Nonviolence Read Online Free PDF

three years. Thus did the Church acknowledge an objection to warfare, but not an insurmountable one. Then in the fifth century an Algerian bishop, Augustine of Hippo, wrote the enduring apologia for murder on the battlefield, the concept of “just war.” Augustine, considered one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, declared that the validity of war was a question of inner motive. If a pious man believed in a just cause and truly loved his enemies, it was permissible to go to war and to kill the enemies he loved because he was doing it in a high-minded way.
    The Catholic Church turned Maximilianus into Saint Maximilian of Tebessa. Jesus Christ, whose teachings had been dismantled by everyone from Constantine to Augustine, was much more than a saint; Christians declared him a deity, the son of God. Martin, who refused to go into battle against the Gauls, is now Saint Martin of Tours. Martin did not really qualify for sainthood, since, according to the original rules of the Catholic Church, one of the requirements was martyrdom. Martin would have been a fine saint if it weren't for the last-minute peace with the Gauls. He would have marched unarmed across the field, been cut down and chopped up for sainthood. The later Church, not the one Martin knew, needed martyrs, because extolling martyrdom is a way of promoting warfare—the glory of being slaughtered. Needing Martin safely as a saint on their side and not as an unclaimed rebel conscientious objector, the Church turned Martin of Tours into the first unmartyred Catholic saint.
    Saint Martin has become a kind of military figure, usually portrayed in armor. The U.S. Army Quartermasters Corps awards a medal named after him, “The military order of Saint Martin.” SaintMartin is supposed to have died on November 11, 397. Historians say that the day is uncertain, but the date has taken on absolute certainty as the Feast of Saint Martin, because it coincides with the date of the armistice ending World War I. It is difficult to know what to do with rebels, but saints have a thousand uses.

III

[We call for peace] in the name of God, since without peace no one will see God.
—Peace meeting at Le Puy, 994
    T he ideology of warfare that has been repeatedly invoked for the past thousand years of Western history grew out of Augustine's thesis of just war in the fifth century and continued to be developed to its complete expression in Pope Urban II's propaganda campaign launching the first Crusade at the end of the eleventh century.
    Simply stated in the terms of the American western, one of the great cultural institutions for fostering violence, the world is made up of good guys and bad guys, and the good guys have to shoot the bad guys for everyone's well-being. Once this was established, the state had only to declare its proposed victim a bad guy to justify a war.
    If Christianity was initially polluted by the state, in the second phase the state was polluted by Christianity. Once the religion began working with the state and became involved in the state's business, it was involved in warfare. Augustine provided the theology to explain this unexplainable contradiction. But in the process, the role of the Christian Church was changing. From a moral guide on the periphery of events, it moved to the epicenter of power politics.
    The state jealously guards the right to make war because this prerogative is a source of power. Once Christianity became interested in power, the Church became competitive with states. If kings derived their power from the right to declare war, the clergy would challenge that power with the right to declare peace. And so began a power struggle in which a peace movement known as pax dei, the Peace of God, led the world into the ruthless and violent wars known as the Crusades.
    The Church engaged in this power struggle for some time before the late tenth century, when the Peace of God came into being as a recognized movement. Officially it seems to have