Peace (23 page)

Marsilius (1290–1342) was a soldier of that city before attending the University of Paris, then becoming its rector. While practicing medicine after his short tenure, he wrote one of the most controversial political works of the times,
Defender of the Peace
(1324). The defender Marsilius had in mind was the secular state, totally severed from and superior to all religious authority. The peace was basically that which Dante had proposed: a product of concordant unity and producer of humanity's greatest achievements. Rather than in, by and for God as Augustine claimed, Marsilius argued that states came about by the application of reason for all to benefit from peace, and in this too he was ahead of his times in presaging Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. In his view, it was precisely because religious authorities had meddled in secular affairs that peace was jeopardized. Free from scriptural conjectures that confuse spiritual and political spheres, only a strong secular authority can legitimately resolve conflicts and maintain peace in and among states. Even coercive force can be used to these ends, he again presciently contended, if it reflects the will of the people whose consent through refined representative legislators ought to be required for both religious and secular decision-making. Of course, the Pope took offense, excommunicated the author and censured the work. Persecuted, Marsilius took refuge with another excommunicate, Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, to whom the
Defender
was dedicated because he refused to relinquish power on the Pope's command. Louis then deposed the Pope and installed a puppet regime including, by sham elections, himself as king of Italy, a mendicant
monk as Pope, and Marsilius as vicar of Rome. Though they were soon rooted out by Papal loyalists, Marsilius thus lived to see the most radical points of his
political imperatives
for peace put into practice, however superficially and temporarily.

Contrasting in some ways with Marsilius was Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), who a hundred years later pioneered a perspective on political peace and peacemaking now called
realpolitik
, based on uses of political power rather than the power of political ideals. A statesman, he entered Florence's civil service the same year its long-ruling family, the Medici, was deposed and a republic proclaimed. As a member of the city council handling diplomatic and military affairs, he served as ambassador to France and Rome, admiring the condottiere Cesare Borgia's rise to power in central Italy. When the Medici retook the city-state in 1512 with Papal backing, he was arrested for conspiracy, tortured and banished from the city after refusing to confess. He then dedicated himself to writing, most influentially, a political treatise hastily composed to curry Medici favor, never received. In
The Prince
(1532), Machiavelli advised by historical examples that feared rulers are more effective than loved ones, and that in acquiring or sustaining their power, upon which peace pragmatically depends, the ends justify the means:

There are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand well how to use well both the man and the beast.
¹⁰

By cruelty alone, however, rulers are not able to “maintain their position even in peaceful times, not to speak of the perilous times of war.”
¹¹
Peace is not an ultimate goal, nor is war always to be avoided; both are simply conditions to which rulers must react to be effective. But Machiavelli's masterwork is actually the
Discourses on Livy
, considered the first modern instruction manual and manifesto for republicanism. Based on the Roman model, with an eye to the Florentine city-state of which Machiavelli wrote a history, Machiavelli argued that the most peaceful form of government is that in which the powerful are checked in popular elections. So while totalitarian tactics are often traced to Machiavelli, his lifelong commitment to republican values ought not to be overlooked. Fair terms between the powerful and powerless, he follows Livy in writing, lead to “a firm and lasting peace,” while “on unfair, a peace of short duration,” because “safe peace” is made voluntarily, not in servitude.
¹²
“It cannot be that a peace imposed on compulsion should endure between men who are every day brought face to face with one another,” perhaps the most realistic proposition of
realpolitical peace
ever put forth
.
¹³

Returning now to the trend from which the Renaissance or “rebirth” gets its name, the revival of classical traditions in philosophy and literature predictably also took place in peace writings, and at the forefront was Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). Raised and educated in a monastery, Erasmus took his vows, was ordained as a Catholic priest, then accepted a clerical position offered by a bishop. On paid leave, made permanent by the Pope, he studied theology at the University of Paris, then worked as a travelling independent scholar and creative writer, a career which put him in contact with the greatest minds and powers of his times. In opposition to Machiavelli, in
The Education of the Prince
(1516) he argues that rulers should be classically trained, biblically guided model citizens who are loved by their subjects to be most effective in making and maintaining peace within as well as between their kingdoms. In
On the War against the Turks
, regarding European retaliation in response to Sultan Suleiman's attack on Vienna (1529), Erasmus urges that “no matter how serious nor how just the cause, war must not be undertaken unless all possible remedies have been exhausted and it has become inevitable.”
¹⁴
Rather than stereotyping Turks as warmongers and using Islam as an excuse for war, he urges Christians to overcome their own warlike tendencies and religious intolerance. In his collection of classical quotes and commentaries, the
Adages
, the longest is on “War is sweet to the inexperienced.” This anti-war tirade aimed at deterring readers is perhaps the most gruesome depiction and scathing critique of warfare of its time. “When did anyone hear,” he asks with typically poignant wit, “of a hundred thousand animals falling dead together after tearing each other to pieces, as men do everywhere?”
¹⁵
Erasmus' pro-peace tour de force based on classical and biblical sources,
The Complaint of Peace
(1517), begins with the words “Peace talks.” Within the book's context, they act as stage directions indicating that what follows is a first-person diatribe by a personified Peace about abuses humanity has hurled. Within its socio-political context, they indicate the core of Peace's plea and the plan the book advocates: violence replaced and peace restored through critical dialogue. Erasmus tried to do just that by acting as an intermediary between Protestants like Martin Luther and the Pope despite disagreeing with them, but the task proved too divine. No surprise, then, that in his renowned satirical work,
In Praise of Folly
, war runs parallel to the exploitative excesses of religious powers in precluding peace.

Erasmus dedicated this last book to a collaborator, Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), who put forth an idealist perspective on peace along both Platonic and monastic lines. Son of a judge, More studied at Oxford, worked his way up England's civil service and became Lord Chancellor, the second-highest position in the land. However, symptomatically of the times, he was in the end beheaded by order of King Henry VIII on trumped-up charges, really for publically shunning the royal divorce and
remarriage in his Catholic stance against Protestantism. The Church, in a now-rare non-violent act of retaliation, canonized More as the patron saint of lawyers. More began writing his most famous work,
Utopia
(1515, coining the word), during his early continental diplomatic trips. The book's title and name of the state it describes is a pun on the Greek words for “no-place” and “good-place,” hinting that Utopian peace and prosperity are both perfect and impossible. In Utopian religious disputes “no other force but that of persuasion” is used, never mixed with “reproaches nor violence,” unlike in Europe at the time.
¹⁶
The differences between Utopians and his contemporaries More illustrates in pointedly unsubtle ways neither start nor end there. Had the latter been more like the former, More and unnumbered other Renaissance writers critical of un-peaceful power-wielders might not have died as they did.

In Part I, More meets the only person to have visited Utopia, who critiques present-day European states in which war is prevalent because of greed, and greed is prevalent because of private property, resulting in laws that are unjust or improperly applied, punishments ineffective or disproportionate, crimes caused by poverty due to mismanagement or miseducation, and religious differences spurred or settled by military might. Part II describes Utopia, where peace prevails because property is held in common, surplus production by hard work and thrift is used as a safety net or for trade, public officials are periodically elected, and people can choose professions and faiths. Although loathed by Utopians, war is far from unknown to them because of warlike neighbors. So they practice Spartan discipline to prepare for unexpected attacks and maintain social order. Prior to war, Utopians “pray, first for peace,” then for war “without the effusion of much blood on either side.”
¹⁷
They pay mercenaries, but under strict rules strongly reminiscent of Cicero, Augustine and Erasmus: “to defend themselves, or their friends, from any unjust aggressors,” to “assist an oppressed nation in shaking off the yoke of tyranny,” and in offensive wars only when “they had found that all demands of reparation were rejected, so that a war was unavoidable.”
¹⁸
Utopianism in different forms and degrees has been a mainstay of modern peace traditions, as have institutions that make their first prominent appearance in modern history of peace during the Renaissance, universities, transformed from keepers of the bellicose status quo into breeding grounds for peace thinkers and activists alike.

Reforming Christian Peace and Peacemaking

On the last day of October, 1517, a German priest named Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailed a piece of paper on the door of the local church. Like
most of his contemporaries, later commentators harp about what was written on and done about it, which was indeed of immense historical importance, including a condemnation of indulgences and the admonition: “Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, ‘Peace, peace,' and there is no peace!”
¹⁹
But the social significance of Luther's non-violent form of protest is for the most part ignored. Those who ignored it blindly carried out the wars between religious reformers and conservatives that ravaged Europe for centuries afterwards, deeply damaging the already diminished peacemaking powers of Christianity. Those who saw the value of its non-violence prototyped major modern peace movements including civil disobedience, conscientious objecting, anti-war protesting and pacifism by drawing on both biblical and more recent religious traditions.

Critiques of Church militarism occurred in Bohemia contemporaneously to Italy, France and England, where radical returns to apostolic pacifism were proposed and practiced by two protestant vanguards. Their efforts signal another shift in Christian peace and peacemaking from medieval theocentric to modern homocentric worldviews within religious frameworks, initiating an indicative though highly inconsistent slippage between Protestantism as a religious movement and anti-war protesting as a peace movement. Jan Hus (1370–1415), born in poverty, worked his way to a degree from the University of Prague and became a professor and preacher. Influenced by writings of English Church reformer, biblical translator and proto-protestant John Wycliffe (1320–1384), Hus rejected two papal prerogatives for which he was burned at the stake as a heretic: using armed forces in Christ's name and raising funds through indulgences to support them. Unlike the strict pacifist and anti-war stances of most of Wycliffe's followers and Hus himself, Hussites took up arms in revolts against both Church and State. Their violent victories, all invalidated in time, thus betrayed the non-violent spirit of Hus' lifework: in essence, that religious institutions and their officials exist for the benefit of humanity, not the other way around, and so should not condone or participate in acts of violence. Peter Chelcicky (1390–1460) shared Hus' spirit but articulated it even more radically: “The man of violence,” whether of a religious or secular calling, “unlawfully enjoys and holds what is not his own.”
²⁰
In
Spiritual Warfare
and
The Triple Division of Society
, he criticized Church, State and the upper classes for precluding peace by oppressing the poor and conducting what he considered devil's works of war with profit as a primary motive. “The executioner who kills” on command “is as much a wrong-doer as the criminal who is killed.”
²¹
Only communal egalitarianism on pacifist apostolic models, he contended, can promote and preserve peace. Practicing what he preached, he lived and died among his peasant farmer peers. Seven centuries later,
the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy would draw upon Chelcicky's humanistic Christian views on pacifism in forming his own, in turn informing Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Within a generation, similar movements to reform or secede from the Catholic Church were rampant across Europe, prompting reactionaries to use both spiritual and physical violence against them. Some reformers reciprocated, others chose non-violent means of reaching their ends, sometimes under the same banner. Sixteenth-century Anabaptists are examples of these contradicting tendencies, named after their rejection of infant baptism as an involuntary and so invalid entry into Christendom, and practice of voluntary baptism as adults. At one end militant Anabaptist leaders like Thomas Munster (1490–1525) were beheaded for leading lower classes of the Holy Roman Empire in what is miscalled the Peasant's Revolt, an economically motivated anticlerical rebellion of all classes except the highest. His aim was to overthrow Church and State to establish a peaceful theocratic society based on communal equality by any means necessary, which in the event killed 100,000 people without the desired results, the deadliest European uprising until then. At the scale's other end were pacifist Anabaptists like Conrad Grebel (1498–1526), who pleaded with Munster to “use neither the worldly sword nor engage in war” while comparing them to plagues.
²²
Breaking with the leading moderate reformer Ulrich Zwingli over his dependence on Zurich's city council for change, Grebel founded a radical group, the Swiss Brethren. Advocating resistance to war and oppression by civil disobedience, they refused to bear arms, hold public office and take oaths in court or elsewhere, as asserted in the seven-article
Schleitheim Confession
. Brethren were persecuted after the civil wars they may have sparked but in no way supported; Grebel escaped, only to die of the plague. Anabaptism soon spread to Poland, where Marcin Czechowic (1532–1613) defended its pacifism in his
Christian Dialogues
, arguing that the only weapons Christ used and Christians need are love, hope, patience and prayer. In Hapsburg, Wilhelm Reublin (1480–1559) protested against taxes for war, calling such funds “blood money” and debunking the “difference between slaying with our own hands and strengthening and directing someone else when we give him our money to slay in our stead.”
²³
A Reublin follower, Jacob Hutter, started a pacifist protestant sect on Utopian principles, for which he also was burned at the stake, rejecting even defense weaponry in the name of peace and unity. Hutterites fled Catholic persecution from Tyrol to Moravia, where they were persecuted by militant Husserites instead. Today's worldwide Anabaptist churches are mostly of pacifist persuasions, a reminder that even religious group survival still depends on peace.