Who knows if the best of man be known?
Or whether there be more remarkable persons forgot?
Thomas Browne
Jesus commanded ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’1 Is military service an obligation to Caesar? The New Testament does not resolve the issue since the first members of the Church were Jews, a people barred from military duty to Rome at their own request to Julius Caesar for religious reasons.2
Christians not of Jewish origin in the early Church were mostly Greeks, another people denied access to the army.3 Auxiliary units were roughly half of the army. Bearing the titles of tribes and nationalities from which they were recruited, none of these units were Greek. This was not the result of requested exemption but discrimination. If Jews disarmed themselves, it suited Rome. Greeks were stereotyped as too clever, ambitious and clannish. Most Christians in the first centuries were pacifists ineligible for army duty.
Religio, to Romans, was literally that which held things together. Cicero in the first century before Christ wrote that ‘Philosophy has never touched the mass of mankind except through religions.’4 As prosecutor in a trial involving a murdered slaveowner, 5 he approved the execution of more than 400 of the master’s slaves. Cicero did not believe in a god with personal concern for mankind. He scorned the stoic ideal of human equality.6 He loathed ‘the wretched starving mob, the bloodsucker of the treasury.’ While writing of his contempt for superstition, publicly he was the exemplar of religiosity, a priest of the imperial cult as a function of office. This to him was not hypocrisy but necessity, fear of the gods essential to keep the ignorant majority from heinous crime.
Romans were to honour the deities of the imperial cult when required by the government. Those in authority and ordinary people sincerely believed – not necessarily from the same motives – that to deny such rites risked disunity or divine vengeance upon society. To refuse was uncivil, blasphemous and unpatriotic. Jesus had warned that ‘the day shall come when they will persecute and kill you honestly believing that they are doing a service to God’.7
This religiosity was manifest in the ceremonies of the army. In the Roman era the Judaic religious document called the War Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls identified the sons of darkness, the enemies of God and Israel, as those who march about in formation and worship military standards as their idols.8 In all likelihood these were soldiers of Rome. The rites that marked off the Roman military calendar were routinely religious. Priests of the imperial cult and official fortune tellers accompanied every legion. 9
The sacramentum, the pagan military oath, was not taken individually but by officers acting as representatives. A baptized soldier required to take the oath would be faced with a choice between losing his life or losing his soul as Christians saw it.
The Roman Empire had no military conscription except the rare dilecta or draft, which applied only to Italians. Its soldiers were volunteers enlisted for a minimum of twenty-five years. Slaves, city welfare recipients, serfs, criminals and gladiators were barred.10 As the middle class of free farmers, whether small landowners, hired hands, tenants or share-croppers, was ever decreasing so too was the Empire’s pool of recruits. Christians refused to serve as soldiers or officials and were understandably resented by pagans.
The early Church refused baptism to soldiers as well as pimps, prostitutes, slave dealers, gladiators, actors, and teachers.11 The objection to the latter was not their job but the pagan content of the usual curriculum.
The moral priority of the gospels is the de-escalation of violence. To Mohandas Gandhi, violence was anything dehumanizing.Violence began within a person as self-pity, self-hatred, insult, prejudice, racism, contempt, lies, cowardice, exaggeration and the like. The Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius remarked that ‘Refusing to imitate is the best revenge.’12 To turn the other cheek was to refuse to take insult to heart as the insulter desired. It defused escalation of violence. It did not deny the right of self-defence nor the moral obligation to defend those with claim protection.
Roman slaves were set free by their masters in a public rite in which the slave was slapped on one side of the face and then the other.13 Ages later this alapsa became the touch on each shoulder with the flat of a sword, the accolade that made a man a knight. The recipient in not retaliating demonstrated goodwill.
Baptized Christians were excommunicated if they entered the Roman army but soldiers on active duty were attracted to Christianity nonetheless. Catechumens, initiates, not baptized, were allowed to participate only partially in Christian worship. Upon retirement, soldiers, if catechumens, could be baptized.
Soldiers of Christian creed received few guidelines from Church philosophers, remote from the battle zones. In response to situations confronting them they hammered out their own military morality. While the Acts give the impression that they were acting in isolation, comparative analysis shows that they increasingly acted in unison as their numbers grew.
It has been held that the sacramentum, the pagan military oath, was the sole reason that soldiers were denied baptism.14 This implies that obeying orders to kill was no problem in conscience to Christians in the army. Here, emphasis will be on the deeds of the martyrs rather than the philosophy of the Church fathers; events enacted in sweat and blood, not abstract theory.
Violence can be de-escalated but is better not initiated but deterred. Deterrence is best effected by professional military or police. Yet, the worst crimes in history have been committed by normally decent men blindly obedient to military orders.