Until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was the normative Christian view. Thus, for medieval theologians, violence may or may not be evil it depends largely on the intention of the perpetrator.
And if you find one exception to the idea that violence is evil, he concluded, then violence cannot be intrinsically evil. That is an act of extreme violence.īut was that violence evil? Augustine said no. Against the man’s will, the surgeon straps him to a table and saws off the leg. The surgeon believes the only way to save him is by amputating the leg. How did medieval Christians support their idea that violence was morally neutral?Īugustine gave this example: Suppose a man has gangrene in the leg and is going to die. Then Augustine formulated his theory of “just war,” but his terms effectively mean “holy war.” Augustine and the medieval world concluded that violence is not evil.
Church leaders, after an initial shock, began supporting the use of force against heretics. And Christians served in the Roman army from the second century on.įollowing the conversion of the emperors, in the fourth century, the church became more open to using violence. In Romans 13, for example, Paul justifies the violence of the pagan emperor, for the emperor is yet a minister of God. Jonathan Riley-Smith : First, the early church was not entirely pacifist.
Professor Riley-Smith is author of The Crusades: A Short History (Yale, 1987) and numerous other books on the crusading era.Ĭhristian History: In the first three centuries, Christians were pacifists. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.Christians marching off to holy war-how can we understand that? And did any good come of it? To answer these questions, Christian History editors Kevin Miller and Mark Galli talked with Jonathan Riley-Smith, professor of history at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.Īs a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
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