The Sword and the Mace

or, War and Peace in the Middle Ages

How can we reconcile this:

with this?:

The first is the ultimate act of submission, nonviolence, and goodwill in the face of cruel injustice and appalling abuse. The second, according to the traditional interpretation, is the gruesome climax of a seemingly unnecessary, massively consequential, potentially unjust, and tragically corpse-laden battle between two Christian armies. The first is the agonizing death of, as the title says, INRI: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum. The second is the agonizing death of, as the title says, Harold Rex: King Harold of England. The first is victory through virtue. The second is victory through slaughter.

How could the medieval imagination be so thoroughly interwoven with both warfare and the crucifixion of Christ? How could medieval culture glorify, in one breath, the exploits of blood-soaked warriors and, in the next, the words of a Man who said “blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God”? How could medieval civilization give knights an investiture ceremony so solemn and sacred that it evokes the ordination of a priest, and then send them out to live precisely the sort of life that the eternal High Priest apparently condemned?

Then saith Jesus unto him, “Turn back thy sword into its place,
for all of those who take the sword, they by the sword shall perish.”

There is no single or simple answer to these questions. First, we have human nature, which in the history of all lands and all eras reveals itself as hopelessly, perpetually, maddeningly addicted to warfare of one type or another. It began with Cain and Abel and continues to this very day. No religion has ever succeeded in purging the human family of its penchant for internecine destruction.

Necessity was also a factor: the cycle of violence is difficult to break, and if the option is fight or die, you fight. And then we have the ghosts of the past: the Romans were imperialistic warriors; the Germanic peoples were tribal warriors; the Vikings were raiding warriors; the Celts were tattooed, long-haired, terrifyingly naked warriors. Everywhere you look in pre-Christian Europe, men are busy killing one another, with the supposed encouragement and assistance of their pagan gods. This sort of civilizational legacy dies hard.

And yet—is this enough to explain the great paradox of medieval culture, which was built upon the nonviolent, agapistic ideals of Christianity and yet continually at war? Probably not, and in any case, I propose that the only satisfying explanation is found in the paradox itself.

Paradoxicality is not modernity’s forte, especially in the West, where intellectual pursuits have long promoted a vision of reality in which a thing must be or do either this or that. Western philosophy favored syllogistic reasoning and conceptual precision, with emphasis on rigorous logic and the principle of non-contradiction (which is a powerful philosophical tool but also, like all powerful things, dangerous when misused). Scientific experiments are designed to probe and test and deconstruct until we know exactly what something is or how it behaves (though the plot thickened when physicists decided that light is both a particle and a wave). Mechanical systems, manufacturing facilities, chemical reactions, software routines—they all depend upon deterministic models in which clearly defined inputs produce clearly defined outputs. Uncertainty is inefficient and often a liability in the world of empirical science. It’s a liability when you’re building airplanes and corporate budgets and atom bombs. It’s even a liability when you’re doing math homework, which requires the student to subtract and divide and factor and simplify until the one indisputable solution is found.

The culture of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, reveled in paradox. We see it in daily life, with the peasantry’s ritualistic, imaginative, “non-scientific” approach to everything. We see it in literature, with medieval poetry’s dualistic characters, nonlinear narratives, equivocal texts, and ambiguous symbols. We see it in art and architecture, which shows us mysterious intersections of the sacred and the profane. We see it in theology, with such celebrated paradoxes as the Holy Trinity and the felix culpa.

And we see it in warfare, which coexisted with Christian nonviolence in a paradox that was perfectly comprehensible to the medieval mode of thought. Peace was glorious; war was glorious. Meekness was virtue; strength was virtue. Angels were protection; armor was protection. Prayer was the weapon of the soul; the sword was the weapon of the body. Christ was the Prince of Peace and He was, as we read in the Dream of the Rood, the “young hero,” the “God of hosts,” the “Lord of victories”—and “brave in the sight of many.”

War, war, no peace! Peace is to me a war.
—Shakespeare, King John

There’s more to say about war and peace in medieval culture, and we will continue this discussion on Tuesday. For now, we’ll conclude with a memorable anecdote.

The paradox of medieval warfare arises yet again in ecclesiastical legislation that attempted to interrupt the flow of blood with intervals of peace. These were sincere and noble efforts that bore fruit, though not as much as one might wish. Another attempt at converting Christian ideals into social reality was a Church law that forbade clergy from shedding human blood.

This is Bishop Odo, depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry as he fought in the Battle of Hastings. Notice that he carries a club instead of a lance or a sword. For clerics of a more martial disposition, especially those who were inclined to obey the letter of the law rather than its spirit, the weapon of choice was a club or mace. With a mace, you see, a man can kill an enemy by crushing his skull. With a sword, you would have to hack through his flesh, thus shedding his blood.