and "Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the
children of God," and perhaps also by certain pagan teachings of
the time and by the doctrines of the Jewish ESSENES, who preached
withdrawal from the realm of war and politics. Even in the first
centuries, however, Christians were divided in their attitudes
toward war and violence; the question whether a Christian could
remain a soldier was long debated. Some Fathers of the Church,
such as TERTULLIAN, took an essentially pacifist stand, and many
Christians deserted the imperial army or suffered martyrdom for
their refusal to take part in military action. For the church as a
whole to be pacifist became politically impossible after the
Emperor Constantine's conversion in the early 4th century and the
adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman
Empire. In the 5th century, when Catholicism in North Africa was
threatened by the invading Vandals, who supported the rival sect
of Arian Christians, Saint AUGUSTINE devised the doctrine of the
Just War, a doctrine that has been sustained by institutional
Christianity ever since.
The pacifist strain did not entirely vanish from the Christian
tradition in the Middle Ages. It emerged in such medieval sects as
the ALBIGENSES and the BOGOMILS, some of whom renounced the use of
violence. After the Reformation, pacifism was adopted by a number
of western European sects, including the MENNONITES, the Quakers
or Society of FRIENDS, and some of the ANABAPTISTS. In
17th-century Russia the Great Schism in the Orthodox church
encouraged the emergence of radical sects such as the DOUKHOBORS
and the Molokans, who opposed participation in war and employed
passive resistance against the authorities seeking to coerce them.
Among Christian pacifists, a distinction must be made between
those who resist participation in war merely to save their
consciences, as is the case with sects that preach withdrawal from
the world in anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ, and
those who see their pacifism as part of an attempt to transform
the world here and now, as do the Quakers. In the late 17th
century the Quakers fought a painful campaign against the English
law forbidding dissenters to meet publicly; nearly 400 Quakers
died in the pestilential prisons of the time. The Quakers provide
one of the early examples of a successful nonviolent movement.
NONVIOLENT POLITICAL MOVEMENTS
Pacifism emerged from its religious context and became a political
philosophy during the 19th century. One wing of American
abolitionists, led by William Lloyd GARRISON, preached the use of
nonviolent methods in the fight against slavery. Many of the
suffragettes who struggled for women's rights in Britain and North
America adopted nonviolent resistance. Count Leo TOLSTOI, after
his conversion to a radical kind of Christianity, advocated a
pacifist rejection of war and advocated methods of CIVIL
DISOBEDIENCE as an alternative to violent revolution in books such
as The Kingdom of God Is Within You. A Tolstoian movement