Peace (19 page)

With the missionary work of the Twelve Apostles (“envoys”) after the Passion, Jesus' ministry took on the features of an organized religious peace movement, the second major one in world history after Ashokan Buddhism. Each was assigned a different group or part of the Roman Empire to proselytize: for example, while Peter was sent to the Jews of the Diaspora, Paul was sent to the Gentiles, or non-Jews. They acted on Jesus' orders, but also in his image as one who “came and preached peace to you that were far off and to them that were close,” and suffered a similar fate, “making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
¹⁸
Demonizing warfare, they preached and practiced peace. Humanity, in their view, had already been spiritually unified by Jesus' self-sacrifice, so “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for all are one in Jesus Christ.”
¹⁹
As “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace,” they recognized and reconciled cultural differences to promote a religious unity that was almost political.
²⁰
The peace Jesus once called his was now ours: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two [Jews and Gentiles] one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
²¹
Evangelism was peacemaking because God “reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.”
²²

In Philo's footsteps, the Apostles made great efforts to syncretise Greco-Roman ideas and ideals with those of Jesus' Jewish tradition, without which Christianity would not have taken root peacefully, if it would have at all. Catered to their intended audiences (such as Romans, Hebrews, Corinthians), Apostolic Epistles form Part II of the New Testament. Their unifying theme is that an imminent supernatural event would suddenly occur through which worthy believers would be selected for the heavenly kingdom and unworthy unbelievers banished from it. Upon this Second Coming of Christ, “While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,' destruction will come on them suddenly, as labour pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”
²³
The severity of the justice and the perfection of the peace to come made present injustices and wars ephemeral. Because the Second Coming's timing was uncertain and could
not be sped up, the best that early believers could do was to pray for, participate in and propagate the pacifist and pacification principles Christ had taught, lived by and died for. The objective of the Apostolic generations of Christians was thus not to establish a new state, but to prepare themselves as individuals for the Second Coming. Roman militarism, the backbone of its cosmopolitan culture, left little room for mercy, compassion and forgiveness. Early Christianity, in counter-culturally promoting these, focused on spiritual and behavioural principles rather than organizational or theological ones. As inequalities in this world would soon be levelled in the next, no new social system was required for salvation regardless of the structural and outright violence suffered under the yoke of Roman rule. With pacification in God's hands, the prospect of the Second Coming put the urgency of involvement in worldly affairs on an early Epicurean-like hold.

Far from inciting rebellion, Jesus' well-known maxim to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's was taken as a call to respect and obey civil authority insofar as doing so did not conflict with his religious authority or moral precepts. Reinforced by the Apostles, this principle gave early Christians their political strategy vis-à-vis Rome: rapprochement. However, two impassable points of contention soon became obligatory: Emperor-worship and mandatory military service, impossible for pacifist Christians because they were tantamount to damnation. To the extent that the antimilitarism and monotheism of early Christians disrupted the stable paradigms of Roman imperialism and mythology, they met with suppression and persecution carried out systematically by imperial powers, arbitrarily by local powers, and sporadically by popular powers. Using violence in self-defence was out of the question not only because it went against their convictions, but because it put their very survival at risk. Martyrs, modeling their death on that of Jesus, became the first Christian heroes less for the example they set than for the idea and ideal of non-violence they represented. One of these, ironically named after the “pagan” goddess of peace Irene, was later canonized by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches as the first patron saint of peace. Breaking Roman law could bring on material, corporeal punishments that could end with death; God's punishment for breaking Christ's law of love was spiritual and eternal. Following Christ and the Apostles, the first Christians thus positioned themselves not as Rome's foes but as its victims, paradoxically the position from which they gained an Empire but at the cost of the very peaceful principles upon which this position was founded.

In the post-Apostolic era, roughly from the late first to the early fourth century CE, fervour for the Second Coming and missionary zeal subsided somewhat. The conviction that the condition of the world at large, not
just preparedness of individuals, would affect God's judgment whenever it came spread slowly, so that theological questions and organizational issues once considered irrelevant now needed to be faced – and fast. The growing numbers of Christian cells, even in the Roman army, and communities as at Rome made peaceful relations between their members and with the state the top socio-political concerns. Leaders of the loose network of Christian churches began realizing that their cause could and was benefiting, at least in some ways, from its unique situation within an imperial infrastructure that had created order and stability in an enormous geographical area and among a great diversity of peoples. As critical masses were reached by the second century CE, pressing questions arose as to whether Christians could, would or should become the heirs or replacements of the Roman Empire instead of being its victims. If so, how would the transition from the Pax Romana to Christ's kingdom take place? If not, how would Christian and Roman traditions coexist?

Bishops who took over the Apostles' regional sees by succession eventually became the churches' official representatives and collectively decided policy and doctrine, while deacons managed the day-to-day of the churches, increasingly well-funded by wealthy converts. Only presbyters continued the tradition of working directly for the benefit of all. Mixed among these were intellectuals, discussed below, who exemplified the idea, popular among the upper classes, that the ideal Christian was not a blind believer, but one capable of defending Christian beliefs with their minds just as vigorously and non-violently as martyrs did with their bodies. After three centuries of pacifism, Christianity was no longer an underground religion, but was now openly competing with Romanization from the inside out and the bottom upwards. Christians won over the Empire when Emperor Constantine who, as it happened, founded a temple to Irene soon after making Constantinople the new capital, converted to Christianity and outlawed persecutions by the Edict of Milan in 313. However, Constantine also passed an ecumenical law by which any Christian who abandoned or refused to bear arms for Rome was excommunicated. In this way, he fully aligned the interests of Church and State, but also betrayed the pacifism by which this alignment had come into being. Religious persecutions continued, but increasingly it was the Christians perpetrating them against polytheists, Christian heretics, Jews and each other.

Christian intellectuals in the Western Roman Empire adopted philosophical pragmatism to address political issues faced by their churches. Saint Justin (
c
. 100–65), born in Palestine and martyred in Rome, wrote two
Apologias
addressed to the Roman Senate. In the first, he used the aphorism “You can kill, but not hurt us” to highlight both the ungodly violence Christians still suffered as well as their godly commitment to
non-violence.
²⁴
Building on this point, in the second he argued that while peace on earth could be imposed, as the Pax Romana purported to do, the peace of heaven must be earned. In another
Apologia
addressed to Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Saint Melito (d. 180), a bishop of Sardis in modern Turkey, argued that the Empire was part of God's plan for the spread of Christianity's universal pacification and peace, noting that the start of the Pax Romana roughly coincided with the birth of Christ. Considered Christendom's first great Latin writer, Tertullian (155–228), echoing Saint Justin, stated the paradoxical inversion of values displayed by the martyrs whose executions he witnessed in his native Carthage: “Your peace is war for him.”
²⁵
He went on to redefine empire as a brotherhood without borders which could even include converted barbarians, replacing the internal/external dichotomy that had sustained the military basis of the Pax Romana, and brought about its downfall. Though writing in defence of one who refused to worship his commander in chief, the term “Christian soldier” was an oxymoron for Tertullian because “by disarming Peter, the Lord dismissed all soldiers.”
²⁶
Instead, he proposed not only that Christians could pray for emperors as opposed to worship them, but that Christianity itself could curb abuses of imperial power detrimental to peace by the emperor being reminded that he is not God. A later Carthaginian, Saint Cyprian (d. 285) shared Tertullian's antimilitarism: “Homicide is a crime when committed by the individual, but a virtue when it is collective. It is not innocence, but the scale of the harm they cause which ensures that rogues get off scot-free.”
²⁷
The vision of a Roman-Christian peace on earth of a third Carthaginian, Arnobius (d. 330), was put forth in an effort to refute the claim that Christianity, particularly its pacifism, was the cause of Rome's ongoing decline. Tertullian, Cyprian and Arnobius set the groundwork for their fellow North African and the most influential intellectual of the early Middle Ages, Saint Augustine.

Christian intellectuals of the Eastern Empire adopted theological speculation to address religious issues regarding the spiritual unity and integrity of individual believers and those of the doctrine of their churches. The scholastic center of Christianity was Alexandria, where Clement (
c
. 150–210) and his student Origen (
c
. 185–252), headed the catechetical school. In Clement's view, peace is the point of education, and war the result of its absence: “We are educated not for war but for peace. In war, there is need for much equipment, just as self-indulgence craves abundance. But peace and love, simple and plain blood sisters, do not need arms nor abundant supplies.”
²⁸
Yet, he uses military language to urge learning how to use peace and pacifism: “Let us therefore learn to handle the arms of peace,” meaning faith and scripture, “these are our arms and nowhere will they inflict wounds.”
²⁹
Origen, on the other hand,
saw peace in the negative: “You can say there is peace when no one lives in a state of discord, when no one gives way to quarrelsomeness and there is no hostility or cruelty.”
³⁰
For him, the peace and unity of humanity through Christianity was not limited by the empire or to cosmopolitan concord, but was cosmic in the name of Christ. Peacemaking was the duty of Christians as “children of peace,” both by the exemplary life Jesus had led and “for the sake of Jesus who is our leader.”
³¹
The
Apostolic Constitutions
, a collection of prayers and customs of the Eastern churches compiled shortly after Constantine's death, partly concur with Clement and Origen, and partly contradict: “Let us pray for the peace and settlement of the world and of the holy churches; that the God of the whole world may afford us His everlasting peace, and such as may not be taken from us.”
³²
Jesus' peace, once “his,” then “ours” in a universal sense, was now reserved for “us” Christians. As this prayer suggests, the primary problem facing Christianity after making peace with the Empire was how to keep “our” universal peace for and within Christianity itself.

A Pillar of Peace: The Qur'an and its World

Though embedded in them, unlike Judeo-Christian peace principles and practices, those of Islam technically could not develop even if from its origins onwards they were manifested very differently in different circumstances. This
static dynamism
stems from the belief that the message Mohammed (570–632) transmitted in the Qur'an was God's culminating revelation to humanity. So while its core communication is one of peaceful unity through the tolerance and benevolence that come with complete submission to God, Muslims have theologically and historically held Qur'anic methods of applying these principles for peace as unchangeable as they are inviolable.

Mohammed was born in Mecca, a trade-route oasis town off the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula prone to flash floods. Aside from its commercial activities, Mecca's main attraction was a masonry structure, later called the Kaaba, to which pilgrimages were made for the tribal jinn figures it housed. He belonged to the Quraysh tribe, a local power by its control of the caravan trade with the northern superpowers, Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia, monotheist monarchies always at war with one another. Orphaned as a child, he was adopted by his uncle, a merchant of a minor Quraysh clan. Little is known of his youth other than he also became a merchant, a peripatetic profession bringing him in contact with Jewish and Christian traders, probably Arabic-speaking like himself. When a flash flood damaged the Kaaba, a dispute arose between
the Quraysh clans as to who would place the honorary last stone. Mohammed is said to have spread out his cloak on the ground, put the stone in the centre and asked clan heads to place it together. His reputation for justice, trustworthiness and honesty attracted a wealthy older widow, whom he married and with whom he had six children.