Eastern
Christianity does not view morality in fundamentally legal terms or within the
context of abstract philosophy, but as part of the holistic vocation of
humanity for theosis: participation by grace in the eternal life of the Holy
Trinity. Hence, the Orthodox vision must be considered on its own terms, and
not distorted by the imposition of Western categories. The question for the
Orthodox is not, “What approach to warfare is most persuasive rationally or
incumbent upon all Christians as a matter of moral law?” Instead, the East
asks, “In light of the human vocation for growth in holiness and communion with
God, how should Christians respond to the prospect of warfare?”
The
prominence of petitions for peace in the Liturgy sheds light on the Orthodox
response to war. Since the Church believes that the Liturgy is a participation
in the worship of heaven, and grounds the knowledge of God in worship and
mystical experience, it is fitting to place the issue of war and peace within
the context of the liturgical life of Eastern Christianity, for it is in
worship that the Church participates most fully in communion with the Holy Trinity.
In the
Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the first petitions of the Great Ektenia
are for “the peace from above, and for the salvation of our souls” and “the
peace of the whole world; for the good estate of the churches of God, and for
the union of all.” At every Liturgy we pray for our parish, the clergy and
laity, for government officials and all those in public service, for the place
we live and for all towns and cities, for peaceful times, for travelers, the
sick, the suffering, for captives and their salvation, and for our deliverance
from all tribulation, wrath, danger, and need. “Help us; save us; have mercy on
us, and keep us, O God, by Your grace,” we beg, finally commending “ourselves
and each other, and all our life unto Christ our God.”
These are
not simply decorative words. Neither are they prayers which refer merely to the
inner tranquility of worshipers, nor to an entirely future Kingdom of Heaven.
Instead, they embody an Orthodox vision of salvation and call upon the Lord to
enable us to experience his heavenly peace right now in every dimension of
life: personal, public, religious, temporal, and political. Whoever prays these
prayers is asking already to participate in the Kingdom of God on earth, to
find the healing and blessing of salvation in every dimension of one’s life
indeed, in every aspect of God’s creation.
The
entire Liturgy is an epiphany of God’s Kingdom on earth. The priest begins the
service with a proclamation, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Spirit: now and ever and unto ages of ages,” which
declares that the assembly is now participating in the worship of Heaven. The
Church is raised to the life of the Kingdom as her members gather to glorify
and commune with the Holy Trinity.
Because
we believe in the Incarnation and the goodness of God’s physical creation, we
pray for peace and salvation upon people in “real life” situations of peril and
suffering, for deliverance from the kinds of calamities and hardships that
beset our mortal bodies in this life.
The peace
for which we pray includes every dimension of our existence before the Lord.
God created us for communion with Himself in all aspects of our personhood:
body, soul, and spirit. Christian salvation entails the resurrection of the
complete, embodied self in the blessed communion of Heaven and the
transformation of the entire creation in subjection to the Holy Trinity.
The peace
for which we pray is our participation in that all-inclusive salvation. There
is no true peace other than that found in the healing and transformation
brought to human beings by the God-Man in whom our humanity is united with
divinity. Since God intends to save us in every dimension of our existence, his
healing concerns the full range of human life. Even as bread and wine become
the means of our communion with the Lord, we are to offer every bit of
ourselves and of this world to the Father in union with the sacrifice of the
Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. We will then find life-giving communion
with the Holy Trinity in everything we say and do; our life will become a
eucharistic offering as we grow in holiness and union with God.
If the
Liturgy is a participation in the eschatological peace of the Kingdom of God,
it is fair to ask whether the members of the Church recognize and live out this
vision of heavenly peace. An immediate note of realism comes to mind, as the
members of the Church are sinners who have not manifested fully the new life of
Christ. Nonetheless, the presence of the Holy Spirit enables the Church to
embody a foretaste of the eschatological peace of the Kingdom of Heaven, and
there is much in the history and ongoing life of the Church which witnesses to
the saving peace of God here and now.
Though
there is some ambiguity in the Church’s teaching on Christian participation in
war, the Orthodox vision of peace prizes selfless love and forgiveness over
violence, viewing war, in some situations, as a lesser evil with damaging
spiritual consequences for all involved.
In
contrast with Orthodoxy, it is easier to describe the traditional Western
Christian justifications of war, which have included both the granting of
plenary indulgences to those who fought in the crusades and the affirmation of
a just-war theory. The former envisioned the killing of infidels as such a
righteous act that the crusaders were released from all temporal punishments
for their sins, including exemption from purgatory. The latter, which has been
widely influential in Western culture, provides moral sanction to wars which
meet certain philosophical criteria.
Orthodoxy
has never embraced the crusade ethic. Orthodoxy has viewed war always as an
evil, even if, as the theologian Olivier Clément expressed it, “The Church has
accepted warfare sorrowfully as a sometimes necessary evil, but without
concealing that it is an evil which must be avoided or limited as much as
possible.” Elsewhere he notes, “The only normative ideal is that of peace, and
hence the Orthodox Church has never made rules on the subject of ius belli and
of ius in bello.”
Canon 13
of St. Basil’s 92 Canonical Epistles states:
Our fathers did not consider killings
committed in the course of wars to be classifiable as murders at all, on the
score, it seems to me, of allowing a pardon to men fighting in defense of
sobriety and piety. Perhaps, though, it might be advisable to refuse them
communion for three years, on the ground that their hands are not clean.
Father
John McGuckin observes that St. Basil refers to St. Athanasius as the father
who wrote, in his “Letter to Amun,” that killing the enemy was legitimate in
wartime. McGuckin argues, however, that St. Athanasius was advising Amun on the
question of the sinfulness of nocturnal emissions. “In fact the original letter
had nothing whatsoever to do with war… The military image is entirely
incidental, and Athanasius in context merely uses it to illustrate his chief
point in the letter,” which is to show that the moral significance of actions
may not be discerned without reference to the contexts in which they occurred.
Against
any simplistic readings of the letter as a blanket justification of killing in
war, St. Basil places the issue in a specific context. As McGuckin writes on
St. Basil in “War and Repentance,” “what he speaks about is the canonical
regulation of war in which a Christian can engage and find canonical
forgiveness for a canonically prohibited act…”
Killing
in war had been forbidden completely in earlier canons, such as Canon 14 of
Hippolytus in the fourth century, which states:
A Christian is not to become a soldier. A
Christian must not become a soldier, unless he is compelled by a chief bearing
the sword. He is not to burden himself with the sin of blood. But if he has
shed blood, he is not to partake of the mysteries, unless he is purified by a
punishment, tears, and wailing. He is not to come forward deceitfully but in
the fear of God.
St. Basil
distinguishes between outright murder and killing “for the defense of Christian
borders from the ravages of pagan marauders.” By limiting fighting to such
circumstances, he sought to “restrict the bloodshed to a necessary minimum.” In
contrast to the lifelong exclusion from the sacraments imposed on murderers,
St. Basil recommends three years of exclusion from the chalice, thus providing
a public sign that the Gospel standard is violated by war.
The
Christian soldier who has killed in war is to “undergo the cathartic experience
of temporary return to the lifestyle of penance… Basil’s restriction of the
time of penance to three years, seemingly harsh to us moderns, was actually a
commonly recognized sign of merciful leniency in the ancient rule book of the
early Church.” (It is not uncommon to meet veterans who are tormented for the
rest of their lives by the horrors of war. I recall the father of a childhood
friend who suffered from nightmares thirty years after the conclusion of his
military service during World War II. Those who are trained to kill sometimes
have difficulty returning to the mores of civilian life, not to mention the
life of theosis.)
McGuckin
concludes that this canon of St. Basil excludes the development of just war
theory in Orthodoxy. Though particular wars may be necessary or unavoidable,
they are never justified, as shedding the blood of other human beings is
contradictory to the way of the Kingdom of God.
In his
book, The Price of Prophecy, Fr. Alexander Webster agrees that a theory of
justified war “has never been systematically elucidated in Orthodox moral
theology.” He describes participation in such a war as “a lesser moral option
than absolute pacifism, for those unwilling or unable to pay the full price of
prophecy.” He suggests that Orthodox criteria for a just war include a “proper
political ethos,” meaning that the nation going to war should follow “the
natural-law ethic and have positive relations with the Orthodox community.” The
war should also take place for the “defense of the People of God” from injustice,
invasion, or oppression “by those hostile to the free exercise of the Orthodox
faith.” A proper “spiritual intent” should also lead to “forgiveness and
rehabilitation” of enemies as persons who bear the image of God, and not “mere
revenge, self-righteousness, or conquest.” Webster states that
Whereas the pacifist seeks to emulate Jesus
as the Good Shepherd who allowed Himself to be slain unjustly by and for
sinners, the just warrior perceives a higher duty: to defend the relatively
innocent from unjust aggression. If the Orthodox pacifist can never do anything
evil even for a reasonably just end, the Orthodox warrior cannot preserve his
personal holiness by allowing evil to triumph through his own inaction.
It is
curious for Webster to suggest that the just warrior follows a “higher duty”
than that of the pacifist, especially when the clear norm for the Church is the
selfless, forgiving, nonresistant way of Christ. Likewise, the enumeration of
moral categories for a justified war and the reference to governments which
follow an ethic of natural law raise the question of whether this
interpretation places questions of war and peace more within the context of
human moral reasoning than in that of the journey to theosis. It is fair to ask
whether Webster’s formulation gives sufficient attention to the spiritual
vision of Orthodoxy, as opposed to the greater reliance on an ethics of human
reason in Western Christianity.
Though
Christlike response of “turning the other cheek” to assaults is the ideal, the
Orthodox Church does not prescribe pacifism or nonviolence as an absolute
requirement of the Christian life. The Church’s moral guidance serves the goal
of theosis, of guiding the members of Christ’s Body to growth in holiness and
union with the Trinity. The canons of the Church are applied pastorally in
order to help particular people find salvation as they seek to be faithful in
the given set of challenges and weaknesses which they face. The Church’s
experience is that temporal authority and the use of force are necessary to
restrain evil and promote good in our fallen world.
Though
the witness of the early Church was largely, but not exclusively, pacifist, the
Byzantine vision was of symphonia, or harmony, between God’s Kingdom and
earthly realms. Hence, Christian emperors and armies fought wars and sustained
a social order that sought to embody faithfulness to the Lord in all areas of
life. Church and empire were to be united, in Webster’s words, “even as the
divine and human natures of Christ are united in the One Person of the
Incarnate Son of God.” In practice, however, that vision was never fully
realized in Byzantium; human sinfulness corrupted its political and
ecclesiastical leaders in many ways.
There
have remained in Orthodoxy, however, indications of the ideal of peace. Monks
and clergy, for example, may not bear arms and are forbidden to use deadly
violence even in cases of self-defense. Canon V of St. Gregory of Nyssa “states
that should a priest ‘fall into the defilement of murder even involuntarily
(i.e., in self-defense), he will be deprived of the grace of the priesthood,
which he will have profaned by this sacrilegious crime.’”
Those
whose hands have shed blood are no longer the icons of Christ which priests are
called to be, and are not suited to serve at the altar. As Webster writes in
The Pacifist Option, “An Orthodox priest is supposed to be an exemplar for the
Christian community, a man with a personal history free from all serious or
grievous offenses including the taking of a human life for any reason.”
Even as
the sacramental priesthood is a special vocation to which not all are called,
the straightforward embodiment of Christlike, nonviolent love incumbent upon
priests is not canonically required of all believers. In keeping with the
practice of economia, the norm of nonresistant love may not be directly
applicable to those whose vocations in our broken world require the defense of
the innocent. These may grow in holiness by fighting as justly as possible,
even as they mourn the harm done to themselves and others by their use of
violence.
Whatever
choices we make in our efforts to defend the innocent from attack and abuse,
none are perfect. In a fallen world populated by sinful people, every
Christian’s journey to the Kingdom will be marked by a measure of spiritual
brokenness, and repentance is the only road to healing.
Particular
countries and peoples have been so closely identified with the Orthodox faith
that their defensive wars against Islamic invaders, though not Western-style
crusades, have been described as “a difficult and painful defense of the
Cross.” The appeal for “victory over their enemies” at the feast of the
Exaltation of the Cross, and other instances of martial imagery in the
liturgies, has at times been corrupted into a “national Messianism” in which a
soldier who dies in battle is regarded as a martyr and the evil of war is
forgotten.
It would
be a mistake, however, to suggest that Orthodoxy has enthusiastically endorsed
war. Even in cases of the defense of a Christian people from Islamic invasion,
the spiritual gravity of warfare has not been forgotten. For example, St.
Sergius of Radonezh in the fourteenth century gave his blessing to Grand Prince
Dimitri to fight a defensive war against the Tatar Khan only after he received
assurances that the prince had already exhausted every possible means of
reconciliation.
Kutuzov’s
strategy in response to Napoleon’s invasion was similar, abandoning Moscow to
the French and merely harassing Napoleon’s forces during their withdrawal,
having no other aim than to drive the invader back to the frontier.
Far from
being examples of unbridled militarism, these are instances which reflect the
reluctant acceptance of war at times as a necessary evil.
These
notes of realism should not be allowed to obscure the Church’s insistence that
“non-retribution, the avoidance of violence, the returning of good for evil …
and the harmony of peoples” are a holistic “normative good which Christians
must seek with God’s help,” in the words of Olivier Clément.
Fr.
Stanley Harakas observes that “the Eastern Patristic tradition rarely praised
war, and to my knowledge, almost never called it ‘just’ or a moral good…. The
peace ideal continued to remain normative and no theoretical efforts were made
to make conduct of war into a positive norm.”
The
evidence for widespread pacifism in the Church is strongest before St.
Constantine, when the Empire was pagan and Christians, including converts
within the army, were persecuted for refusing to participate in the worship of
false gods. Even after the Christianization of the Empire, with the eventual
requirement that only Christians could be in the army, there remained teachers
of pacifism in the Church, such as Pope St. Damasus, Prudentius, and St.
Paulinus of Nola. Webster remarks that St. Paulinus, in the fifth century, was
the last Church Father who explicitly addressed the moral issue of war from a
pacifist perspective. From then on, pacifist sensibilities would manifest
themselves in other contexts, such as the requirement of clerical and monastic
nonresistance.
The
contrast between the canonical requirement of pacifism for the clergy and the
acceptance of military service by the laity requires further comment. Webster
notes that the identification of clergy with the nonviolent norm and the
allowance of participation in war on the part of the laity implies a two-tier
ethic with a higher and a lower class of Christians, which could be taken to
imply that the clergy are necessarily holier than the laity.
More
faithful to Orthodox ecclesiology would be the affirmation that the norm now
embodied by the clergy will at some future point become normative for all
Orthodox. Here we are dealing with a point of eschatological tension that will
be resolved in the Kingdom of Heaven, when all will be pacifists, for violence
and other evils will be destroyed. In the present, as Webster writes in The
Pacifist Option, the clergy are “expected to demonstrate the attainment of an
advanced spiritual and moral state to which all Orthodox Christians are
[ultimately] called.”
The
recognition of pacifism as an ultimate norm or goal for all Christians should
not be surprising. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ calls His followers
to theosis, to growth in holiness and perfection in union with God. “Be
perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48) This
teaching is the conclusion of a section focusing on the love of enemies, which
is immediately preceded by the Lord’s repudiation of resistance against evil.
“Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn
the other also.” (5:39)
These
passages indicate that the repudiation of violence in self-defense is a sign of
growth in holiness. Our Lord’s example of offering Himself on the cross for our
salvation is the paradigmatic epiphany of the selfless love in which human
beings are to participate as they come to share by grace in the life of the
Trinity.
By Fr.
Philip Lemasters
Source: http://www.pravmir.com/may-christians-kill/
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