Chapter 10. THE CHRISTIAN REFUSAL TO PARTICIPATE IN WAR II: TERTULLIAN

The writings of Tertullianus make it abundantly clear that in his time there were considerable numbers of Christians serving in the Roman army. This fact, the nature and significance of which will be considered later, is one of great importance, but it is very far from exhausting the contribution of this great writer to our subject. He testifies not only to the willingness of many to serve, but also to the unwillingness of many others; and the views he expresses on the question are more than mere statements of a personal opinion -- they represent the convictions of a very large proportion of his fellow-Christians. Our best plan will be, first, to quote the pertinent passages from his works in chronological order, and then to add a few necessary comments.

distinguished from the army officer as he is now. In any case, the Christian difficulty was pretty much the same with the one as with the other: common to both were the two great stumbling-blocks of idolatrous contamination and the shedding of blood (either judicially or in battle). It will therefore help us to understand the Christian position if we include a few passages bearing upon the question of the Christian's abstention from public office.

We recall first the passage in Tertullianus' 'Apologeticus,' in which he tells the pagans that, though the Christians are numerous and reckless enough to avenge their wrongs, there is no fear of their doing so. "For what war," he asks them, "should we not be fit (and) eager, even though unequal in numbers, (we) who are so willing to be slaughtered -- if, according to that discipline (of ours), it was not more lawful to be slain than to slay?"⁽¹⁾ It is doubtless in the light of this sentiment that we are to read the assumption earlier in his apology that Caesars could not be Christians.⁽²⁾

1. Tert Apol 37 (i. 463). The Latin runs: Cui bello non idonei, non prompti fuissemus, etiam impares copiis, qui tam libenter trucidamur, si non apud istam disciplinam magis occidi liceret quam occidere? The meaning is sufficiently clear, viz. that the Christians, though few, were so careless of death that they would fight their pagan enemies, were it not for their rule that it is better to be killed than to kill. Professor B.-Baker, however, translates (ICW 23): "Tell me a war for which we have not been useful and ready, even when inferior in numbers; ready to be cut down, as none would be whose tenets were not that it is more lawful to be killed than to kill," and quotes it as showing that "the chief thing by which they" (i. e. Christians in the Army) "were distinguished from their Pagan comrades--so far as concerned their action in the field--was their greater readiness to encounter death, in proportion as they had received a more excellent hope for the future" (italics mine). This surprising misinterpretation of Tertullianus has been followed by Cunningham (251 f).

while he was still a loyal Catholic, he states the conditions under which he believes it to be possible for a Christian to be a magistrate. "And so let us grant," he says,

In the next chapter he brands all magisterial garb and pomp as idolatrous and diabolic, but does not touch on the objection of violence and bloodshed. In the following chapter he deals specifically with the question of military service.

3. Latin: neque judicet de capite alicujus vel pudore.

4. neque damnet neque praedamnet.

5. Tert Idol 17 (i. 687).

In 'Adversus Judaeos,' which belongs roughly to the same period as 'De Idololatria,' Tertullianus says:

7. The allusions are to various items in the Roman soldier's equipment.

8. Tert Idol 19 (i. 690 f).

Church and became a Montanist, he asks: "Who shall produce these (results, viz. truth, gentleness, and justice) with the sword, and not rather that which is contrary to gentleness and justice, (namely), deceit and harshness and injustice, (which are) of course the proper business of battles?"⁽¹⁰⁾ A little later in the same work, he says: "'And they shall not learn to make war any more,' that is, to give effect to hostile feelings; so that here too thou mayest learn that Christ is promised not (as one who is) powerful in war, but (as) a bringer of peace."⁽¹¹⁾ In 'De Pallio,' written about 210 A.D., he confesses, in the person of his philosophic mantle, that he is "no barking pleader, no judge, no soldier."⁽¹²⁾

We next come to his important treatise 'De Corona Militis,' written--in 211 A.D., some years after his attachment to Montanism--in defence of a Christian soldier who had refused to wear a garland on the Emperor's birthday. Tertullianus takes occasion to touch on the prior question whether a Christian ought to be a soldier at all.

10. Tert Marc iii. 14 (ii. 340), cf Jud 9 (ii. 621).

11. Tert Marc iii. 21 (ii. 351).

12. Tert Pall 5 (ii. 1047): caussas non elatro, non judico, non milito, secessi de populo, etc.

In the following chapter, he asks: "Is the laurel of triumph made up of leaves, or of corpses? is it decorated with ribbons, or tombs? is it besmeared with ointments, or with the tears of wives and mothers, perhaps those of some men even (who are) Christians--for Christ (is) among the barbarians as well?"⁽¹⁶⁾

The clear, thorough-going, and outspoken opinions of Tertullianus have naturally attracted a good deal of a attention and criticism; and there are one or two points in connection with them which it will be well briefly to consider and emphasize.

1. The 'De Idololatria' (198-202 A.D.) is the earliest evidence we have for the enlistment in the army of Christians who were already baptized.⁽¹⁷⁾ Any Christian soldiers mentioned in documents of an earlier date may well have consisted, for aught we know to the contrary, of men converted when already engaged in military life.

15. Tert Cor II (ii 91-93).

16. Tert Cor 12 (ii. 94 f).

service, or suffer martyrdom. Harnack indeed says that Tertullianus displays some uncertainty in regard to converts who were already soldiers, and that he does not present them this dilemma of either leaving the army or dying as martyrs, "but opens to them yet a third possibility, namely that of avoiding pollution by heathenism as much as they can."⁽¹⁸⁾ But it has to be remembered that the pollution was, in Tertullianus' view, practically inseparable from military life; he runs over a large number of the commonest duties of the soldier, and raises objections to them one after another; and his third alternative must therefore be regarded as an ironical concession of a bare abstract possibility, which would be obviously impossible in practice, like his concession that a Christian may hold office, provided he has nothing to do with sacrifices, temples, public shows, oaths, judgment of capital or criminal cases, pronunciation and infliction of penalties, and so on.

3. The emphasis which he lays on the danger of contamination by idolatry has led some authors to represent this as his one real objection to military service and to use it for the purpose of dissociating him from those who in later times have objected to war on humanitarian grounds. Thus Professor Bethune-Baker says:

This remarkable statement is approvingly quoted by Archdeacon Cunningham.⁽²⁰⁾ The passages just quoted from Tertullianus are sufficient proof of its amazing inaccuracy. Great as was his horror of idolatry, his conviction of the illegitimacy of all bloodshed and violence was equally great. Nor can I understand how Gass can say: "Tertullian was prepared to put up with Christian soldiers, only without the ostentatious crown of victory."⁽²¹⁾ Even Troeltsch falls a victim to this error: he says that Tertullianus and Origenes, "despite the(ir) contention that the soldiers' handiwork of blood was absolutely unchristian, would have acquiesced, if service in the army had not brought the Christians into contact with the worship of the Emperor and (the religious customs) of the camp."⁽²²⁾ This statement is unwarranted even in regard to Tertullianus, and still more so in regard to Origenes, who never raises the difficulty of idolatrous contamination in the army at all.⁽²³⁾

19. B.-Baker ICW 25. Italics mine.

20. Christianity and Politics, 253. What is, I think, the one solitary allusion to the early Christian attitude to war in Dr. Forsyth's Christian Ethic of War contains a serious over-statement, if not a positive inaccuracy. He says (68 f): "The demand from Christian soldiers of the military oath . . . was objected to less on the grounds of the Sermon on the Mount than because it involved a confession of the Emperor's deity inconsistent with the place of Christ in His Gospel."

21. Gass, Geschichte der christlichen Ethik, i. 93.

22. Troeltsch III n 56.

23. The remarks of Ramsay (The Church in the Roman Empire, p. 435 f) on the subject imply that fear of participating in heathen rites was the one ground for the early Christian refusal of military service. Cf Aso Milman, History of Christianity, ii. 142.

with his fellow-Christians that there ought not to be any Christians in the army at all.⁽²⁵⁾ But unless candour requires a writer to explain his whole mind on a subject every time he mentions it in a purely incidental way, the charge of disingenuousness is unwarranted. Each time that Tertullianus spoke to pagans of Christian soldiers without reproaching them, he was simply adverting to an obvious and admitted fact, in order to prove the numbers and ubiquity of the Christians and their readiness to take part in the activities of society. It would have been not only futile, but out of place, to introduce a topic upon which Christian opinion was divided, unless the course of the argument distinctly called for its treatment.

25. So Harnack MC 59f: cf B.-Baker ICW 23; Guignebert 192; Bigelmair 180; De Jong 9 ff.

26. Scullard 212.

not only to work out the application of these principles to his own life, but also--and this is particularly the duty of the Christian teacher and writer--to assist others to do the same.

6. It is interesting to notice in Tertullianus the idea already suggested by Justinus⁽²⁷⁾ of the 'alternative service' rendered by the Christian to society and the State, despite the fact that he does not engage officially in public affairs. The idea forms, as we shall see later, a very important item in the apologia of Origenes. Tertullianus does not work it into any organic system of thought; but his expressions of it, such as they are, are interesting. "I might deservedly say," he argues,

He makes his philosophic cloak say in reply to the charge of idleness and neglect of public affairs:

and so on.⁽²⁹⁾

27. See above, pp. 60, 103.

28. Tert Apol 33 (i. 448).

an individual dissenter from the Church as a whole on this question of whether Christians ought to serve in the army or not. Harnack, for instance, urges (in my opinion, without sufficient ground) that the Christian soldiers in the army had up till then never agitated as malcontents (frondiert) on account of their Christian profession, and that his "attack on the service of Christians in the army was something new, hitherto unheard of: easy as it was for him to prove the essential incompatibility of the service of Christ and service in the army, even in peace(time), it was just as impossible for him to appeal to a rigorous custom and practice already in force hitherto."⁽³⁰⁾

It is true that no general or authoritative ruling on the point had yet been given--circumstances not having called for it, that Christian conviction in regard to it was never absolutely unanimous, that many of Tertullianus' Christian contemporaries (how many we do not know) differed from him, and that the Church on the whole ultimately agreed with them rather than with him. It must however be borne in mind that this last fact would have its own effect in submerging to some extent earlier utterances of a contrary tendency; and this effect must be allowed for in explaining whatever paucity there is in records of this kind. Tertullianus clearly tells us that 'many' soldiers, when converted to Christianity, immediately left the service.⁽³¹⁾

30. Harnack MC 67.

31. See p. 112n. 1. Harnack (MC 66) waters down Tertullianus' 'multis,' into 'vielleicht viele.'

32. Professor B.-Baker's treatment of this ploint (ICW 22-26) is peculiarly conflicting and difficult to follow. He knows the date of 'De Idololatria,' and quotes what is said in it about Christ disarming every soldier, and so on: yet he makes much of the distinction between "Tertullian (a) Catholic" and "(b) Montanist," quotes the former as testifying to the presence of Christians in the army, adding that "in the opinion of Tertullian this redounded to their credit," speaks of "Tertullian's change of mind," points out how his Montanism is revealed in his later writings, and concludes that "the opinions recorded in them must be proportionately discounted." Some remarks have already been offered (pp. 115 f) on the real bearing to Tertullianus' boasts in Apol 37 and Nat i. I. They cannot be taken as showing that in his Catholic period be approved of Christians acting as soldiers.