Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay
the legislator should rather make it his object so to order his
legislation upon military and other matters as to promote leisure
and peace is a theory borne out by the facts of history.” ...
(_loc. cit._ Ch. XV.). “War, as we have remarked several times,
has its end in peace.”
Aristotle strongly condemns the Lacedæmonians and Cretans for
regarding war and conquest as the sole ends to which all law and
education should be directed. Also in non-Greek tribes like the
Scythians, Persians, Thracians and Celts he says, only military
power is admired by the people and encouraged by the state.
“There was formerly too a law in Macedonia that any one who had
never slain an enemy should wear the halter about his neck.”
Among the Iberians too, a military people, “it is the custom to
set around the tomb of a deceased warrior a number of obelisks
corresponding to the number of enemies he has killed.... Yet
... it may well appear to be a startling paradox that it should
be the function of a Statesman to succeed in devising the means
of rule and mastery over neighbouring peoples whether with or
against their own will. How can such action be worthy of a
statesman or legislator, when it has not even the sanction of
law?” (_op. cit._, IV. Ch. 2.)
We see that Aristotle disapproves of a glorification of war for
its own sake, and regards it as justifiable only in certain
circumstances. Methods of warfare adopted and proved in the East
would not have been possible in Greece. An act of treachery,
for example, such as that of Jael, (_Judges_ IV. 17) which was
extolled in songs of praise by the Jews, (_loc. cit._ V. 24) the
Greek people would have been inclined to repudiate. The stories
of Roman history, the behaviour of Fabricius, for instance,
or Regulus and the honourable conduct of prisoners on various
occasions released on parole, show that this consciousness of
certain principles of honour in warfare was still more highly
developed in Rome.
Socrates in the _Republic_ (V. 469, 470) gives expression to a
feeling which was gradually gaining ground in Greece, that war
between Hellenic tribes was much more serious than war between
Greeks and barbarians. In such civil warfare, he considered,
the defeated ought not to be reduced to slavery, nor the slain
despoiled, nor Hellenic territory devastated. For any difference
between Greek and Greek is to “be regarded by them as discord
only—a quarrel among friends, which is not to be called war”....
“Our citizens [_i.e._ in the ideal republic] should thus deal
with their Hellenic enemies; and with barbarians as the Hellenes
now deal with one another.” (V. 471.)
The views of Plato and Aristotle on this and other questions were
in advance of the custom and practice of their time.
The treatment of a defeated enemy among the Jews rested upon a
similar religious foundation. In the East, we find a special cruelty
in the conduct of war. The wars of the Jews and Assyrians were wars
of extermination. The whole of the _Old Testament_, it has been said,
resounds with the clash of arms.[9] “An eye for an eye, a tooth for
a tooth!” was the command of Jehovah to his chosen people. Vengeance
was bound up in their very idea of the Creator. The Jews, unlike the
followers of Mahomet, attempted, and were commanded to attempt no
violent conversion[10]; they were then too weak a nation; but they
fought, and fought with success against the heathen of neighbouring
lands, the Lord of Hosts leading them forth to battle. The God of
Israel stood to his chosen people in a unique and peculiarly logical
relation. He had made a covenant with them; and, in return for their
obedience and allegiance, cared for their interests and advanced
their national prosperity. The blood of this elect people could
not be suffered to intermix with that of idolaters. Canaan must be
cleared of the heathen, on the coming of the children of Israel to
their promised land; and mercy to the conquered enemy, even to women,
children or animals was held by the Hebrew prophets to be treachery
to Jehovah. (_Sam._ XV.; _Josh._ VI. 21.)
[9] “The Lord is a man of war,” said Moses (_Exodus_ XV. 3). Cf.
_Psalms_ XXIV. 8. He is “mighty in battle.”
[10] This was bound up with the very essence of Islam; the devout
Mussulman could suffer the existence of no unbeliever. Tolerance
or indifference was an attitude which his faith made impossible.
“When ye encounter the unbelievers,” quoth the prophet (_Koran_,
ch. 47), “strike off their heads, until ye have made a great
slaughter among them.... Verily if God pleased he could take
vengeance on them without your assistance; but he commandeth you
to fight his battles.”
The propagation of the faith by the sword was not only commanded
by the Mohammedan religion: it was that religion itself.
Hence the attitude of the Jews to neighbouring nations[11] was still
more hostile than that of the Greeks. The cause of this difference
is bound up with the transition from polytheism to monotheism. The
most devout worshipper of the national gods of ancient times could
endure to see other gods than his worshipped in the next town or by
a neighbouring nation. There was no reason why all should not exist
side by side. Religious conflicts in polytheistic countries, when
they arose, were due not to the rivalry of conflicting faiths, but to
an occasional attempt to put one god above the others in importance.
There could be no interest here in the propagation of belief through
the sword. But, under the Jews, these relations were entirely
altered. Jehovah, their Creator, became the one invisible God. Such
an one can suffer no others near him; their existence is a continual
insult to him. Monotheism is, in its very nature, a religion of
intolerance. Its spirit among the Jews was warlike: it commanded
the subjugation of other nations, but its instrument was rather
extermination than conversion.
[11] See _Acts_ X. 28:—“Ye know that it is an unlawful thing for
a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another
nation.”
_The Attitude of Christianity and the Early Church to War._
From the standpoint of the peace of nations, we may say that the
Christian faith, compared with other prominent monotheistic religious
systems, occupies an intermediate position between two extremes—the
fanaticism of Islam, and to a less extent of Judaism, and the
relatively passive attitude of the Buddhist who thought himself
bound to propagate his religion, but held himself justified only
in the employment of peaceful means. Christianity, on the other
hand, contains no warlike principles: it can in no sense be called
a religion of the sword, but circumstances gave the history of the
Church, after the first few centuries of its existence, a character
which cannot be called peace-loving.
This apparent contradiction between the spirit of the new religion
and its practical attitude to war has led to some difference of
opinion as to the actual teaching of Christ. The _New Testament_
seems, at a superficial glance, to furnish support as readily to the
champions of war as to its denouncers. The Messiah is the Prince
of Peace (_Is._ IX. 6, 7; _Heb._ VI.), and here lies the way of
righteousness (_Rom._ III. 19): but Christ came not to bring peace,
but a sword (_Matth._ X. 34). Such statements may be given the
meaning which we wish them to bear—the quoting of Scripture is ever
an unsatisfactory form of evidence; but there is no direct statement
in the _New Testament_ in favour of war, no saying of Christ which,
fairly interpreted, could be understood too regard this proof of
human imperfection as less condemnable than any other.[12] When men
shall be without sin, nation shall rise up against nation no more.
But man the individual can attain peace only when he has overcome the
world, when, in the struggle with his lower self, he has come forth
victorious. This is the spiritual sword which Christ brought into
the world—strife, not with the unbeliever, but with the lower self:
meekness and the spirit of the Word of God are the weapons with which
man must fight for the Faith.
[12] Neither, however, is there any which regards the soldier as
a murderer.
An elect people there was no longer: Israel had rejected its Messiah.
Instead there was a complete brotherhood of all men, the bond and
the free, as children of one God. The aim of the Church was a
world-empire, bound together by a universal religion. In this sense,
as sowing the first seeds of a universal peace, we may speak of
Christianity as a re-establishment of peace among mankind.
The later attitude of Christians to war, however, by no means
corresponds to the earliest tenets of the Church. Without doubt,
certain sects, from the beginning of our era and through the ages
up to the present time, held, like the Mennonites and Quakers
in our day, that the divine command, “Love your enemies,” could
not be reconciled with the profession of a soldier. The early
Christians were reproached under the Roman Emperors, before the
time of Constantine, with avoiding the citizen’s duty of military
service.[13] “To those enemies of our faith,” wrote Origen (_Contra
Celsum_, VIII., Ch. LXXIII., Anti-Nicene Christian Library), “who
require us to bear arms for the commonwealth, and to slay men, we
can reply: ‘Do not those who are priests at certain shrines, and
those who attend on certain gods, as you account them, keep their
hands free from blood, that they may with hands unstained and free
from human blood offer the appointed sacrifices to your gods; and
even when war is upon you, you never enlist the priests in the army.
If that, then, is a laudable custom, how much more so, that while
others are engaged in battle, these too should engage as the priests
and ministers of God, keeping their hands pure, and wrestling in
prayers to God on behalf of those who are fighting in a righteous
cause, and for the king who reigns righteously, that whatever is
opposed to those who act righteously may be destroyed!’ ... And we do
take our part in public affairs, when along with righteous prayers
we join self-denying exercises and meditations, which teach us to
despise pleasures, and not to be led away by them. And none fight
better for the king than we do. We do not indeed fight under him,
although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special
army—an army of piety—by offering our prayers to God.” The Fathers
of the Church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian,
Ambrose and the rest gave the same testimony against war. The pagan
rites connected with the taking of the military oath had no doubt
some influence in determining the feeling of the pious with regard
to this life of bloodshed; but the reasons lay deeper. “Shall it be
held lawful,” asked Tertullian, (_De Corona_, p. 347) “to make an
occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the
sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take
part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law?
And shall he apply the chain, and the prison, and the torture, and
the punishment, who is not the avenger even of his own wrongs?”
[13] In the early centuries of our era Christians seem to
have occasionally refused to serve in the army from religious
scruples. But soldiers were not always required to change their
profession after baptism. And in _Acts_ X., for example, nothing
is said to indicate that the centurion, Cornelius, would have to
leave the Roman army. See Tertullian: _De Corona_ (Anti-Nicene
Christian Library), p. 348.
The doctrine of the Church developed early in the opposite direction.