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(00:01) but our topic tonight is from jesus to christian militancy and we'll try to cover you know just 2 000 years of history and development with very rapidly so we'll see if we're able to hit it all so so one of the reasons why we ended up doing this particular topic or we decided to explore this particular topic is in my own denomination here community of christ we are having next year our triennial uh world conference and so this is if you've ever looked in the back of the wall here we have the picture of the what's this vast kind of auditorium the

(00:43) auditorium is where representatives or delegates from all of the different sections of the church around the world send their delegates every three years in order to consider legislation and and essentially operate the denomination so the denomination is its governing body is elected delegates who come together and decide what the you know uh budget principles the rules and all those kind of things and so anyway one of the one of the propositions that is before our denomination uh is what's uh calling what's being

(01:18) called a not the non-violence uh resolution and so the european mission center which is to say delegates to their conference have forwarded this resolution to the world conference for our whole church to be considering and so i've been thinking about it uh because i'll be a delegate to this conference and so as we're kind of thinking about it and so the resolution that where is before us and our denomination is um is this resolution for non-violence and i'll just read it quickly whereas jesus taught in matthew 5 44 love your

(01:51) enemies and pray for those who persecute you and whereas no known christian writings before 100 i mean sorry between 100 of the common era and 313 of the common era approve of christian participation in warfare and whereas the founding vision of community of christ or our denomination was of the peaceable kingdom of god on earth a non-violent zion with economic justice for all and whereas community of christ has been admonished from its earliest days to hear the words of the living christ and listen again to the voice that calls us

(02:22) to the great and marvelous work of building the peaceable kingdom of god on earth and whereas community of christ has a logo inspired by isaiah 11 1-10 there's the logo right there on the wall uh that shows uh non-violence is central to the way we conceive of peace in other words the lion and the lamb and then the motto peace that's been our logo for over a century whereas community of christ today is called to become a prophetic people that embodies and lives i'm sorry embodies in the lives of its members the ministries of the temple

(02:54) through the pursuit of peace reconciliation and healing of spirit and whereas community of christ's enduring principles and mission initiatives so one of the things that we do is we read the mission right at the beginning of this and so one of those missions is peace through all creation and embody god's love for all creatures whereas previous world constant conference resolutions one one seven seven one two one six and one two two seven have supported non-violent methods of establishing peace so very legalistic right that's how we do

(03:23) this therefore resolved and this is the strong resolved here that we're considering that community of christ reject all forms of violence including acts of terrorism war and financing wars and act upon christ's invitation to practice non-violence confront and resist injustice and be it further resolved the community of christ reject the notion that violence on earth and violence against earth can be addressed separately and affirm the importance of addressing the environmental causes of conflict and be it further resolved that through its

(03:55) enduring principle of worth of all persons community of christ opposes all ideologies of violence and injustice including those expressed in diverse forms of nationalism populism racism and bigotry and be it further resolved the community of christ continue with support of peace education invite its members to embody christ's non-violence through local global ecumenical and interfaith actions toward justice and peace for all so that's the resolution in front of us in some senses if you go back to the beginning here though

(04:25) reject all violence including war and financing war which is sort of the strongest um maybe most controversial parts denominationally this is calling the church which has become we have been a peace focused church and peace has been our motto it's been our principles has been our mission for well over a century and yet we aren't um officially part of the true peace churches like the quakers and some of the other churches who are really you know fully committed to um you know non-violence and so this is kind of one of the things that's before

(05:02) us whether or not we're going to do that and so anyway because of all these kind of whereases or getting back into the nitty-gritty of the history of this movement and everything like that we thought we'd look at it and you know because it's a pressing thing for us today so as always we'll look at this evolution of ideas of non-violence uh in christianity or peace or warfare and then how it got to militancy and all these kind of things by um era starting uh in this earliest era early christianities where christians

(05:36) are existing as diverse minority groups among a pagan majority or polytheist majority roman empire from the 300s and 400s christianity as the first just the religion of the emperor but also patronized by the emperor and ultimately as the state religion that uh also doesn't allow uh you know that outlaws actually the old old religions uh within the empire um the church in the area of the invasions so as in the west the uh central state collapses as the different barbarian confederations move in and establish the different germanic kingdoms

(06:19) and then all through what's commonly called the dark ages but anyway the the period of time uh when uh europe is feeling experiencing a general collapse uh in terms of its capacity uh state capacity population economics every other kind of thing like that uh what's going on there the resurgence of the west into the high middle ages where we also experience essentially the church that's known for its crusading ethics then christianity divided by the protestant schism so the protestant reformation the wars of religion in europe and then

(07:00) christianity is now again in the post-christian west so um as westerners are still somewhat christian sometimes you know depending on and in some cases technically having like a lot of influence let's say let's evangelical vote in the united states and that kind of a thing nevertheless in all vast portions of what's now called the west as opposed to what used to been called christendom uh it's in part because so few for example europeans anymore are actually adherence to any particular christian denomination in the post-christian west

(07:36) so anyway looking at these whole vast ideas of these we'll look at both kind of the histories and we'll also try to look at some of the philosophical or theological underpinnings at different times so turning to the early christianities we don't have interestingly you know i'm having here this is taken from a picture of jesus and the apostles from around 300 we have very little imagery or anything from this earliest time period there's just very little for before christianity becomes the state religion and then suddenly

(08:14) there's a huge expansion and change and everything happens and so for this we have to kind of piece a lot of things together from what sources we do have so i'm trying to use as early sources as we have in terms of imagery but even even doing any images are somewhat anachronistic because it's coming these are coming later mostly so this is definitely a later icon of jesus uh from fifth or sixth or something like that century so in the early christianities in the new testament their relationship here so jesus and

(08:46) early christians were marginal people within the roman empire obviously they aren't empowered leaders and so they aren't having to make decisions about whether or not to go to war or any such thing they're not in the kind of position of power the original jesus movement that exists prior to what we call christianity so jesus is not you know although we maybe think of him in this way jesus is not a christian christianity as a religion doesn't exist until after jesus's execution uh so jesus is an israelite he's um

(09:19) uh you know what becomes it's a jewish religion or judean religion um it started if you say jewish the again second temple rabbinic judaism also i'm sorry post second temple repenting judaism also doesn't exist yet but it's a proto version of that um so anyway he's of that religion he's in the 30s and 40s in his movement is in that time period in different parts of the roman empire galilee which is a mixed zone in the north of israel-palestine and so essentially this is a part that's semi-hellenized so it's already been

(09:58) ruled by greek speakers for 300 years and before that the persians and so it's not the the local language is predominantly aramaic as opposed to hebrew and then there's lots of greek speakers as well so between that we have very little in terms of this movement itself this aramaic speaking movement left us no texts and so all of our understanding of this jesus movement this proto-christianity uh has to be reconstructed for us from the later greek christianity that emerges in the later first centuries and then the texts into the

(10:37) second and third centuries so after then the execution of jesus early christianity develops and quickly spreads among greek speaking peoples most of whom are non-jewish ultimately in the roman empire who then define themselves with the texts that become the new testament and so i'm not going to focus too much on the jesus movement here because we can only know so much about it instead we'll look at christianity from the beginning of when it when it emerges as a religion here and so we do that by looking at the texts especially the

(11:11) earliest texts which are included in the new testament so this early movement considers itself essentially to be a congregation of the poor and so they often call themselves the poor and they celebrate uh you know they're actually quite there's some pretty blanket statements against wealth um as opposed as opposed to let's say war or slavery which we don't get like a blanket condemnation of there is some fairly substantial statements against wealth and so there is a people who are um in some sense celebrating uh the their

(11:47) condition of being poor they're also celebrating the meek and also roles like peacemakers so among these beatitudes as they're called that are contained in matthew and also in luke so two of the canonical gospels blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of god this is one of those pictures i took in in uh on the vacation the last two weeks in provence i think this is this is an oral so uh aurel has the um largest collection of uh late antique

(12:24) early late roman early roman anyway christian uh sarcophagi outside of the vatican and so there's all of these images on the on the coffins and sarcophaguses of um early christians that are essentially telling bible stories um what you find is very interesting is in almost all of them the picture of jesus jesus is pretty well just envisioned as a uh fourth century roman and not bearded right so this beard image of jesus comes later and it's largely um adopted from essentially the uh the earlier image of of zeus and

(13:02) jupiter so essentially this idea that you have of the kind of the bearded king god uh jesus is kind of almost pulled over directly from jesus in jupiter yes so this is a shepherd picture so he's got you know a lamb right over and he's he's essentially the good shepherd who's gone and found the one lamb that had gotten away uh and while the 99 were wandering around who knows doing what and brought the one back right so the good shepherd okay so among all those other writings then in that same thing about you know like i

(13:35) say blessed are the peacemakers another famous one here is uh a revision of the lex talionis or the law of retaliation that is found in leviticus so jesus says here you have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth but i say to you do not resist an evil doer but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn the other also and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat give your cloak as well and if anyone forces you to go one mile go also the second mile so some strong insistence here on not retaliating on

(14:13) especially possibly not seeking uh justice in the court system but rather um in this case uh avoiding any those kind of suits and then also even in the case of the being forced to go one mile essentially if you're being drafted into government service that you you fulfill that service uh and even go a second mile according to this another one of these is uh in the same kind of gathering here in the gospel of matthew you've heard it's that it was said uh you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy but i say to you love your

(14:50) enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your father in heaven for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good and he sends the reign on the righteous and on the unrighteous and so this is uh we've done before when we did a lecture on the book of job and the developments of providential and reflective wisdom traditions in the ancient israelite tradition essentially proverbs will tell you you know this is the prudential one and these will tell you things like don't trust your enemies because

(15:26) no good is going to come of that so you watch your back that kind of thing those kind of proverbs you know which are common sense kind of uh uh wisdom but then the kinds that we have in books like job are aware for example that just because you lead a good life doesn't mean that good results are going to happen to you the rain is going to fall on the righteous and on the unrighteous you know very dastardly people may well get really rich it doesn't just immediately follow that if you're good you'll have good ends and good results

(16:01) oh this is jesus again and so in this case jesus is on again one of these sarcophagus from arl in this case uh he is it's a part of a broader picture where he is in the trial in front of pontius pilate and so um there's a little thing of water here because pontius pilate has just washed his hands uh of the whole thing but it's just another one again where jesus is kind of like wearing a roman toga you know and he doesn't have a beard right and so he is in the guys in these early images essentially of the um like

(16:36) the young philosopher so as opposed to one of the other images with the beard is the older philosopher who is kind of the that kind of a teacher and also the bearded guy is also the the king right so he's also like zeus or jupiter or the emperor in this case it's essentially the young philosopher who's going around also on a lot of these images he's got a big wand and he does the different tricks or miracles you know so essentially he heals people or he turns um water into wine or with this with the wand or he um

(17:09) where he multiplies bread you know and so it's the same kind of um this kind of era of roman iconography of of like a wonder worker which is to say also a philosopher since there's a big overlap at this point as far as um the romans are concerned between people who on the one hand work wonders and or are scientists and so essentially astrology and astronomy are exactly the same thing and so that's also also where this imagery comes from so jane yeah figure behind christ so there's just um it's a roman guard i've just so a roman guard is back here

(17:45) so he's holding him because he's a prisoner so he's being tried in front of pilot i i just cut this little image out it's actually a bigger image there's three romans behind him and pontius pilate is right here in that image and i just cut it out to show the jesus the jesus image there okay so an alternate saying um and if you've read a recent relatively recent biography of the historical jesus or study of it called zealot the author there makes a big case about for example the passages that are like this one which are do not think that i

(18:25) have come to bring peace to the earth i have not come to bring peace but the sword and so this is like an alternative let's say text maybe and reading then these other ones that are all about you know non-violence and and peace so depending on which verses you're going to pluck out of the complex gospels you can you can find and say different things about what ancient uh christian or proto-christian teachings and there's a bunch of sword imagery in early christianity including the angel michael who's the main archangel

(18:59) has always got a sword right because it's part of um that's his identifier as an angel you know gabriel has got the horn because he's a herald and et cetera et cetera so however so one of the points of however of the sword imagery uh is that the sword is often in early christianity a metaphor for the word and so it's not always going to be the case but for example in revelation the sword that's wielded by the heavenly rider of the horse who emerges from the mouth in the battle of armageddon i mean the reason why a sword is coming out of

(19:38) your mouth uh is because it's the word that you're you're bringing forth and so essentially by bringing um all of these teachings by bringing this gospel that's causing the um metaphorical sword here uh and that's made explicit in one of paul's letters here ephesians take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit which is the word of god right so the idea is that the sword here possibly is the word or the gospel and so in this case the idea then would be i'm not coming to bring peace i'm coming to bring

(20:13) a sword the idea here the sword being an unsettling message uh not something that's complacent so after he says i come to bring a sword not peace it continues here the next portion of that saying for i have come to set a man against his father had a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and once foes will be members of one's own household whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me and whoever does not

(20:45) take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me so the idea here is that this word or the sword this um this teaching this discipleship of this in this movement is going to be divisive and it's going to cut across all of your traditional uh family groupings and so if you have been complacent in your you know central lived identity up until this time as a galilean person where you are obliged to family for all sorts of obligations now that we are bringing forth a different kind of ethical message where you're trying to

(21:27) rethink all of those connections and obligations in some senses those are all going to be cut off and you're not no longer going to be able to do things where you're living your life for you know familial obligation that you might have inherited possibly as an interpretation of this so an example of that kind of sense is also found in the gospel of matthew where another of disciples said to jesus lord let me go and bury my father what jesus said to him follow me and let the dead bury their own dead so this has been pretty well the i don't

(22:03) know the most kick and kick somebody in the nuts kind of thing that you could possibly say in the ancient world because the the obligation to bury uh for example your father is pretty much the center of what piety even uh means and so if the idea here is uh to you know even essentially following in this new movement or being involved in this uh thing that's going to eventually become christianity involves uh just letting aside all of your past obligations up to and including burying the dead um this is meant to you know

(22:38) really uh you know you shake shake uh your complacency mr phil you're gonna say in the previous slide there's the last sentence yes and whomever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me yes where is the cross coming from yes so so like i say um the the text here is a good point i really like that so so the idea here is um when we have the new testament texts uh matthew here you know this is written whatever this is it's a 60 you know 50 60 years after jesus's death and so um in this particular take up the cross and follow me i'm

(23:30) trying to think of that's from q so that would be earlier but in any event it's all it's that's written after jesus death and so and so this is an example of it's hard to argue that this was a saying before people all of jesus followers knew that jesus was going to be crucified but after that historical event which is multiply attested so people are pretty clear that of the historical jesus one of the things that we could say about the figure is that he was executed by the romans and that form of execution is probably crucifixion

(24:04) that's the that's pretty well known and so in this case this is a a saying that's put into jesus's mouth that anticipates that face and so either either it's a it's a saying that is created by his followers ex post facto or if people want to make the argument that jesus is the prophet who is able to predict these kind of things because of supernatural means then that would be how they would understand that but essentially that's what the idea of it is and so essentially this is also a model for um one of the one of the ways

(24:41) um early christians have to come to terms with what ends up happening so jesus's movements didn't necess wasn't necessarily intended to lead to jesus being executed like that and that may help when that happened for a lot of the members uh who had been following him around in disciples and things like that this was a crisis moment when they tried to figure out why did this happen this was not what we were anticipating with this movement as we understood this person to be the messiah this wasn't what we were expecting to happen to the

(25:11) messiah and this kind of a thing in which case then part of the idea is how do they how do they interpret it and so one of the ways that people are interpreting this is taking up your cross and following jesus so jesus as a model of martyrdom as a model of of how you were able to give yourself uh all the way to the point of death as a um uh as a symbol that you're standing for truth and righteousness right and so previous models of that in the israelite tradition include uh the books from the book of maccabees there's the um

(25:51) the mother of the maccabees who like all of her seven children or whatever are sons after one after another are all essentially massacred uh and martyred and so that was like a model for martyrdom and so in the same way then there are sayings preserved in the new testament that are coming along this uh that jesus is a prophet who um who's was executed because that's what people always do to true prophets and so the his execution uh seals his testimony and shows that in fact after the fact that it was truth and in that same sense then for many

(26:28) early christians um them becoming martyred or them being killed for their beliefs uh shows that likewise and you know gives them this position where they will be with the elect and the first among the first that are raised in the resurrection yes i'm just wondering too if i mean there was some editorializing on the part of matthew wherever he was with this idea of the cross being written backwards into the historical event is it possible also that perhaps there was some let's say turmoil in the uh contemporary uh early christian community at the time

(27:13) matthew was written such that it was setting you know families in turmoil and and and that perhaps this was emphasized in order to address that problem sure very very possibly there definitely is conflict going on at this time period and so each one of the different um writers when we have all of the different early early christian writers each one of them is writing for their own purpose and goals to their own community and they're addressing their own community's needs and so in a lot of cases they are preserving um

(27:46) they're either preserving memory of something that other people don't have because it's more important to what their community's understanding of the past is or in other cases they're inserting text into the mouth of of the founder in order to make their own case and so this um i come not to bring peace with the sword this isn't in the other gospels right it's one of the the things that matthew it's important for matthew's community and so matthew has written it into his gospel likewise the other ones other ones like that are

(28:22) so right in the middle of all this matthew also has a statement that i come not to uh not to end the law but to fulfill it and that not one jot or one title will be taken away from the law and so it this is a major conflict in early christianity where paul has written very seriously to his congregations that if you uh focus on the law then you're essentially rejecting christ in everything that christ did and his sacrifice and everything is for whereas matthew's uh arguing quite the opposite that um if you if you are if you're

(28:57) rejecting the law if you're not embracing every single thing about the law and then doing christianity on top of that um you've you've missed out on on the message and so those are diametrically opposed statements both of which are in the canonical new testament yep and i wonder if he can just take it literally because the sword is in the shape of a cross and the whole passage talks about separating families and separating your previous relations so if you look at it literally picking up the cross could just mean picking up the

(29:32) sword right yeah it could follow so it follows me to the extent that it's like you say it's a um to expect that these are all together as a composite piece as opposed to individual fragments of of things that matthew stuck together but yeah in that sense it could also be visually talking about division so dividing the two the sword is dividing and so this is a somewhat literal but also metaphor for division i don't think anybody saw a cross in when they looked at a sword until christianity okay well now um now when you see a

(30:10) lightsaber you see the cross right because yes sorry is this passage uh in all four gospels or is it just in uh matthew so um i i'm pretty confident that this take up the cross and follow me section i think is in more is multiply it tested so that might that part might be in more than one but i'm pretty sure that the this one is only in matthew this component of it and so what ends up happening is the different components of let's say the oral tradition if these are remembered pithy sayings or something like that

(30:52) those will get rearranged by the different evangelists so that they can like focus on let's say a particular topic and so matthew will lump all these different things that he thinks are important together and luke will do them in a different order and things like that so not all of these are are multiply attested okay okay so here's some of the anyway what we're going to point out in all of those is on the one hand yes we have these kind of teachings radical teachings of turn the other cheek and love your enemies on the other hand

(31:27) there's some complexity here with not bringing peace bringing division and also overturning social convention another component in early christianity is that christians are understanding jesus uh after the fact or maybe during his life as the messiah and so one of the ways that they uh understand then his entire life is by going back and reading uh the greek version of the hebrew bible the septuagint and and reading essentially all of the various um actually the whole text as being predictive of jesus's life and

(32:11) so all kinds of different ways when we read the gospel accounts of the narrative of different things that are happening in jesus's life a lot of these are constructed out of psalms they're constructed out of imagery that prophets like isaiah are having and so where one of the ways that that happened is that when those details were unknown the christian writers who were constructing the gospel narratives uh have this sense that all of these old testament passages are predictive of jesus's life and so they can just go and

(32:45) look them up and some and insert them because they know that that's how it would have happened uh because that's how the different prophets predicted it would happen and so one of these core ones here is from isaiah 9 6 and this is if lander was here he'd sing this for us because he loves this particular yeah elizabeth can sing it from the handel's messiah for a child would be born to us a son will be given to us and the government will rest upon his soldiers and soldiers i'm sorry his shoulders and his name uh will be called

(33:14) wonderful counselor the mighty god the everlasting father the prince of peace so essentially um then this idea uh that um this image that is found in isaiah refers to jesus as far as early christians are concerned and so therefore it's part of this imagery is that christ is the prince of peace so um one of the components then of this early jesus movement that evolves into early christianity is this idea of being inclusive of communities of the unclean so part of being an observant second temple judean is operating with certain ritual purity

(34:02) laws or kosher laws kind of thing mosaic law and that included excluding from meals and other kinds of things people who are ritually unclean early christians by contrast were pretty focused as we read in both what they're doing in the in the new testament and also jesus's various teachings that people who are ritually unclean should be included in the congregation uh including such people as tax collectors prostitutes but then also soldiers who you know again are being ritually unclean because they're in this

(34:41) encountering death and causing death so an example that's written into the gospels here again is a story that of jesus encountering a roman soldier so when jesus entered capernaum a centurion a roman centurion came to him appealing to him and saying lord my servant is lying at home paralyzed in terrible distress and he said to him i will come and cure him the centurion answered lord i am not worthy to have you come under my roof but only speak the word and my servant will be healed for i also am a man under authority with soldiers under me

(35:16) and i say to one go and he goes and another come and he comes and to my slave do this and the slave does this when jesus heard him he was amazed and said to those who followed him truly i tell you in no one in israel have i found such faith i tell you many will come from east and west and will eat with abraham and isaac and jacob in the kingdom of heaven while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into outer darkness where there'll be weeping and gnashing of teeth and the centurion to the centurion jesus said go let it be done

(35:48) for you according to your faith and the servant was healed that hour so essentially this is then kind of showing anyway by writing a story into the gospel account you know of jesus then actually interacting with the soldier just saying that among the different um communities of people who might otherwise be considered ritually unclean or would be outcast would not be allowed in that's not going to be true for christianity so that said so although we don't have then a clear condemnation of uh being a soldier or war thing something like that in the

(36:31) gospel accounts when early christians got to thinking and writing about these things some of our earliest writers are kind of committed to the idea that military service and christianity are not compatible so tertullian who's a second and early third century writer says there's no agreement between the divine and the human sacrament the standard of christ and the standard of the devil the camp of light in the camp of darkness he's a very dualistic or you know good and evil kind of guy black and white tertilian

(37:02) there can be no there's no no overlap between the temple and the academy between jerusalem and and athens as other kinds of things he likes to say anyway one soul cannot be due to two masters god and caesar how will a christian man uh how will christian man war nay how will you serve even in peace without a sword which the lord has taken away so christians can't be involved in war as far as tertullian here is concerned be serving um caesar who is a pagan at this point so um other early thinkers who kind of say something similar origen

(37:43) who's another very important early christian thinker he's also against christians serving in the roman military that said however as in the story with the centurion many soldiers did convert and continue to serve in the military even though they were christians and in fact some of our earliest archaeological remains of christian churches so we have very little um actually archaeological stuff from these first few centuries uh but one of the more important two of the more important early christian churches in the east are associated with uh

(38:17) christian i'm sorry with roman military camps so one here at megiddo and another one at euro to ropas anyway so it's anyway in in the on the front here in the military so essentially um very early christian symbol here of the fish right as opposed to uh a jesus symbol in the third century and this is anyway in a roman military camp so the idea is that there are many of the soldiers enough of the soldiers in the legion here to actually need a church they've built a church in the camp that's quite nice so yeah the question is why would um why

(38:59) would these soldiers want to join christianity why would they want to be involved in this um and so they may well be um part of this one of the early communities that um where christianity is very successful in spreading as a community called the god fearers uh and these are um people who let's say are greek speakers you know people who are uh otherwise would be like from the normal pagan population but they are there in the east they're aware of judaism they like the synagogues they go to synagogue and they listen to

(39:37) the stories and the ethics and the idea of the one god um and so they are able to listen to that because it's all in greek and they know greek um but they are not able to join right because you would have to do all this stuff like if you're one of these soldiers you have to get circumcised that's no fun in in now but in the ancient ancient surgery you know less fun you know um there's all kinds of different you know reasons why it'd be real tough to actually officially join but what christians say is oh no you don't

(40:12) have to do all that you know you can you can join and you can be a member and and and you won't have to worry about any of that kind of thing and you'll be saved and you get to um and after let's say you have a battle and you and you and you dead and you think of your own mortality um you know there's also this whole idea of resurrection and and eternal life and that kind of a thing and so um those same kind of appeal that uh other people would have had but uh for a soldier or somebody who's otherwise not allowed to um wouldn't be

(40:42) allowed to become jewish or part of it this is giving that person an opportunity and so for um this is also just simply true for a lot of the legionnaires in any event you are you're away from um you're let's say traditional if you're a pagan you have like a traditional uh cult identity and things like that that are based on household gods and your local community and everything like that you're away from all of that and you're off on the some alien frontier and so you're way more interested in than these sort of international or you know say

(41:17) what's now being called like world religions and so um the scent the legionnaires are much more likely to let's say start becoming they're they're going to join a mithram so they're going to start worshiping mithras um then or some of them maybe their centurion as a christian so they all join and become christians you know so so so there's all kinds of different religions that are like that um that that are that appeal a lot to these kind of legionneers and to their commanding officers and to their officers too yep

(41:48) yep and in this case to um uh local wealthy women so christianity when i got anywhere without very wealthy widows who um apparently there's a woman who patronized and actually paid for the making of this church and so there was also a lot of appeal for in early christianity for wealthy women and widows there's a lot of concern for widows in early christianity and so widows and women are have a much more say in the religion especially early on um than later when the church kind of succumbs to the surrounding patriarchal pressures of

(42:26) the empire okay so just to get through the early period because we've got to go six five more periods and it's already been a little while okay so um there's a mixed view coming out of the gates in early christianities so although um you know early christians see jesus as a messiah who is a prince of peace who heralded the coming of a kingdom that's described as the peaceable kingdom uh and they recorded many difficult teachings of jesus including love your enemies and although key early thinkers were against christian participation in

(43:04) war nevertheless we didn't unlike the kind of several blanket statements that we get against things like divorce against things like wealth what we don't get here is like we don't get a statement against slavery we don't get statements against war that are blanket ones and active roman soldiers are permitted to become christian and in fact it seems like in the early centuries kind of joined in fairly significant numbers to the point where different times some of the persecutions of the emperors like the dc and

(43:36) persecution the emperors themselves are concerned that too many of their troops maybe are already christian and they aren't necessarily going to ensure that they're going to even be able to purge it out of the ranks because they're afraid that some of the soldiers are going to rebel because they're christian so that's kind of that first period then of course with constantine everything is going to change like history always you know like everything changed because of constantine so essentially in 312 constantine who is one of the

(44:07) competing candidates for emperor there's a bunch of different potential emperors at the time he has a vision he has a vision that he will in this particular christian symbol that he sees he will see have victory in the following battle and the milvian bridge uh in response to that vision constantine had his soldiers paint the symbol christian symbols on their on their shields probably the symbol is more like what you think of that you've maybe seen the pic this is a papal symbol but essentially there's an x with

(44:37) a p sticking out of it which is to say chi rho which is to say the two first two greek letters in the in the name christos chi in rome um on their shields and then they enter battle against maxencia's arrival for the uh imperial throne the resulting military victory then led constantine to convert to christianity and thus you know forever changes the course of history so one of the things though that's why this moment of like you know considering what we've already had in terms of kind of like the mixed ideas that christians at best you know

(45:10) kind of kind of pro piece ideas that have led up to this moment that the crucial moment here is actually a battle you know and the battle where where essentially uh there's a vision where constantine believes that uh christ has given him victory in battle and so as a result of the divinity putting out or whatever essentially is in other words as a result of the miracle actually happening this is um something that everybody is very interested in in the fourth century if you're if your uh god is going to give you victories

(45:42) then then that's what you need in these circumstances so at this point um and actually pretty much from the entire history of the institution of the emperors emperor uh our word emperor grows out of the roman um the latin word imperator which just means general right and so initially um uh generals like julius caesar uh and marius and pompey and all and salah essentially they're over powerful and that's how they uh the emperorship you know evolves out of uh this essentially this idea of generals that are controlling armies

(46:21) so ultimately the idea of the emperor the main task of the emperor is to essentially defend the frontiers of commanding the legions all along the frontiers but then also putting down all the internal rebellions and so that's really what the imperial government is really focused on especially the position of emperor so the conversion of the emperor meant that christian ideas about military service quickly became a lot less theoretical than they had been before when most everybody uh could just be a christian you're in a tiny minority within an

(46:51) empire you can be like tertullian in origin and say well christians shouldn't serve in the military because there's a whole bunch of pagans who could go off and serve in the military now uh things are going to be quite different so in in this whole um you can just say just in constantine's own case so one of the practices that kind of happens at this time because of this ongoing ambiguity is because constantine is continuously involved in the uh the business of being an emperor that means he's involved in war that means he's involved in killing

(47:22) people and all this kind of thing he himself then following this kind of fourth century christian practice he puts off being baptized until essentially the very last minute because his idea is is that when that baptism happens it's kind of a one-time washing away of all sin so all the things that he would have done before in terms of being in the military or anything like that he may have been and like many of the roman soldiers they may well have been completely active christians but they would be unbaptized christians and then

(47:53) they would get baptized you know right at the end and then try not to sin anymore afterwards you know in as much as possible uh and so this is why one of the in this kind of time period uh the most important um christian things that come out are these baptisteries and so if you look at these old christian edifices that have survived it's very often like baptisteries and things like that so so anyway though into this atmosphere then we have augustine who we often get to as um this amazing thinker of the uh anyway the fifth century first major

(48:30) christian theologian and philosopher on almost everything but anyway one of the things we've done is to consider warfare systematically so we'll take a little detour into how he how he does that and so essentially he identifies two aspects of war that required moral justification and guidelines essentially he divides us into the right you have whether or not you can be justified to go to war use odd bellum and then the right uh sorts of conduct in war so how do you justly have a war in so the use in bellow yeah

(49:02) yeah this is saint augustine so and of hippo it just means this is a huge bishop of hippo which is a city in north africa near carthage and it's just identifying from the other augustines like augustine of canterbury the big saint augustine that was who we're talking about so saint augustine um uh argued or just taught that the right to go to war concerns the justification that a nation has or has to give in order for it to have a moral right to wage war on another nation and so he lays out four main criteria so one

(49:40) you have to have just authority he says is the decision to go to war based on a legitimate and legal process so you can't just be i don't know random thieves who are deciding to go wage war on people and plunder them you have to actually have some kind of legal authority to declare war just cause has a wrong been committed with which war is the appropriate response so things like somebody invaded you you respond by doing that right intention is the response proportional to the cause so in other words it's the war action

(50:12) limited to righting the wrong and going no further so uh kicking the people out who have invaded you maybe stopping them from being able to keep on invading you but not going and exterminating them or something like that uh which would be like some kind of disproportionate response to it and finally last resort has every other means of writing the wrong been attempted sincerely so that no other option but war remains so have you done exhausted all those kind of diplomatic channels so in some ways this is also a

(50:40) theory of unjust war right and so it's usually called augustine's theory of just wars but in fact and it's in part because once you kind of open the door and say well some wars are justified then usually people just drive the train through the door and all the wars end up getting justified but in a lot of senses the idea here is that a lot of these are limited right so the same thing too once you've decided that it was legitimate according to augustine to go to war um then the conduct of how you go to war is still

(51:09) also of moral concern so augustine says that even if you were justified in waging war on another nation there are limits on what you can do in order to prosecute the war morally so that includes uh i mean so to define and enforce those limits that's a concern for international agreement on law so the characteristics that augustine outlines for this is again proportionality so the proportionality of the use of force in war the degree of allowable force used in war has to be measured against the force required to correct

(51:41) the just caused and limited you know but the just intention so if you just start nuking everybody you know so it doesn't it's out of control for what the proportionality is discrimination so you have to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants you're not supposed to just go around and terrorize civilian populations so innocent non-military people should not be the target of attacks in a just war according to augustine responsibility a country is not responsible for the unaffected side effects of his military activity as long

(52:17) as the following three conditions are met so this is trying to limit unintended consequences in some cases you can get paralyzed if you every single thing that you do leads to something else and ultimately something bad is going to happen as as one of the consequences but anyway so the action uh must carry the intention to produce good consequences so you're supposed to want things to be good so although in christianity the the the road to hell is behaved with these good intentions right but anyway so the bad effects were

(52:45) definitely not intended so you didn't want the things that happened to do and the good of war has to outweigh the damage done by it so you have to imagine that um if you hadn't done this thing something more horrible was going to happen like you know somebody was going to have committed genocide or some kind of horrible thing was going to happen that a targeted war was able to stop yep sorry i was just going to ask if you think that this is where thomas aquinas came up with his principle of double effect yeah yep i think so so i i wanted to put

(53:19) in we're gonna we'll have run out of time but i wanted to put aquinas is then then after so augustine really dominates all this thought until you know a thousand years later whatever it is that aquinas not quite that aquinas um then adds in and kind of builds on what augustine had been saying and formula adds more criteria and formulates more things um and i would like to add him in but we don't we're not going to do it today so we'll have it we'll have a whole aquinas lecture in the future so so essentially that takes us then

(53:50) through uh essentially augustine's thought here takes us through this um period of uh christianity as the state religion of the roman empire and then the collapse of that state uh and into then what the what does the romans do in this kind of post-pure imperial world that they have in the west as uh the different components of what had been the eternal empire uh are now carved up into uh into independent or little barbarian kingdoms so essentially um the what happens historically is germanic bands uh military confederations essentially

(54:32) took service with the empire and so ultimately um the empire is having as it has empires facing in any event a population an economic decline and so one of the things that's happened is because of things like mass slavery income inequality a bunch of different plagues the western provinces are especially are are substantially depopulated over uh earlier heights that they've had in the uh first and second century and so one of the things that's happened then on the other side of of the rhine is that the germans have and tribes have

(55:07) uh have been trading with the romans and so they've been had a lot more prosperity uh in the meanwhile people like the huns running off the steps and that pushes everybody to want to nobody wants to be on the same side of the frontier as the huns and so everybody wants to run on the other side of the frontier at this point and so in the meantime the romans have less military force that's indigenous anymore so they have less citizen soldiers available to them because of this large slave holdings of the different villas

(55:35) they don't have any as much in the way of little citizen farmers that they used to have and so now they're instead having germanic mercenaries as their own troops anyway and so it's not as big a deal in a way that you just have essentially your own kind of germanic troops on your side of the border when another whole confederation can kind of come in and and be your mercenaries and be troops again on your side of the border but then at a certain point they all kind of get the sense well we could be here and fight the huns for

(56:03) you or we could just go move to you know carthage where there aren't any hands and where we could just you know like live uh live there and rule and be quite rich and happy and so then essentially people like the vandals run from all the way over in bulgaria vandalize rome a little bit but anyway get all the way over and move to living in tunisia where they establish a very happy little vandal kingdom you know that kind of a thing so that's essentially what ends up happening uh all these individual little kingdoms

(56:33) exist then within the former frontiers of the western empire essentially then what happens is the kings and their bands or the confederates take over the emperor's military role in the former role of the legions and as a result um the there's a separation essentially of that military role from the uh what exists left the remnants of the roman state all the civic functions that are in the cities these germanic tribes aren't really interested in the cities and they don't they kind of keep clear of them and as the cities contract

(57:08) essentially the people who take over all the different civic functions that used to be happened by the the roman or municipal government are essentially done by the bishops and the church government which is the essentially the remaining uh roman uh uh officials as roman civilization kind of retreats into declining cities and then also into the monasteries so for the next several hundred years the west continues to be on the offensive and although they're armed as we've seen with augustine's ideas of just war the

(57:41) christian west then actually lacks a developed idea of holy war so as you kind of read about that it's only that war theory that augustine is having is not to say that war becomes holy or justified in a kind of a in a kind of what you think of as a holy war sense it's rather more of a philosophically how are you morally allowed to do that when for example then the christians in first encounter uh the forces of islam and so in the west that happens over here in spain as opposed to what's happening in the east with the byzantines

(58:14) so one of the ways that kind of plays out then in the earliest frontier battles here uh you know the iberian peninsula is um the local leaders on on what we kind of maybe think of in the maps now are are they in this you know culture clash between christendom and islam the local leaders on the on the frontier are not seeing it anywhere near like that uh rather what will often happen is that uh christian knights will take service with muslim emirs and uh muslim fighters again mercenaries will go into the service of different christian kings

(58:55) the emir of sarah caesar augusta saragosa as it becomes caesar augusta anyway ends up for example choosing to become a vassal of charlemagne in order to get out of the taxation of the emir of cordoba right and so as a result of that even for example if el cid who is later remembered as essentially a crusader he actually spends his early years you know in the service of different muslim lords and he ultimately by intermarrying with some of them he ultimately goes and becomes essentially the he's the leader of valencia a little the

(59:33) muslim emirate of valencia so you know so it's really um not this crusade idea uh that later happens in spain uh at this earliest time period um so that's essentially takes us through this era of the invasions and then to though now the emergings of that kind of crusading idea uh in the higher middle ages in the central middle ages so after all this kind of centuries of decline population and also economic the west really began to experience substantial growth with the turning of the millennium so we don't think of gothic architecture

(1:00:10) as being modern architecture like it was called at the time so but it was called the modern style cathedral here like chartres in the 12th century these are the windows from chartres if you look at it we realize even looking back when we think of this stuff as medieval this isn't just replicating what the romans had been doing right so now suddenly this looks very different what they've been doing all the way up until this time with romanesque building they've been able to replicate some of what the romans had

(1:00:40) done and there was some advance on it but in general they weren't able to build anything of the same size that had happened now they're building taller they're building things that have new forms this pointed arch these flying buttresses these vast windows that weren't possible with the kind of vaulting that had been available and things like that for the romans and so anyway so there's this this advances that are happening architecturally technologically but also economically and also population as the population

(1:01:11) explodes here and so meanwhile that also means that there's uh the land owning class the emerging nobility and emerging what becomes the nightly class these guys also have lots more wealth than they ever would have had in the dark times because everybody's richer and what they've inherited though is that their whole role kind of in society is military right and so they're they're they've essentially inherited out of that kind of um uh it's not really a separation of church and state but a separation of spheres where essentially the old roman

(1:01:48) officials that have come into being the church their position is the ecclesiastical and so their role is to pray uh this germanic uh nobility that essentially that becomes uh their descendants of this nightly class or the royal class their position is to and or a role in society is to fight so to fight to pray and then of course on the position of the people who had been the the slaves the serewe but who now uh have their slavery commuted into serfdom and so they have various uh so surf is the you know our word for it but it comes from the latin

(1:02:21) originally had been slave so is to work and that's the huge bulk of the society who just has to do all the work right jane any idea where the new architecture took origins from so the question is when did this new arc where did the new architecture take its uh origins and so chartres is pretty early but the earlier one that is the model for this is sandini so if you've been to the royal abbey of sandini that's a little north of paris and so this uh is the um this is the abbey that this great abbott suje who had been the um

(1:03:01) essentially the the vizier of the kings of the capetian kings of france essentially suje just gathers you know uh like all the best crafts people and things like that and builds a new style according to the kind of values that they're trying to have essentially they're trying to solve problems which is to say build higher and they're also trying to have more window space than had ever been possible and they're also interested in new kinds of vaulting and things like that and so they experiment with it they build

(1:03:30) higher they have regular buttresses then they make the buttresses flying so you can see the advancing of the of the style as they kind of are trying for these different things not many of those elements come directly from oh so yeah the question is yeah dude did these um emerge out of uh contact with islam and so i think that these particular elements of the flying buttress and things like that are not emerging from uh contact with islam although lots of other things are so one of the whole the whole reason of the wealth the west becomes wealthy

(1:04:08) is really all of the you know like all the trade that reemerges you know in the centuries before this so essentially the fact that the amalfitans the venetians the genoese who are they trading with you know they're trading with this rich you know muslim world you know and so and so then that's causing you know this kind of resurfacing of trait there is all kinds of um stuff that contact with islam is really doing for intellectual uh reawakening and renaissance in this time period including things like revolutions in western medicine

(1:04:39) philosophy logic all those kind of things are coming because of texts that the muslims in spain they've gotten from the muslims in spain which is essentially like aristotle and all that kind of thing in this particular case though i don't think that this has been pulled from that okay so one of the things that does also happening at the same time period of this expansion is uh there is the emergence of this reform papacy so the papacy uh the bishops of rome uh had been really at a low point themselves that we've we've we did that

(1:05:14) when we did the pope joan uh lecture a month or so ago um and so there but from out of kind of a real low water mark that the papacy hit it really got really fast uptick into very able reformers uh by the end of the 11th century and so among these very famously is pope gregory the seventh of which after whom which this gregorian reform movement is named um and so uh gregory uh in the west there had long been an argument essentially that there are two swords uh the spiritual sword so that sword that i've been talking about before like

(1:05:50) that's the word that's coming out of the mouth and things like that but then there's also this temporal sword that had been in the hands of the emperors and also the german kings and all of these kind of germanic nobles now in terms of as the papacy is recovering roman law and is essentially deciding that the popes are the successors of the emperors um they're essentially realizing or they're theorizing or gregory is asserting um that the popes in fact are have control over both the swords and you know who does the emperor get the power

(1:06:24) of the temporal power from if it's not as a thief essentially from the popes and so the popes in addition to then essentially handing delegating the temporal sword to temporal leaders like the emperor and kings um also is is deciding according to gregory who's worthy to be in those positions and so with this famously um this conflict between gregory and emperor henry iv at at this moment at a certain moment gregory excommunicates henry and also then uh [Music] declares him no longer to be emperor no longer to be king and dissolves all of

(1:07:06) the oaths of allegiance all of the fealty that any of um henry's subjects owe to him essentially causing a crisis and almost collapse of of the empire and so in this kind of famous incident henry was able to counteract this kind of temporal devastation as all of his enemies essentially rise up and take this as a as a legitimate way to rebel against him um henry goes to uh the pope at canosa and he um you know wears sackcloth and he uh kneels you know for four days in the snow in order to be a penitent and so having done that and having

(1:07:43) submitted very physically and graphically to the pope um the pope had no alternative but to then you know lift the excommunication and as soon as he did that then henry went back and everybody all the rebels he got to go put down all the rebels he killed essentially all of the pope's allies you know among the temporal guys and so later when he refused to do the things that the pope said in the popex communicated again him again then none of it nobody believed it the second time right so he was able to kind of show the limitations of what the

(1:08:12) reformed papacy wanted to be able to do that said this is a pretty pretty powerful thing that the pope has kind of latched on to uh at this moment and so anyway this control or theoretical control over the temporal sort and so this emerges fairly quickly uh in the reformed papacy uh uh soon successor of uh gregory is pope urban i think it's not that's not the same it should be urban the second um i just had that from gregory anyway calls the first crusade in 1099 uh which results in an armed pilgrimage which conquered

(1:08:47) the levantine coast essentially lebanese and syrian and palestinian coast from local muslim rulers so when that kind of when that happens uh successfully when uh the popes have this idea that uh the temporal sword can be used we have yeah this is the slightest comes first would be first anyway essentially we'll come back to it um when that happens um uh that the temporal sword could be used warfare that had existed in places like spain um now become uh cloaked in this idea that now this is a crusade and so now it's no

(1:09:28) longer going to be able to be the kind of uh fun fighting that they had before now now it's religiously motivated fighting from the two sides and essentially at a certain point more or less it's not just local people in spain that are are having little wars with each other for local effect uh the french get involved on the one side as crusaders and then the alma ravids the the people from africa get involved on the muslim side and it's no longer you know fun and games anymore uh anyway it's places like spain turkey

(1:10:01) the balkans and then against pagans in lithuania they all then take the character of crusades or holy wars as opposed to just just wars so just to back up a second on this slide i mean churchman had already before this idea of crusade they tried to limit warfare among christian nobles so i said that essentially the nobles had the idea that their calling was to fight but essentially by saying he sent the church now starts to theorize well couldn't you be doing that fighting for good or couldn't there be a good end to it as

(1:10:35) opposed to just you know fighting in order to steal stuff from your neighbors and everything like that and so there had been this idea that um that that of the truce of god where essentially um uh they'd get together in big groups and try to bishops would get the different sides to all swear together on holidays like easter that you're not going to have a war on easter that you're going to limit it to particular non-holy days when you could have be having the fighting that you won't do certain things you know so like

(1:11:04) you're going to avoid um just always sacking the monasteries that you're going to avoid you know so much of the raping and this kind of thing and instead it's going to be more more more just fighting with other against other nobles or something like that these kind of things so this had been the idea of trying to limit the kind of very al all-out warfare that had happened now they're taking from that truce of god that gets focused to well wait a second you guys could really be uh doing this whole fighting thing that

(1:11:31) you like to do against enemies of christendom and suddenly that would then be not just a just war but it would be a holy war okay so once though you know the idea of you know war holy war against the external enemies in that same way that i mentioned once you kind of have a theory of war can be justified morally like augustine had and i said that essentially once you have that people drive a train through it and now all words are kind of justified without you know you thought well we've sort of tried to be good about it and that kind

(1:12:01) of thing but anyway that's not it's not a way in the same way once uh crusades and holy wars exists as an idea it doesn't take long at all for this to get uh repurposed in all kinds of ways so um the papacy has that political tool and and that's the hammer that the pope is holding and now everything's a nail you know and so essentially the crusades are called against uh heretics so christians who are not in communion with the practices the orthodox practices of the church so the cathars the albigensians of southern france uh

(1:12:35) there's a crusade that's called and essentially the nobles of northern france um realize that there's all kinds of uh booty and and free lands to be had if they go essentially on this justified holy war and so they massacre all the different people in the south as much as possible in order to um stake out their own take grab the lands for themselves uh likewise then once that kind of a thing has been done the popes also have political enemies like these emperors who they keep having fights with and so at a certain point the um

(1:13:05) wars that the popes are having against emperors uh are also dubbed crusades and take on that same kind of character and of course uh again once people are running around crusading uh they can kind of lose focus pretty fast so pretty famously the fourth crusade um uh is responsible for the sack of constantinople essentially the crusaders part get hijacked by the venetians the venetians are interested in conquering byzantium and so and the crusaders aren't totally disinterested in that because of all the wealth and so this city that had been

(1:13:48) the greatest city in christendom for uh 500 700 years or whatever you know and had never fallen previously it's sacked then by christian crusaders and ultimately that's a blow that the eastern roman empire never really recovers from so although eventually the greeks do take it back and kind of refound byzantium and it holds out until 1453 essentially it never recovers from this blow crusade enthusiasm also of course as we've seen in our previous lectures recall resulted in all kinds of massacres especially of uh jewish

(1:14:22) populations in europe where local people felt like they they wanted to be part of this crusading fervor local christians and uh couldn't there was no way to get to find muslims to attack and things like that but they knew where the jews were and so they killed them and so that was one of the ways that all of these got lost focus one of the more amazing results of this making of creation of holy war is the monastic ideal itself and so this idea that it existed kind of in the um fourth and fifth and sixth centuries as

(1:15:00) uh roman noble men and women and other people who were feeling that they have um religious calling would retire from the world and take kind of holy vows to not participate in worldly things and they'd go and live in essentially roman villas that are repurposed as now monasteries uh and where they're devoted to contemplation and the divine work and that kind of thing that monastic ideal and those monastic rules now with the creation of uh the crusader states uh with the knights templar the knights hospital are

(1:15:36) the other various holy orders the sword brothers the teutonic knights they now take that monastic rule and monastic vows but instead of having your job be to copy manuscripts or to sit around and sing gregory and chance or to pray at different times your purpose is now a holy war essentially defending the holy land but also attacking muslim states to make more holy land you know that's kind of a thing so essentially clerics devoted to crusading warfare which is essentially then almost complete reversal of what uh anyway the

(1:16:14) original idea so uh that brings us through like a pretty strong right turn or whatever that gets made in the in the central middle ages uh to you know where we since then and we're running out of time so fortunately i didn't make a lot of slides for this because i was running out of time by this point too but this is all stuff you're more familiar with but essentially um uh 1492 you know is the year that spain defeats grenada the last muslim state on the peninsula and so because the the northern kingdoms you know the

(1:16:50) kingdoms the christian kingdoms in spain um had all of this experience essentially as the frontier is moving uh and with this holy war it becomes a crusade the reykjankista um and then colonizing the muslim territories and ultimately also um expelling uh non-christians or as we'll see with the with the inquisition um forcing conversions and then persecuting people who they don't think are sufficiently converted and ultimately you know massacring and also kicking people out in some ways that experience then uh

(1:17:26) essentially directly segued into the kind of overseas colonialism that occurred and was born out of the other events of 1492. yeah i just wanted to say that prior to colonizing the the americas the spanish after the defeat of granada colonized these islands off the coast of off of africa yeah um and basically wiped out the native population it was a complete genocide yeah yeah so so this is it's like the islands just outside of morocco oh the canaries the canary islands yeah okay and then also attacked into morocco

(1:18:07) too right but anyway maybe that's not until later anyway but yeah and so essentially that also happens fairly quickly right into let's say in hispaniola and so the um there's some initial peaceful relations that last a few months uh with the uh arawak indians that are in the natives that are in the antilles and with the west indies as they come to be known uh but that pretty quickly um you know becomes you know enslaving everybody killing everybody and essentially the whole all the native population of that whole initial area is

(1:18:42) pretty well all gone um so into that then into that period one of the things then that happens as well is that with the protestant reformation 16th century this sets off a series of warfare wars of religion within europe that led to the deaths of over 10 million people in europe and so specifically especially the 30 years war it's especially devastating and in some cases like a third of the populations in many of the places uh as in what's now germany but essentially the holy roman empire um is the main fighting ground uh between

(1:19:19) protestant and catholic powers and then and then people kind of fighting for opportunism too so not always on the on the one side of the other in terms of the religion it ultimately led to uh europeans kind of beating it out of each other where it decided that they're not going to all be one particular church of christianity anymore but there will now be multiple different denominations in terms of pluralism that more or less is the the solution to the 30 years war essentially the treaty of westphalia defines it that whatever the religion of

(1:19:51) the particular ruler so the guys over here that had been the teutonic knights they secularized they became protestants and the people who um you know then were the the rulers they became the the protestant rulers of prussia as a result of that or if you're in austria and the habsburgs are ruling uh the habsburgs are catholics so then everybody there has to be catholic and so essentially there's an idea that there's going to be though you know you can be any one of these different denominations depending on what the ruler wants to be and so

(1:20:20) there'll be not just one christianity anymore so um essentially that brings us to that that idea of christianity divided by protestantism christianity kind of beating it out of itself uh to then to the point of the period of the enlightenment and ultimately within that um uh denominational pluralism of western christianity to then a point where um where the church and the states are separated and churches are cordoned off into their own little zone and have decreasing relevance you know as we've seen to the point where now in europe

(1:21:01) very few people are adherence to any particular denomination in terms of christianity and that's declining really fast in canada as well um anyway to the this place where we are now where christianities then are also freed from being state religions and so therefore aren't called upon as often to go to war like you would if you're a state religion on the other hand and so that's allowed there to be uh for example churches like the quakers that are in this peace tradition where people are able to um let's say reinterpret early christianity

(1:21:38) to say these components of it do speak to us about non-violence or though conversely there's also the kinds of christianity that's caught up with let's say white nationalism in the united states you know that can be very militant still and is drawing upon other components of christian history so essentially that's leading us then to the christianities of today again where there's division and also division within all of the different uh denominational bodies and different ones can all decide kind of for themselves

(1:22:12) about how their understanding of militancy and which components of this kind of vast and problematic history that they want to be drawing from and that leads us to kind of where are we today in terms of understanding of just war or holy war or whether war is justified or whether non-violence would be the principle or whether some war is like world war one if you're invaded if you're friends in belgium it's that's a just war then to to respond for canada is it just to help other fellow democracies when they're invaded like that

(1:22:50) vietnam iraq invasion less easy to justify so so valerie and then elizabeth you know i'm just wondering whether uh the fact that christianity arose under the so-called pax or peace romana the roman peace might have affected the way the the early christians saw militancy and battling it was not really available to them because they were living in a police state that had um strongly defended borders such that it never became an issue and that would be as opposed to let's say some religion that might arise among the people that

(1:23:44) immediately have to do battle yeah i think in the early muslim community yeah yeah no i think that's a very good point so in fact when we read about uh tertullian and origen you know who and their kind of um theoretical or philosophical you know theological takes against christians having military service you know so they are in a very peaceful time in the empire that like you say uh is defended you know by the emperors by mostly pagan soldiers and they are living in let's say alexandria which is just a a city that

(1:24:18) is very far away from at that point anyway from any kind of fighting or being you know the potential of being conquered by a foreign adversary and so it's one of the things then in origins um argument so uh origen is writing against a pagan who says you know you christians are um you're you're essentially traitors to the state because you won't defend the state through military service and origen's kind of response is well we actually are helping more because we're you know praying on behalf of the armies and on behalf of the

(1:24:54) emperors and this kind of a thing and that's obviously putting the demons that are causing wars down a lot more than anything you guys are doing and so you know so that doesn't necessarily convincing to uh the pagan philosophers you know uh and also it also doesn't describe well what do you what do you do then when if you guys were to suddenly take over the whole state nobody expected that to happen but when it did happen then um this is why they had to come up with something a little more more substantial with augustine at that

(1:25:24) point elizabeth i think it's impossible for pacifists and on any kind of i hate to say this on any kind of long-term basis uh to run a country there's a passage i'm citing from memory in ben franklin's autobiography where he is very he was very amused uh the quakers were basically running pennsylvania yeah as indeed they were they they started pennsylvania and they were in a position where the legislature really kind of had to buy munitions specifically gunpowder so they passed a resolution or made a law uh allocating

(1:26:20) money for grains meaning gun powder but they didn't powder but they didn't say which kind of grains they didn't say which kind of grains and uh uh they had to choose do we do do we become do we get involved in military things or or or do we or do we stay pacifists and they decided to save pacifists and got out of the business of governing yeah uh i'm also thinking of a story i once read about uh kennedy jfk he had a delegation from i don't know who i probably read this somewhere in gallery wills uh from a bunch of do-gooders religious

(1:27:05) people uh who were i don't remember just what cause they were uh they were they were working for but they made their case to him and he was very impressed but then he came back and he talked about how he had to defend the country and how they needed nuclear weapons yeah i think it was people fighting nuclear weapons and they were even more impressed by him than they he had been by them and one of them said mr president what can we do to help you and he thought about it and he said maybe you shouldn't there is a place for

(1:27:48) the pacifist opposition um coming back to the cruiser yes i just want to interrupt you oh that's fine but uh i would like to bring um a bit more behind the scene what was happen what the reason of decreasing and also i said that because i'm i grew up in belgium which is at the crosswalk in the heart of europe yes and have been schooled from elementary school so it means i receive a very detailed history class yes about you know the european history and so also to mention put in a bigger picture because basically what happened is for a long time it was

(1:28:44) just you know the noble class and and the civilians poor people yes because all the europe was divided by land and and ruled by uh i mean uh noble right but yeah and then and then gradually started the rise of the cities yes the cities the towns yes and and then a new social class yes so because noah has a very negative connotation when we say bourgeois but bourgeois means literally the buu the city yes and then it said that the new class of bourgeois yes and and then socially economically they started to have the power yes and

(1:29:38) so it means also the noble class start to decline yes but more importantly economically yes yeah so it means also that uh but there were still um i mean um in terms of a prediction you know to have many children yes so it means uh yeah but now what will happen to the okay the the the the one will inherit the land not to divide but how about the youngest one sure yeah and then either they go to the monastery to become a priest monk etc that's right but how about the others that's right so and then said that's why

(1:30:23) the church got that brilliant idea yeah in combination with that noble class compensate and then to find a social world but also economically because they knew that the arab world was exactly wealthy and much more advanced at many levels but socially economically and and the west because the arab world was also exactly already at the doorstep for the sikh road and access to the to the far east yeah we are so that's why the arab world was already very wealthy and it was the way to do a kind of uh looting yeah like

(1:31:06) like exactly like you say so one of the things that has happened where because like you say there's a change in in inheritance law so they're no longer dividing holdings and so therefore there's a whole bunch of younger sons they can't all go to the monastery they've got to go somewhere and so one of these things that has happened when i was like mentioning part of the reason why europe was on the defensive all this time was because of an economic decline at comic in population and collapse but once you start having like you say a

(1:31:33) population surplus um that continued to increase up until uh you plague you know the black death actually brought it back to anyway it's a little more sustainable they had to export people and so the um like you say the nobility was exporting people vastly into different crusading ventures so to spain to southern italy to the holy land if they could to fighting the turks to fighting the lithuanians wherever you could send people you know send from northern france to southern france anywhere you could you know yep good point and then like you say uh

(1:32:09) warfare totally changes everything changes in this modern era we skipped over almost all of it but like you say with the rise of at a certain point the economic clout of the population the merchant class those kind of classes the cities it's so overtakes you know like you say both in terms of demographics then also economics and then also um finally military so when essentially knights are are uh by 1500 or something like that they're they're completely obsolete and they're not helpful at all in war although they

(1:32:40) still want to keep having these cavalry charges and things like that that are become increasingly absurd and instead you have these citizen armies that gets to the point where under cromwell or napoleon where you suddenly have you can have mass mustering and that changes everything so okay well i think we'll uh end the formal discussion and all that kind of thing and we can go talk over snacks and things like that and so and we will thank everybody who joined us online and thank all of you [Applause] [Music] you