#16 – Jesus, Violence, Love

How St Augustine provided the ultimate Christian justification for acts of violence – Jesus did it first and it’s okay as long as you do it with love. * Still talking about Augustine and his “City Of God” * Last time we looked his theory that God knowing certain women deserved to be raped. * But the majority of the book is his way of saying “Look, Rome was a horrible place with lots of problems BEFORE we became 100% Christian, so you cant blame it on us.” * But I have to hand it to him – dude could write. * He knew his history and mythology. * His arguments are quite lame. * But he sells them with full conviction. * And he mentions all of our old friends – Caesar, Augustus, Cicero, Sulla, Marius, the Gracchi * Speaking of Cicero, one of the last known surviving copies of Cicero’s De Re Publica, was written over by Augustine. * Meaning he or someone scraped the ink off the original text and then wrote something new over the top of it. * Augustine himself once declared to a congregation in Carthage that ‘that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!’ * He got wild applause, and this speech was possibly the cause of religious riots resulting in sixty deaths. * It is estimated that pagans still made up half of the Empire’s population. * Augustine called this religious violence against the pagans “merciful savagery”. * “Where there is terror, there is salvation. Oh, merciful savagery.” * One of Augustine’s other contributions to the dark ages was how he managed to balance the ideas of “turn the other cheek” and killing your enemies. * He came to the conclusion that as long as you LOVED your enemies while you killed them, then that was the Christian thing to do and got the Jesus tick of approval. * If you shoot someone in the head but you tell them you love them, then it’s all going to be okay. * In COG he justifies the idea of a just war: “But, say they, the wise man will wage Just Wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars.” * So the term “just war” comes from Augustine. * Although the concept goes back to Cicero. * He later justifies having the Emperor using force against the Donatists, who were still around * Remember they were the Christians from North Africa who thought the Christians who gave up the holy books during the persecutions shouldn’t be let back into the fold * Their property was to be confiscated, their services forbidden and their clergy exiled. * Augustine ejected the Donatists from Hippo and, taking over their churches and posting his own anti-Donatist texts on the walls. * He came to the position ‘that the thing to be considered when any one is coerced, is not the mere fact of the coercion, but the nature of that to which he is coerced” * So if you think the thing you are forcing someone to do is the right thing – like, accept your religious views – then it’s okay to use force. * From his “A Treatise Concerning the Correction of the Donatists”. * He actually makes the point that Jesus used violence against Paul – blinding him – and then, after Paul believed in him, Jesus was nice. * So – “Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to their destruction?” * But, he says, it’s all okay, because “they congratulate themselves that these most wholesome laws were brought to bear against them”. * In his earlier works Augustine was reluctant to condone the compelling of outsiders into the churc...