Was Medieval Warfare a “Very Great Good”?

Thinking about war and peace with help from John Senior.

Peace makes plenty, plenty makes pride,
Pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel brings war;
War brings spoil, and spoil poverty,
Poverty patience, and patience peace:
So peace brings war, and war brings peace.
—Jean de Meun, thirteenth century

Though trained as a literary scholar, Dr. John Senior is known above all for his incisive commentary on the disintegration of Western culture. Brilliant, poetic, good-natured, uncompromising, intensely spiritual—he was a man of qualities seen often enough in isolation but rarely in unison. He was also a true radical, in the etymological sense: always going back to the root, the radix, of things, and finding thereby much ancient wisdom that lies buried beneath the thin topsoil of modernity.

Not one to shy away from controversy, Dr. Senior had no patience for the fashionable pacifism of the Vietnam era: “Antiwar movements are not really antiwar…. The enemy wanted us to ‘stop the killing’ in Vietnam so as to have a clean sweep of killing himself.” I’m not prepared to agree with that statement, but I see his point. His theoretical view of warfare is also difficult to swallow, but Senior wrote like an herbalist—the more bitter the draught, the more curative the effect:

Peace is not a lack of war. It is a state of justice…. As Plato said, the state is the soul writ large. This means that there is an analogy between justice among persons and among nations. The primary purpose of war is retributive justice—punishment inflicted on nations that have injured innocent victims. War is therefore certainly not a crime but a very great good.

It is a bold man indeed who can live in the second half of the twentieth century and declare, after the apocalyptic devastation of two world wars and the dystopian conflicts of the Cold War, that warfare is a “very great good.” But John Senior was a bold man, and he did declare it, and whether you agree with him or not, he is giving us insight into the question that we explored in the previous post: How can we reconcile Christian ideals of nonviolence with the brutal and seemingly endless military violence of the Middle Ages? Much of the answer, so far as we can hope to formulate one, lies in the paradoxical mode of thought that permeated medieval culture and that found in the great questions of human life—as in human nature itself—a wholeness and harmony of opposites.

All of the images in this post are personifications of justice found in medieval art.

“Peace,” Dr. Senior proposes, “is not a lack of war. It is a state of justice.” In the traditional understanding, justice is “rendering unto others that which is their due,” but this bare-bones definition doesn’t do it—well, I mean, it’s not good enough on its own. Justice was the highest of the civic virtues and served as the central pillar around which the grand edifice of human society was built. It applied to relationships between individuals and between the individual and the community, regulating these relationships according to the orderly equilibrium of the cosmos and the preconditions of human happiness. If we extend “others” to heavenly beings or to God Himself, justice becomes a spiritual and religious reality that brings the human soul into harmony with divine goodness and transcendent truths.

Once a concept of extensive metaphysical significance, justice now appears most prominently in courtrooms, prisons, and highly politicized, poorly defined social movements. In other domains of modern life, justice is often perceived as antiquated, harsh, or—in a masterstroke of irony—unfair. The ethos of modernity disavows vengeance and looks askance at punishment while favoring niceness and habitual leniency. It emphasizes offenders’ rights and privileges rather than the personal, social, or spiritual debt that they have incurred. Retribution is discouraged or accomplished covertly, disciplinary actions are pragmatic tools that help people to improve, and the architects of war can usually find a way to construe it as “self-defense.”

I honestly do not mean to imply that all these modern tendencies are wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s a discussion for another day. The point here is the contrast: the communities of the Middle Ages inherited their notions of justice from Germanic peoples, ancient Rome, and the Hebrews of the Old Testament, and though all was repainted somewhat with the brush of Christianity, the picture remained vastly different from what we see in Western society today. Among the ruling and fighting classes of medieval society, justice was serious business. It was a religious virtue learned from the sacred words of the Psalms, a chivalric virtue underlying courtly love and feudal loyalty, a social virtue that made civilized life possible, and a political virtue demanding that malefactors be punished and balance be restored. With individuals, serious offenses against justice could be redressed through such penalties as execution or the Germanic wergild—the “man-payment.” When entire territories or nations were involved, preserving justice meant waging war.

He kept laced upon him his helmet studded with gold and gems
And girt about him his sword Joiuse, which had no peer
And whose color changes thirty times a day….
Frankish barons should not forget it;
From it they derive their battle cry “Monjoie.”
For this reason no race on earth can withstand them.
—The Song of Roland

Paradox, as the great literary scholar Sister Miriam Joseph observed, is a fount of wonder. Eloquence emerging from contrast, harmony from dissonance, unity from disparity, insight from uncertainty, possibility from that which seems impossible, truth from that which seems inexpressible—such things are strange, enchanting, elevating: wondrous.

If we are not prepared to admire medieval warfare as a “very great good,” we might still look with some measure of wonder at a civilization that, unlike ancient civilizations, was built around justice and mercy, those two central and seemingly incompatible pillars of Christian thought and of medieval life. We might marvel at a world where an army of monks sings of heavenly peace while an army of warriors sings the cry of battle—not, as the modern historian Hilaire Belloc explains, because battle brings conquest through strength, but because it brings justice through valor:

There did not exist in those days among Christian men the conception of right based upon force. Conquest in that sense, mere seizure of land and revenue by superior strength—that is, mere robbery—no man would have [laid claim to]…. The doctrine that mere superior strength gave a title to possession was not in the mind of the day—it belongs to our own. No doubt a covetous man would have a wrong motive in pleading a right, but plead a right he always did.¹

And finally, we should remember that however much the knights of the Middle Ages gloried in warfare, however eagerly they wielded their swords in defense of the rights and noble causes that they claimed, they knew the horrors of battle, they felt the pain of loss, and they hoped for peace in heaven. We see this in their poetry, and we see it also in the poetry of Shakespeare, who captured the spirit well in his play about the medieval king Henry V:

No, great king:
I come to thee for charitable license,
That we may wander o’er this bloody field
To book our dead and then to bury them,
To sort our nobles from our common men,
For many of our princes—woe the while!—
Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood.
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs
In blood of princes, and the wounded steeds
Fret fetlock deep in gore, and with wild rage
Yerk out their armèd heels at their dead masters,
Killing them twice. O, give us leave, great king,
To view the field in safety and dispose
Of their dead bodies.

1. See pp. 58–59 in his biography of William the Conqueror. The italics are mine.