Non Violence and Peace Traditions in Early & Eastern Christianity

For the record I am not a pacifist and for a variety of reasons which I am not going to go into now, I do not agree with those who advocate a Christian doctrine of pacifism. However this article is so extremely detailed I can not but recommend it. The article is not short. But its well worth the read. Only the first two paragraphs are posted here.

Ideals of Peace in a Violent World.
Christianity has had a very chequered history in terms of its peace tradition. It is often to images of Inquisition and Crusade that the popular imagination turns when considering the darker side of the church’s imposition of control over the personal and political worlds it has inhabited over long centuries. The figure of a pacific Jesus (the poet of the lilies of the fields, and the advocator of peaceful resistance to evil, who so inspired Tolstoy and Gandhi among others) is often contrasted with a church of more brutish disciples who, when occasion presented itself, turned willingly, and quickly enough, to tactics of oppression and coercion, policies which they themselves had lamented, as being against both divine and natural justice, when applied to them in the earlier centuries of the Roman persecutions. The common version among Church Historians of this generic tale of a progressive sinking into the ‘brutal ways of the world’, also points to regular cycles of renewal and repentance, when Christians are said to reappropriate the ‘real’ meaning of their past, and renounce violent resistance in the cause of a ‘truly Christian’ non resistance. This, of course, is usually a matter of occasional academic protest from the sidelines, or the wisdom of the aftermath, since in times of war the ranks of those who rush to defend the Christian defensibility of hostilities are rarely short of representatives, it would seem. The key academic studies of the Early Church’s peace tradition, for example, had to wait until the 20th century. They appeared in two clusters, both of them the immediate aftermath of the great conflicts of 1914-18, and 1939-45, followed by a longer ‘tail’ which was overshadowed by the Cold War’s generic fears of nuclear holocaust, and which produced a more thorough-going tenor of the ‘suspicion of war’ in academic circles. Both the main-clusters of post-war re-assessments of Christian peace tradition in antiquity, witnessed a conflicted product in the tone of the literature. All lamented the fact and experience of war, from a Christian perspective, but some justified the concept of limited war engagement (usually Catholic scholars defending the then dominant Augustine-Aquinas theory of the Just War) while others were evidently more pacifist in tone (generally Protestant scholars calling for a ‘reform’ of defective medievalist views). The more recent work, inspired by the public sight of several disastrously ‘failed’ military interventions (such as Vietnam, and Afghanistan) and the horrific record of genocidally-tinged conflict at the end of the 20th century ( one of the bloodiest and nastiest on human record, though we still like to regard the ancients as less civilised than us) have, again understandably, caused the Christian witness on war and violence to come under renewed scrutiny. Today the literature on war in early Christian tradition is extensive 2 , and a synopsis of the primary sources has recently been collated in a useful ready-reference volume, with a good contextualising discussion 3.

While the common image of a militaristic Church is still, perhaps, prevalent in popular estimation, there are nevertheless, a multitude of pacific figures who feature in the Church’s exemplary stories of the lives of the saints. One such hagiography was the narrative on Abba Moses the Ethiopian in the Tales of the Desert Fathers who, when warned in advance of the impending attack of marauding Blemmyes tribesmen in 5th century Lower Egypt, refused to leave his cell, and ( though famed as a strong man of previously violent temper) stayed quietly in prayer waiting for the fatal assault of the invading brigands. This story of his election of pacific martyrdom was celebrated as most unusual; a heroic and highly individualist spiritual act of a master ( and thus not normative). All the other monks of Scete in his time were either slaughtered because they were surprised, or else had much earlier fled before the face of the storm of invasion.

Read the rest here.