Warfare and the Christian State

As a fundamentally pacifist system, Christianity never developed formally an ideological obligation to wage war against non-Christians, although at times individual theologians spoke and acted as though such a justification could be made.

Indeed, the thirteenth canon of St Basil expressly advised those who engaged in warfare to abstain from communion. Yet defending the Christian Roman state had to be justified and the tension between the pragmatics of political and ideological survival on the one hand and pacifist Christian precepts on the other overcome or bridged.

Early Christian thinkers had evolved a number of objections to warfare and violence in general, and more especially to serving in the armies of the pagan Roman emperors, and many believers before the ‘conversion' of Constantine felt that Christians could not serve two masters - Christ and the Roman state - especially when the latter was on occasion actively hostile to their beliefs or their very existence. Indeed, the liturgy of the period before the Peace of the Church and the Edict of Toleration issued by Constantine I in 313 forbad soldiers who wished to become Christians to take life, whether under orders or not.^{^[970]}

The adoption of Christianity by the emperor Constantine I and the reformulation of imperial political ideology which followed radically altered this situation, and while the debate about the justness of waging war continued, soldiers now became, not servants of an oppressive pagan empire, but fighters for the faith and defenders of orthodoxy, at least in theory. Soldiers were fully accepted members of the Christian community, who had a recognised and indeed worthy role to play. Liturgical prayers evolved from the fourth and fifth centuries in which the military role of the emperors and the need for soldiers to defend the faith were specifically recognised: ‘Shelter their [the emperors'] heads on the day of battle, strengthen their arm...

subjugate to them all the barbarian peoples who desire war, confer upon them deep and lasting peace' is an illustrative example from a fifth-century liturgical text. But this did not, of course, mean that warfare and the killing of enemies were in themselves intrinsically to be praised or regarded as in some way deserving of a particular spiritual reward. Quite the reverse, for however much Christians were able to justify warfare, whether from a defensive need (to preserve orthodoxy, for example) or in what we would see as an offensive context (to recover ‘lost' Roman territory from non-Christians or barbarians or heretics, still judged as defensive action) killing remained (and continues to remain) a necessary evil from the Christian standpoint: this is such a strong

tradition within Christian culture, indeed, that even in the modern highly secularised world of advanced technological warfare, Western strategists, military theorists and anthropologists or sociologists of war point to the need still felt to justify war-making in terms established by this pre-medieval moral-ethical context. And of course matters became more complicated when warfare between Christians also had to be taken into account.^{^[971]}

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

Warfare and the Christian State

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