Remembering the Great and Holy War, 1914-1918

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The Great and Holy War

One hundred years ago today marked the onset of what was then known only as “The Great War.”  As Philip Jenkins’ new book The Great and Holy War shows, however, perhaps we ought still to dignify it with that awful title.  Although WWII looms vastly larger in our cultural consciousness, this is due partly to its greater proximity in time, and to the much greater role that America played in the hostilities.  Yet most people would be surprised to learn that the bloodiest battle in US military history remains the Battle of Meuse-Argonne, which took place over the final 47 days of WWI, in which 26,277 perished.  And the toll suffered by US troops is immeasurably dwarfed by that of the European nations.  Jenkins puts things in perspective for us:

“The full horror of the war was obvious in its opening weeks. . . . On one single day, August 22, the French lost twenty-seven thousand men killed in battles in the Ardennes and at Charleroi, in what became known as the Battle of the Frontiers. . . . To put these casualty figures in context, the French suffered more fatalities on that one sultry day than U.S. forces lost in the two 1945 battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa combined, although these later engagements were spread over a period of four months.  One single August day cost half as many lives as the United States lost in the whole Vietnam War.

During August and September 1914, four hundred thousand French soldiers perished, and already by year’s end, the war had in all claimed two million lives on both sides.  The former chapel of the elite French military academy of Saint-Cyr systematically listed its dead for various wars, but for 1914 it offered only one brief entry: ‘The Class of 1914”—all of it.” (pp. 29-31)

Britain lost 1.75% of its pre-war population to military deaths alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands maimed for life; Germany, 3%; France, 3.5%.  The Western Front of WWI would claim ten times as many lives as the Western Front of WWII, a statistic borne out by the somber lists of names that can be found in any parish church in Britain. Given that Europe in 1914 was the unquestioned leader of world civilization, and still the center of global Christianity, such trauma could not fail to reshape the course of world religion as well as politics, remaking the world order more comprehensively even than its more global successor, WWII, could do.  It is this cataclysmic shift, in all its varied manifestations, that Jenkins seeks to chronicle in The Great and Holy War.

This book is extraordinarily wide-ranging, even by the standards of Jenkins’ impressive oeuvre thus far, and is difficult to summarize neatly.  This is in part due to the sense one gets that Jenkins was working to a deadline (the centenary of World War One) and hence lacked the time to fully organize the immense array of material his research had assembled.  The book thus perhaps lacks at some points the clear focus and compelling readability that has characterized much of Jenkins’ other work, though it remains a fascinating read, and one hopes any such handicaps will not prevent readers from engaging with its remarkable insights and theses.

The title of the book declares Jenkins’ most remarkable thesis: that the Great War, what we often consider the pinnacle of cynical nationalistic realpolitik, was perceived at the time as a deeply religious conflict, indeed, a “holy war,” by all the combatants.  Such a thesis strikes deeply at the roots of much modern secularization theory, which sees the de-Christianization of Europe as a long gradual process set in motion by science, the Enlightenment, and modern industry, a process very far underway by the 20th century.  On the contrary, shows Jenkins, Europe in 1914 was still steeped in religion, perhaps as much as at any point in its history—mostly Christianity of course, but even freethinkers and secularists were more likely than not to follow strange alternative religions like Theosophy, and to dabble in the occult.  Against the traditional narrative, Jenkins concludes his book with a new theory of religious development that he calls “punctuated equilibrium,” echoing the leading current view in evolutionary science: long periods of relative stasis (such as 1815-1914) followed by short periods of cataclysmic change (such as 1914-1918).  Jenkins’ thesis undermines any claim to comfortable self-assurance on the part of the modern West that technological and political progress necessarily leads to a cool scientific rationality; on the contrary, the years of the Great War were a time of superstition, apocalypticism, and mass hysteria in all the combatant nations.

However, Jenkins’ thesis also strikes deeply at any comfortable self-assurance on the part of western Christians: we like to think that our religion has long been a force for peace in the world, or at worst, essentially disengaged from the secular rationality that drives global conflict; Islam, on the other hand, is a primitive and violent religion that seeks to discern the divine will in every historical incident and to pursue expansion by merciless jihad, or “holy war.”  Jenkins neatly inverts this narrative: “enlightened” western Christianity was responsible for some of the most shocking rhetoric of holy war that we can imagine, at a time when global Islam was diffuse and relatively passive and apolitical; the events of World War One, in fact, set in motion the radicalization of Islam and its current appetite for “holy war” thinking.  Read More

The Soul of a Christian Commonwealth

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(An excerpt from a recent thesis chapter draft; citations removed)

Nowhere is Hooker’s dependence on the dictum “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it“ more true than his treatment of the role of religion in the commonwealth. While Hooker understood public religion as a natural and civil phenomenon, not as exclusively Christian or spiritual, this did not mean it was a mere simulacrum of the spiritual; rather, although achieving its effect through natural and outward instruments, Christian worship can serve as a real pathway toward our growth in grace.  The key point, however, was that the civil kingdom, in addition to being concerned with all the mundane concerns of public order, economic prosperity, and outward protection that characterize our modern conception of the domain of politics, was also properly a religious order; it existed under God, toward God, and animated and structured by worship. 

Given Hooker’s argument in Book I, it is not hard to see why this should be the case.  Human nature is not satisfied with mere finite, earthly ends, but constantly seeks a happiness beyond the bounds of temporal existence, a happiness to be found in God.  This restless longing for God, which subordinates and orders all other desires, will always, thinks Hooker, be reflected in the life of human society, which will always establish some kind of religious devotion at the heart of its public life.  Because of the centrality and ultimacy of this religious devotion, worship is not merely of value for its own sake, but serves as an anchor for the public life of the community, guaranteeing unity around a common object of love, and reverent esteem for the magistrates who are the guardians of this common life.  Hooker describes the importance of religion for the commonwealth at the outset of Book V: 

We agree that pure and unstained religion ought to be the highest of all cares appertaining to public regiment: as well in regard of that aid and protection which they who faithfully serve God confess they receive at his merciful hands, as also for the force which religion hath to qualify all sorts of men, and to make them in public affairs the more serviceable, governors the apter to rule with conscience, inferiors for conscience’ sake the willinger to obey.  It is no peculiar conceit, but a matter of sound consequence, that all duties are by so much the better performed, by how much the men are more religious from whose abilities the same proceed.  For if the course of politic affairs cannot in any good sort go forward without fit instruments, and that which fitteth them be their virtues, let Polity acknowledge itself indebted to Religion; godliness being the chiefest top and wellspring of all true virtues, even as God is of all good things.

Hooker then goes on to outline how religion helps preserve and perfect each of the four cardinal virtues, to the great benefit of the commonwealth, going so far as to say, regarding the greatest of the cardinal virtues, “So naturall is the union of Religion with Justice, that wee may boldly deny there is either, where both are not.” 

Hooker will return to this argument early in Book VIII, where he constructs his defence of the Royal Supremacy on two chief pillars.  The first is the personal identity of the visible Church (being an outward society of those who profess the faith) and the Commonwealth in Elizabethan England.  The second is the natural responsibility of commonwealths for religious concerns, for which Hooker is not afraid to cite Aristotle: 

“That the scope thereof is not simplie to live, nor the duetie so much to provide for life as for meanes of living well,” and that even as the soule is the worthier part of man, so humane societies are much more to care for that which tendeth properly unto the soules estate then for such temporall thinges as this life doth stand in need of.  Other proof there needes none to shewe that as by all men the kingdome of God is first to be sought for: So in all commonwealths things spirituall ought above temporall to be provided for.  And of things spirituall the chiefest is Religion.  

From all this, however, it might appear that Hooker has been so eager to demonstrate nature’s receptivity to the supernatural, religion’s integral place in the commonwealth, that he has perhaps naturalized religion altogether, reducing Christianity to a mere prop of political order.  He anticipates this objection in V.1 and V.2, attacking both skeptics and atheists.  The latter conclude from the “politique use of religion . . . that religion it selfe is a mere politique devise, forged purposelie to serve for that use.”  The former imagine “that it greatly skilleth not of what sort our religion be, inasmuch as heathens, Turks, and infidels, impute to religion a great part of the same effects which ourselves ascribe thereunto.” Against these objections, he takes care to argue that on the contrary, it is not merely religion, but true religion, after which all men instinctively seek, and that finding the true religion, Christianity, makes a great difference, both in this life, and in that which is to come.  He has no hesitation in recognizing the many virtues and benefits which flowed from heathen religion, as “certain sparks of the light of truth intermingled with the darkness of error,” but he maintains nonetheless that “the purer and perfecter our religion is, the worthier effects it hath in them who stedfastly and sincerely embrace it.”


Hooker thus develops his account of public religion under his overarching logic of nature and grace.  The desire for and worship of God is natural to man, and indeed, so central to human nature that it serves to ground and orient the other virtues, and is a mainstay of civil polity.  Fallen as man is, however, this religious devotion is tainted with “heaps of manifold repugnant errors,” on account of which we desperately need the gracious revelation of true religion.  This true religion, then, serves not only to set us on the path to everlasting life, which the false religions cannot even begin to do, but also reorients our temporal existence, crowning the natural virtues with a perfection beyond the capacity of false religion, and enabling a more harmonious life together in civil society.  For all these reasons, Hooker can argue for the Christian magistrate’s overarching concern for the spiritual well-being of his subjects, which is found only in their redemption by Christ; for in this rests their ultimate good, to which they are naturally oriented, and from it flows all subsidiary goods which will ensure a peaceful and virtuous life for the commonwealth.  On Hooker’s definition, then, the Church, considered as an external, visible society, is a commonwealth ordered toward the true religion: 

the care of religion being common unto all societies politic, such Societies as doe embrace the true religion, have the name of the Church given them for distinction from the rest; so that every body politic hath some religion, but the Church that religion which is only true.  Truth of religion is that proper difference whereby a church is distinguished from other politic societies of men.

He concludes, therefore, attacking what he perceives as the disastrous implications of the Presbyterian separation of church and commonwealth, 

A grosse errour it is to think that regall power ought to serve for the good of the bodie and not of the soule, for mens temporall peace and not their eternall safetie; as if God had ordained Kings for no other ende and purpose but only to fatt up men like hogges and to see that they have their mash? Indeed to leade men unto salvation by the hand of secret, invisible and ghostly regiment or by the externall administration of thinges belonging unto priestly order (such as the worde and Sacramentes are) this is denied unto Christian Kings, no cause in the world to think them uncapable of supreme authoritie in the outward goverment which disposeth the affayres of religion so farr forth as the same are disposable by humane authoritie and to think them uncapable thereof only for that, the said religion is everlastingly beneficiall to them that faythfullie continue in it.  

This passage highlights at the same time to Hooker’s haste to qualify what he envisions by the magisterial care for religion.  After all, if the prince is responsible for the good of his subjects, and their highest good is to be found in union with God, then does this not make the prince the pontifex maximus, both priest and king, arbiter of his subjects’ eternal destiny as much as their temporal?  Certainly, in some of the ambitiously caesaropapist declarations of the Henrician era, these implications would not have been far from the surface.  Hooker protects himself against these excesses by two sets of distinctions.  The first, of which we have already seen a good deal, is his two-kingdoms doctrine, which we see on display here in his qualification about “secret, invisible and ghostly regiment.”  The salvation of believers lay entirely within the hands of Christ alone, working invisibly by his Spirit in the hearts of men.  External means he may use to ready the soil and water the sapling, but only he could plant the seed of spiritual life.  No human servant could usurp his kingship here; they could only point to it.  

The second distinction, mentioned here in Hooker’s reference to “the externall administration of thinges belonging to priestly order,” designates a distinction of roles or orders, within the one civil kingdom.  While insisting that church and commonwealth are one society, he is careful to preserve a diversity of duties within this society, so that those activities in which the activity of the spiritual kingdom is outwardly manifested—the preaching of the Word, leading of worship, and administration of sacraments—are entrusted to priests, not kings.  He resists, however, the implication that “they that are of the one can neither appointe, nor execute in part the dueties which belong unto them which are of the other.”  On the contrary, throughout his argument for the royal supremacy, he maintains that the monarch, by virtue of his office as highest guardian of the common good, ought in England to have final (though not sole) authority for directing the various offices within the Church toward the good of the whole.  In other words, while the magistrate’s arena of direct concern is temporal affairs, and he can by no means lay claim to the power of order—which is the priestly authority over word and sacrament—he nonetheless exercises dominion over all matters in his realm, as the repository of sovereignty and the deputy of Christ in the civil kingdom. 

By virtue of these distinctions, Hooker tries to resolve the ambiguity inherent in the Puritans’ constant insistence that the affairs of the visible Church are “spiritual” and hence belong to Christ’s “spiritual kingdom”; he is willing to accede to this language, so long as it be qualified rightly:

To make thinges therfore so plaine that henceforth a Childes capacitie may serve rightly to conceive our meaning, we make the Spiritual regiment of Christ to be generally that wherby his Church is ruled and governed in things spirituall.  Of this generall wee make two distinct kindes, the one invisibly exercised by Christ himself in his own person, the other outwardly administred by them whom Christ doth allow to be the Rulers and guiders of his Church. 

 This outward administration of the “spiritual regiment” belongs within the orbit of what will elsewhere be called the “civil regiment,” which contains also matters of strictly temporal concern.

What Good Ol’ Days?

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Even among us postmillenial types, it is a common enough foible to imagine that we are living in a dark and decadent age.  We look back with nostalgia and longing to an earlier Christian culture, to a time when everyone went to church, society lived basically in accord with Christian morality, Biblical teaching was enshrined in law and followed in national and international affairs, and orthodoxy was universally accepted and taught in the pulpits.  Nowadays, it is clear, we have rejected God and are suffering His judgment.  

So it is strange when one starts reading works from these good ol’ days and finds the same old complaints about the irreligiousness of society, the same laments about impending judgment. 

Recently, I had the opportunity to read two things which helped reveal just how one-sided this narrative really is–Patrick Collinson’s brilliant study The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625, and an essay in the Wall Street Journal, “Violence Vanquished” 

 

In the first, Collinson offers a wonderfully thorough and lively portrait of ecclesiastical life in Elizabethan and Jacobean society–the period following a successful reformation, and before the waning of piety that an ensuing formalism is thought have caused–here, more than any time, we might have expected a picture of the good ol’ days in action.  And yet, wherever we look, we find the familiar problems of modern society?  Power-hungry and amoral rulers?  Check.  Corrupt church leaders?  Check.  Incompetent, uneducated, and/or immoral ministers?  Check.  Widespread ignorance of Scripture and orthodox theology?  Check.  A populace that seems by and large apathetic about the faith and inconsistent at best in putting into practice?  Check.  Absence of children and young people from church altogether?  Check.  Loose sexual mores, with widespread practice and acceptance of premarital sex?  Check.  

Not that Collinson’s point is to paint a gloomy, cynical picture.  Far from it; one of his main burdens in the book is to demonstrate the relatively robust health of the English church in this period.  The bitter invectives of the Puritans, and their certainty that theirs was a church rotten almost to the core, are shown to be just as without foundation as the “good ol’ days” mirage.  The reality?  The English Church in this period was a lot like many churches in many periods–a mixed bag, with a  large number of inconsistent professors and practitioners, and a small minority of fully dedicated and zealous believers, whose leadership consisted of a few true saints, a few true villains, and a generous helping of well-intentioned but imperfect and usually undereducated clergy, who were sometimes too strict, sometimes too lax, but on the whole, slowly nurtured their parishioners into greater piety and maturity.  

 

Very well, then.  Perhaps they had their problems back then too.  But one can hardly say that we have much improvement to be thankful for, right?  Well, not quite.  When was the last time one of your friends was robbed and murdered while traveling?  Or when your town was attacked by a neighbouring town over a resource dispute?  In his recent WSJ article, “Violence Vanquished” (a précis of a book he has just published, The Better Angels of Our Nature), Steven Pinker challenges us to come to grips with just how peaceful a society we (and by we, he means the whole world) enjoy now.  Homicide rates in the Western world are only a few percent of what they were five centuries ago; violence and execution as a form of legal punishment has been dramatically reduced (except in Texas 😉 ); feudal conflicts and tribal violence have been banished from most of the world; leaving inter-state conflict as the only large-scale form of organised violence.  But inter-state violence is huge nowadays, right?  Wrong.  The death rate today from inter-state conflict is only a few hundredths of a percent.

Pinker’s narrative is a bit overstated, perhaps, relying too much on the relatively short period of history that has elapsed since the end of the Second World War, and his explanations are decidedly secular, giving the credit to evolutionary factors, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the State (though perhaps these latter two deserve more credit than we are usually wont to give them), and none at all to the leavening effects of Christianity.  Nonetheless, he certainly has a point, and one well-worth attending to in an age of ubiquitous media, when single murder cases from thousands of miles away can dominate the headlines for months on end, creating an illusion of ubiquitous violence.

 

The moral of all this is certainly not complacency.  There is more than enough sin in the world to get worked up about, more than enough that still needs to be done for Christ’s kingdom to get us up off our lazy bums.  But discontentment with our present lot and ingratitude for our present blessings are vices; and constantly assessing the present by comparison, not with the realities of fallen human existence, but with some utopian Golden Age, leads readily to an extremism that sets its face against the wickedness of the world and embraces dangerous creeds and schemes in a vain attempt to restore the lost Golden Age.  When we realise that every age has had its share of vices and virtues, we will be more able to exercise patience in our efforts to make our world a godlier place today.  


A Constantinian Showdown

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 Yes, believe it or not, I am still alive.  But I am on vacation, and my brain has completely shut down and refused to produce blog-worthy ideas.  

However, I can point you to where some real blogging action is–or was–I’m a week or two behind. 

Ben Witherington recently produced a lengthy series of posts reviewing Peter Leithart’s groundbreaking recent book, Defending Constantine–while broadly appreciative and complementary, he was sharply critical on several points, as one might expect, given that he is a pacifist.  Leithart’s responses to his objections are particularly fascinating, and very relevant to the recent discussion about retributive justice here.  Leithart’s final post, “Loving Enemies” offers a frank confession of the difficulties of a Christian just war position, which he nonetheless feels compelled to cling to.  My own thoughts on this subject are very similar to what Leithart voices in this fantastic post.

Here are the links:

Witherington Intro
Witherington 1
Witherington 2
Witherington 3
Witherington 4
Witherington 5
Witherington 6
Witherington 7
Witherington 8 

Leithart 1: “Guarding the Garden”
Leithart 2: “Crushing Heads”
Leithart 3: “Protoeuangelium”
Leithart 4: “Warrior Messiah”
Leithart 5: “Marcion”
Leithart 6: “Loving Enemies” 

If you’re eager for more action, this just in–the AAR conference this fall in San Francisco will host a dialogue/debate between Leithart and Stanley Hauerwas over Defending Constantine.  If I weren’t already going, I might buy a plane ticket just to see that!

Nuggets from the O’Don

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My supervision meeting with Prof. O’Donovan today featured the usual generous sampling of entertaining and illuminating tangents, in which he deigned to share tantalizing tidbits of insight about political theology as a whole and that of the Reformation in particular.  Here are a smattering of them (take these with a significant grain of salt as representations of O’Donovan’s thought, since he was speaking off the cuff and these thoughts are filtered through the narrow and potentially distorting limits of my own understanding and particular interests):

The point that the Calvinists are urging at the end of the 16th century is that the Reformation has not been completed because a true Church has not been established with independent integrity as a social body.  The Anglicans respond that the Presbyterians are in fact wanting to reverse the Reformation, by re-establishing a new papacy, just a papacy of the proletariat.  There is some justice in the charge, but there is also justice in the point the Presbyterians are urging; after all, the Papacy was not an all-bad idea.  In fact, the Papacy was a historical development that grew out of the need to answer the same sort of question–namely, how do we give a locus of the Church’s identity as a unique institution in  the midst of a Christendom society?  The advent of Christendom and the Christianization of the Roman Empire called forth the Papacy as the solution, as a way of giving a clear visible form to the Church as something independent from Christendom.  The problem did not go away, and the Presbyterians were right to raise the question again.  Even Hooker recognizes this to an extent, giving the Church a certain kind of independent visible identity again, with its own laws and its own Convocation that govern how the monarch can govern it.

The invocation of the “Hebrew Republic” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far from uniform.  For many, it was not so much a desire to repristinate the Hebrew Republic in contemporary Europe, as it was a way of accounting for the historically-conditioned nature of the political structure of the Old Testament, and thus of putting it at a certain distance from contemporary politics.  We see this with Grotius, for instance, who sees the legal system of the Old Testament as exceptionally elegant and wise, but not always applicable.  To determine how much it may be applicable, we have to look at what Christ said.

In the Patristic period, a simple binary configuration is used for making sense of the OT law–there is the enduring moral law, and the obsolete ceremonial law.  The criminal law can be subsumed under this latter, and thus comfortably done away with.  The scholastic emergence of the third category, civil law, allows one to do more justice to the authentic value of the civil laws, but while enabling them to be historically relativized where necessary.  The category of evangelical law emerges in the later Reformation.  It is not present in Lutheran and the early guys (not present in Vermigli and Bullinger, for instance), who will have no truck with the idea that the Gospel imposes a new form of law–the Gospel is of a different order entirely.  But with the Calvinists emerges the idea that that there might be a particularly Christian form of law that should affect how states operate, how justice is administered, how international affairs are run, etc.

The problem with the Puritans is that they simply wanted to copy Geneva, but the Genevan model, while very satisfactory for a small city-state, could not be so easily mapped onto a large kingdom, as Hooker recognized.  If you tried to copy Geneva in England, what you ended up with was a political structure centralized in a national monarchy, and an ecclesial structure that operated on a town and parish level, resulting in a very unsatisfactory balance of power, unlike that in Geneva.  This problem has become very evident in the American setting, where no tradition (except the Catholics) have been able to sustain a national church; the denominations have simply splintered into regionalized bodies, and ones in which effective sovereignty operates generally at the local level.  Meanwhile, political structures have become increasingly concentrated at the national level, making it impossible for there to be any effective ecclesial counterweight.