medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Why "nothing but fear for one's soul"? Only those who do not take sin or heaven or hell very seriously will see this as a mere, small limitation on what one may do in warfare. The issue is not that this was the only brake on soldiers but the issue is how many soldiers believed that judgment awaited them upon death. Those of us who live in peace and security (or thought we did until recently) may assume that even medieval folk, who did believe in heaven and hell and judgment, viewed it as something abstract and far off and hence not really relevant to today's battle. Judging from the firefighters who lined up en masse to make their confessions and receive absolution before entering the World Trade Centers (according to Fr. George Rutler, one of the first priests on the scene apart from the fire department chaplain, Fr. Judge), those who live closer to the presence of danger may be inclined to see these matters less abstractly.
Members of the modern "knowledge class" (Peter Berger's term) may, perhaps, see journalists as the chief means of keeping people honest rather than people's own internal beliefs, which are so foreign to us. Given the way most journalists today, in a herd mentality, pick and choose villains, letting some egregious public malefactors off the hook because every one does X or Y and pillorying others (usually those of opposite political persuasions from the journalistic knowledge class), I'd put more faith in the internalized faith (as semi-pagan and superstitious as it may have been) of medieval soldiers than I would in the moral judgment of modern war correspondents of the Boomer Generation whose views on the morality of war were shaped by Vietnam era pieties, themselves justified by a cynical attitude about war born o self-segregation from those who actually served in the military. We have today in our university culture a pool of individuals who have virtually zero personal experience with soldiering and military life, more so probably than at any other time in modern university history. The reality of military culture is, today, I think, very different from what most of us in our ivory towers think it is. We would do well to exercise some caution in making assumptions about how soldiers think and what motivates them.
What I write here is written in that spirit of caution--as suggestions to consider in regard to the question of justified warfare in the Middle Ages.
The promise of a martyr's death for Crusaders did not mean that they could willfully commit mortal sin and expect heaven, even if it might have been so interpreted. See Bernard's _On the New Knighthood_.
I must also comment on the widespread assumption that the Crusades, at least the First Crusade, were totally unjust. Since the 18thc, for a variety of reasons, the Islamic conquests of the 7th-11th century have been minimized by western intellectuals. They should not be distorted negatively but neither should they be whitewashed. It's past time for some reassessment and at least some Crusade historians are perhaps beginning that process, but their work has yet to filter into the consciousness of the broad spectrum even of medievalists, let alone Western intellectuals (or journalists) in general.
Dennis Martin
>>> [log in to unmask] 11/30/01 19:18 PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I suspect that in the Roman Empire and Middle Ages,
when there were no journalists there searching for a new and controversial
angle on a story, there was nothing but fear for one's soul to stop one
committing battlefield excesses, and dispatching prisoners. It is also worth
remembering that unless a statement of absolution, as in the case of the
Crusades, was made in advance, medieval knights (and ther soldiers?), were
required to undertake penance after combat. Presumably, the prospect of
steep financial penalty, enforced pilgrimage, or some other act of
penitance, would have discouraged many from perpetrating atrocities. The
immediate and worldly prospect of a tangible penitentiary act of this kind
would probably have had been a more effective way of enforcing the notion of
Just War than an abstract and deferred threat to one's soul.
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