James Turner Johnson: The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 14, 1988.
A tradition cannot validate itself. When confronted with another, contradictory tradition, it can either retreat into cultural solipsism or appeal to something beyond itself: revelation, nature—some authoritative source of principles. Historicists deny that any trans-traditional framework exists, except for ‘History’ itself, which simply moves onward and cannot in principle offer guidance. Some historicists—Hegel and Marx most prominently—posit an ‘end of History’ wherein all contradictions must cease. The evidence they offer for this promise seldom convinces any but the most wishful thinkers.
Many historians today are also historicists. James Turner Johnson does not consistently think through his historicist assumptions, but he surely does have them. They mar an otherwise informative, well-ordered account of Christian and modern Western civilization’s not entirely successful “quest for peace.”
Johnson identifies three “traditions” of peace-seeking: that animated by ‘just war’ doctrines; that of sectarian pacifism; and that of political peacemaking. He proceeds, however, not by isolating and discussing them thematically, but by describing their historical unfolding.
Challenging pacifist historians, he denies that the early (pre-Constantinian) Christian Church adhered to absolute non-resistance. Jesus and His disciples rejected violence because they expected the Second Coming within the first Christian generation; they felt no need to elaborate a political modus vivendi that included warfare. As the Church gradually adapted to the historical long run, Christians generated several views concerning warfare. Pacifism was only one of them.
Johnson’s claim rests on two unsteady pillars. First, he questions the pacifism of the major early Church fathers: Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen. He does not always summarize their arguments accurately—failing to quote (for example) Tertullian’s explicitly condemnation of military service based upon Jesus’ rebuke of Peter’s swordplay at Gethsemane. Second, he defines the Church not by the authoritative teachings of the fathers, but by the actual practices of all the baptized, many of whom did serve in the Roman legions. Thus may some historian two millennia from now argue that the Roman Catholic Church endorses artificial contraception, because so many Catholics use it. It may be that Johnson, in both these instances, displays something of the historicist tendency to deny the cognitive status of ideas, preferring to look at ‘concrete’ historical practice.
Johnston stands more firmly when discussing the just war tradition, on which he is an authority. He observes that Ambrose and Augustine formulated the first just-war theories, marrying Christianity to Ciceronian political philosophy. Christian love in the political realm aims at justice; warriors moved by the desire for a just peace partake in Christian love. This brilliant and perhaps somewhat unstable synthesis appalls pacifists, who often describe it as the Church’s fall from Christianity, back to a new form of paganism.
For centuries, such post-Augustinian pacifists tended to withdraw from this world many of them surviving not in cities but in the apolitical countryside. Those sects such as the Waldensians, who did try to live non-violently among their fellow-men, were soon driven away by just-war Christians scandalized by pacifism.
Johnson identifies the first stirrings of political or secular peacemaking in the writings of Dante and Marsilius of Padua. Both undercut “the temporal supremacy of the Church and its clergy,” arguing that the disorder “resulting from [the clergy’s] unwarranted pretensions impedes justice and the other supreme value in medieval political thought, peace.” Stressing the importance of good institutions as a substitute for rulers’ goodness, they anticipated such modern writers and Rousseau and Kant.
Johnson sees that sectarian pacifists in the last two centuries adapt many of the plans of secular peacemakers. Gandhian “nonviolent defense” represents one attempt to reconcile radical idealism with realism. Thus have sectarians become more worldly, more politically ambitious, without necessarily becoming very realistic. Gandhi especially (it might be added) inflamed the political ambitions of Christian pacifists by making it seem that the spiritual warfare of Christianity might be transferred to the realm of social action in some decisively effective way. The results have been mixed.
Purely secular peacemaking offers scarcely more realism than does sectarian pacifism. The champions of internationalism almost invariably require a prior commitment to peace among the nations—who, Johnson notes, if they were committed to peace, would already be internationalist. Johnson’s criticism here is too narrowly voluntaristic. It would be more just to say that secular peacemakers seek moments favorable to peaceful sentiments in order to establish or strengthen institutions that re-channel warlike sentiments when, inevitably, those sentiments reappear. This can work; General Douglas MacArthur transformed Japan into a commercial republic whose worst wars now are only trade wars. Whether such peaceful republics can ever come into existence worldwide, and maintain themselves, remains an open question.
Johnson hopes his historical work can help others committed to the quest for peace. It can, but only if peacemakers combine Johnsonian realism with an in-Johnsonian rejection of historical relativism.
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