritualizes the words of Jesus, as an injunction to teach them figuratively that henceforth they must take care of themselves (M. D. Gibson, Horae Semiticae, v. [Cambridge, 1911] 193 f.).
The choice lies, in all likelihood, between (a) and (c) and the balance of probability is slightly in favour of (a). In either case, the singular and militant tone of the saying is the best proof of its genuineness; it is more easy to understand why it should have been passed over by the other evangelists, if they knew it, than how it could be invented by apostolic tradition. What measures of self-defence could it have been devised to justify? The early Christians did not defend themselves against attacks (cf. Rom 8:38; 1Pe 3:14). Even the peaceful Essenes carried arms, to defend themselves against robbers (Jos. BJ ii. 125: ). But, so far as we know, the primitive disciples of Jesus did not go about their work armed. We do not find anything in their primitive record that would suggest the need of putting a word like this into the lips of Jesus. That is one inference to be drawn from the passage. Another is that, whether it is taken in the light of (a) or of (c), it cannot be set up against the other pacific sayings which are so characteristic of the teaching of Jesus; if it is literal, it is only meant for a special occasion, and not laid down as a rule which supersedes the entire earlier instructions of our Lord against resisting evil. No more flagrant abuse of it could be imagined than that of Pope Boniface viii. in his famous Bull Unam Sanctam (Nov. 1302), which gave the imprimatur of the Lateran Council to the view not only that the two swords denoted the spiritual power and the temporal power (in hac eiusque potentate duos esse gladios, spiritualem videlicet et temporalem evangelicis dictis instruimur), but also that the latter as derivative must be subordinate to the former (oportet autem gladium esse sub gladio, et temporalem auctoritatem spirituali subjici potestati).
2. Militant messianism and the primitive church.-The influence of the militant spirit in some circles of messianic faith presents a more complicated problem. So far as Jesus was concerned, the views of His mission which we have already outlined are enough to prove that He stood aloof from all the current expectations of a national supremacy for Judaism as the dominant power on earth. He compared the spread of His kingdom to the dropping and the sprouting of seed; His emissaries were sent out to teach and to heal, not as an organized force of armed adherents. Even the apocalyptic aspect of His kingdom was non-militant. The conceptions of a book like Enoch were influential; yet, when we read a passage like lvi. 5f., which describes the last onset of the pagan powers upon Israel, stirred up like lions and wolves to attack the holy city but ruined by quarrels and finally annihilated, we feel at once the difference between this apocalyptic outlook of nationalism and the hopes of the primitive church. The Son of Man whose sword is drunk with the blood of the mighty opponents of Israel (lxii. 6f.) is not the Son of Man in the Gospels; Jesus can be stern, but this is not His kind of sternness; and, when a sword is given to the sheep (i.e. the pious Jews) wherewith to rout their brutal enemies (90:19), we instinctively think of the sword or knife by which the early Christians were constantly butchered (Rom 8:36; cf. Rev 5:6). Yet the apocalyptic eschatology did carry with it suggestions of martial exploits, which may have appealed to some members of the primitive church. We have only to look at the setting from which the fulfilment of a prediction* about Jesus as the peaceful conqueror was taken, in order to see how closely the OT predictions of Him were bound up with more or less incongruous elements. War weariness had prompted some fair dreams of peace in the older Jewish literature, but it should never be forgotten that the peace was to be the result of a conflict; only, as the international situation had so altered that the saints could not win the battle for themselves, they were generally content to wait till God or His messiah chose to intervene super-naturally in order to win it for them, or at any rate to call on them for aid. The very increase of a belief in demons and in the Satanic dominion which confronted God and stood behind the opposing powers of human life, did not altogether remove this conflict from the region of actual war. No stable peace could be looked for in the future unless and until the non-Jewish world had been reduced to subjection or annihilated along with the devil and his angels. The messianic interpretation of psalms like the 2nd and the 110th, which originally depicted a martial monarch, like the mediaeval St. Louis of France, kept such beliefs and hopes alive. No doubt, when the little groups of Christians succeeded to this tradition, it was reset for them by their conception of Jesus. Their ardent expectation of His return in order to take them safe to heaven prevented the large majority of them from cherishing the least interest in the fortunes of the world around them. Eschatology tended to insulate and isolate the Christians far more than the Jews. Their faith detached them from the destinies of nations. The figure of Diocletian would have been intelligible to them; the figure of Constantine never. The last thing of which they dreamed was the conversion of the Roman empire, and much less its subjugation by their celestial Lord. The sovereignty of God meant to them another kind of rule than that of a theocracy on earth, such as the fanatical Zealots dreamed of, who believed that God would not help them in their messianic hope unless they struck together a blow for faith (Jos. Ant. XVIII. i. 1). But, while this was true theoretically and, in the main, practically, while the rle of Christians was to hold the fort till they were relieved by the appearance of their messiah on the clouds of heaven, their literature shows occasional traces of another mood.
So far as the gospels go, it is again St. Lukes which suggests that the Apostolic Age had slightly affected the primitive outlook.
Twice we meet suggestions of this kind. The first group (a) is less important, viz. the references in the birth narrative; the second (b) in Luk 18:7 f. carries more significance, (a) The former contains the militant imagery of the Magnificat and the Benedictus-for the only allusion to the sword (Luk 2:35 : a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also) is of course metaphorical. But the warlike terms of the songs are religious reminiscences of the OT-e.g. of Hannahs song-and are fundamentally* figurative also. Jesus did not come to put down the mighty from their seats in Caesarea Philippi or at Rome; John was arrested by Herod, according to Josephus, because the Jewish ruler feared that his popularity would develop revolutionary tendencies, but Johns mission was not to deliver the Jews from the hand of their Roman enemies. Oriental symbolism is enough to account for such terms in those hymns of the primitive Palestinian church (cf. J. G. Machen, in Princeton Theol. Review, X. [1912] 1-38). This interpretation is not affected by the song of the angels at the birth of Jesus (Luk 2:14), which, in the mistranslation, on earth peace, good will toward men, especially when it is unconsciously read in the light of Miltons Ode. on the Nativity, seems a definite programme of peace. The peace proclaimed is between God and man, however, not between man and man. The gospel is not announced as an international league of peace. Charles Wesley was right when he put these two lines of interpretation into his Christian hymn-
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!
The line of the angels song is meant to allay any suspicion of Gods goodwill towards men. Of Gods goodwill to men, and to all creatures, for ever, there needed no proclamation by angels, says Ruskin (Val dArno, X. 253). But this was precisely what did need to be proclaimed, in view of human sin and ill-will towards God. The coming of Jesus implies and proves that the divine thoughts to men are thoughts of peace and not of evil, that the suspicions of God which sin prompts are unjustified, and that He intends to create harmony between men and Himself. There is now peace on earth for men whom He favours. And this message is sung by a detachment of the angelic !
It is a very different matter when we turn to (b) the language of Luk 18:7 f., where, after describing how even a selfish and callous magistrate will attend to a widows complaint, if she is only persistent enough, Jesus asks: And will not God see that Justice is done to his elect who cry to him by day and night? Will he be tolerant to their foes [ , as in Sir 35:22, of which this passage is a reminiscence]? I tell you, he will quickly see justice done to his elect. The wording is judicial, but justice in the East was military in the last resort, and that is the meaning here. The Sirach passage describes the confident hope that God will effectively interpose on behalf of the oppressed who cry out bitterly against the tyrannical power of the overlords. These pagan oppressors will be put down from their thrones, and Israel, the mourning widow, relieved. The Lucan words suggest that some saying of Jesus has been sharpened in the course of transmission through a period of what seemed to the Apostolic Church to be almost intolerable misery. It is a momentary relapse into the terms if not into the spirit of militant Jewish eschatology. But the wonder is that such relapses were not more frequent. Besides, the cry for vengeance on the foes of religion is the Oriental expression of the innate yearning for justice in the moral order. The note of impatience with Gods apparent toleration of evil men and His intolerable delay (cf. 2Pe 3:9), as well as the longing for the speedy end of things in order that the present distress may be relieved, is not so definite and characteristic as the appeal for retribution, however, and, as this is loudly echoed in Rev 6:10-11 -the great Quousque of the church-it obliges us to look back upon the course and trend of religious feeling which prompted it.
War, in the present, had been regarded by Israel as occasionally a punishment of the nation for wrong-doing; the prophets had taught that faithlessness to Jahweh might he requited by invasion and defeat at the hands of a foreign power raised up by Jahweh for that purpose. The people might need to be chastised or purged by some bitter and hasty outside conqueror, although eventually Jahweh throws away His very tool (cf., e.g., the Book of Habakkuk and Deu 32:25 f.). This is still recognized not only in the Psalms of Solomon but as late as the Pirke Aboth, where (Deu 32:11) the sword comes upon the world for the suppression of justice and the perversion of justice, and for those who do not explain the Torah according to rule (i.e. for heterodox ways).* Even in the Zadokite document (Charles, Apocrypha and Pscudepigrapha, ii. 816) the militant messiah himself destroys the disloyal by the sword for their disobedience to the new covenant (ix. 9f.). But the last-named prediction is eschatological, and it suggests the three war-scenes in the last act of the drama, as eschatology usually shaped the future course of the world, (a) Wars and bloodshed, the wars and rumours of wars of which the Gospels speak, precede the dawn of the messianic age; international strife ushers in the new era here as in the contemporary astrological scheme of Hellenism, but it is not war waged upon Israel. The people of God may suffer in the conflict, but they are not the objects of the pagan campaign. (b) Then comes a campaign of God or messiah against the opponents of Israel, who are supposed to be instigated by Satan and his agents. This hope, which thrills through one class of apocalypses, including Enoch, Baruch, the Psalter or Solomon, and the early Jewish strata of the Sibylline Oracles, is still maintained in 2Es 13:33 f. the colours of the sketch vary, from Isaiah 24-27 downwards, but the general outline remains the same; the assault of the massed pagans is a failure, and they are enslaved or annihilated, so that the saints can now enjoy the peace for which they have lived and longed. Nevertheless, these dreams of peace are always based on war; Jahweh or messiah must do for the people what they cannot do for themselves, i.e. rout and overpower the foe. The allegiance of the nations is evidently thought of as growing out of their fear and awe in the presence of the irresistible God. He reigns as a great conqueror. He fights no more because there is nobody left to oppose him. The peace that is to prevail is a peace that has been conquered by the sword of Yahweh. The day of Yahweh which is to usher in the Golden Age is the day of battle upon which he from the heavens sets the battle in array and once for all overthrows all his foes, whether spiritual or temporal. As the demonology developed, the foes became more supernatural, not so much isolated powers as agencies of a transcendental evil realm; but the human instruments of the Satanic delusion were never entirely left out of the picture. Then (c) the closing battle between God and the spiritual hosts of Satan rounds oft the campaign and the drama of the ages. This is a single combat, so far as God or messiah is concerned; even less than in (b) is there any real place for hosts of men or of angels aiding the divine conqueror. They may escort Him, but by a breath or a word He wins the victory single-handed. Thus evil is finally routed where it originally arose-in the spiritual, supra-natural region.
Living in an atmosphere which was charged with such militant elements, an atmosphere breathed by some of the most ardent and earnest souls of the age, did Christianity in the early church become affected by this hot air? To answer this question, we must first of all glance at the Pauline eschatology and christology.
The prevalent idea that the crucifixion had been a disastrous strategical error on the part of the supernatural Powers of evil in the universe (1Co 2:8) was naturally connected with the idea that Jesus had then and there triumphed over these dethroned authorities of the present age. The forgiveness secured by Christ at His death and resurrection is, in one aspect, a signal triumph over the hostile demon-spirits (Col 2:13 f.): he cut away the angelic Rulers and Powers from us, exposing them to all the world and triumphing () over them in the cross. They are disarmed and rendered impotent to injure Christians. St. Paul drives home the paradox by his military metaphor. The cross is not the ignominious defeat of Jesus; it marks the open subjugation of His supernatural foes, it is a trophy of His victory, which has decisively stripped them of their power. The metaphor is military, as in the martial quotation of Eph 4:8, but it is more than a metaphor. The human soul is beset by those real supernatural forces, and the victory of Jesus inaugurates the peace and freedom of His people (so 1Pe 3:22). Thus it is that Athanasius (de Incarn. xxiv. 4) takes the crucifixion-although he proceeds, in his passion for demonology, to add (xxv. 5f.) that Jesus was lifted up on the cross to clear the air from the demons who infested it and beset the human soul with their stratagems. In 1Co 15:23 f. the last battle in the campaign is described, when death is finally annihilated after the rout of all the anti-divine authorities and powers; then and only then does the triumphant Christ, at the end of the ages, hand over His royal authority to the Father. Even if (each in his own division) in 1Co 15:23 is not a military metaphor, as , the visit of a potentate, certainly is, the following passage definitely depicts a Christian replica of (c) above, and human as well as supernatural foes are included in the rout which brings the messianic reign to a successful conclusion.* The influence of the tradition in the 110th psalm is felt here as elsewhere, even, e.g., in an epistle like Hebrews, where the primitive eschatological idea of the enthroned Christ waiting in heaven until His enemies are humiliated and forced to do homage, or, as the Oriental phrase went, put under his feet (1Co 10:12 f.), is out of keeping with the authors characteristic scheme of things. In Hebrews the expression is almost entirely figurative. But in the Pauline eschatology the realistic idea emerges in the apocalyptic prediction of 2Th 1:7 f. and 2Th 2:13 f., where the apostle hints that King Jesus must ultimately intervene to defeat the lawless one whom even the restraining power of the Roman empire could not hold in check. The mysterious opponent is a sort of false messiah, issuing from Judaism, and invested with a Satanic authority which produces apostasy on the verge of the end. The delusion sweeps Jews and pagans alike into an infatuated rebellion against God. St. Paul has nothing to say about the fate of Satan, who instigates the outburst. It is the victims and tools of Satan who are destroyed, those who at present persecute Christians and those who dare to engage in the last and imminent struggle to their own doom-men who will pay the penalty of being destroyed eternally. This apocalyptic prediction draws upon sagas like those in Daniel and in the Ascensio Isaiae; it is from the former especially that the note of self-deification as a trait of the last deceiver is derived.
Half a century later the ardent messianic hope of a campaign against antichrist (cf. DAC i. 67 f.), which breathes through this passage in 2 Thess., broke out again under the strain of the Domitianic persecution. In 2 Thess. the hot air of the later Judaism, with its apocalyptic anticipation of the jus talionis applied by God to the enemies of His people and His cause, produces a climax of history which is judicial* rather than distinctively military. The moral order is vindicated by an overwhelming manifestation of the divine glory which sweeps all enemies of Jesus and of Christians to ruin. The outraged conscience becomes indignant and even vindictive at the sight of cruelty to itself or to others. The relief of the distressed elect means the doom of their foes, and the encouragement offered is the hope of such a speedy and crushing intervention. Christians need not stir a finger. Their very suffering sets in motion the divine engine of retribution against these wanton foes of goodness. This is emphatic enough, but it is when we pass forward to the apocalypse of St. John (cf. DAC i. 71 f.) that we come upon what is by far the most explicit reproduction of this militant messianism, from the livid horse of Rev 6:8 (for the horse is invariably a martial figure; cf. DAC i. 585 f.) on wards, amid the horrors and terrors of the period which the prophet anticipates in the near future, when Christians are harried ruthlessly by the authorities for refusing to join in the Imperial worship. The prophet repeats unflinchingly the message of Jesus: submit patiently to the trial (Rev 13:9-10), do not resent the cruelty and injustice of the ordeal.
Let any one who has an ear listen:-Whoever is destined for captivity, to captivity he goes: whoever kills by the sword, by the sword must he be killed. This is what shows the patience and faith of the saints, viz. abstaining from the use of force, when they were sent to prison or put to death for declining to invoke the emperors genius and throw a few grains of incense on the altar. Even when the pagan hordes from the East are roused by God to attack and destroy Rome, the saints rejoice, but it is the rejoicing of those who stand still and see the salvation of God in the rout of their oppressor; they take no active part in the campaign. The prophet maintains the primitive Christian standpoint on this issue. There is no question whatsoever of an armed revolt against the State. The duty of Christians is simply to wait, under any storm of persecution, until God intervenes to inaugurate the reign of the saints by destroying their tyrant. But this passivity is accompanied by a certain vindictiveness (cf. the taunt-song in Revelation 18 and Rev 19:1 f.). Now vindictiveness, which is the temptation of moral indignation, is often more likely to beset those who can do nothing but look on than those who are able to take some active part in avenging atrocities. So it is here. The Christians exult over Romes doom, and their satisfaction is bound up with an attitude of grim quietism. This is thrown into relief against a singularly dramatic background of militant supernatural power in action, depicted on the ordinary lines of apocalyptic hope. Such a hope becomes intelligible when it is remembered that its heart is the doctrine of the approaching Judgement, and the doctrine of the approaching Judgement was in essence an expression of the Jews unquenchable conviction that God would not altogether allow His Chosen People to perish in their struggle with the Civilization of the heathen world (Burkitt, Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, London, 1914, p. 49). Already this had been partially moralized and made transcendental. Now it is Christianized, perhaps as far as it ever could be. The prophet will have his people remain unintimidated by the last threats; he assures them that it is the fury of desperation-of a foe whose end is near. The devil is come down to you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. St. John encourages the church by the thought that the quarrel between them and the Roman power is Gods affair, a Satanic challenge of their God which can have only one ending. But this thought is worked out in a series of predictions which are sometimes truculent and weird; the adversary of God is no longer a political power, it is an incarnation of supernatural evil; the Roman State is an inspiration of the devil, and the final struggle is between the protagonists of good and evil. This Asiatic Christian prophet allows no considerations of patriotism to qualify or check his exultant anticipations of the doom that is to fall upon the Roman empire. He anticipates, as some of the later Sibyllinists did, the triumph of the East over the West; only, the antipathy is based on a resentment not of Romes economic maladministration but of her irreligious policy in the Eastern and especially the Asiatic provinces. There is to be an end, before long, to the fascination, the impiety, and the luxury of Rome-all due to her possession by the evil one! The victory already won over the dragon in the upper world is being followed by the dragons final campaign on earth;* in the crushing offensive taken by God the prophet sees a bloody rout of the enemy, messiah in action as a triumphant conqueror, and the total destruction of all Satans hosts, human and supernatural. The divine retribution is worked out in history. The transcendental and supernatural transformation of messiahs conquest is as obvious as in the later Jewish apocalyptic, more obvious indeed at several points, but this does not mean that the historical process is evaporated into a spiritual sequence. The book lent itself to allegory, but allegory was the last thing in the writers mind. The author or prophet is dealing with realities of this world; the Roman religious policy is to him the supreme device of Satan, and the seriousness of the situation calls out the powers of God and His messiah. It is a holy war which ends in a ghastly Armageddon for the wanton world-power which has proudly defied the moral order and stained itself with blood, especially with the blood of the Christian martyrs. Not until this victory has been won (Rev 19:7 f., Rev 21:2 f.) can the warrior-messiah celebrate His marriage; but, once the divine commandant has triumphed, He and His Bride, the Church, have an endless day of peace and bliss before them.
It is a proof of the quietist temper in early Christianity that, even when a book or such ardent language and spirit was admitted to the canon, it did not make the church swerve from the path of non-resistance into rebellion against the Roman empire. The church adhered to the loyalist passivity of St. Paul on this issue. The section of St. Johns apocalypse which resisted the spiritualizing interpretation longest was the prediction (Rev 20:1-6) of the saints reign on earth; what the book seems to have fostered was chiliasm rather than militarist hopes of a supernatural kind, even though the military setting of the eschatology is prominent in its pages as it is not in 2 Thessalonians. It is true that the chiliasm itself had a martial setting, but at first it was not interpreted in a militant sense. The early chiliasts were not Fifth Monarchy men. There was a danger of this, but the danger was never real in the early centuries. The ideal of Christianity remained peaceful-an important point, for no aspirations of martial success were excited in the churchs mind, and there was no glorification of the sword. In the main* the church kept, practically as well as ideally, to an eschatology which was not coloured by the militant hopes of this apocalyptic tract.
3. Martial metaphors and illustrations.-But, if it is difficult to estimate the extent to which some primitive Christians took a realistic view of their new messianic hope in its eschatological outlook, there is no dubiety raised by their description of the Christian life in military terms. The one passes into the other through the conception of Satan as the inspirer of heresy (e.g. Rom 16:20) and persecution (1Pe 5:8; cf. DAC i. 294), as the foe to be resisted. The very resistance tends to assume militant forms of expression. As the Persian dualism had contributed to develop the demonology of the later Judaism, it intensified the sense of moral conflict. Mithraism was one outcome of this tension, in the later days. But the dualism never became so sharp, metaphysically and morally, in Christianity or even in Judaism; Satan was never considered to be on anything like equal terms with his divine antagonist. Note how this militant expression of the faith prevailed. Early Christians spoke of themselves as soldiers of God, just because they were not literally soldiers as, e.g., the Maccabees had been. They were not even crusaders. Their military language is purely metaphorical and figurative. But it is none the less significant on that account. And it is curiously widespread. The early Christian writers drew upon agriculture, architecture, slavery, law, marriage, sea-faring, and even the games, to illustrate their faith, but scarcely any one of these departments of life furnished such a number of apt and favourite metaphors for the heroic aspect of the new religion as the Roman army. When we consider that these Christians had as yet no rank or standing in the Roman world, and also that they inherited traditions of a resolutely pacilic nature from their Lord, this becomes all the more remarkable. In one aspect it was part of the deorientalizing of Christianity. As messiah was replaced by the equivalent Lord, so carrying the cross involved ideas which were more intelligible to non-Semitic people when they were expressed in military figures. More than once we feel that the early Christians were sensible of the paradox and even delighted in the use of such language. To state the gospel of peace in terms of warfare was a telling as well as an intelligible method of self-expression. To say that their faith was the victory which conquers the world, or that by bearing persecution and suffering they were more than conquerors, was to put a new edge on language. Besides, their principles were so well known that these militant terms could be employed without the smallest risk of misconception, either to themselves or to those who overheard them.
Take the Pauline epistles, to begin with. St. Paul never calls himself the soldier of God or of Jesus Christ, but in two of his latest letters, when he was in daily contact with the Roman troops in his captivity, he describes Epaphroditus (Php 2:25) and Archippus (Phm 1:2; cf. DAC i. 89) as his fellow-soldiers.* St. Pauls experience of Roman soldiers was happier than that of Ignatius. The latter was disgusted with them. He calls his armed escort a set of wild brutes (ad Rom. v. 1): I am bound fast to ten leopards (that is, a company of soldiers), who, the better they are treated, grow worse and worse. When pious Christians gave these soldiers money (see above, p. 648), in order to get access to Ignatius, the guard did not cease to ill-treat him; they only became more brutal and bullying to their prisoner. St. Paul makes no complaints against his military guard (Act 28:16), and indeed we know that not only the procurator Felix (Act 24:23) but the officer of the Imperial regiment (DAC i. 123 f.) who conducted him to Rome behaved with courtesy and consideration (Act 27:3)-a feature which more than once recurs in the red record of the martyrs, for soldiers had police-work to do, and they could alleviate a prisoners lot, if they chose. St. Pauls epistles draw repeatedly and lavishly on the military vocabulary. Thus, the apostolic instructions which were to regulate the practice of the church at Thessalonica are called by the technical military term (1Th 4:2), as in 1Ti 1:18 ( ), in order to emphasize their authority. A similar note of discipline is struck in 2Th 3:6 f., where the church is told that it must not degenerate into a disorderly mob of individuals who break their ranks ( , .); also, mutineers are to be avoided, just as the Roman general Germanicus had ordered in the case of a mutiny (see Lightfoots Notes on Epp. of St. Paul, London, 1895, p. 129). On the contrary, churches which are free from insubordination and united in a common obedience to the orders of the gospel are commended; it is a pleasure, the apostle writes to the Colossian Christians (Col 2:5), to note your steadiness and the solid front of your faith in Christ, which no specious heresies had been able to break; and the Philippian Christians are congratulated on having presented an undivided front against persecution and suffering (Php 1:27 f.: Let me know you are standing firm in a common spirit, fighting side by side like one man for the faith of the gospel. Never be scared for a second by your opponents, etc.; Php 4:3 : These women have fought at my side in the active service of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my fellow-workers).* Thrice the pay of the soldier is mentioned: in Rom 6:23 (The wages of sin is death, where , meaning the rations and pay of the soldier, which he gets as his due, is contrasted with the , or free gift of eternal life); in 1Co 9:7, where the right of an apostle to be supported at the expense of the church is defended or illustrated by the analogy of a soldier in the legions (Does a soldier provide his own supplies?); and in 2Co 11:8, where he explains to the Corinthians that he had not accepted any remuneration from them because he had made a levy on other churches, taking pay () from them so as to minister to you. In addition to the trumpet sounding for the charge (1Co 14:8 : If the trumpet sounds indistinct, who will get ready for the fray?-the assumption being that all are brave enough to serve if they only hear the signal, whereas the coward in Theophrastus, Char. xxv. 5, sits in his tent and grumbles that is sounded only too distinctly!), the familiar and splendid procession of triumph, accorded to a successful general at Rome, is used to describe the success won by God through St. Pauls preaching missions: Wherever I go, thank God, he makes my life a constant pageant of triumph in Christ (2Co 2:14). The second epistle to the Corinthians has two other military allusions of interest, besides that in 2Co 6:7 to weapons for attack and defence-one to envoys or ambassadors (cf. DAC i. 52) who press the offer of peace (2Co 5:20 : I am an envoy for Christ, God appealing by me, as it were-be reconciled to God, I entreat you on behalf of Christ), the other to an evangelists work as storming the citadel (2Co 10:3 f.: I do live in the flesh, I do not make war as the flesh does; the weapons of my warfare are not weapons of the flesh, but divinely strong to demolish fortresses -I demolish theories and any rampart thrown up to resist the knowledge of God, I take every project prisoner to make it obey Christ, I am prepared to court-martial any one who remains insubordinate, once your submission is complete). The latter passage, with its siege-metaphor, which Philo had already employed (e.g. de Confus. Ling. 26, on Jdg 8:9, de Abrah. 26, 38), is a vigorous account of St. Pauls activity in fighting for the good cause till it was triumphant; he claims to make a trenchant attack on all church theories, however formidable, which in his view dispute the freedom and authority of the gospel; he will give them no quarter; any notion subversive of the faith starts him to take the offensive; the pride and rebelliousness which are entrenched in the human mind, even within the church, are a perpetual summons to him. The siege of Man soul is a challenge to his powers. And he emphasizes at the end his apostolic authority over the members of the church; he will court-martial any seditious and disorderly person.
Hardly any passage is so vivid with military allusions, except the description* of the Christian armour in 1Th 5:8 and Eph 6:10 f. The former reference to faith and love as the coat of mail, and the hope of salvation as the helmet of the Christian, implies (1) that faith in God and mutual love are a unity, and that, instead of requiring to be protected, they form the real protection of the Christian character against the moral dangers that threaten the church in the last days; they are ours to be used, not to be admired or laid aside as too good and delicate for contact with the rough world. (2) What protects the vital centre of the Christian life is hope of the future salvation which is imminent; this is a Christian addition to the OT imagery which St. Paul probably has in mind; to lose hope is to lose everything. He is saying metaphorically what is put otherwise in Luk 21:28 (when these things begin to happen, look up and raise your heads; for your release is not far distant). In Eph 6:10 f. the details are much enlarged, and the supernatural opponents are brought into the foreground. Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might; put on Gods armour [best description of the Roman in Polyb. vi. xxiii. 2 f.] so as to be able to stand against the stratagems of the devil [as the inspirer of heresies-cf. Eph 4:14 -and persecutions]. The devil, I say, for we have to struggle, not with blood and flesh but with the angelic Rulers, the angelic Authorities, the potentates of the dark present, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly sphere. So take Gods armour [a military phrase; cf. Jdt 14:3; Jos. Ant. xx. 110, etc.], that you may be able to make a stand upon the evil day and hold your ground by overcoming all the foe. Hold your ground, tighten the belt of truth [which keeps everything in its place] about your loins, wear integrity as your coat of mail, and have your feet shod with the stability of the gospel of peace; above all [the Roman consists first of all in the shield-five feet by two and a half (Polybius)], take faith as your shield, to enable you to quench all the fire-tipped darts flung by the evil one, put on salvation as your helmet, and take the Spirit as your sword; i.e., the writer adds, the word of God-the idea being, apparently, that an apt and ready memory of Scripture would form an effective means of counteracting and defeating evil suggestions (cf. the use of the OT by Jesus in His temptations). The long passage closes by an appeal for prayer** as a further means of success in the Christian conflict. With prayer there is (v. 19, ) the suggestion, though it is no more than a suggestion, of alertness, as of a sentry on duty; this is also hinted at in other semi-military passages like Rom 13:12 and 1Th 5:6 f., but the most direct allusion to the divine sentinel is one which occurs in Php 4:7 (Gods peace shall keep guard over your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus)-a thought echoed by Francis Thompson in A Fallen Yew:
The hold that falls not when the town is got,
The hearts heart, whose immured plot
Hath keys yourself keep not!
Its keys are at the cincture hung of God;
Its gates are trepidant to His nod;
By Him its floors are trod.
The military allusions in the Pastoral epistles are of high importance. One is adduced to illustrate the undivided attention required of a true evangelist and leader in the church: Join the ranks of those who bear suffering, like a loyal soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civil pursuits; his aim is to satisfy his commander (2Ti 2:3 f.).* The special vocation demands absorption, and hardships are to be borne as part of ones duty in the ranks (cf. Seneca, Ep. Mor. cxx.: Civem esse se universi et militem credens, labores velut imperatos subiit). The writer might have chosen other metaphors-e.g. that of priests, as St. Paul does in another connexion (1Co 9:13)-but he prefers the military to the sacerdotal (cf., e.g., Servius comment on Verg. aen. vi. 661: Hi qui sacra maxima accipiebant renunciabant omnibus rebus, nec ulla in his nisi numinum cura remanebat) figure, in order to give the idea of undivided attention. It is the same conception which Jesus sets in unmilitary language, in Luk 9:57 f. The other allusion, to the good fight (1Ti 1:18 : I transmit these instructions to you, Timotheus my son, fight the good fight on these lines, keeping hold of faith and a good conscience-as weapons which cannot be dropped without danger to life), proves afresh that is practically an equivalent for living up to the Christian position in this world.
It is in a Roman document, like the Epistle of Clemens Romanus (xxxvii), however, that we find the organization and discipline of the army held up definitely as a pattern to the Christian church (cf. DAC i. 217). What St. Paul had expressed in the metaphor of the body and its members (1Co 12:14 f.) Clement puts in military language, before he echoes the Pauline metaphor. My brothers, let us serve with all earnestness in our army, after His faultless commands. Let us consider those who serve our [i.e. the Roman] generals. With what excellent order, how readily, how submissively they discharge their appointed duties! Not all of them are prefects, nor tribunes, nor centurions, nor in command of fifty men, or the like, but each in his own rank executes the orders of the Emperor and the generals. The great cannot live without the small, nor the small without the great; there is a blending of all ranks and one makes use of the other. The moral is that rich and poor, wise and humble, ascetics, and all other varieties in the church must learn to render mutual help and avoid insubordination, the dutiful member must not decline to help if he is not promoted-an idea already put in military language by Cicero (ad Attic. iv. 6: Immo etiam in bellum et in castra. Ergo erimus qui esse noluimus? Sic faciendum est) and still more aptly by Seneca (de Tranquill. Animae, 4: Quid si militare nolis nisi imperator aut tribunus? etiamsi alii primum frontem tenebunt, te sors inter triarios posuerit, inde voce, adhortatione, exemplo, animo milita).
Similarly, there is quite a military tinge in the advice given by Ignatius to the church or clergy of Smyrna (ad Polyk. vi. 2): Give satisfaction to Him whom you serve [; cf. 2Ti 2:3], and from whom you receive your pay [, as above, p. 654]-let none of you be found a deserter. The supreme reproach of cowardice in the OT had been the word of Psa 78:9 : The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle. Ignatius, like the early Christians, preferred to take the contemporary illustration of desertion from the legions. Then he proceeds: Let your baptism remain as your shield, your faith as helmet, your love as spear [an item never mentioned in 1Th 5:8 or in Eph 6:13 f.], your patient endurance as armour; let your works be your deposits, that you may receive the arrears due to you.
The latter allusion is to the custom of payment in the Roman army (cf. Grenfell, Hunt, and Hogarth, Faym Towns and their Papyri, London, 1900, p. 252 f.). Soldiers at the moment received only half of the donativa,* or bounties, awarded to the army on any special occasion; the other half of these gratuities was deposited in the bank or common purse (follis) of the regiment, together with any sums which the soldiers chose to deposit of their own accord. At the conclusion of their term of service they were entitled to receive these arrears and whatever stood to their credit in the bank. It was their own property, exempt even from the patria potestas.
The rest of the paragraph is partly an echo of NT allusions, with the characteristic addition of the word on baptism. The reference to desertion, a reference as old as Plato (Apol. 28 D, the famous refusal of Socrates to desert his post, which Epictetus [i. 9, 22 f.] quotes against rash and cowardly suicide), had already been made by a Christian writer like Clement, who observes (xxi. 4), It is right that we should not be deserters from His will, and argues that in a world where God is present at all places there is no escape for the guilty: What world shall receive those who would desert from Him? None, he replies, quoting Psa 139:7 f. to clinch his reasoning (28:2f.). Unfaithfulness to God, which the Hebrew had preferred to express in terms of the marital relationship, was generally stamped by the early church not as adultery but as desertion; there were exceptions to this, of course, perhaps the most notable being the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins, who adjures all Catholics to adhere to the holy faith of the holy fathers by proving themselves genuine sons of mother church (xxxiii.). But Christians went more often to the army than to the family for metaphors to denote disloyalty. They could not select any term with more fateful associations than deserter to convey their detestation of cowardice under persecution. An excellent specimen of this figure is afforded by Commodians Instructiones (l., lii. [ii. 9, 11]), and the allusions to fighting against the lower passions (Rom 6:13 f., Rom 8:7, Rom 12:21, Jam 4:1, etc.), which are equally common, as they had been in pagan writers (e.g. Lucretius, de Rerum Natura, v. 43 f.), are also illustrated finely by the same writer (liii., lxiii. [ii. 12, 22]) in his verse, as well as by Clement of Alexandria in the prose of the Quis dives salvetur? (25), although nothing equals the extraordinary description of the battle against the flesh and the devil which Arnobius Junior in the 5th cent. addressed to a young married lady at the Roman court (cf. G. Morin, tudes, Textes, Dcouvertes, i. [Paris, 1913] 383 f.).
Clements martial references are not characteristic, not nearly so characteristic as the nautical or musical, but they are sometimes striking. Thus, after describing the proclamation of the gospel by Christ (Protrept. xi. 116), he adds: When the loud trumpet peals out, it musters the troops and proclaims war; and shall not Christ, breathing a melody of peace to the ends of the earth, muster His own soldiers of peace? He has mustered the bloodless army of peace, by His blood and by the word, and assigned them the realm of heaven. The trumpet of Christ is His gospel. He has sounded this trumpet, and we have heard it. Let us arm ourselves with the armour of peace. Then he quotes loosely from Eph 6:14 f., putting in the sacramental touch of the sword-blades being dipped in the water of baptism to temper their edge-a touch which even Ignatius had not attempted in his military reference to baptism (ad Polyk. vi. 2: to ). Similarly, when Clement has to speak of Gods discipline, he compares it not only to parental training and medical treatment but to the military discipline of the refractory (Paed. i. 8, 65): As the general has a good end in view and acts for the admonition of his subordinate officers when he imposes fines, corporal punishment, fetters and abject disgrace on offenders, sometimes even inflicting death, so that great General of ours, the Logos, who is in command of the universe, admonishes those who will not be amenable to his law, in order to release them from the bondage, deceit, and captivity of the adversary and overthrow the passions of the soul, thus conducting them peacefully to the sacred harmony of citizenship. Again, to insult or injure a Christian is to dishonour the Christians God, for as those who maltreat soldiers insult the general, so the mishandling of his consecrated ones is contumely shown to the Lord (Strom, vii. 3, 21). The supremacy of Christ is thus described: the Son of God never leaves his watch-tower all the host of angels and divine beings is subject to Him (Strom, vii. 2, 5).
Later, in the early part of the 3rd cent., Minucius Felix, the Roman lawyer, betrays a genuinely humanitarian view in his dialogue; he drops several remarks about war-e.g. about the rapacious policy of invasion and oppression which had built up the Roman state (25), about the frequency of it (When was there ever an alliance of empires, which began in good faith and ended without bloodshed? [18]), and about the melancholy truth which the Greek tragedians had already noted, that in the heat of battle it is the better men who generally fall [5], but he boldly claims the Christian martyr as the true conqueror (37). So does the author of 4 Maccabees (e.g. 4Ma 1:11; 4Ma 18:4), which was a favourite book in some circles of early Christianity; but the point is different. The Jewish homilist reflects that the endurance of Eleazar and his brother as martyrs for the Torah defeated the tyrant by rousing the martial spirit of the Maccabaean fighters, who so resented the cruelties inflicted by Antiochus on their patient brethren that they broke into successful revolt. Minucius Felix takes another view of the victory won by a martyr.
How fair a spectacle it is to God when the Christian joins battle with pain, when he is arrayed against threats, punishments, and torture, when in triumph and victory he exults over the very man who has sentenced him! For he conquers who obtains the object for which he contends. What soldier would not be emboldened to challenge danger under the eyes of his general [in de Bell. Gall. ii. 25, when Caesar was rallying his right wing against the Nervii, his very appearance nerved the troops. Cuius adventu spe inlata militibus ac redintegrato animo, cum pro se quisque in conspectu imperatoris etiam in extremis suis rebus operam navare cuperet]? For no one receives a reward before he is put to the proof; and yet a general does not give what he does not possess; he can only glorify military service, he cannot preserve life. Whereas the soldier of God is neither forsaken in pain nor put to an end by death.
The concentration of the soldier idea upon the martyrs* was inevitable; in the long period of persecution the martyrs came to be regarded more and more as the fighting-line of the church against the devil, and, if the conception of the Christian life as a warfare was not reserved for them, it acquired, in connexion with them, an accent and emphasis of its own.
Two extracts will serve to bring this out, both from the literature of the 2nd century. Thus, in a.d. 177, the churches of Lyons and Vienne, describing the outburst of local persecution as due to the devil, add that Christians were enabled to bear the brunt of the attack, because the grace of God acted as their general against him ( ) and they joined battle with him (Eus. HE v. 1), i.e. by their passive resistance to the violence of the mob and by their adhesion to Christ in face of dreadful sufferings and threats. The refusal to apostatize is the weapon of the Christian, and his inspiration is the grace of God, which suggests and maintains these tactics of defence. Then, again, Tertullian writes as follows in a.d. 197 to Christians who were lying in prison awaiting martyrdom (ad Mart. 3): Granted, O blessed men that a prison is irksome even to Christians. We were summoned to the active service (militiam = campaigning) of the living God at the very moment when we repeated the words of the sacrament [sacramenti verba, i.e. the baptismal confession, regarded as the Christians oath of fealty and allegiance]. No soldier takes luxuries with him on a campaign; he goes out to battle not from a bedroom, but from narrow, pitched tents, where all sorts of hard, rough, and unpleasant experiences abound. When he turns to encourage the women, he develops the figure of training for the athletic games, but the male Christians are reminded of their oath of loyalty to Christ as general, in the deadly warfare against evil. Their very harmony-and Tertullian (ib. 1) pleads for this, since even martyrs sometimes quarrelled in those days as afterwards-is an effective weapon of war against the devil; Satan wins a triumph if he can succeed in making imprisoned Christians fall out among themselves.
In fact, by the 3rd cent., especially through the Latin Christians of Northern Africa, the ritual and organization of the church began to be infused with military expressions. Thus, burden in Mat 11:30 is rendered sarcina, the soldiers load, by Tertullian. A term like had been used by Ignatius (ad Smyrn. i), echoing the OT-e.g. Isa 49:22; Isa 62:10, where Jahweh raises His standard in Jerusalem for men to rally round; Jesus, says Ignatius, was crucified in order to raise an ensign for all ages by means of his resurrection, for his saints and loyal people. It is not far from this to the cognate use of vexilla, and, after the cross had been set upon the standards of the army by Constantine, the vogue of became increasingly popular in the vocabulary of Christian writers. Feretrum had been already used metaphorically by Tertullian, practically as equivalent to trophy; in lauding the virtues of Job (de Patientia, 14), he exclaims: What a trophy (feretrum) God set up over the devil in a man like that! What a banner (vexillum) did He raise over the Adversary of His glory, when this man, in reply to all the load of bad news, uttered nothing but thanks to God! And so he who worked hard for the victory of God, repelling all the darts of temptation by the breastplate and shield of his patience, presently received his health of body from Gods hand. But words of still greater importance were to be taken over from the troops. Legion had already become a popular term for a large and powerful number (cf. DCG ii. 23). This, however, was only the first of such borrowed words, and one of the least significant. A far more vital case was that of sacramentum. If this term for a binding promise was not adopted by the church on account of its apt associations as the oath of loyalty, it was the military suggestiveness of absolute devotion that certainly helped to popularize it (cf., e.g., Tertullian, de Spectaculis, 24). The troops swore individually to obey their generals orders to the letter, never to desert, and always to be ready to face death unflinchingly for the Roman State. When the Christian answered the questions put at baptism, he assumed as real responsibilities and pledged himself to an equally heroic allegiance (see E. Debacker, in Muse Belgique, 1909, pp. 147-155). So with statio, which meant outpost or picket duty, when soldiers had to keep awake and do without food, a more dangerous, trying, and responsible position than that of the ordinary sentries of the camp. Stationarii was one of the military metaphors adopted by Judaism even. But by the middle of the 2nd cent. (Herm. Sim. v. 1) statio had begun its long career in the Christian vocabulary as a technical term for fasting and vigils, since fasts, as Ambrose (Serm. 25) afterwards explained, protect us from attacks of the devil; in fact, they are called stationes because by standing (stantes) and staying in them we repel the foes who plot against us. In Tertullian this military vocabulary* is already rooted and thriving; in Cyprian it is full-blown-especially the idea (see above, p. 656) that Christians are fighting for their faith under the Generals eye (e.g., Ep. x. 2, lviii. 4, lx. 2, lxxvi. 4). The bishops and clergy are the officers, the laity are the rank and file of the Christian army. On statio, Cyprian observes (de Orat. 19) that the term is derived from the model of war-for we are Gods army (nam et militia Dei sumus),and (de Jejuniis, 10) soldiers, though ever mindful of their military oath (sacramenti), are still more true to their outpost duties (stationibus).
How far the term soldier of Christ had become current even before Tertullian may be gathered from the Acta Pauli (DAC i. 32). The presbyter of Asia Minor who composed this religious historical novel tells, in the section of the Martyrdom (cf. L. Vouaux, Les Actes de Paul, Paris, 1913, p. 278 f.), how Neros cupbearer Patroclus confessed that he had been raised from the dead by Christ Jesus, the king of ages, after falling like Eutychus (Act 20:9 f.) from a height. the Caesar answered () woefully, Then he is to rule the ages and destroy all kingdoms? Patroclus tells him, Yes, he destroys all kingdoms and he will live alone for ever, and not a kingdom will escape him. Nero then struck him on the face and said, So you fight for () this king, Patroclus, even you? Yes, lord Caesar, he replied, he raised me from the dead. Then Barsabas Justus the fiat-footed, and Urion the Cappadocian, and Festus of Galatia, Neros chief men, said, We fight also for him, for the king of ages. So Nero imprisoned them, inflicting fearful torture on them of whom he had been extremely fond, and ordered the soldiers of the great King to be sought out (2). When St. Paul appears, he declares, Caesar, we gain recruits not only from your command but from the whole world. Our orders are to refuse no one who will fight for my king. When the guard offers to let St. Paul go, instead of killing him, he declines: I am not a run-away () from Christ, but a loyal () soldier of the living God (4). Finally St. Paul appears after death (6) to Nero, saying, Caesar, here is Paul the soldier of God. I am not dead but alive, and threatening the emperor with doom. This illustrates the semi-political tinge of eschatology (see above, p. 653) and it brings out afresh the martyr-application to which reference has been already made. The noble army of martyrs is an English misrepresentation of the original martyrum candidatus exercitus in the 4th cent. hymn of praise, but noble answers to the feelings of the early Church towards those faithful soldiers of Christ. A 5th cent. hymn, attributed to Ambrose, hails them as
Ecclesiarum principes,
Belli triumphales duces,
Coelestis aulae milites.
They are ranked next to the apostles and the prophets; they are also promoted at death more rapidly than the rank and file of the Church militant. Titus, or at any rate Josephus (BJ vi. 47), is sure that the souls of brave men, which are parted from their bodies by the sword in battle, are taken up by the ether, the purest of the elements, and set among the stars, where they shine forth as beneficent daemons and heroes friendly to their posterity. This is an almost exact parallel to the early Christian belief about the martyrs as soldiers of God who have died in battle, or been burned, beheaded, and flayed alive for their Leader. They pass immediately into glory. For example, the Scillitan martyrs, on receiving their death-sentence and on the point of being led away to execution, thank God: To-day we are in heaven. The special honour thus paid to the martyr in early Christian eschatology does not seem to be paralleled by any corresponding feature in rabbinic eschatology. It is a distinctive homage offered by the Church to her champions in the early battles against paganism.
This rich and varied use of military metaphors, however, throws no light upon the opinions cherished by the early Christians about war in itself. Three of the writers who explicitly oppose war, Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian, are in fact lavish in their use of military terms. Origen, in his homilies on Joshua and Judges, e.g., delighted to allegorize the most martial passages in the OT, and Cyprian did more than almost any one else to domicile the idea of the church as the army of God, with Christ as its imperator, the martyrs and confessors as the leaders, the sacramentum of baptism, the stationes of fasts and vigils, and heretics or schismatics as rebels against the castra dei. Origens allegorizing of the OT enabled him, of course, to counter Marcions repudiation of it as too militant for the Christian church. As a pacifist he uses military language, just as Bernard, the celibate, loved the vocabulary and ideas of marriage-though, unlike Bernard, Origen did not allow the vocation in question to any one. Similarly, Lucretius detested war (i. 28 f.), but he employs military figures with force in order to illustrate his theme (e.g. in ii. 5f., 40 f.). These illustrations from St. Paul onwards merely indicate the martial environment of the new religion within the Roman world of the first three centuries; they no more prove that the church encouraged or even approved of war than the less frequent allusions to the games and the theatre prove that these were sanctioned by the conscience of the primitive Christians. Besides, the use of military illustrations is not confined to Christian writers by any means. The newer advocates and exponents of moral philosophy, and in especial of Cynicism and Stoicism, frequently employ metaphors culled from the Roman army to adorn their semi-religious convictions.
The disciple of Poseidonius who wrote the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise de Mundo about a.d. 100(?) declares that God is in the universe as the helmsman is in the ship, the general in the army (400b), the only difference being that Gods rule causes Him no trouble or fatigue. Seneca could compare human life to a campaign (vivere, Lucili, militare est [Ep. Mor. xcvi. 3]), which absorbed the serious man (nobis quoque militandum est: et quidem genere militiae, quo numquam quies, numquam otium, datur. Quidni malit, quisquis vir est, somnum suum classico quam symphonia rumpi? [ib. li. 5]); he could summon men to cheerful resignation under the divine discipline by reminding them that it is a poor soldier who whines as he follows his captain (ib. cvii. 9); he is particularly delighted (ib. lix. 5: movit me imago ab illo posita) with a military simile of Q. Sextius, who compared the wise man deploying his virtues against evil to an army marshalled against an enveloping attack; he insists that the moral life is promoted not by coaxing and subtle addresses but by such manly demands as those of an officer to his troops (in aciem ducturus exercitum, pro conjugibus ac liberis mortem obiturum, quomodo exhortabitur? Dux ille Romanus, qui ad occupandum locum milites missos, quum per ingentem hostium exercitum ituri essent, sic adloclutus est: ire, commilitones, illo necesse est unde redire non est necesse! Vides quam simplex et imperiosa Virtus sit [ib. lxxxii.]), The Cynic philosopher, in Lucians (8), declares that he fights like Hercules, against pleasures, not as a conscript but as a volunteer, his aim being to purify human life. The slave-philosopher Epictetus also draws some of his most impressive appeals from the terminology of the military profession. Thus, after explaining that every man has a guardian angel or indwelling spirit (), be proceeds (i. 14): You ought to swear an oath to this divine being just as the soldiers do to Caesar. These hired soldiers swear to regard the safety of Caesar above all else; will not you swear, and swearing keep your oath, when you have received such a number of great boons? And your oath? Let it be this: never to disobey, never to blame, never to find fault with anything he gives to you, never to do or to suffer against your will anything that is needful. Is this oath like the oath of the soldiers? Why, they swear to honour no one above Caesar; you swear to honour no one above yourself. Or, again, in a passage which recalls 2Ti 2:4 even more than 1Co 7:35, he observes (iii. 22, 69) that the genuine Cynic must not be expected to entangle himself with ordinary duties: In the present state of things, which resembles an army on active service, the Cynic must be free from all distractions in order to serve God with his entire attention, instead of being tied down to domestic cares. Nor must you blame the Cynic for being a busybody ( [iii. 22. 97]), for you might as fairly say that the general is a busybody, when he is inspecting his troops, examining them, keeping watch over them, and punishing the insubordinate. Such allusions are scattered over his talk. The most sustained is the well-known paragraph in iii. 24. 31-34, which reiterates the conception of life as a warfare (cf. Job 7:1; Job 14:14, Isa 40:2): Dont you know that life is a campaign ( )? One man has to stand sentry, another has to go out as a spy, another has to fight. It is impossible, it is undesirable, that all should be in exactly the same position. And here are you, neglecting the commands of the general, and grumbling when any rather severe duty is imposed upon you. You dont understand what you would have the army become, if it depended on you; if everybody copied you, no one would dig a trench, no one would put up a rampart, no one would keep on the alert, no one would take any risks, everybody would prove useless for campaigning. Every mans life is a sort of campaign, and it is long and varied: you must follow the rle of a soldier, and do everything at the nod of your general, divining what he wishes done, if possible-for there is no comparison in strength or superiority of character between this general and any other. Finally, it is possible that a passage in iv. 13. 5 illustrates the misconduct censured by John the Baptist (Luk 3:14). Epictetus is warning men against loose talk about themselves, and he clinches his advice by this reference to contemporary life: A soldier in private dress sits down beside you and starts to abuse the Caesar. Then you join in, assuming that you can trust his fidelity because he began the talk. You say what you think-and then you are arrested and taken to prison. Even in the later pages of Marcus Aurelius military figures recur, although they are by no means so numerous and distinctive as we might expect, considering that this melancholy and self-conscious philosopher had been for years in command of troops. Once we do get a saying like this: Be not ashamed to receive help; you are bound to do the duty that falls to you like a soldier when a wall is being stormed; if owing to lameness you cannot scale the battlements alone, cannot this be managed with the help of another? (vii. 7). But in his metaphors and similes the emperor talks more of doctors and sailors and hees than of soldiers. His pages are a warning against the common idea that a mans vocation may be deduced from his metaphors, or that a man invariably tends to colour his language by the associations of his calling. The really noticeable thing in this military emperors little book is a couple of disparaging allusions to war; it is ranked (x. 9) with slavery and the mimes as a deteriorating influence, and (x. 10) military conquerors are frankly described as robbers: The spider is proud of catching a fly, one man is proud of catching a hare, another of netting a fish, another of capturing wild boars, another of seizing Sarmatians, as the writer had done himself or was doing when he wrote this sentence. Are they not robbers, if you look into their principles of action? A century earlier another Stoic philosopher, the Roman knight Musonius Rufus, had done more than write resigned commonplaces about the iniquity of war. With the officiousness for which the Stoics were sometimes blamed (see above), this eminent teacher of Epictetus had contrived to push himself in among the troops of Vitellius and Vespasian during the strained situation of a.d. 69. Tacitus tells us how he then began to lecture the men-at-arms upon the blessings of peace and the hazards of war. Many jeered at him, the majority were impatient with him; some would have hustled him and trampled on him, had he not given over his ill-timed philosophizing at the warning of the better sort and under threats from others (Hist. iii. 81). Tacitus, of course, had no sympathy with such a move, and we should perhaps allow for his military sympathies in judging the philosopher. Still, a manlier tone breathes through the sentences of Demetrius of Phalerum (Stobaeus, Anthol. viii. 20), describing how differently Courage and Cowardice speak to a soldier in battle-order. Would not Courage bid him stay where he was and keep his place in the ranks? But Ill be wounded I Endure. But Ill be killed! Die rather than leave your place. the diatrib-harangues are often marked by such military figures, but it is needless to quote further from this field.
The prevalence of these military symbols and images was so widespread in the period under survey that it is gratuitous to refer their popularity and spread to any single origin. The allusions in the Stoic philosophers were probably derived in the main from the contemporary vocabulary of the cults. But the use of such militant expressions is spontaneous, especially in a military age and empire. As for primitive Christianity, during the apostolic period at any rate, the Jewish devotional literature might be thought more likely to have suggested many of the details into which, as we have seen, the Christians worked their parallel of religion and military service. With the OT and the later Jewish literature at hand, we might imagine that the early church would scarcely require to go far afield for suggestions of this kind. But their Jewish environment and their use of the OT are not upon the whole sufficient to account for the majority of the military turns of expression which are to be found in the earliest strata of their devotional literature from the end of the 1st cent. onwards. Occasionally an OT passage is employed in this connexion, as we have already noted. The homiletic use of the historical books also enriched the spiritual vocabulary with martial terms. Bunyan owed more to this source than to his brief service in the army, when he wrote his military allegories, and we might expect it to have been so with most of the primitive Christians. Yet a glance at the devotional sections of the OT-e.g. at the Psalter-reveals the comparatively limited use of military metaphors. It is always difficult to determine whether an allusion to war is literal or metaphorical, for some of the psalms were battle-songs,* but, even when we set aside those which are probably literal, and which reflect the ordinary horrors of war, its havoc, its atrocities, the provocation of reprisals (Psa 125:3), the passions of revenge and moral indignation, the perplexities of captive good and captain ill, and so forth, the remainder of the psalms allusions fall generally under the heading of Gods aid for men-God as a shield or fortress, God shooting His arrows against the foes of the good man, God starting up out of sleep to champion the defenceless, Gods mighty army of stars, angels, and the elements, God the conqueror riding home into the city after a victory, and so on. Such is the scope of the Psalters war-metaphors. The armour is almost altogether Gods, not mans.
This is not unnatural, for the psalms are mainly the cry of an oppressed little community, struggling against outside pagan foes and godless enemies of religion within their own nation. They are on the defensive. Faith is besieged (Psa 31:21), OT harried. Now and then, as in a psalm like the 18th or the 44th, a more vigorous note is struck; the plaintive appeal for divine succour is exchanged for a resolute confidence that the army of the pious cannot triumph except by Gods help. But this is probably a literal expectation, in some period of revolt, a return to the traditional ideal of Deu 33:29 :
Happy art thou, O Israel!
Who is like thee?-
A people victorious by Yahweh,
Who is thy shield to help, thy sword to maintain thy power.
So shall thy enemies come cringing to thee,
And thou shalt march over their heights.
Books like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes show a certain fondness for military phraseology and illustration-e.g. Ecc 3:8; Ecc 8:8 (there is no discharge in war) Ecc 9:11, Ecc 9:14-15 (siege) and Pro 18:19 (an instance of the difficulty of love winning its way with extreme gentleness | Through all the outworks of suspicious pride), Pro 20:18 and Pro 24:5-6 (statesmanship and war) Pro 21:31 (the horse) Pro 24:34, Pro 25:18 (cf. Lam 3:12) Pro 30:5; Pro 30:27 -but this is not characteristic of them or even of the pacific Philo. He is not always pacific indeed. He extols the bloody punishment inflicted by the Levites on Israel (Exo 32:26 f.) as an immaculate slaughter, which ought to be regarded as the most brilliant and important of all gallant deeds (de Spec. Leg. iii. 22); it was a holy war, voluntarily undertaken for Gods honour (Vita Mos. iii. 20). And in de Plant. i. 33f., his exposition of Deu 20:5 is a realistic, sympathetic sketch of military methods. But the Jewish philosopher also indulges in martial images (see above, p. 654). Thus, in order to illustrate the truth that compulsion to help other people is not necessarily a mark of slavery, he appeals to the business of an army (Quod omnis probus, 6), in which the soldiers have to wear heavy armour and carry loads, besides cutting trenches and so forth, all for the sake of the common good; they are under strict orders, but that does not make them slaves. Other warlike figures recur in his comments on Gen 42:11 and Jer 15:10 (de Confus. Ling. 11f.) and in de Gigantibus (11). Still, this line of illustration is not Philos forte. Now and then quite original touches occur in the OT literature-e.g. in the magnificent picture of the war-horse (Job 39:19-25; cf. Jer 8:6), or in the comparison (cf. Sir 10:17) of overwhelming troubles to a king ready for battle (Job 15:24), or in the account of Jobs popularity and honour, when he occupied a position of dignity among his fellows, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth mourners (Job 29:25).* Similar allusions are present in Sirach (e.g. spies, Sir 11:30, Sir 14:22; the blare of trumpets, Sir 26:27; the beacon or fire-signal, Sir 43:8); they are not infrequent in the prophets, who lived in periods of war and occasionally were stirred by the militant eschatology even to depict Jahweh as a redoubtable warrior, blood stained (Isa 63:1 f.) and exultant, sometimes whirling a monarch like Cyrus (? Jer 51:20 f.) as his battle-axe against the nations. Now and then the gnomic wisdom was couched in military figures (e.g. 1Ki 20:11, Psa 127:4) like the erotic passion (Son 6:4; Son 6:13). The bow, e.g., denoted the manly vigour which could protect itself and champion the interests of the oppressed (Job 29:20). Nevertheless, a survey of the military metaphors and illustrations in the Jewish literature before the Christian era or contemporary with the primitive Church shows that this source does not account for the range and detail in which the Christians of the first three centuries worked, when they drew upon war to body forth their religious convictions. Their environment in the Roman world, where the legions were constantly in evidence, the spontaneous instinct which prompts ardent religious feeling to clothe itself in such terms, and possibly-in the later stages probably-the lead given by the mystery-religions need also to be taken into account in this connexion.
For military service, as a symbol of devotion and an emblem of unflinching loyalty, did influence the mystery-religions and cults of the period as well as Christianity. It is natural to expect this in the case of a cult like Mithraism, which was so popular in the army itself; probably one of its attractions for soldiers lay in the fact that the Mithra initiates were enrolled in a sacred army, swearing an oath (sacramentum) when they enlisted in the cult, and devoting themselves to a campaign against immorality and mortality. The unconquerable god of the cult marshalled his devotees against the powers of darkness. The organization of the cult was partly modelled on military lines; the third grade in the hierarchy was that of miles, according to Jerome (Ep. 107, in a.d. 403), who reminds the Roman lady Laeta that her kinsman Gracchus had only a few years ago destroyed the Mithraeum at Rome with all the images, before which (cf. ERE viii. 756) the initiates were ranked as Raven, Gryphus, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Heliodromus, and Father.* One of the ceremonies of initiation consisted in the solemn abjuring of a crown; the votary had a crown placed on his head, which he formally removed, saying that Mithra was his crown. This, according to Tertullian (de Corona, 15), stamped him as a Mithrae miles.
In the cult of Isis also the votaries of the goddess were considered to be her sacred troops; the initiate, as we learn from Apuleius (Met. xi. 14-15), took a solemn oath on entering the sancta militia, and thenceforth belonged to the cohort of the goddess. It was a conception of the religions life which was familiar in connexion with the cults, long before Christianity; Livy (xxxix. 15. 13), e.g., witnesses to the use of sacramentum as a term for the oath taken by those who had been initiated into the mysteries of Bacchus, and he chronicles a similar practice among the Samnites (x. 38: Et deorum etiam adhibuerant opes ritu quodam sacramenti vetusto velut initiatis militibus iurare cogebatur diro quodam carmine in execrationem capitis familiaeque et stirpis composito, nisi isset in proelium quo imperatores duxissent). One factor which developed its usage in the religious world was probably the oath of allegiance taken by the subjects of Oriental monarchs who were regarded as semi-divine on earth. Thus loyalism blended with piety, and military allegiance acquired a religious sanction, so that, per contra, the religion of the cults, Syrian, Egyptian, and Persian, became more than ever adapted to the ideas of an absolute devotion on the part of members to their sovereign deity. The sacred militia of the mysteries, says Cumont (Les Relig. orientates, p. xvi), is simply this civic morality viewed from the standpoint of religion. With regard to the Isis cult, in particular, early in the 2nd cent. we come upon an invocation of Isis Myrionyma, a rigmarole of her various titles and excellences, which shows how even a female deity inspired this sense of adoring confidence in her votaries. The military aspect is repeatedly visible; e.g. she is hailed as victorious, saviour of men, swiftly victorious, warlike, warding off attacks, the queen of war and rule, who easily destroyest tyrants by trusty counsels. Her Egyptian initiate adores her for satisfying the manifold needs of men and women; he has a religious and naive assurance that she will never disappoint her loyal followers. Later on, the pious emotions of an Isis-worshipper are described by Apuleius of Madaura in the 11th book of his Metamorphoses. Apuleius was an Oscar Wilde of the 2nd cent. literature; an unclean brilliance shines from his pages, and the more devoutly he writes, the more we suspect him of posing. But his delineation of what Lucius felt and said at Corinth, when he was admitted to the cult, is probably a faithful transcript, on the whole, of the better elements in Isis-worship. The convert is told to enrol himself in this holy warfare (da nomen sanctae huic militiae [xi. 15]), and he adores the goddess as his saviour from fate and sin, as the deity who can shut and open the lower and the upper worlds.
The moral aspirations and hopes which were expressed in this sancta militia of the cults, and for which the military organization was felt to be an extremely suitable image, were three-fold.
(a) In the first place, a confidence in the deity, an unshaken faith that the divine being who presided over the cult was able to ensure his devotees triumph over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, over the powers of darkness and immorality in this world and the terrible, mysterious dangers which beset the soul as it passed at death into the circles of the upper air or the lower world. As the Roman legions held sway over the world, so these initiates believed that their respective cults represented the dominant powers, from a religious point of view. The victories of the army, which were assumed to be due to the emperor, and which were often won by his personal generalship,* symbolized the triumph, of a cult-deity like Mithra, the Sol invictus, or like Isis, the orbis totius domina, victrix, invicta. For these deities were cosmopolitan in their sway. They claimed to control the universe. The cults breathed into their adherents the sense of participating in the triumph of a sovereign power, not of a mere local and provincial sect, and this is not invalidated by the fact that such a belief was more pious than well-based. The early Christians also put this faith into their martial imagery, to express their absolute confidence in the Lord, who would enable them to master demons with their onset of persecutions and heresies, and to overcome the fear and power of death itself. The term Lord included this; the terms king of kings and imperator brought it out.
(b) This supremacy of redeeming power, guaranteed by the deity, required from men a devotion and loyalty like that accorded by soldiers to their generals. It was a confidence which implied moral surrender and absolute dedication. The mystery-religions gave the individual a new sense of his value, but his personality was realized through service and self-sacrifice. This was the second note in the military conception which pervaded the cults. To a modern the methods and aims do not always seem particularly moral, and they are tinged by superstitious elements which eventually proved their weakness. But as a rule the relation of the individual to the deity was characterized by a thoroughgoing allegiance, which made stringent demands upon him-demands so stringent that their nearest analogy was felt to be the binding tie of the soldier to his military superiors. In the case of Mithraism, especially, this tie involved a moral earnestness. It was attained through ritual, but one of the conditions indispensable to the final victory of good was purity, and few contemporary cults, if any, pressed this requirement so stringently and sharply on their votaries. Here, also, the martial symbolism served Christianity (see above, p. 659). It was accentuated by the fact that the sacramentum, or oath of allegiance, was supposed to be taken to the commander in person, and was renewed by all the troops on the emperors birthday and on the 1st of January every year. Eventually it was extended to civilians as an oath of allegiance, but technically and originally it denoted the armys loyalty to its leader; the sacramentum was for the campaign, and was renewed for a fresh term of active service under new leaders. Personal devotion to ones leader, in fact, became more and more characteristic of military service. The general or officer could inspire and exact obedience; the soldier followed and fought, without asking questions. A modern writer puts it thus: Alan was in the right trade as a soldier; this is the officers part to make men continue to do things, they know not wherefore, and when, if the choice was offered, they would lie down where they were and be killed. And I daresay I would have been a good enough private; for in these last hours it never occurred to me that I had any choice but just to obey as long as I was able, and to die obeying (R. L. Stevenson, Kidnapped, ch. 22). This absolute and unqualified devotion corresponds to the Roman ideal in the early centuries of the church (cf., e.g., Seneca, Ep. Mor. 95: Quemadmodum primum militiae vinculum est religio et signorum amor, et deserendi nefas, tunc deinde facile cetera exiguntur mandanturque jusjurandum adactis, ita in his quos velis ad beatam vitam perducere, prima fundamenta jacienda sunt, et insinuanda virtus), and it readily suggested the devotion of the Christian to his Lord and Leader, the unqualified demands made upon him for self-sacrifice and detachment from other ties, and at the same time the satisfaction of abandoning himself without reserve to One who would reward all service, who would take all responsibilities for His soldiers, and who was personally interested in them. The issue and strategy of the campaign were His; theirs only to follow where He led and do their best, unhampered by any suspicion or doubt* of their lives being thrown away. When Christianity was to be put as a religion of loyalty, in which the oath of duty ruled out any personal choice or preference, the army furnished a telling set of ideas and words.
(c) A third element was probably the cohesion and new sense of brotherhood provided by the cults at their best, though this was by no means so prominent as the thought of renunciation. The initiates were taught to regard each other as comrades, fighting side by side in the ranks of their faith. A common religious hope bound them together. This is known to have been a feature of Mithraism, in theory if not in practice, and we might have expected it to flourish in the church. But it was not so. Early Christianity on the whole preferred other expressions for the solidarity and cohesion of the faithful; it went to the family, to architecture, or to the physical organism, rather than to the army, when it needed metaphors for unity; brothers, stones in a building, or limbs in the body were much more common than fellow-soldiers, though the cults also used the first of these terms quite freely.
4. Attitude of the early church towards war.-We now turn to sketch the attitude of the primitive Christians to war and the army as realities instead of analogies (cf. A. Harnack, Mission and Expansion of Early Christianity2, London, 1908, i. 308 f., ii. 52 f.). Down to the reign of Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 161-180) military service does not seem to have presented itself as a problem at all to the conscience of the Church; it is only during this emperors reign that indications of a difficulty are to be noted for the first time. But, in order to appreciate the situation which was now rising, we must glance at the preceding period, when the political and social conditions of the life of Jesus were passing or had passed away, and when Christians were no longer in the environment of those to whom the words of Jesus had been spoken. A wider situation was emerging than that of Jews in a small subject province of the empire.
During the Apostolic Age the first non-Jew to enter the Christian Church was a Roman officer. The Ethiopian treasurer of queen Candace had indeed been baptized previously by Philip, but he disappears in the south, far from any fellowship of the Church. On the other hand, Cornelius (cf. DAC i. 259), the captain of the Italian regiment stationed at Caesarea, comes before us definitely in St. Lukes history as a convert whose case led to a new development of the Churchs policy. Nothing is said about his profession being inconsistent with the faith. It was the fact that he was uncircumcised, not that he was in the army, that raised suspicion and opposition in the conservative party of the Church at Jerusalem. This forms a fresh proof, if proof were needed, that, if the gospel did not start by encouraging war, it certainly did not prohibit from the outset any connexion with the army as absolutely inconsistent with the faith. No one dreamt of any problem here, any more than in the case of marriage or of slavery.
The first war undertaken by a man of God in the Bible was Abrahams campaign against Chedorlaomer for the liberation of Lot (Gen 14:14 f.), in which he proved himself effective, loyal, and generous, both as a general and as an ally; but this daring exploit is not selected by the author of Hebrews (cf. Heb 11:8-19) as an instance of his faith. He did not pass it over, however, from any sense of embarrassment, for he goes on to recount other military events in the story of Israel with unhesitating enthusiasm, from the downfall of Jericho to the Maccabaean struggle (Heb 11:30 f., men who by faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness won to strength, proved valiant in warfare, and routed hosts of foreigners). This frank recognition of the historical connexion between war and religion deserves to be contrasted with one of the most nauseous pieces of sophistry in Josephus, i.e. the appeal which he says that he made to his fellow-countrymen at the siege of Jerusalem to surrender to the Romans. He actually advised them not to fight, on the ground that Israel had never succeeded in war, and that all she needed to do was to trust in God, if her cause was just-which this renegade Jew, from the shelter of the legions, coolly denied. In the old days, said Josephus to his indignant countrymen, God carried on these campaigns for our fathers, because they dispensed with active service and arms and committed their case to Him to vindicate. In short, our fathers won no success by war and never failed to succeed when they abjured war and committed all to God (BJ v. 386, 390). Pacifist special pleading like this was untrue alike to history and to the OT. The author of Hebrews took a more sane view of Israels record, and included martial exploits in his list of honour. These achievements* are ranked in the same class as the martyrdom of Abel and the passive glories of Isaac and Joseph. It is true that the writer seems with a tender instinct to avoid anything like stress on the exploits of warriors. Of the twelve persons having a share in the detailed expositions, David is the only warrior, and his character as a man of war is eclipsed by his greater attributes as a prophet, or declarer of the Divine counsels. It is yet more noteworthy that Joshua, who had so fair a fame, but who was only a warrior, is never named in the chapter, and we are simply told that by faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they had been compassed about seven times. But the series of four names, which are given without any specification of their title to appear in the list, are all names of distinguished warriors. They had all done great acts of faith and patriotism against the enemies of Israel-Gideon against the Midianites, Barak against the hosts of Syria, Samson against the Philistines, and Jephthah against the children of Ammon. Their title to appear in the list at all is in their acts of war. At the same time there is not the slightest hint that in the people of God who live under the spirit and hope of Jesus any successors of these martial saints were expected to arise. The promise of Deu 31:6 and Jos 1:5 is taken out of its very militant setting and transformed into a word of encouragement for those who needed to be freed from worldly anxiety about their possessions (Heb 13:5 : I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee). The situation of the community to which the writer addresses himself was too remote from public affairs to suggest any difficulties about such matters as the relation of Christians to the army or to any other function of the Empire. At this stage, indeed, no difficulties were felt at all.
When we read of conflicts and wrangles in Jam 4:1 f., the writer is referring to the private animosities of Christians; he is not laying down any philosophy of war and its causes in the outside world, but simply denouncing (cf. Psa 120:7, Mic 3:5) the passions of greed, envy, and selfishness which stir up feuds in small religious communities. His words have not the scope of the similar passage in Ciceros de Fin. i. 13 (the passions are insatiable; they ruin not merely individuals but entire families, and often actually undermine the fabric of the State; from them come hatred, discord, quarrels, seditions, wars); they belong rather to the diatrib class of sayings about so-called peace being really a state of bitter warfare, thanks to the strife and aggressiveness of men (cf. the quotations in P. Wendland, Philo und die kynischstoische Diatribe, Berlin, 1895, p. 39 f.). On the whole, we are justified in regarding Justin Martyrs allusions in Apol. i. 39 and Dial. 110 as no more than an expression of Christian antipathy to such aggressiveness in public and private.
The former passage runs: When the prophetic Spirit is prophesying what is to happen, it speaks thus: For out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and he shall judge among the nations and rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughs and their spears into sickles, and nation shall not lift the sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any longer. You can be convinced that it happened thus. For men, to the number of twelve, did go forth from Jerusalem into the world, and, although they were untrained and unable to make speeches, by the power of God they made it known to every race of mankind that they were sent by Christ to teach all men the Word of God; and we, who formerly murdered each other, not only do not make war on our enemies but die confessing Christ gladly, so as not to lie or to deceive those who examine us-though we might indeed have practised the saying.
My tongue has sworn, my mind has sworn no oath.
It would be absurd if the soldiers you muster and enlist were to put life itself, their parents, fatherland, and all their kindred second to their confession of loyalty to you, to people who cannot give them any incorruptible reward, while we, who long for incorruption, could not endure all things in order to gain our hearts desire from Him who is able to bestow it.
Here we are in the middle of the 2nd cent., with an author who had mingled in the great world, a man who had grown up in the age when Trajan had extended the Roman Empire to its limits, and when Tacitus had regretfully compared his period with the older military opportunities which his predecessors enjoyed (Ann. IV. xxxii. 2f.). Historians and politicians alike saw that a military imperialism was the policy of Rome. But Justins holy empire is not Roman. The issue of martyrdom has been also raised sharply; there is to be no holy war even of a defensive character, and Christians are to die cheerfully rather than retaliate on their persecutors or abandon their convictions.* But there is no more than this, even when Christians are thus described in the Dialogue (110): We who were filled with war and mutual slaughter and every wickedness have each of us throughout all the world altered our weapons of war, turning our swords into ploughs and our spears into agricultural instruments, and cultivating piety, righteousness, human kindness, faith, and hope, which we have from the Father Himself through the Crucified. The spirit of Jesus still controlled the church in which and for which words like these were written. The ideal was that of the Beatitudes, and Justin sought to have that ideal realized. Rome was at war with Parthia when he wrote, and fighting her way up into Scotland; the disaffection in Palestine was to blaze up in the revolution of a.d. 161; on almost every frontier the empire had to hold its own by force of arms. But Justin steadily set his eyes upon the peaceful advance of Christianity, unarmed and non-resisting. Even yet, however, the question of the Christian as citizen had not fully presented itself to the Christian consciousness. The political horizon had altered and broadened since the days of Jesus, but the Church was still unconscious that its very development must, in the providence of God, bring it face to face with the problem of its relation to the Empire in more than a merely antagonistic or aloof spirit.
A quarter of a century later Irenaeus echoed Justins faith and hope from far-off Gaul. The bishop agreed with the apologist. He quotes the Isaianic prediction (iv. 34. 4) to the same effect, as a direct prophecy of Jesus Christ, since these pacific results were produced by the preaching of the gospel, which made such a change that swords and spears were converted into ploughs, and altered into sickles for reaping grain-that is, into tools of peace-so that people are now ignorant how to fight, but when struck offer also the other cheek. Seneca had longed for the time when only farmers tools would be made out of iron (Thyestes, 930: Ferrum omne teneat ruris innocui labor). Irenaeus claims that Christians were already devoting themselves entirely to peaceful agriculture. He proceeds, however, to allegorize the Isaianic prediction, and this is his main interest; e.g. the plough signifies the creation or first sowing of humanity, and the sickle denotes the ingathering of the elect by Christ. There is nothing in his pages any more than in Justins to betray the least consciousness that war as a function of the State seriously presented a problem to the conscience of the church. Neither of them speaks so clearly and sharply as their predecessor Tatian, the bitter, earnest Syrian apologist, about the middle of the 2nd century. Tatian loathes war. But his antipathy is not based on any positive statement of the Christian faith so much as on the associations of warfare with the pagan Greeks. The wars of the Greeks, from Homer downwards, and their connexion with the pantheon of Olympus, furnish him with shafts to wing against polytheism, and this is practically all that we find in the allusions scattered through the Oratio ad Graecos. Thus, he upbraids the Greeks for using poetry to describe the battles and amours of the gods (1), sneers at Athena as a homicide (Schwartz omits in 8), derides the delight of Ares in war, and tells his pagan readers bluntly, divination is an aid of your worldly lusts: you want to make war, and you take Apollo to advise you about slaughter: he who makes you fond of wealth is he who reveals to you the secret of money-making; he who stirs up strife and war predicts victory as well (19). This is the standpoint of the martyr Carpus (Acta Carpi, etc., in TU IV. iv. [1888] 446), who tells the magistrate that the devil sets wars afoot and also pretends to reveal the future.
Twenty years later, c. a.d. 170, when the legians had conquered the Parthians and were now, under Marcus Aurelius, fighting among the Balkans, in the long campaign against the Marcomanni, the apologist Athenagoras happened to touch the subject of war. Athenagoras was a sensitive soul. He could not bear bloodshed, and he recoiled in horror from armed conflict, but his pages contain no direct repudiation of war or of the military profession. It is impossible to interpret his language as conveying a direct censure of military service. The relevant passage occurs in his Legatio pro Christianis (35), where he has occasion to refute the widespread calumny that Christians were cannibals. To eat human flesh, he declares sarcastically and indignantly, you must first of all kill a human being. Now, who can prove that against us? Who can accuse us of homicide or of cannibalism, when they are well aware that we cannot bear to see a man put to death even justly? We decline to watch the gladiators in the theatre, he adds, since our opinion is that to watch a man being put to death is much the same thing as actually putting him to death. This is repeated later by Lactantius (a.d. 260-340). It would have been indeed strange if the early Christians had not lifted up their testimony against war, as distinguished pagans had done before them, from the peripatetic philosopher Dikaearchus of Messana, who in the 4th cent. b.c. calculated that war had killed more people than all other causes of destruction put together (Cicero, de Offic. ii. 5), down to Plutarch in the beginning of the 2nd cent. a.d.
Lactantius is one of those who endeavoured to set public opinion in the Church against the war spirit, but he (Div. Inst. vi. 20) carries his protest forward into a philosophic repudiation of war as inconsistent with the character of the just man. He protests that the spectators of the games, at which condemned criminals had to fight, were exposing themselves to a corrupting influence. He who thinks it a pleasure to watch the slaying of a man, even though he has been justly condemned, pollutes his conscience as much as if he watched and shared a secret murder. And yet people call them sports, at which human blood is shed. He objects to all capital punishment, inflicted in the gladiatorial games, and concludes: When God forbids us to kill, he does not merely prohibit violent attacks (latrocinari), which even the public laws condemn, but warns us against doing what men consider lawful. Thus it will not be lawful for the just man to fight in the army, for his real warfare is justice itself; nor to accuse any one of a capital crime, for there is no difference between putting a man to death by the sword or by a word; what is forbidden is to put to death at all. Consequently, there ought to be no exception to this order of God; it ought always to be wrong to kill man, man whom God willed to be a sacred creature (sacrosanctum animal). This humanitarian objection to war is a favourite thought of Lactantius. He protests against the deification and glorification of great generals (i. 18), as if the path to immortality lay through indiscriminate bloodshed and slaughter. The successful military conqueror, he sneers, is just a multiple murderer. He bewails and ridicules the insane delusion that immortal fame and glory are to be gained by making war on ones fellow-creatures. And in another passage (v. 17 f.) he avows that Horaces Integer vitae ode is the ideal and pattern of the just man, who would rather die than owe his life to the death of another human being. Cicero had pointed to the fact that Romes high spirit and passion for martial fame were shown by the statues in the capital, which were generally in soldiers uniform (de Offic. i. 18), but Lactantius was Ciceronian only in style. He shrank from war and force. The man who could write the pro Murena was no model for him in political philosophy. No early Christian is so Tolstoyan in his ethics as Lactantius. He refuses to allow any retaliation whatsoever, and he does so on philosophic grounds rather than upon definitely Christian principles; his proofs are drawn from his humanitarian considerations rather than, as in the case of his predecessor Tertullian, from appeals to the NT.
5. Christians in the army.-The extant literature of the Church down to the close of the 2nd cent. betrays no sense of military service as incompatible with Christianity; it is discouraged rather than disparaged, when it is noticed at all. Neither then nor afterwards did the Church ever decline to baptize a soldier, or to allow him to remain in the army. Tertullian, writing about a.d. 197, proudly claims that Christians are so numerous that they have swarmed into every department of Roman life, into the army as well as into civil employments (Apol. 37). How can you taunt us, he asks the Romans (ib. 42), with being parasites and useless members of the State, when we fight at your side, trade along with you, and prove every day of our lives that we are no recluses? The language is hyperbolical, especially when he warns the Romans that Christians, by their sheer force of numbers, could wreck the State if they were to withdraw or to rebel. But, although the rhetorical bent of Tertullian always made him care more for emphasis than for accuracy, the significant point is that a Christian apologist was able to make this claim about Christians in the army, conscious that the fact could not be denied by his opponents, and sensible of no objection to it on the part of the Church. As we shall see, Tertullian had other private views on the advisability of Christians serving in the army, and later on he developed these into a rigid repudiation of military service as a sphere for genuine Christians; but as an apologist he makes no scruple whatsoever about using the existence of Christian soldiers as an argument in favour of the Churchs claim to consideration at the hands of the empire. Even later, in his vehement protest ad Scapulam (4), he witnesses to the presence of Christian soldiers in the legions, mentioning again, as he had already done in the Apology (5), the case of the 12th legion in a.d. 174, which, by its prayers, was believed to have rescued the army of Marcus Aurelius from a desperate plight.
The Roman troops were in straits for lack of water; these Christian soldiers knelt down, and in response to their prayers God sent rain for themselves and their fellows, while thunder and lightning scared their enemies, the Germans and Sarmatians. So the story ran. The legion was called after its headquarters at Melitene in S. Armenia, in the neighbourhood of which it was recruited; it supplied more than one martyr subsequently, and, as both S. Armenia and Edessa, which also supplied soldiers to it, are known to have been penetrated by Christianity, at least as early as the beginning of the 3rd cent., there is no reason to doubt that Christians did serve in its ranks.
Whatever be the historical truth of the tale,* it was firmly believed by the early Church from the end of the 2nd cent. onwards (see Eus. HE v. 5), and for our purpose this is sufficient; the acceptance of the story proves not only that Christians must have been in the army but that their presence there did not raise the slightest sense of embarrassment or disapproval in the Church. The Pax Romana, within which Christianity itself was growing, would not have been maintained unless there had been plain, duty-loving men at arms, Christians as well as pagans, who were content to serve in the legions with the same kind of healthy spirit as that which Marius expressed (Sallnst, Jug. lxxxiii.: Illa multo optuma rei publicae doctus sum-hostem ferire, praesidium agitare, nihil metuere nisi turpem famam, hiemem et aestatem juxta pati, humi requiescere, eodem tempore inopiam et laborem tolerare).
No reliable clue either to the relative number of Christians in the legions or to any deduction from that number as to the general feeling of the Church about military service can be found in the many allusions scattered throughout the Christian inscriptions. Soldiers are not often mentioned in the extant Christian epitaphs. But this is not so significant, perhaps, as it might seem to be. It must be recollected that soldiers fell in battle all over the empire, and usually on the far frontiers. Of all professions, the military was the least likely to furnish material for epitaphs in Christian cemeteries at Rome or in any of the leading cities of the empire. Death abroad, perhaps with no Christian comrade at hand, perhaps with no epitaph beyond the sed miles, sed pro patria muttered in pride and regret, was a frequent end to the Christian soldiers career. This must be taken into account in estimating the comparatively infrequent notice of the military profession in the catacombs and elsewhere. Besides, the worldly calling of a Christian is by no means universally inserted in his epitaph. Many a soldier may have been buried without a word being set up to preserve his profession. And this omission need not have been due to a sense of disapprobation or shame. In the presence of God social distinctions were often regarded as beneath notice; a modesty or reverence in the survivors forbade such secular positions being perpetuated in the memory of men. The grave of a slave was not always marked by the addition of slave to the name of the departed, and the same would apply to soldiers.
Another technical regulation must have restricted for a time the number of Christians in the legions. Although the ancient practice of admitting only Roman citizens to the army had been relaxed, no slaves were allowed into the ranks; the penalty of death was inflicted upon any who managed to make their way into the coveted service. Military service was still, in one sense, a privilege; there were obvious reasons, as Juvenals sixteenth satire shows, why not only officers but men were glad to embrace the army as a profession, for it held out to some a life of adventure and economic independence and it opened up to others an avenue leading to considerable social and political influence. The exclusion of the slave,* except in dire cases of emergency, and even of the freedman, naturally ruled out a considerable percentage of Christians. This ought not to be forgotten in any attempt to estimate the possible numbers of Christians in the legions. The majority of Christians were by no means all Roman citizens; that is, they were not qualified to serve. Besides, the recruiting system did not sweep in even the non-slave classes of Christians automatically. The conscription only required a certain number, as a rule, in order to keep the legions up to their full strength; the legions were not large, in proportion to the population of the empire, and any one whose name was drawn could (from Trajans reign onwards) provide a substitute, if he chose and could afford it. The voluntary principle was in force under the empire (plerumque voluntario milite numeri supplentur, Dig. XLIV. xvi. 5). It is only in a modified sense that we can speak of conscription being the means of recruiting for the Roman army. Consequently, if a Christian was in the army, he was usually there of his own free choice-unless, of course, he had been in the service before he became a Christian at all. Even under the empire the Romans were not a nation under arms. Military service still retained its associations of privilege; no doubt, the possession of a certain income involved liability to serve in the legions, and this was irksome to a certain number, but they could sometimes gain exemption-indeed they were eventually allowed to buy exemption; and on the other hand there were many freedmen and others whose anxiety to join the army enabled the State to enrol them even although, on the strict principles of the older law, they were disqualified. Furthermore, the sons of legionaries tended to adopt their fathers profession, and this was particularly true of the period after Septimius Severus, when regular marriage was permitted in the army.
This two-fold fact, that no Christian slaves could enter an army which was primarily reserved for Roman citizens (cf. DAC i. 93), and that even other Christians were not regularly pressed into the service, helps partly to explain why, during the first century and a half of the Church, the problem of war never became a serious matter for Christians. But, when their number increased, when converts were made in practically all ranks and vocations of life throughout the Roman world, the difficulties of military service began at last to be realized. Primarily, they met men who were in the army when they became Christians. A private or officer had then to consider his position, once the scruple had been voiced. Ought he to remain? Should he not withdraw from so compromising a profession? The rigorist party in the Church seems to have considered it his duty to leave the legions without any hesitation. But the conditions of military service prevented any Church-discipline from being enforced as easily as on civilians at home; not all the Christian soldiers were rigorists, and for various reasons it was difficult to agree with this cut-and-dry principle. Had not St. Paul told Christians to remain in the calling and position in which they were converted (1Co 7:20)? Did not that apply to soldiers as well as to slaves? The question might be asked sophistically, but it was also asked quite seriously. Clement of Alexandria, e.g., assumes this position without the least hesitation. His argument is (Protrept. x. 100): Practise farming, we say, if you are a farmer, but know God as you till your fields; sail away, if you are fond of seafaring, but call upon the heavenly Pilot; if the knowledge [i.e. of the gospel] has come upon you in the army, listen to the General who gives orders that are righteous. The implication is that the soldier is to be pious where he is, like the sailor and the farmer. What makes this remark all the more significant is that Clement feels no need of arguing the point; he was stating the normal Christian principle. Besides, what were Christian soldiers to do if they left the ranks, perhaps after years of service, when they were more or less incapable of taking up a new profession? Were they to forgo the valuable retiring allowances which they would earn at their discharge? And, even if they wished to leave the army, was that feasible? The law recognized only two exits-disease which incapacitated a man from active duty, and an honourable discharge at the end of his sixteen, twenty, or twenty-five years of service. Desertion was the ugly and ominous name for the conduct of those who forsook the eagles upon any other plea.
It is premature to speak of a rigorist party even in the days of Marcus Aurelius, when Christian soldiers were serving freely in the legions, but from the remonstrances and taunts of the pagan patriot Celsus (170-185), which we overhear in the pages of Origen (c. Cels. viii. 73f.), it is fairly obvious that he had met Christians who were already holding back from military service. He gives no hint as to their reasons. All that concerns him is the fact, and he deplores it as a lover of the Empire. He cannot understand these conscientious objectors. Their attitude is all the worse because it professes to be religious. To him it is part and parcel of the pusillanimity which characterizes these skulking, contemptible, superstitious sectarians. Celsus was an earnest Epicurean, as Lucretius had been before him, but lie is as devoted to the Empire as the poet had been indifferent, and he endeavours to overcome the apathy of Christians. He quotes from Homers Iliad (ii. 205) to base a sound principle of government and order; there must be one strong royal hand. Then he turns to Christians and tells them, if everybody were to do as you do [i.e. abstain from military service and loyal, patriotic self-sacrifice], there would be nothing to prevent the king from being left quite alone and forlorn, and the affairs of this earth would fall into the hands of the wildest and most lawless barbarians. At the same time this antipathy to the army was by no means universal among Christians, for, as we learn from the stories of the 12th legion (see above, p. 663) and of the Acta Pauli, which probably were put into shape during the reign of Marcus Aurelins, soldiers belonging to the Church not only served in the legions but were occasionally persecuted.
6. The problem first raised.-The next half-century, however, i.e. from the end of the 2nd cent. to the middle of the 3rd, was to witness a slight change, or rather an oscillation of feeling, and the first to voice it was the very Tertullian who had formerly appealed to the army as proving the existence and spread of Christianity within the Empire. Both he and Origen after him are the protagonists of the extreme section in the Church which now frankly disavowed the military profession. Froude declares that he and Hurrell were told by their oldest brother that they might begin to think for themselves, if they saw Newman and Keble disagreeing. Did the divergence of opinion between contemporary leaders like Tertullian and Clement set the rank and file thinking for themselves on the question of war? Perhaps it did. At any rate, scattered cases occur of Christians either refusing to join the army or throwing down their arms for conscientious reasons. Whether these incidents were due to the literary propaganda of the two pacifist writers, and if so how far, we cannot tell; in one case, at least, the recalcitrant recruit declares that no one had instigated him.* The point is that a certain feeling of dislike to the army was in the air, among some circles of Christians, and it is important to notice the reasons put forward by this serious fraction of the early Church.
Lord Acton said that he would never write in the Rambler upon unworthy conciliation or virulent controversy. Tertullian in his day wrote of both, especially of what he considered the former. He came to regard all the State service, military and civil, as an unworthy combination of faith and idolatry; public work was too equivocal; neither an official nor an officer could keep his position without compromising his Christian religion, and Tertullian had no patience with any one, clerical or lay, who asserted that these professions were compatible with a true faith. It is significant that several of the pacifist writers, from Tatian onwards, were or became eccentric and heretical. So it was in Tertullians case. After writing his Apology, he had gradually identified himself with an extreme position on various points, which finally drew him over to sympathy with the Montanists. Theologically, the change did not make him much less orthodox; in fact, his great contributions to the doctrines of Christology and the Trinity, which date from this later period, are unspoiled by Montanist aberrations. It was not so, however, in the field of ethics. His opposition to what he considered the laxity of the Catholic Church made him an ultra-puritan, and the idea of a Christian serving in the army now became anathema to him.
He gave sweeping and brilliant expression to this view in two tracts, de Corona and de Idololatria. They are specimens of his special pleading at its best-or at its worst. A noble spirit of devotion to Christ is blended with a fanatically anti-social bias, and a number of the arguments are not only scornful but quite fantastic. The de Corona was written after news had reached Carthage of an incident involving a Christian soldier. When Septimius Severus died at York in 211, during his campaign in Britain, the emperors Caracalla and Geta signalized the new reign by presenting the troops at Lambesa in N. Africa with a largesse, or donativum. Each legionary received this, coming forward for the money with the usual crown of laurel on his head, a ceremonial badge of respect for the State deities of the army and the empire. One soldier, however, violated the etiquette of the proceedings. He carried the crown in his hand, and was promptly arrested for this breach of discipline. He explained that as a Christian he could not wear a crown, and, abjuring military service, was imprisoned before being executed. Apparently this was quite an exceptional case. His action was blamed as rash and idle by his fellow-Christians, within and without the army. But Tertullian, on hearing of it, heartily approved. Here is a true miles gloriosus,* he cried-a soldier whose glory is in God! Here is a man who will not sell his Lord for money! To the objection that there was nothing in the Bible to prohibit a Christian from wearing a chaplet of flowers, Tertullian can only answer sophistically that this prohibition is one of the excellent customs which have grown up in the Church, excellent because flowers are meant to be admired or smelt or carried in the hand but not worn on the head, which would be unnatural! You never read of bishops or saints being crowned with flowers! Only pagans wear such crowns, pagan deities like Isis, and pagans who seek thus to honour their idols. The laurel is sacred to Bacchus and Apollo. Besides, Christ is the head of the man (1Co 11:3 f.), and He was only crowned with thorns! The head should be kept sacred to Him, who will crown it one day with the crown of life eternal (15). Such is the kind of pleas which, in all seriousness, Tertullian advances in defence of this soldiers refusal to wear a laurel crown. But he goes further. Not only is such a crown inconsistent with Christianity, for a Christian must not touch the symbols of idolatry, but the military profession (11) itself is tabued, because (i.) the sacramentum, or oath of loyalty, which a Christian takes to his Lord, supersedes and invalidates any other sacramentum; (ii.) when Jesus said, He who uses the sword shall perish by the sword (Mat 26:52), He made it unlawful for a disciple to use the sword at all; (iii.) if a Christian cannot go to law (1Co 6:7), much less can he, as a son of peace, go to battle; (iv.) if he is not allowed to avenge injuries done to himself (Rom 12:19), he cannot consistently take part in imprisoning or torturing or punishing his fellow-creatures; (v.) the military calling interferes with the regular practice of his religion-e.g. he may have to do sentry-duty on the Lords Day, or to stand sentry over pagan temples. The mixture of real and fantastic objections becomes bewildering at this point. Tertullian, e.g., asks how a soldier can hold a spear, when Christs side was pierced by a spear, or allow himself to be raised from sleep by a trumpet, when he hopes to be raised from death by the last trumpet! But there are deeper notes in the appeal for severing all connexion with so compromising a place as the camp. He admits that the case of men converted when they are already in the army is a special case, like that of the soldiers who came to John the Baptist or of the centurions in the gospels and Acts of the Apostles; still, once soldiers have accepted the faith, a man must either quit the service, as many have done, or absolutely refuse to do anything contrary to God (and yet neither course is permissible, according to military law), or finally he must suffer death for his God, as a civilian Christian has also to do in terms of his loyalty. Military service will not hold out to him any prospect of impunity in the matter of sin, or immunity from martyrdom. A Christian is never anything but a Christian, no matter where he is. The gospel is one and Jesus is the same Jesus, who will deny every one who denies God and confess every one who confesses Him, who will save the life that has been lost for His sake and on the other hand destroy the life which has been valued over against His name. In His eyes the civilian (paganus) believer is just as much a soldier [i.e. of Christ] as the pagan [paganus-a play on the double meaning of the term] soldier is no soldier [i.e. of Christ]. There can be no plea of necessity, in the region of faith; those for whom the one thing needful is to avoid sin have no plea of necessity for sinning. And so on. It is a radical assertion that Christians have no right to enter the army, and that Christians within the army must risk death itself in order to maintain their faith against the most trivial association with pagan religion. In fact, Tertullian shuts out the profession of arms as well as philosophy from the Christian religion. The vexed question of military service primarily turns, for him, upon the polytheistic and idolatrous practices which were bound up, more or less directly, with the entire fabric of Roman civilization. They met the Christian in almost every branch of trade as well as in a profession like education and in the pleasures and intercourse of social life; as we might expect, therefore, Tertullian takes up this problem again in the de Idololatria, where he handles it with an equally paradoxical and uncompromising vigour, refuses to hear of any bowing in the house of Rimmon, reiterates that Christianity is a holy war against idolatry, in which the catechumen at baptism takes the sacramentum, or oath of fealty, to his divine Imperator, and (19) rules out the army even more drastically than in the de Corona. The question is, whether a believer can take to military service, and whether one can be admitted into the Christian faith who belongs to the army either as a private* or as a menial servant who is not obliged to take part in sacrifices or capital punishment. The divine oath of loyalty (sacramentum) and the human have not a thing in common, there is no affinity between the standard of Christ and the standard of the devil, between the camp of light and the camp of darkness; one soul cannot serve two masters, God and Caesar. Moses carried a rod [like the centurions vitis or wand]? Aaron wore a clasp [like the soldiers on their shoes]? John was belted with a leather girdle? Joshua the son of Nun led an army? The people [of God] made war? To talk thus is to trifle! How can people make war, how can they even do military duty in times of peace, when God has deprived them of their swords? For, although soldiers did come to John and receive instructions on their duty, though a centurion did have faith (Mat 8:10), the Lord subsequently disbanded every soldier when He disarmed Peter (Joh 18:11).
In this last sentence Tertullian argues that John the Baptists regulations were not final. John the Baptist met soldiers at the opening of his mission, and he died by the hand of a soldier-a , as Mark notes (Mar 6:27), i.e. a gendarme, one of the non-commissioned officers called by that name, who were sometimes employed as executioners (cf. Seneca, de Ira, i. 16) as well as in the capacity of couriers. Their domineering and tyrannical conduct to provincials, when they were employed on police-duty, was the fault that John had rebuked (cf. W. M. Ramsay, Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the NT, London, 1915, p. 316 f.). But, according to Tertullian, Johns mere prohibition of this was not the last word; Jesus had excluded a Christian even from being a just . This is a fairer view than the disparagement or even the sweeping rejection of John which many other extremists within and without the Church advocated-e.g. the Manichaeans of a later day (Manichaei Johannem aperte blasphemare consuerunt, Aug. c. Faustum, xxii. 74). But it was far from general in the Church. Tertullians contemporary, Clement of Alexandria (Pd. iii. 12, 91), denied that it was John, and only John, who spoke: The Lord gives by John to soldiers the command, Be content with your pay. The belief in inspiration must have told seriously against any exegesis which, for however high an end, depreciated even a word like that of Luk 3:14.
The Isaianic prediction, for which there are striking parallels in Plutarchs Vita Numae (20) and in the discussion of the relative merits of agriculture and the army by Maximus of Tyre (Diss. xiii. f.), lent itself so naturally to allegorizing that we are not surprised to find it elaborated by Origen (c. Cels. v. 33), in the same sense as Irenaeus, a century earlier. He does insert before and afterwards, as though he allegorized the weapons of war into rhetorical devices and sophistical harangues. But the context indicates that the literal sense of the prediction was not forgotten by him. Later on, in vii. 26, he makes his point clearer. There is this difference, he says, between the Mosaic polity and the Christian, that the Jews could not maintain the former if they accepted the gospel; for Christians could not follow the Mosaic law in destroying their enemies or those who were condemned to be burned or stoned for having transgressed the law; the very Jews are unable, much as they desire to do so, to carry out the punishments ordered and enjoined by the law. Origen sees a providential purpose in the removal of the Jewish state; it removes from the Jews the need and opportunity, which had been essential to them in OT ages, of maintaining their national existence by force of arms. To have deprived them of the right of making war on their enemies and of fighting for their country and of executing or in some way punishing adulterers, murderers, or persons guilty of similar crimes, would have been to expose them to sudden and utter destruction, whenever their enemies attacked them; for in that case their very law would have crippled them and prevented them from resisting their enemies. Origen admits that war is vital to nationality, and so he rejoices that nationality no longer exists for the Jews. He cannot of course imagine that it could exist for Christians either.* Tertullian had no positive notion of the state in his Christian ethic. Origen betrays a slight consciousness of this problem, but as yet, while the political conditions had begun to alter the focus assumed in the NT, they had not developed sufficiently to enable any satisfactory view to be propounded. Christians do not spread the gospel by force of arms, and they do not form a nation in the ancient sense of the term. This is all that Origen can say. But the further question arises, Have Christians, as citizens of the Roman empire, any duty of loyalty which obliges them to fight in the legions on behalf of their empire? Are they to enlist voluntarily or to obey the orders of the recruiting-sergeant, when their names are called? It is clear that some hesitation had been felt on this point. As we have already seen, Celsus had urged Christians to rally to the help of the emperor, for the maintenance of justice and order against the barbarians, and in viii. 73f. Origen meets this tacit criticism of political indifference among members of the Church.
We Christians, he argues, help the State by being good men, by putting on the panoply of God (Eph 6:11), and also by offering prayers for kings and authorities, as the apostle enjoined (1Ti 2:1-2). The more pious any one is, the more serviceable he is in support of those who reign, more serviceable than soldiers who sally forth to fight and slay as many of the enemy as they can. Besides, when the opponents of the Faith bid us do battle for the common weal and slay men, our answer is this: Among yourselves the priests at certain shrines and the attendants of your gods keep their hands free from bloodshed for the sake of the sacrifices, so that they may have unstained and pure hands to offer the appointed sacrifices to those whom you consider gods. Even when war comes, you do not make the priests serve in the ranks. Well, if that is a reasonable and laudable custom, how much more so, that while the rest of men are fighting, these persons [i.e. Christians] should serve as priests and ministers of God, keeping their hands pure and wrestling in prayer to God for those who are fighting in a righteous cause and for a righteous king, that all opposition to righteous agents may be crushed. Also, as we vanquish by our prayers all the demons who stir up war and the violation of oaths and disturbances of the peace, we thus prove of more help to kings than those who take up arms. Besides, we do take part in public affairs, for from a righteous life we offer up prayers, conjoined with ascetic discipline and meditations which instruct us to scorn delights instead of being carried away by them. We fight for the king better than any one else. We do not take up arms along with him, even though he presses us, but we take arms on his behalf, raising a special regiment of religion ( ) by means of our supplications to God. If Celsus wants us to fight on behalf of our country as well, let him know that we do so fight. And our fighting is not for the purpose of being noticed by men or of winning vain glory, for our prayers are in secret, in the inner life, ascending as from priests on behalf of our fellow-citizens. Besides, Christians render more help to their countries than other men, for they train citizens and teach piety towards the supreme Deity. This course of reasoning would naturally have seemed evasive to Celsus, and he would have been still more disappointed with the plea (viii. 68f.) that the wild barbarians would not bring Roman civilization to ruin, because, if they were converted to Christianity, they would make excellent citizens, law-abiding and humane. Origen recalls the prediction of Zep 3:7-13, but he is not very certain about its meaning, though he actually brings it forward in all seriousness against the remark of Celsus that any wholesome agreement between the barbarians and the Romans was in the last degree unlikely.
Origen, in fact, falls back upon fatalism. He propounds a holy experiment, which had no relation to the moral order or to the actual situation of the empire. He declares that, if the Romans would all accept Christianity, their prayers would enable them to overcome their foes-or rather, he adds, they would not require to fight at all, since the divine power which promised to save five cities for the sake of fifty just men would be their safeguard. One can imagine how chilling and unreal these airy excuses would sound to Roman patriots who were celebrating with a glow of enthusiasm in a.d. 248 the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome.* Besides, to suggest disarmament as the only alternative to militarism was worse than folly to any serious citizen of the Empire in the 3rd cent.; it suggested an unhealthy conscience. But the plea of Celsus was as much beside the point as Origens answer. Neither dealt with realities. When Celsus asked Christians to serve in the army, he did not realize that the religious rites associated with military and civil service were a genuine stumbling-block to Christians. He forgot, as Renan (Marc-Aurle, p. 370 f.) says, that in upholding the established religion he was asking Christians to agree to absurdities greater than those which he attacked in Christians themselves. Celsus had an Epicureans healthy scorn for superstition and a Romans inability to see how any religion could be real or reasonable apart from nationality. Both of these traits prevented him from doing justice to Christianity. Origens main position is sound, but then he weakens it by letting himself be drawn off into doctrinaire opinions and speculations about politics. It is true that in one passage he incidentally (c. Cels. iv. 82, Philocalia, xx. 9) appears again to admit that war in certain circumstances might be justified for non-Christians. He has been speaking of bees, which obey a sovereign and engage in wars. Perhaps, he adds, the so-called wars of the bees suggest how just and regular wars (if such must be- ) should be prosecuted by men. But this is an obiter dictum, although, as we have just seen, he contemplates Christians praying for a righteous cause and army.
So far as the straight issue went, Origen answers Celsus on this point with a blunt Non possumus; he is not so defiant as Tertullian, but he is equally decided. The reasons added to his decision are less convincing; they remind us too vividly of the ingenuous philosophy of war which his fellow-Alexandrian had propounded two centuries earlier. Philos simple scheme of things (de Praem. et Pn. 15-16) divides the enemies of man into two classes, animals and human beings. Wild beasts are our natural enemies ( ); war against them has no ending, for their nature is alien to ours. The only prospect which Philo sees of any improvement in mans relations to the beasts-and it is a dim prospect-lies in the taming of the human passions; is it not silly to imagine that we can avoid injury from wild beasts external to us, when all the while we are training the wild beasts within to awful savagery? Hence, we must not give up hope that, once our wild passions of the soul are subdued, animals also will be broken in. In this way Philo hopes further that the wars of man against man will be ended; once the wild beasts are overcome by human gentleness and self-command, men will feel ashamed to pursue wars of aggression which make them lower than the brutes.* It will seem most disgraceful if venomous, carnivorous, unsociable, and ferocious animals have become on good terms with man, and if man himself, who is naturally gentle, and endowed with a sociable and harmonious disposition, is truculent and bent on destroying his fellow-creatures. For an idealist like Philo to write in such terms was harmless, if it was useless. His dream compromised nobody. But, when Origen talked about the possibility of the barbarians becoming Christians, at a time when Rome was face to face with the wild Goths on the northern frontiers, he forgot that there is a time and a season for everything, even for dreaming dreams. To suggest, as lie did, that the barbarians were not really so dangerous as Celsus had made out was to run the risk of giving Roman citizens a false and poor impression of Christian sagacity, to say nothing of Christian loyalty. Tertullians outburst was less likely to do harm; it was meant for Christians. But Origens utterances would reach the outside public more readily than his predecessors.
The second of the great African fathers admired Tertullian and on this point agreed with him. Cyprian, in a.d. 246, invites his friend and fellow-rhetorician Donatus (Ep. i ad Donatum, 6) to look at the state of the world: roads rendered impassable by brigands, seas infested with pirates, wars waged on every side with the bloody horror of camps, the world drenched with internecine bloodshed (mutuo sanguine), and murder-a crime, when committed by an individual-a virtue when committed wholesale. Impunity is claimed for crimes not because they are free from guilt but because of the large scale of their cruelty. There is a tinge of sentimental melancholy and weariness of the world in these words penned amid the charming case and quiet of his gardens at Carthage. But Cyprians position amounts to a discouragement of war in general. He has no room for it in his scheme of things. Half a century later the trenchant African objection to war was repeated by Arnobius of Sicca (i. 6), from whom Lactantius may have learned his pacifism as well as his rhetoric. Arnobius claims, however, that wars have abated in the Empire since the coming of Christ, though he insists that Christians would rather shed their own blood than stain their hands and conscience with the blood of other people. One of the points which he makes later (vii. 12) is the absurd situation created by two nations at war sacrificing to the same gods for victory. What are the poor gods to do? To side with each, time about, or with neither? But he uses this illustration to bring out the futility of imagining that the divine favour can be influenced by human offerings, not to emphasize the incongruities of war and religion. Neither Cyprian nor Arnobius nor even Lactantius and Athanasius, however, dinted Christian opinion like Tertullian and Origen.
7. The pressure of the problem.-Yet the dint was neither deep nor permanent. Fortunately for the early Church, the views of Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian did not alter the situation. Tertullian and Origen, like Tatian, happened to be suspected by the orthodox on other grounds. Cyprians influence might have been expected to exercise far more influence; apparently it did not. Of the four great African fathers, only the last, Augustine, recognized the sad, stern necessity of war as a sphere for Christian civic loyalty; Tertullian, Cyprian, and Lactantius take the opposite position. Yet Christians still continued to serve in the army. Had the extremists succeeded in their policy of tabuing military service, it is very doubtful if the victory of Christianity in the next century would have been possible; had the Church committed herself to an open line of disloyalty, by forbidding her members to join or to remain in the legions, the perils of the new religion would have been seriously increased, and Constantine would hardly have felt justified in raising it to the position of the State-religion. One of the factors of the Churchs triumph in the 4th cent. was that the Christians had made themselves necessary to the well-being of the Empire and proved themselves in deed as well as in word loyal citizens. A saving instinct kept the Church from yielding to the Gnostic and Manichaean tendency which was implicit in the fanatical anti-civic repudiation of force voiced by Tertullian and Origen. By the end of the 3rd cent. Christian soldiers were so considerable an element that one of the aims of Diocletian, in his ruthless policy, was to purge the army of their presence. The fact speaks for itself.
To it we may add, more for the sake of interest than of importance, that in the first half of the third cent. a Christian actually wrote on military tactics. (An incidental parallel occurs in the advice of Ep. Aristeas, pp. 193 f., 281, where a Jew gives Ptolemy Philadelphus some good counsel on military matters.) This was Sextus Julius Africanus, the versatile and indefatigable friend of Origen, who not only travelled widely in the East and studied science, but composed pages on subjects as diverse as chronology and agriculture. The recent discovery (cf. Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, iii. 36f.) of a papyrus containing the end of the 18th book of his removes any reason for scepticism as to his authorship of the latter work. The were, like the Stromata of Clement, a miscellany or encyclopaedia, but of a more secular character; they discussed all manner of topics from charms and medicines to strategy, from literary criticism to methods of warfare. Africanus seems to have been on intimate terms with the emperor, Alexander Severus; he arranged a library for him at the Pantheon, and his interests, theoretical as well as practical, were by no means confined to ecclesiastical affairs. He stood in the front rank of contemporary culture, and was a man of affairs as well as a scholar. Whether or not he had served in the army, it is significant that he could transcribe from his note-books information about matters of military science such as poisoning wells and provisions or the beat methods of attack.
But the 3rd cent. witnessed the rise of difficulties for Christian soldiers on a serious scale, which produced a certain reaction against the service. Some part of the repugnance obviously felt by Christians for military service may have been due to the fact that Mithraism was one of the favourite religions among the troops. From Memphis to the south of Scotland, from Armenia and the Balkans to Spain, the presence of the legions has left more or less distinct traces of this cult; from the reign of Commodus onwards, it was patronized by various emperors as the fautor imperii sui; sometimes, as under the reactionary policy of Julian, it was favoured actually as a counter-weight to Christianity, and all this may have sharpened the distaste of the Church for a branch of the public service which was so closely identified with the rival and belligerent cult of Mithra. But the reasons for the Christian hesitation lay deeper. Some Christians felt (see above, p. 662) that the sixth commandment forbade the taking of human life at all, and that the soldiers trade was no better than murder. This had never been the aim of the OT command, of course, and a man like Athanasius (Ep. xlviii.) frankly recognized the difference between murder as prohibited by the sixth commandment and the duty of the soldier to kill his enemies. Still, under a Christian regime which discouraged and had to discourage murder, it was inevitable that such a conclusion should occasionally be drawn. Far more serious was the difficulty raised by the compromising association of the Roman army with polytheism and the State-religion. These offered a real obstacle to some early Christians, and it was on this score that the issue was sharply raised. The allegiance of the army was bound up with a statutory recognition of the Emperor as the semi-divine head of the State; the military standards, decorated with gold and silver images of gods and emperors, were set up periodically as sacra to be venerated; and altars were erected, from the reign of Gallienus onwards, to the genius of the Emperor and subsequently to the genius of the Roman people. Camp religion, said Tertullian, is nothing but a veneration of the standards; the whole camp swears by them, and sets them up above all other gods (Apol. 16).* The genii of the legion, the genii of the cohort, and so forth, made up a military religion of their own, alongside of the Capitoline deities. On the other hand, all this religious side of the army could be, and evidently was, regarded by many Christians as a purely formal and official business; it was an unpleasant and distasteful item in the organization, but it could be judged from the point of view of patriotism, and many who were not Christians at all showed that they did not take it seriously. Church-parades were even then what they are often now. Besides, the offering up of the prescribed sacrifices was the duty of the officers; the rank and file had no direct personal share in the ceremony, although they tacitly assented by their presence on parade. And Christian officers cannot have been very numerous, at any rate in the 2nd century. At the same time, the army obviously was a place of special danger to the Christian who wished to be perfectly consistent. The situation was undoubtedly equivocal. The pagan Caecilins, in the dialogue of Minucius Felix (6), proudly claims that the Roman service had a distinctly religious accompaniment: Exercent in armis virtutem religiosam cultu religionis armati. Trouble was almost inevitable before long for members of the Church who had to face the religious rites of the camp in the light of what some Christian authorities were saying about idolatry. For example, a Christian soldier was put to death at Caesarea under Gallienus (Eus. HE vii. 15) for refusing to offer the usual sacrifice to the emperors, which was required of all officers. Marinus had been elected to the position of centurion, but his election was challenged by a rival, who objected that Marinus could not take the honour as he was a Christian and therefore unable to perform the due sacrifice. On examination this was found to be correct, and the Christian forfeited his life. The local bishop, Theoteknus, came to him during the three hours given him for reconsidering his position, and, taking him into the church, asked him to choose between the sword at his side and the gospels which the bishop put before him. The soldier took the gospels. Once again, a case of voluntary death on the part of two Christian soldiers is chronicled in the famous inscription of Pope Damasus on the Appian Road (cf. H. Achelis, in TU XI. ii. [1894] 43 f., where their later Acta are discussed), which commemorates the martyrdom of Nereus and Achilleus; they were buried in the cemetery of Domitilla, the niece of Domitian. The exact date of their death is uncertain. But they certainly felt that their Christian faith was incompatible with their profession, and acted upon their feeling (conversi fugiunt ducis impia castra, reliquunt clypeos, faleras, telaque cruenta, confessi gaudent Christi portare triumphos). In like planner, there were isolated cases of men refusing to take part in the pagan religious rites which the army practised. One of these is known to have taken place at Tangiers, where a centurion called Marcellus, during some ceremony of sacrifice in honour of the Emperors birthday, suddenly threw off his military belt and declared that he was a soldier of Jesus Christ the eternal King. From this time, he shouted, I cease to be a soldier of your emperors, and as for worshipping your gods of wood and stone, I scorn to do it; they are deaf and dumb idols. For this breach of discipline he was arrested and beheaded (cf. T. Ruinart, Acta Primorum Martyrum, Amsterdam, 1713, p. 343 f.). Marcellus suffered under Maximian and so did the Christian soldiers of the Thebaic legion (i.e. from Thebais, in Upper Egypt), which is said to have been twice decimated for refusing to participate in some pagan rite; both officers and men died for thus incurring the charge of insubordination.
Again, what were Christians in the army to do when they were ordered to take part in the arrest and even in the execution of Christian civilians during a persecution? This task often fell to soldiers. Indeed, it was one of their temptations to harshness and extortion (see above, p. 653). Christians who desired to avoid persecution could bribe soldiers, as Tertullian implies (de Fuga, 12: Tu autem pro eo pacisceris cum delatore vel milite quem coram toto mundo Christus emit. Quid enim dicit ille concussor? Da mihi pecuniam). A Christian soldier would not be likely to take bribes from a cowardly Christian civilian, and it would be dangerous, if not impossible, for him to connive at the escape or exemption of his fellow-believers. What then was he to do? Military discipline left the troops no alternative but to obey such a distasteful command. And yet how could they as Christians participate in the punishment of their fellow-Christians? Eusebius describes one case, during the fierce Decian persecution of the Church at Alexandria (HE vi. 41, 22 f.). Four or five legionaries standing beside the tribunal attracted the attention of the court by the marks of violent disapprobation* which they made when a Christian prisoner seemed on the point of recanting. Without waiting to be arrested, they ran forward to the presiding magistrate and confessed proudly that they were Christians. This encouraged the civilian Christians who were awaiting their trial. The legionaries themselves were executed; but, as Dionysius the Alexandrian bishop, from whom Eusebius quotes the story, is careful to add, their martyrdom was a triumph for their God ( ; cf. 2Co 2:14). Half a century earlier, when Perpetua and Felicitas were tortured to a horrible death at Carthage in a.d. 203, a humane soldier, Pudens, who was in charge of them was so impressed by their conduct that he became a Christian (Passio S. Perpetuae, 9, 16). Whether he remained a soldier or not, we are not informed. He was by nature a kind man, like Julius the officer who had charge of St. Paul (see above, p. 653), but Pudens advanced from humane feeling to faith. He did not suffer with the two women and Saturus, however. The Passio closes with Saturus, on the eve of his own death, encouraging Pudens to believe with all his heart. There is no claim made that he came forward to seal his confession alongside of his prisoners. But this infectious courage sometimes caught up a soldier. When Potamiaena, the beautiful girl-martyr of Alexandria, was being led away to be burned, e.g. (Eus. HE vi. 5), the Roman officer who was in charge of the prisoner chivalrously protected her from the coarse violence of the mob. In gratitude for his kindness, she told him that she would ask her God, after she died, to reward him. Shortly afterwards Basilides, the officer, declined to take one of the usual military oaths on the ground that he was a Christian. He attributed his conversion to visions of the woman whom he had watched dying for her Lord, and was beheaded for his own confession. Another case occurred during the Decian persecution at Alexandria (Eus. HE vi. 41. 16), when a soldier called Besas checked the riotous mob round the martyrs and was beheaded promptly. The probability is that he was already a Christian, like his five fellow-soldiers of the Second Trajan legion (see above), but the story leaves it a fair question whether he was not suddenly converted by the bearing of the prisoners.
Another case may be selected. Writing in a.d. 250-251 (Ep. 39), Cyprian warmly commends Celerinus as the leader in the battle of our own day, the foremost of Christs soldiers to advance (antesignanus),* a man who, although racked and tortured, defeated the devil his enemy by his constancy. He had prevailed, says Lucian, one of his Carthaginian friends (Cyprian, Ep. 22), against the chief Snake, the quartermaster (metatorem) of antichrist-the metatores (cf. Lipsius, op. cit., p. 300 f.) being the advance-party who laid out the camp.
Cyprians comment is: In the case of a servant of God, the glory of the wounds constitutes a victory. Celerinus came, on both sides of his family, from a military household. Not only had his grandmother been a martyr, but his two uncles, on the fathers and the mothers side, Laurentius and Egnatius, once fought themselves in the armies of the world, and, true, spiritual soldiers of God as they were, overthrew the devil by confessing Christ, thereby winning palms and crowns from the Lord.
These two Christian soldiers had not renounced their profession. They suffered rather than renounce Christ, but at the time of their martyrdom they were still in the army.
The difficulty of reconciling Christianity with military service also met recruits. One case has been preserved, which occurred in 295 in Numidia, where a certain Maximilianus, the son of a veteran, declined to enlist on the ground that he was a Christian: I cannot fight, for I am a Christian. Militare is for him the same thing as malefacere. Non milito saeculo sed milito deo meo. In spite of all threats the youth refused to do his duty, and the recruiting authorities, who behaved with considerable patience, had no alternative except to order his execution for disloyalty (Ruinart, p. 340 f.). He is reminded that there are Christians already in the army, but that does not remove his scruples: Ipsi sciunt quod ipsis expediat.
We may sum up the evidence thus. The available data for the 3rd cent. go to prove that, if some Christians left or tried to leave the army, others found it quite possible to remain; if some had conscientious objections to entering the legions, others enlisted of their own accord. Naturally, it is the cases which led to martyrdom that are chronicled. Instances of men who suffered in the army or for declining to join the army come repeatedly to light. But their number must not be exaggerated. It should be remembered that there was nothing to attract attention to the other class of Christian soldiers who, for one reason or another, never came up to the critical issue, who fought for their country either without raising the general question of war at all or after weighing the problem and deciding that a healthy conscience could not look at any other alternative than to serve in arms. How important a factor they were in the army by the end of the 3rd cent. may be gathered indirectly but decisively from the fact that they were more than once made the special or primary target of official persecution. Thus, Galerius, incited by his pagan mother, over-persuaded Diocletian, his colleague, to persecute Christians, and one circumstance which whetted the older mans wrath was that the presence of Christians was supposed to obstruct the pagan rites of divination; when some Christians who had to be present at the ceremony made the sign of the cross, the soothsayers at once blamed this for the failure of the rites. The persecution was specially directed against officers and the rank and file of the army (Lact. de Mort. Persecut. 10), who were ordered to offer sacrifice on penalty of dismissal from the service. At first, however, the attack on Christians in the army was not pushed home (cf. Eus. HE viii. 4); the authorities evidently found that their Christian officers and privates were too resolute and also too numerous to make a ruthless policy advisable. Only one or two cases of martyrdom occurred. But during the five years of the great persecution, from 303 onwards, the army contributed its martyrs to the roll-call of the Church, men like Dasius the private, who refused to take part in the revels of the Saturnalia (cf. F. Cumont, in Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels and Paris, 1897. xvi. 5 f.), Sebastian, an officer in the Praetorian Guard, who was shot to death by archers for declining to abandon his religion (cf. H. Delehaye, in ib. xvi. 209 f.), and Seleucus, either a veteran or one who had withdrawn from the army (Eus. de Mart. Pal. xi. 20-23), and who was put to death at Caesarea (further particulars in A. J. Mason, The Historic Martyrs of the Primitive Church, London, 1905, p. 203 f.). The (early 4th cent.) Acts of Callistratus (cf. F. C. Conybeare, Monuments of Early Christianity2, London, 1896, p. 273 f.) also assign to the great persecution under Diocletian the martyrdom of that saint and forty-nine of his fellow-soldiers, either at Rome or at Constantinople.
Early in 303 the Great Persecution was begun with the demolition of the Church at Nicomedia: and there was a tall young officer looking on with thoughts of his own, like Napoleon watching the riot of June 1792.* But Constantine was not to get his chance, even three years later when he became one of the Caesars. It was only in 311 that the death of Galerius gave him the opportunity of crushing Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312; even then the vision of the Cross did not definitely stamp the victorious general or the army as Christian, but the Christians and Constantine were drawing closer together, and their union was sealed by the final struggle with Licinius (a.d. 323), who suddenly committed himself to a fresh policy of repression against the Church, ordering all the Christians in his army to apostatize, on penalty of dismissal from the service. The sacrifice involved in this dismissal was serious, for, when a veteran received his honourable discharge (honesta missio), he not only received his bounty (see above, p. 655) but was generally made a Roman citizen, if he was not already enfranchised; he was also assigned land to settle upon as his own property. The mere prospect of the pay secured to him at the end of his service was a strong motive for adhering to the army, as Vegetius observes (ii. 20: Miles qui sumptus suos scit apud signa depositos, de deserendo nihil cogitat, magis diligit signa, pro illis in acie fortius dimicat). We are hardly surprised, therefore, to discover that some of those who allowed themselves to be cashiered rather than offer the pagan sacrifices, and who conscientiously gave up their military belts, reconsidered their position afterwards and by bribery regained their position in the army. It is their case that is decided by the Council of Nicaea (canon xii.), which ordered such soldiers, who had returned like dogs to their vomit (an echo of 2Pe 2:22)-i.e. to serve in a pagan army fighting against Constantine, who was sympathetic to the Church-to undergo a prolonged penance. But no censure was passed on military service as such. Others were apparently treated with more rigour than dismissal from the service,* if the famous story (cf. Basils 19th Homily, in Sanctos Quadraginta Martyres) of the Forty Soldiers of Sebaste is to be referred to this period. For declining to sacrifice, they were first plunged in an ice-cold lake, and then tortured to death. These heroes belonged to the famous Melitene legion, which had already Christian traditions (see above, p. 663), and it was to this legion that Polyeuctes also belonged, although the 4th cent. Acts of this military martyr (cf. F. C. Conybeare, Monuments of Early Christianity2, pp. 123-146) yield no authentic evidence for the period of his death. The martyrdom of Theodore, an officer in high command (ib., p. 217 f.), is, however, definitely assigned to the period when Licinius was purging his army. Soldiers who had recanted under the terrible pressure of the Diocletian persecution formed a special item in the problem which the lapsi furnished to the Church (Epiph. Haer. lxviii. 2).
It would be unjust to infer that the Christian soldiers who were not martyred were necessarily of inferior quality to their fellows. The Romans were not a persecuting people. Except on special occasions of popular fury, they did not as a rule force the issue even on civilian Christians, and in the army, particularly on active service in the provinces, where men held together in face of a common enemy, there would seldom be any occasion or desire to throw a legionary into difficulties by raising the question of his religious beliefs. The enforcement of even an imperial edict depended largely on the local authorities. It was not uniformly put into execution throughout the army, and this explains partly why some soldiers suffered while others seem to have been exempted. How far Christian soldiers even acted as missionaries of the faith we can only surmise. The devotees of Mithra in the legions certainly carried their worship with them, and Mithraeums were erected all over the Empire where the army had their headquarters. Did Christian soldiers push the propaganda of their faith also? Was it to them, or to traders, that the early introduction of Christianity into Britain was due-the introduction of which Tertullian speaks so proudly by the end of the 2nd cent. (adv. Jud 1:7)? In our present state of knowledge, this is a question which can only be asked. Probabilities are not evidence, and there are no reliable data to support even inferences that might serve as an answer.
8. The practical solution of the problem.-It is only upon a generous estimate of the scope of this Dictionary that the survey has been carried down even this length; but for the sake of completeness a word may be added upon the final solution of the problem, so far as it was finally settled, for the early Church. The open adhesion of Constantine to Christianity, after his defeat of Licinius, entirely altered the focus of the problem. When the head of the army had become a Christian, and especially when he used the nails which were alleged to have been used for the cross to fix his armour (Socrates, HE i. 17: , , , ), a whole series of difficulties was removed; theoretically, a number of the objections urged during the pagan regime fell to the ground. The army had received a semi-consecration. Christians were no longer exposed to pagan seduction in the army. A passing wave of reaction might alter the situation under Julian,* but this was temporary, and the position after Constantine was in the main established. The only scruple which Christians could now feel about military service was with regard to bloodshed. Was war, even under the auspices of a Christian Emperor, and in defence of the State, permissible or advisable for members of the Church? The question had reduced itself to this. Yet, at the same time, it was soon to broaden out; for, when the Church and the State were allied, their common interests were sometimes bound to make war assume the position of a holy war.
As early as 314 a Council of the Church in the West seems to have been anxious to prove the loyalty of Christians to the army, in view of Constantines sympathies. The third canon of the Council of Aries runs thus: De his qui arma projiciunt in pace, placuit abstineri eos a communione. The difficulty of the phraseology was felt at an early period, as is plain from the v.l. proelio, which would mean that soldiers who proved cowards in face of the enemy were to be excommunicated. But would they have lived to be excommunicated? The army would surely have dealt with them before ever the Church could. The canon does not refer either to this or, as even Hefele thought, to gladiators. It appears to be a repudiation of Christian soldiers who gave way to their scruples about war; since the Church now enjoyed peace, under Constantine, there was no reason for this desertion, and all such persons were debarred from communion. The adhesion of the Church to the State is complete, on this interpretation of the canon. It is all the more likely that the declaration of Arles is to be read in this light, as the Western Church would be anxious at this period to lend its moral support to a general like Constantine.
Constantine himself acted afterwards upon a broad policy of toleration. He (Eus. Vita Const. ii. 33) left it to Christian officers to decide whether they would be reinstated in the army from which they had been ejected on religious grounds by Licinius, or would accept an honourable discharge from the service. The choice lay with themselves. He would not force any Christian to serve against his will. This made it more easy for the Church to form a conclusion, but it did not help matters. The question was still left to the individual, and we have few data for determining how far it was fell to be a question at all. Now that the scruple about idolatry had fallen, the scruple about bloodshed became vital. This had always been recognized, even in army regulations; the piacular sacrifice or illustration of the army at the close of a campaign was both Semitic (see Num 31:19 f., after a ruthless massacre of prisoners) and Roman-though W. Warde Fowler (The Religious Experience of the Roman People, London, 1911, p. 217) cannot find any trace of it except in a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the generals car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem. This scruple about the taint of bloodshed now appears in Christian ecclesiastical rules. On the one hand, there must have been a feeling abroad in certain circles which led up to the attitude adopted in the later Canons of Hippolytus and Testament of our Lord, not earlier than the end of the 4th cent., which propound a stringent ecclesiastical discouragement of the army as a sphere for earnest Christians. The Testament is more sympathetic to teachers than to soldiers; the latter are not only forbidden to shed blood and bidden to be content with their pay (cf. Luk 3:14),* but, if they wish to be baptized in the Lord, they must give up military service absolutely (ii.). In the same way, the Tertullian-spirit dominates the Canons of Hippolytus (13, 14), which prohibit a soldier from wearing chaplet or crown, and exclude him from the sacrament till he has done severe and long penance for any blood he may have shed. But these extreme attempts did not represent the normal temper of the Church, as is plain from their later editions: in the Canons of Hippolytus the sentence of the 14th Canon (71-73) that no Christian is to go and become a soldier is qualified (74: nisi sit coactus a duce; cf. TU VI. iv. [1891] 82) afterwards by the insertion of the clause, unless he is obliged to do so; that is, a Christian is allowed to join the army if he is called up by conscription, but he is not allowed to enlist voluntarily. The profession is discouraged for members of the Church, principally on the ground that it involves bloodshed. Similarly, in the later Coptic version of the Testamentum Domini, the claim that a catechumen must leave the army before he can be baptized is omitted, although Christians are still prohibited from joining the legions of their own accord.
Over against these extreme views we may set not only the distinctly loyalist tone of Eusebius, but the extreme appeal of a writer like Firmicus Maternus, in the middle of the 4th cent., who urges the sons of Constantine to root out paganism forcibly. The weeds which he has in view particularly are Eastern cults like those of Isis, Mithra, and Magna Mater, which had hitherto seemed to many Romans to possess the same origin and aim as Christianity itself. Firmicus Maternus regards them as the 16th cent. reformers regarded the Mass. He advocates, for the first time in the history of the Church, a holy war (de Errore profanarum religionum, 16 ff.). Paganism requires a rough surgery, et, si conualuerit malum, et ignis adhibetur et ferrum. O Constantius and Constans, he cries, most sacred emperors, only a little more action and the devil will lie prostrate, under the blow of your laws, the dreadful plague of idolatry will vanish and perish; raise the standard (vexillum) of the Faith, you for whom the Deity has reserved this honour: raise the banner or the Law for men to reverence may weal and bliss accrue to the stale, because you have laid low the enemies armies amid heaps of slain victims. Blessed are you also, for God has made you participators in His glory and His will; and, out of kindness to the people, Christ has granted yon with your own hands to destroy idolatry and demolish the shrines of the profane. He conquers evil spirits with spiritual arms, you have conquered earthly evils. Raise the trophies of victory you have won the battle for mans salvation, Christ Himself fighting in the conflict (20). Firmicus Maternus believes strongly in a Lord of hosts. When a Roman army in the old days came back from victory over foreign foes, it had to march through the Porta triumphalis, and Fowler (p. 217) suggests that this custom most likely had as its original meaning the separation of the host from the profane world in which it had been moving, To Firmicus Maternus an army which had been putting down idolatry required no such purging from profane influences; its task had been high and holy. Yet his contemporary Basil, who succeeded Eusebius in the bishopric of Caesarea, looked more askance at Christian soldiers. In the first of his canonical letters to Amphilochius, the bishop of Iconium, he would exclude from communion for three full years all soldiers who retire when their term of service is over: Our fathers did not consider homicide in war to be homicide, presumably because they wished to make allowance for men who fought on behalf of chastity and true religion. Perhaps it is well, however, to counsel that those whose hands are not clean should only* abstain from communion for three years (Ep. clxxxviii. 13). He had already (ib. 8) discussed the difference between intentional and unintentional homicide, and argued that all attacks on other people in battle are intentional, since soldiers fight to kill their enemies; such acts are ranked by Basil as murders, on the same plane of guilt as deaths caused by robbers and poisoners. This is the plea against war which we have already noticed (p. 662 f.). Basil seems to have considered it possible for soldiers to avoid bloodshed, but this cannot have been a common experience, for most of the legionaries must have seen active service in his day. He himself had correspondents in the army. One of his short letters (cvi.) is to a soldier-friend, evidently high up in the service. I have learned, says the bishop, to know one who proves that even in military service it is possible to maintain absolute love to God, and that one should distinguish a Christian not by his style of dress but by his temper of soul. It was a great delight to meet you, and I am now extremely glad whenever I recollect you. Basils ecclesiastical opinion on war is coloured by his strict asceticism, like his objection to lending money on interest, and his restriction of the ordinary practice of discipline for the sacrament was never acted upon by the Church. It is significant that even he, however, does not venture to brand military service as unchristian. Asceticism led then and afterwards to extravagant and heretical developments, but Basil had enough good sense to prevent him from declining to bracket Christian and soldier together.
The problem of the army at this period was complicated by the increasing number of mercenaries who were pouring into the legions. The military spirit had almost died out among the Romans. Ever since the 3rd cent. the military profession had been declining in the public esteem. Recruits were branded on entering the service, as if they were slaves in an ergastulum. The aversion to military service appears to have been growing.* Efforts were naturally made to avert the lowering and paganizing of the legions. By a.d. 416 Theodosius II. Had strictly forbidden any pagan to enter the army; it was to be composed entirely of Christian soldiers, and uncontaminated by heathen recruits. The ideal was a lovely company; only Theodosius was not a Cromwell, and the supply of honest and godly men was inadequate. Now, if men occasionally mutilated themselves rather than enter the army, it was natural that Christian scruples should also operate against the service, when service had become otherwise unpopular. The steadying verdict was given by Augustine in the opening of the 5th century. On this, as on many other points of dogma and practice, his opinion came to be virtually authoritative. It was not an abstract decision. He was consulted by some officers on the matter, among others by Boniface, the distinguished military governor of N. Africa, and his correspondence with them presents his mature opinion. Intrinsically, he holds, Christianity does not forbid military service; otherwise, John the Baptist would not have allowed the soldiers to remain in the army. Besides, think not only of David but of the centurions whom Jesus and Peter praised. In the present situation of mankind some must fight against the barbarians in defence of order and justice; every one has his own gift from God, and military service is at least a subdivision of labour in the one kingdom of the Lord. He repudiates militarism; few writers in the early Church speak more sternly of the callousness, the havoc, and the senseless retaliation which war may breed; war for wars sake is wrong. Also, even in a just war, ferocity and treachery are inconsistent with a Christian soldiers duty (When a promise is made, it has to be kept even with the enemy against whom you are fighting), as he tells Boniface. He would have heartily agreed with Seneca, who canonized Scipio Africanus, non quia magnos exercitus duxit, sed ob egregiam moderationem pietatemque (Ep. Mor. lxxxvi.). He emphasizes the need of personal religion, in view of the many temptations incident to military life. In short, the Christian soldier now becomes a definite type, more definite than the of Act 10:7. This attitude was widely accepted. What Augustine did was (i.) to re-affirm not only the legitimacy but, for certain men, the duty of serving in the army, and (ii.) to suggest some of the principles which should determine war. He includes among just wars (in which, he admits, terrible suffering is caused [de Civ. Dei, xix. 7]) even a war for the purpose of humbling some arrogant power-the debellare superbos of Vergils time. He assigns a paternal authority to the Roman State, in virtue of which war may be a disciplinary measure for the good of other peoples. But into the details and consequences of this Augustinian philosophy and moralization of war we cannot enter. The relevant point here is to note that Augustines opinions, expressed incidentally (a) in some of his commentaries like the sixth book of the Quaestionum in Heptateuchum, or (b) in his correspondence with Christian officers and officials, or (c) in the treatise c. Faustum (xxvi. 74 ff.), possess a significance which attaches to no individual judgment prior to himself, and for the first time present a considered judgment upon war from the Christian standpoint. They express the central good sense of the Church, which declines to identify Christianity with either the negation or the glorification of warfare.
(a) In the commentary on Joshua (Jos 6:10) he claims that a righteous war, and a righteous war alone, justifies the use of stratagems and spies such as Joshua employed. Righteous wars may be defined as wars to avenge wrongs, when a nation or state has to be attacked for neglecting either to make reparation for some misdeeds committed by its own citizens or to restore what has been wrongfully seized.
(b) The correspondence with Marcellinus, the Imperial commissioner, and with Boniface elaborates Augustines judgment on war from a Christian standpoint. In a long letter (Ep. cxxxviii.) to the former on various doctrinal and practical difficulties, including the question of the compatibility of the Sermon on the Mount with effective citizenship, he uses Luk 3:14 to prove that the Christian religion did not prohibit military service. If all soldiers-and even citizens-would live up to these gospel-demands, there would be no fear of weakness to the State [cxxxviii. 2. 15). He repeats to Boniface (Ep. clxxxix.) this argument from John the Baptists rule, and adds that war is only a lamentable necessity, a last resort, a means to secure peace, not an end in itself. Peace ought to be your desire, war only your necessity peace is never sought for the purpose of stirring up war, but war is waged in order to win peace.* Hence, even in warfare, be a peacemaker, that, you may, by conquering your assailants, bring them over to the advantages of peace. Let it be necessity, not your desire, which slays the foe in fight. This is a Christian replica of the spirit which prompted Lucans (ix. 199) famous praise of Pompey: Praetulit arma togae, sed pacem armatus amavit. It is civilians who are truculent more often than those who have actually to fight, but Augustine knew that even generals needed a word on moderation in the hour of victory. When Boniface, after his wifes death, had almost resolved in a fit of depression to quit the public service and become a monk, Augustine (Ep. ccxx. 3) dissuaded him, pointing out that by forcibly restraining the invaders of N. Africa be could render far better service to the Church, which would then be protected from these barbarian hordes. The supreme obstacle to a good life, as he says, is not militia but malitia, not the army but iniquity. Thus Augustine not only indicates the army as a profession for Christian laymen, but actually insists on military efficiency no less than on self-restraint in a general (cf. Cicero, de Offic. I. xi. 35). A Christian soldier must regard his profession as a gift from God, in the sense of 1Co 7:7, and he must therefore uses his gift to the fullest advantage for God.
(c) It is a passion for doing injury, cruel revenue, a fierce and implacable temper, savage fury, the lust of power, and things like these, that sum up what is rightly reprobated in war. It is generally to punish these crimes rightly that good men undertake war at all and carry it on, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, against violent opposition. This had been, of course, the aim of the ideal Hebrew monarch; he wielded the sword (Psa 45:3-4] on behalf of loyal piety, humility, and justice. But Augustine refers to a NT argument. He quotes: Render to Caesar what is Caesars and to God what is Gods. Then he adds, And tribute money is paid for the very purpose of providing pay for the soldiers who are needed to fight. The natural order of things, which promotes the peace of mankind, lays it down that a ruler has the authority and ability to undertake war, while soldiers must serve in the execution of military orders on behalf of the common peace and safety. It is wrong to doubt that war is righteous when it is undertaken in obedience to God, to overawe or crush or master human arrogance. There is no power except from God (Rom 13:1), by His command or permission; consequently a righteous man who happens to be serving under even a sacrilegious king, is justified in fighting under his monarchs orders-for, even when these orders are not obviously just, the responsibility does not lie with the soldier. Such is the argument of the treatise against Faustus. Ever since the fulfilment of Psa 72:11 (All kings of the earth shall worship him, all nations shall serve him) in Christ, who is the true Solomon or Peace, Christian emperors, putting entire confidence in Christ, have won splendid victories over sacrilegious foes who relied on the rites of idols and demons. The entire argument turns upon the objection raised by the Manichaeans, as earlier by the Marcionites, to the use of force by the OT God.
Literature.-In 1908 Karl Kautsky published a monograph on Der Ursprung des christentums (Stuttgart), a so-called historical investigation, in which (especially p. 384 f.) he attempted to prove that Jesus had been a Messianic leader of revolt, who had really been put to death for His seditious and fanatical Galilaean uprising, and that the failure of this movement led to a pacific reinterpretation of His career, which in the NT has replaced but not entirely obliterated the originally militant aspect of His gospel. The reply to this unhistorical restatement of primitive Christianity came from Hans Windisch in his Der messianische Krieg und das Urchristentum, Tbingen, 1909. In addition to the literature already cited in the course of this article, the following more or less recent monographs on the relation of early Christians to warfare and the Roman army may be mentioned as specially valuable: A. Bigelmair, Die Beteiligung der Christen am ffentlichen Leben in vorconstantinischer Zeit, Munich, 1902, pp. 164-201; K. H. E. de Jong, Dienstweigering bij de oude christenen, Leiden, 1905; A. Harnack, Militia Christi: die Christliche Religion und der Soldatenstand in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, Tbingen, 1905; P. Batiffol, essay in the volume of collected essays entitled Lglise et la Guerre, Paris, 1913; some pages (pp. 24-28) in E. Le Blant, Les Perscuteurs et les martyrs aux premiers sicles de notre re, do., 1893, as well as in his earlier Inscriptions chrtiennes de la Gaule, do., 1856, i. 81-87: J. B. Mullinger, art. in DCA ii. 2028-2030; and H. B. Workman, Persecution in the Early Church, London, 1906, pp. 181-188. The European war has naturally produced a crop of pamphlets and studies, which occasionally discuss the early Churchs attitude to war in general, but seldom to any scientific profit; the large majority, whether written by pacifists or by patriots, suffer from an unhistorical imagination, and for the most part discover evidence for conclusions already formed. C. W. Emmets essay on War and the Ethics of the NT, in The Faith and the War, London, 1915, is a notable exception.
James Moffatt.
Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church
Wandering Stars
wonder-ing. See ASTRONOMY.