EBOOK: An Approach to Crusading Ethics
Priests Exhorting Crusaders by Gustave Doré
Of course they had all kinds of motive, but it is clear that ideals did play a very large part. These ideals, therefore, including the moral theology of violence, are worth studying. But the ethics, as opposed to the laws, of crusading is a subject that historians have shied away from, choosing to adopt, in place of rational enquiry, expressions of high-minded moral outrage which are fair enough, but really only show how much moral perceptions have changed. Many of the popes who proclaimed crusades and the preachers who recruited the faithful for them were moral men, some of them recognised by their contemporaries as saints, with a real concern for Christian ethics, and the same is true of many of those who answered their call. Condemnation does not help us to understand why sincere men believed crusading violence to be positively good and something demanded of the faithful by God.
A crusade was a form of holy war, but holy war was itself only one expression of a wider concept, that of sacred violence. Crusading thought emerged from a ferment of argument about rebellion and throughout its history it was fuelled by ideas justifying the physical repression of heretics. Sacred violence requires as a premise the conviction that God and his intentions for mankind are intimately associated with the well-being of a political structure here on earth which has become threatened. It is therefore positively sanctioned, even ordered, by God, since it is employed to preserve something that embodies his wishes for mankind, and participation in it is a moral imperative. The fundamentals of this idea were laid down very early, particularly around 400 by St Augustine, who established certain criteria according to which, he believed, sacred violence could be recognised. He required a just cause, which always related to injuries inflicted by others, the only response to which could be a violent one, With regard to legitimate authority, he envisaged violence not only authorised by ministers of God like emperors, but also directly commanded by God himself. And he maintained that right intention must mean that the participants should always be motivated by love.
The
first and most important stage of theoretical development had ended by
600 and it is today a sort of orthodoxy to see the Church in the
eleventh century turning to force after 400 years in which its views had
been ambiguous if not predominantly pacifist. This is probably wrong.
It is true that, except for a short period in the ninth century, there
was very little theoretical writing on force. But over and over again
one comes across rather unthinking applications of the old ideas, and it
is clear that during this time merit, which along with free will had
been played down in Augustine’s thought, come to be attached to
participation in sacred violence. It is, however, true that I although
by the eleventh century a large body of writing on Christian violence
was in existence, it was scattered and not easily available. Certain
ideas had passed into Christian thinking and had been put into practice,
but what was required was synthesis and systematisation; and this
process began in the 1080s.
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