Nonviolence (7 page)

In the thirteenth century, Muslims became the enemies of Islam when Mongols, who had converted to Islam, invaded and sacked the Islamic cultural center, Baghdad, in 1258. In the midst of the Mongol disaster, a brilliant young Sunni named Ibn Taymiyah, sometimes known as Shaykh-al-Islam, started writing the first of what was to be 350 works on Islamic law. He completely rejected greater
jihad.
To him
jihad
meant violent warfare, and he insisted that it was the obligation of all fit males to fight. It is Ibn Taymiyah who is quoted today by Osama bin Laden and other “Islamic militants.”

The Christian world did have a few voices of moderation. Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar from England, argued that Muslims should be converted rather than killed and that if the Church treated them well they would gladly convert. An Italian theologian of the same period, Thomas Aquinas, argued that the evil done by Muslims did not justify killing them. While these were sincere pleas for nonviolence, they were completely accepting
of the false premises with which the violence had been justified. Bacon was agreeing that Islam had to be eliminated, and Aquinas still believed that Muslims necessarily did evil.

Most warmakers try to claim that theirs is a holy war, a just war, that God is on their side, because their cause is just. In the United States the often-repeated inanity, “God bless America,” though technically a request, is generally used as a declaration, God blesses America. And war is seldom far behind such assertions—a holy war at that.

It is not surprising that the counter-Crusade and its war cries continue to echo in the Muslim world. Islamic militants from Palestinian Hamas to Libya's Muammar Qaddafi use Crusade and counter-Crusade imagery in speeches to rally the faithful. What is more surprising is that in the West, where the Crusades represent a humanitarian atrocity, an unconscionable act of aggression, a military failure, and one of the worst mistakes in the history of international relations, they also remain a model. Images of the Middle Ages and the Crusades in the movies, video games, and toys by corporations such as Disney steep children at an early age in the culture of warfare and killing. Urban's rallying cry has been copied over and over again. Contemporary right-wing American evange-lists such as Billy Graham call their campaigns “crusades.” In 2001, when U.S. president George W. Bush announced his “war on terror,” his words echoed the messages of Pope Urban II. He even used the word
crusade.
Though George W. Bush may not even have known who Urban II was, Urban's famous speech had become the standard way to sell a war.

IV

How he would have lashed out against anyone who dared to eat pork on a Friday, and yet now he cannot make the shedding of men's blood a matter of conscience ….

—PETR CHELCCICKÝ

on his 1420 debate in Prague with Jakoubek of Stribro

D
uring the Middle Ages, the customary way to reject militarism was to retreat to a monastery. In fact, the monastic movement was to a large degree a rejection of the Church state with its wealth, power, and wars. This is why the Church refused, and still refuses, to support them. Monks and nuns produced crops, bread, jam, wine, liqueurs, and cheeses while they illuminated stunning manuscripts and sang some of the most beautiful music mankind ever created. Monasteries became citadels of learning in a violent age, enclaves for Christians who refused to take up arms.

Though the Church put aside its interdiction on Christians bearing arms, many of the monastic orders, such as the Franciscans, rigorously maintained the rule. At the same time, many sects arose that operated like the early Christians, outside of the machinery of state, shunning the politics of power. One of the first such groups was the Cathars, in the French-Catalan region of Languedoc.

The Cathars were inspired by the pre-Constantinian Church and traced their theology to a third-century Mesopotamian prophet named Mani, who had contact with not only Christians but Buddhists when he traveled to India. Mani taught a dualistic theology in which there was a realm of God and a realm of Satan, forces of light and forces of darkness. Manichaeism had escaped coopting by a state and so remained a nonviolent theology. This independence, of course, always has a price, and Mani died in a Persian prison.

In subsequent centuries Manichaeism spread. Augustine in his youth had been a Manichaen and later converted to Christianity. For centuries, followers of Mani had taught a message of nonviolence, or at least pacifism, throughout Europe as far north as England, where the religion developed into different sects with an increasingly Christian flavor. In the Balkans, Manichaeism created a sect called the Bogomils, God's Loved Ones. Bogomils were vegetarians who refused to kill animals because of a belief in reincarnation.
The killing of humans was forbidden, and since an animal could have a human spirit, thus the killing of all animals was forbidden. But Bogomil pacifism suffered the same fate as Christianity. The religion was adopted by the ruling families of Bosnia, who quickly renounced the ban on killing, and after being conquered by the Turks they converted to Islam.

But the Cathars of southern France were not merely pacifists. They were nonviolent resisters who actively promoted their cause and attacked Roman Catholicism, rejecting the sacraments of the Church, including marriage, because they saw the medieval Church as a fraud, and refused to pay taxes to support the sham. They also scoffed at the notion of private property. The Cathars rejected all killing because it was against the teachings of Christ. They also did not accept the right of the state to kill, either in warfare or in the guise of capital punishment, and consequently they refused to participate in government.

The Church dealt with the Cathars in much the same way as it dealt with the Muslims. First it created myths to demonize them. The name
Cathar,
by which history has known them, was itself a Church-invented pejorative, meaning cat worshipers, because the Church insisted that Cathars kissed the anus of cats. Cathars also were said to eat the ashes of dead babies, hold orgies, even with family members, and practice anal intercourse. They were, according to the Church, strange, perverse, evil heretics. Those who did not want to use the slanderous label called them Albigensians, from the town of Albi, a name rejected by most historians because they came from a much wider area. Almost lost to time was their own name for themselves, “good Christians.”

In 1209 the Church unleashed a crusade against the good Christians. It is impossible to say what would have happened had the Cathars held to their beliefs and refused to take up arms. Surely many would have been killed. But what would have been the impact of “soldiers of Christ” slaughtering unarmed good Christians? How long would this have been able to continue as a “holy war”? Instead the Cathars divided into the “pure” and the “fighters,” who took up arms. By defending themselves, the Cathars gave an appearance
of legitimacy to Pope Innocent II's claim that some wars were just. The campaign took exactly one hundred years, but every last Cathar, both armed and pure, was killed. The moment they engaged in the fight, thereby capitulating to the pope's values, the Cathars had lost.

History teaches over and over again that a conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. The lesson is that if the nonviolent side can be led to violence, they have lost the argument and they are destroyed.

For centuries, unending, almost uninterrupted warfare raged throughout Europe. The priests, noblemen, statesmen, and generals who made the wars filled the pages of history, while those small, persistent, persecuted sects that said, “This is wrong and we will not participate,” were slotted for small footnotes. If, as Napoleon was to assert, history is on the side with the biggest artillery, it certainly has little time for those with none, most of whom, for centuries, were powerless commoners.

In 1170, saying he was following the teachings of Christ, a wealthy merchant in Lyons, Pierre Valdes, suddenly gave all his material wealth to poor people, and persuaded others to do the same. Originally the movement was called “the Poor Men of Lyons,” but as it spread, the French began referring to its members as Vaudois, which came into English as Waldenses or Waldensians. In the thirteenth century, they seem to have become influenced by the Cathars and, like the Cathars, rejected all killing, including capital punishment and warfare, and refused all military service. They taught that patient suffering was the Christian way to resist and that fighting back was an urge that came from Satan. They stated that the fourth-century alliance between the emperor Constantine and the Church was the origin of a complete corruption of Christianity. Waldensianism spread throughout Western Europe, mainly among the poor, which should not be surprising for a group that required giving up wealth. They survived and became part of the Protestant Reformation.

Another movement, called the Taborites, rose up in the Czech
lands of Bohemia and Moravia in the fifteenth century. Inspired by Jan Hus, a Prague priest of peasant origin who, in turn, was inspired by Waldensians, the Taborites also rejected militarism, war, and capital punishment. Hus, burned at the stake for heresy in 1415, was exalted as a martyr for the cause of Czech nationalism. The Taborites were certain that a better world, without violence, was arriving, and they did not have to do a thing to promote it but wait for the second coming of Christ. Some grew impatient with this passive approach but did not seem to know how to turn their pacifism into nonviolent action. And so Jan Zelivsky, a Taborite leader who often invoked the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” became an advocate of violent revolution. Like the Cathars, the Taborites responded to the threat of a Crusade against them by raising their own army. Like the papacy, they justified this reversal by claiming that they were doing God's work. They became “the Warriors of God,” not only defeating the Crusade but terrifying European populations with offensive attacks.

In 1420 it was the Taborites who drove off a Crusade whose real purpose was to seize power in Bohemia and marched into Prague to save it from the invader. Among the holy Taborite warriors who saved Prague was a remarkable man named Petr Chelcicky. It is not known why ChelCicky participated in the battle for Prague. Some historians believe that he was there only as an observer, others that he had experienced a momentary lapse of faith. If he was a combatant it was a singular aberration in the life of a man who had embraced nonviolence as the only Christian approach long before the fight in Prague and continued to do so long after. While in Prague he had sought out the noted theologian Jakoubek of Stříbro. Jakoubek believed that although warfare was unchristian, Christians could engage in it for a “just war”—that is, if the cause was in the service of God. According to ChelCicky's writings, when he challenged Jakoubek to show one passage anywhere in the New Testament that said that it was permissible for a Christian to engage in warfare, Jakoubek was forced to concede he had no such authority but was relying merely on the teachings of “saints of old.”

ChelCicky urged Christians to return to the teachings of Christ, “the law of love,” as expressed in the New Testament. His principal work,
The Net of Faith,
called for just such a Christian renewal. He believed that it was not possible to kill, regardless of the circumstances, and still practice what Jesus called love. Government, as it was known, was intrinsically pagan, for it could not operate under Christ's law of love.

Significantly, ChelCicky, like many Hussites, Waldensists, and Taborites of the period, erroneously believed that Pierre Valdes had lived in the time of Constantine. According to the legend, when Valdes's good friend Pope Sylvestre allied the Church with Constantine, betraying and undermining Christianity, Valdes had led his followers into the wilderness to live a pure life uncorrupted by the polluted Church.

ChelCicky recognized, as did Paul the Apostle, that government was necessary to keep order among those who did not live under the Christian law of love, but this was not to be the work of Christians. This meant that Christianity was to be a marginal and probably persecuted group. That, according to ChelCicky, was the proper role of Christianity. “There can be no power without cruelty,” he wrote. “If power forgives, it prepares its own destruction, because none will fear it when they see that it uses love and not the force before which one trembles.”

ChelCicky was one of the first to see that the cause of perpetual war lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power. To establish a world living in peace would require the abandonment of power politics, both on the grand scale—states trying to bend other states to their will—and on the small scale—legal systems coercing social behavior with the threat of prison.

ChelCicky's writings also explore what today would be seen as a nearly Marxist analysis of society, though, ironically, in the 1950s, official Czech communism rejected him as “petit bourgeois.” According to ChelCicky, the few accumulate wealth by exploiting the labor of the impoverished many. He also saw war as a conspiracy in which the poor were duped into fighting to defend the privileges
of the rich. If all poor people refused to fight, he argued, the rich would have no army and there would be no war. He was even opposed to universities promoting a militaristic, warmongering, wealth-hording society—a point made again by many students in the 1960s.