• Contrast a passage like Sir 361I"- (3930), where Ood ia expected to inten-ene with a militant stroke.
A quailer of a century later IrunaMis echoed Justin's faith and hope from far-olf Gaul. The bishop agreed with the apolof;ist. He quotes the Isaianic prediction (iv. 34. 4) to the same eli'ect, as a direct pro])heey of Jesus Christ, since these pacific results were produced by the preaching of the gospel, ' which made such a change that swords and spears were converted into plougijs, and altered into sickles for reaping grain — that is, into tools of peace — so that people are now ignorant how to Mght, but when struck olier also the other cheek.' Seneca had longed for the time when only farmers' tools would be made out of iron (Thi/estcs, 930: ' Ferruni omne teneat ruris innocui labor '). Ireujeus claims that Christians were already de- voting themselves entirely to peaceful agriculture. He proceeds, however, to allegorize the Isaianic prediction, and this is his main interest ; e.ij. the plough signifies the creation or first sowing of humanity, and the sickle denotes the ingathering of the elect by Christ. There is nothing in his pages any more than in Justin's to betray the least consciousness that war as a function of the State seriously presented a problem to the conscience of the church. Neither of them speaks so clearly and sharply as their predecessor Tatian, the bitter, earnest Sj'rian apologist, about the middle of the 2nd century. Tatian loathes war. But his anti- pathy is not based on any positive statement of the Christian faith so much as on the associations of warfare with the pagan Greeks. The wars of the Greeks, from Homer downwards, and tlieir connexion with the pantheon of Olympus, furnisli him with shafts to wing against polytheism, and this is practically all that we find in the allusions scattered througli the Oratio ad Grcecos. Thus, he upbraids the Greeks for using poetry to describe the battles and amours of the gods (1), sneers at Athena as a homicide (Schwartz omits i] TroXefjiowoto^ in 8), derides the delight of Ares in war, and tells his pagan readers bluntly, 'divination is an aid of your worldly lusts ; you want to make war, and you take Apollo to advise you about slaughter : lie who makes you fond of wealth is he who reveals to you the secret of money-making ; he who stirs up strife and war predicts victory as well' (19). This is the standpoint of the martyr Carpus {Acta Carpi, etc., in TU IV. iv. [1S88] 446), who tells the magistrate that the devil sets wars afoot and also pretends to reveal the future.
Twenty years later, c. A.D. 170, when the legions liad conquered the Parthians and were now, under Marcus Aurelius, fighting among the Balkans, in the long campaign against the Marcomanni, the apologist Athenagoras happened to touch the subject of war. Athenagoras was a sensitive soul. He could not bear bloodshed, and he recoiled in horror from armed conflict, but his pages contain no direct repudiation of war or of the military profession. It is impossible to interpret his lan- guage as conveying a direct censure of military service. The relevant passage occurs in his Lefjatio pro Chruiianis (35), where he has occasion to refute the widespread calumny that Christians were cannibals. To eat human flesh, he declares sarcas- tically and indignantly, you must first of all kill a human being. Now, who can prove that against us? ' Who can accuse us of homicide or of cannibal- ism, when they are well aware that we cannot bear to see a man put to death even justly ? ' We decline to watch the gladiators in the theatre, he adds, since ' our opinion is that to watch a. man being put to death is much the same thing as actually putting him to death.' This is repeated later by Lactantius (A.D. 260-340). It would have been indeed strange if the early Christians had not lifted up their testimony against war, as distin- guished pagans had done before them, from the
peripatetic philosopher Dik.Tcarchus of Messana, who in the 4th cent. B.C. calculated that war had killed more people than all other causes of destruction put togetlier (Cicero, de Offic. ii. 5), down to Plutarch in the beginning of the 2nd cent. A.D.
Lactantius is one of those who endeavoured to set public opinion in the Church aj^'ainst tiie war spirit, but lie {Div. Inst, VI. 20) carries his protest forward into a philosophic repudiation of war as inconsistent with the character of the just man. He protests that the spectators of the ^anies, at which condemned criminals had to lij^ht, were exposing themselves to a corrupting influence. ' He who thinks it a pleasure to watch the slaying of a man, even though he has been justly condemned, pollutes his conscience as much as if he watched and shared a secret murder. And yet people call them "sports," at which human blood is shed.* He objects to all capital punishment, inflicted in the gladiatorial games, and concludes : ' When God forbids us to Itill, he does not merely prohibit violent attacks (latro- cinari), which even the public laws condemn, but warns us against doing what men consider lawful. Thus it will not be lawful for the just man to fight in the army, for his real warfare is justice itself ; nor to accuse any one of a capital crime, for there is no difference between putting a man to death by the sword or by a word ; what is forbidden is to put to death at all. Consequently, there ought to be no exception to this order of God ; it ought always to be wrong to kill man, man whom God willed to be a sacred creature {sacrosnnctvm animal).' This humanitarian objection to war is a favourite thoughtof Lactan- tius. He protests against the deification and glorification of great generals (i. 18), as if the path to immortality lay through indiscriminate Ijloodshed and slaughter. The successful military conqueror, he sneers, is just a multiple murderer. He bewails and ridicules the insane delusion that immortal fame and glory are to be gained by making war on one's fellow-creatures. And in another passage (v. 17 f.) he avows that Horace's 'Integer vitae ' ode is the ideal and pattern of the just man, who would rather die than owe his life to the death of another human being. Cicero had pointed to the fact that Rome's high spirit and passion for martial fame were shown by the statues in the capital, which were generally in soldiers' uniform {de Offic. i. 18), but Lactantius was Ciceronian only in style. He shrank from war and force. The man who could write the pro Murena was no model for him in political philosophy. No early Christian is so Tolstoyan in his ethics as Lactantius. He refuses to allow any retaliation whatsoever, and he does so on philosophic grounds rather than upon definitely Christian principles ; his proofs are drawn from his humanitarian considerations rather than, as in the case of his predecessor Tertullian, from appeals to the NT.