The story of Telemachus, the monk whose death helped to inspire the ending of the Roman gladiatorial games, is one that shows forth the power of nonviolence to transform people through self-sacrifice, the natural human love of violence, and finally the central role that nonviolence and self-sacrifice played in Christianity’s power to defeat their enemies through the power of love. The most complete version of his story comes from Theodoret of Cyrus, Christians historian, theologian, and bishop, in Book V of his Ecclesiastical History (sometimes called Church History.) This account of Telemachus is as follows; note that the Honorius it refers to is the Roman emperor who ruled from 384-423 AD/CE:
Honorius, who inherited the empire of Europe, put a stop to the gladiatorial combats which had long been held at Rome. The occasion of his doing so arose from the following circumstance. A certain man of the name of Telemachus had embraced the ascetic life. He had set out from the East and for this reason had repaired to Rome. There, when the abominable spectacle was being exhibited, he went himself into the stadium, and, stepping down into the arena, endeavoured to stop the men who were wielding their weapons against one another. The spectators of the slaughter were indignant and inspired by the triad fury of the demon who delights in those bloody deeds, stoned the peacemaker to death. When the admirable emperor was informed of this, he numbered Telemachus in the array of victorious martyrs, and put an end to that impious spectacle.
Ecclesiastical History, Chapter 26, pg. 288
A slightly different account has Telemachus, as he rushes down to prevent the murderous fighting of the gladiators, shouting, “In the name of Christ, stop!” And how revealing is it that the enraged crowd responded by loudly crying out against Telemachus until their fury reached such levels that they were fine with killing him because he dared to interfere in their violence? Every Christian peacemaker knows the metaphorical, if not literal, truth of this experience as they too have been attacked for daring to suggest that men and women might solve their problems through some other path than brutality and for standing for Christ’s commandment that we abandon hurting and killing one another.
I remember well when I learned this truth for myself. During Dr. Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign to win the Republican Party’s nomination as its candidate for American President he proposed that the US government should adopt the Golden Rule as its guide for foreign policy. How did the supposedly Christian crowd of South Carolinians respond to someone suggesting we follow the advice of Jesus Christ? They booed him! Loudly, vociferously, and repeatedly! It shocked me then and shocks me now. Since then I have had my own experiences being subjected to the hatred of those who reject peace for violence and justify bloodshed. How did we get to this state? How did we get from the place where a Christian like Telemachus would rather die himself than watch two strangers kill each other for the crowds to the point where Christians are the crowd baying for blood and casting hatred at those who would call for peace?
The beginning of the answer to that question is another story, one including a different Roman emperor a century before Telemachus.
“By This Sign Ye Shall Conquer”
Diocletian, the last Roman emperor to rule over anything like the unified Roman empire of old, realized that it was essentially impossible for anyone in his era to be the sole ruler of an empire that stretched North and South from modern day Scotland to modern day Ethiopia and West to East from modern day Portugal to modern day Iraq. In an effort to ensure domestic peace he formed what is today known as the Tetrarchy by dividing the Roman empire into two administrative districts, each ruled by a senior emperor (or Augustus) with a junior emperor (or Caesar) under him. Constantine, son of the Western Caesar Constantius, grew up in the court of Diocletian before the latter’s abdication of the throne, and was trained both in the political and military skills necessary to rule. Upon the death of his father during a military campaign in Britain, Constantine was acclaimed emperor in 306 AD/CE and he immediately launched a series of brutal civil wars that would only end eighteen years later when he finally defeated the Eastern Augustus, Licinius, in 324 AD/CE. The crucial moment in this for Christians came during the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD when Constantine is said to have been told by God how to win the battle and thus claim rulership of the Roman West. Christian writer and Constantine apologist Eusebius of Caesarea wrote that Constantine, thinking that the Roman pagans had failed to ever secure rule turned to God in prayer for victory:
Accordingly Constantine called on him [the Christian God] with earnest prayer to reveal to him who he was, and stretch forth his right hand to help him in his present difficulties. And while he was thus praying with fervent entreaty, a most extraordinary sign appeared to him from heaven …He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the sign of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, “By this symbol you will conquer.” He was struck with amazement by the sight, and his whole army witnessed the miracle.
He said that he was unsure what this apparition could mean, but that while he continued to ponder, night suddenly came on. In his sleep, the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies.
[Eusebius then gives a description of the Cross symbol that Constantine used for himself and his forces.]
Life of Constantine, Chapters 27-31
…Constantine, however, filled with compassion on account of all these miseries [caused by the Western emperor Maxentius], began to arm himself with all warlike preparation against the tyranny. Assuming therefore the Supreme God as his patron, and invoking His Christ to be his preserver and aid, and setting the victorious trophy, the salutary symbol, in front of his soldiers and bodyguard, he marched with his whole forces, trying to obtain again for the Romans the freedom they had inherited from their ancestors.
And whereas, Maxentius, trusting more in his magic arts than in the affection of his subjects, dared not even advance outside the city gates, but had guarded every place and district and city subject to his tyranny, with large bodies of soldiers, the emperor, confiding in the help of God, advanced against the first and second and third divisions of the tyrant’s forces, defeated them all with ease at the first assault, and made his way into the very interior of Italy.
Life of Constantine, Chapter 37
Lactantius adds that Constantine had his soldiers write the symbol of the Chi-Ro (XP) on their shields as they went to war as the name of the God under whose power they conquered. How we should interpret these reports are varied, and I think Herb Montgomery explains the various ways that Christians since then have interpreted them:
Various theories today exist in interpreting these reports. Some view the reports of this vision as legend with no historical basis whatsoever. Others believe Constantine made up this story after the fact, being the great political strategist he was and seeing that the only way to defeat Christianity’s influence and threat to Rome was to somehow unite Christianity with Rome itself. Others believe the vision happened, but that it was a vision from the Devil. And finally there are some who interpret this vision as genuine, but intended to communicate to Constantine that he should lay down his sword and embrace non-violence of the Christian Cross instead. This interpretation sees this vision as genuinely from God in an effort to reach Constantine, but a vision that was nonetheless misinterpreted by Constantine and taken to mean just the opposite of what was intended.
Whatever the origins, the facts remain the same. From 312 AD/CE, with Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge until the day he died the name of Christ became linked with the powers of the imperial state and its ability to crush any who oppose it by overwhelming brutality. Christ became synonymous with violence and force and slaughter. A year after his victory at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine and Lincinius (they were not yet at war) issued the Edict of Milan which pronounced Christianity a legal religion of the empire with all the rights to act as such. A year after crushing Licinius and assuming total power over West and East, you have Constantine, not a Christian bishop but the still unbaptized Roman emperor, calling the Council of Nicaea and taking part in its debates, demanding that it create a more uniform Christianity than had then existed.
The Christian Warmongers
It is during this era that we see the rise of the Christian Warmongers, those men who constructed the heresies that would apostatize Christianity by abandoning the Christian truths of nonviolence which had endured since the days of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry until the Fourth Century AD/CE (301 – 400). These men -Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, and Eusebius – would construct on the corpse of Christianity a corrupt thing that would first justify the insanities of war and then wrest and warp scripture to justify those insanities. Below I want to sample the most influential among them for an example of just how anti-Christian their arguments were and to see what their true goals were.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine is one of the most influential Christian theologians in history. Much of modern Christianity, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Primitivist, or Restorationist, bears some mark of influence from Augustine’s ideas. In no place is this more obvious than in war as Augustine invented what today we think of as Just War Theory, which is just a nonsense concept. Let us take a sampling of Augustine’s heresies:
What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling. The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like; and it is generally to punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars, when they find themselves in such a position as regards the conduct of human affairs, that right conduct requires them to act, or to make others act in this way.
Otherwise John, when the soldiers who came to be baptized asked, What shall we do? Would have replied, Throw away your arms; give up the service; never strike, or wound, or disable any one. But knowing that such actions in battle were not murderous but authorized by law, and that the soldiers did not thus avenge themselves, but defend the public safety, he replied, “Do violence to no man, accuse no man falsely, and be content with your wages.” Luke 3:14 But as the Manichæans are in the habit of speaking evil of John, let them hear the Lord Jesus Christ Himself ordering this money to be given to Cæsar, which John tells the soldiers to be content with. “Give,” He says, “to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” Matthew 22:21 For tribute-money is given on purpose to pay the soldiers for war.
Against Faustus, Chapter 74. I added the paragraph separation.
First off notice Augustine’s argument: It isn’t wrong to kill people who are going to die anyway. It is merely wrong to enjoy it. Does this not justify all slaughter, every murder, all evil? “Yes, I slit that person’s throat, ripped off another’s head, cut that one’s cuts open, burned that home down with children in it, but I didn’t enjoy it.” It is the doing of monstrous acts that makes one a monster. Enjoying it is irrelevant. And anything requiring you to act this way is not “right conduct,” unless of course you think burning babies alive is ever “right conduct.”
From that absurdity though Augustine goes on into heresy. How could anyone think John’s command to the soldiers to “do no violence to no man,” is anything less than a command to them to never strike or wound another person, which, being the soldier’s job, is tantamount to ordering them to give up being soldiers? This is plainly obvious to anyone not in the grip of delusion or those seeking to justify their evils by any means necessary. Or how about how he goes on to completely and intentional twist the words of Christ? As we have discussed here, Christ actually taught people not to pay taxes because all things belong to God and there is nothing therefore to give to Caesar. The only clear truth here is the last sentence, that taxes are about ensuring the power of the government to wage war, a truth that many today ignore with all their hearts and minds.
When humans undertake war, the person responsible and the reasons for acting are quite important. The natural order which is directed to peace among mortals requires that the ruler take counsel and initiate war; once war has been commanded, the soldiers should serve in it to promote the general peace and safety. …All power comes from God’s command or permission. Thus a just man may rightly fight for the order of civil peace even if he serves under the command of a ruler who is himself irreligious. What he is commanded to do is either clearly not contrary or not clearly contrary to God’s precept. The evil of giving the command might make the king guilty but the order of obedience would keep the soldier innocent.
Against Faustus, Chapter 75, page 107.
According to Augustine what you see in the above picture is not a crime, the soldier is not committing a sin, and that it is okay for a man to murder a woman and child in cold blood. Tens of millions of people are slaughtered in the most evil ways possible and somehow only one person is to blame – the person who ordered it. Forget personal responsibility or sin. As long as you’re an unblinking robot following orders nothing you do will matter to your soul. Augustine may be right about one thing. It may be that his god teaches men that they aren’t responsible for their actions and that they are allowed to do the most horrendous evils as long as someone with a fancy hat tells them its okay, but that god is not the Christian God. That is not Jesus Christ. And lest we miss it, don’t overlook the Orwellian absurdity of saying that waging war is for the general peace as if the mass chaos, destruction, slaughter, and carnage caused by war is in any way, shape, or form anything like “peace.” War doesn’t bring peace, it brings annihilation and oppression. Nothing more.
Then, in direct contradiction to the counsel of earlier Christians which taught that a Christian must abandon all military service and refuse to ever engage in violence, we have Augustine teaching this heresy:
Do not suppose that a person who serves in the army cannot be pleasing to God. …When you are arming yourself for battle, therefore, let this thought be foremost in your mind: even your bodily strength is God’s gift. …You must always have peace as your objective and regard war as forced upon you, so that God may free you from this necessity and preserve you in peace. Peace is not sought in order to stir up war; war is waged to secure the peace. You must, therefore, be a peacemaker even in waging war so that by your conquest you may lead those you subdue to the enjoyment of peace.
…“Blessed are the peacemakers,” says the Lord, “for they shall be called children of God” [Matt. 5: 9]. How sweet is human peace for the temporal prosperity of mortals; yet how much the sweeter is that eternal peace for the eternal salvation of the angels. May it be necessity, therefore, not your own desire, which destroys your attacking enemy. As you respond with ferocity to the rebelling and resisting, so do you owe compassion to the defeated and captured, especially when you no longer fear a disturbance of the peace.
Letter 189, Sections 4 and 6, page 108. I added the paragraph separation.
Again we have the Orwellian nonsense that war somehow creates peace, as if mass murder on titanic scales that wipes out entire cities, nations, or peoples is somehow peace. The idea that a person waging war could be considered a peacemaker is absolutely laughable. “Why are you so angry at me for burning down your city and murdering your wife and kid? I’m just making peace!” He thought torture was a tool of conversion. No level of violence is off the table when you believe your rape, torture, and murder is God’s will. And notice who is the target of such violence – the “rebelling and resisting,” i.e. those who refuse to be dominated by the ruling powers of the state. Here Augustine betrays his true ideal, which is not the peace of God but the subservience of the masses to those in power. War, as always, is a tool of oppression and domination and its target is always the same – those who would seek independence, liberty, and freedom from the despotic rule of another.
The Worship of the State
Augustine is not a Christian. He is not teaching Christianity. He is, in the modern nomenclature, a statist (“state-ist”) and his god is the idol of Government. He is what Dr. Carl Jung called a “mass man,” one who has subjected his religion to the rule of the worldly governments and given his loyalty to the ideals that empower the rulers of the world instead of to the One True God. Yes he continues to use the language of Christianity but what he is preaching is not Christianity. As I have shown over the past few weeks, Christians taught from the time of Christ until Constantine’s rule that Christians must renounces all violence, abandon military service, and even give up all political office because political orders are enforced by violence. And here Augustine is teaching the exact opposite, passing off the antithesis of Christianity as the real thing.
Why? Well, it is simple really.
Constantine had an empire to rule.
You see, if the former ideals were held to then there could be no Roman Empire and Constantine could not rule it. He came to power through civil war, by murdering people until the rest submitted to him, and once emperor he ruled that way. All governments do. They spew the same propaganda and lies that Augustine and his cohorts were teaching. And for good reason. Because if you believe that war brings peace and domination is justified, if you think subservience creates unity and murdering for those in power is moral then you’ve already accepted the basic foundations of the state. This is what Augustine did so masterfully. He took the apostate ideals of worldly governments, wrapped them in a Christian coating, and then taught them to everyone who would listen. And because for the first time so many so-called Christian stood to gain power and wealth in the new Roman state they embraced these ideals. It took time for the old ideas to be fully pushed out, but within a century of Augustine his ideas would dominate and they’ve only continued to do since then.
It is not that his arguments are sensible, according to scripture, or made with some subtle depth of insight or observation that just transforms the soul. They’re none of those things. It is because the Roman emperors and later European kings needed a set of doctrines that justified their own brutal, warmongering, oppressive rule. This is also why his ideals triumphed over the ideals of the true Christians before him. People will justify untold evils and manifold lies for power and all the better if it teaches the people to submit to oppression for their own good. Tertullian wasn’t going to do that for them. And neither was Origen. But Augustine? He fit the bill exactly. Thus we have endless cycles of wars, persecutions, purges, crusades, and inquisitions in the Middle Ages. Thus we have Christians today who would jeer and boo the preaching of Jesus Christ as the basis of foreign policy.
Yes, I’m aware that there were probably Christians who served in the military before Augustine. After all, you don’t preach about something that isn’t a concern. No one would argue that forbidden adultery isn’t a Christian doctrine just because Christians commit adultery. Likewise, the presence of however few Christians in the military pre-Constantine doesn’t change the fact that it was Christian doctrine to renounce violence and not serve in the military forces of the world. Today we have the exact opposite problem though. Instead of a society where Christians are taught to abandon war, violence, the military, and political power and fall short of that and have to be taught better we live in a world where Christians embrace killing and terror – blood and horror – openly and it is those who hearken back to the true principles of Christianity who are treated as being in need of correction.
No matter what type of Christian you are or how old your church is, if it justifies violence, political power, or waging war then it is teaching a false, apostate doctrine at odds with the teachings of Jesus Christ and the historic truths taught by Christian leaders for three centuries after Christ. If you, like many Christians, despair at the power of Christianity to change the world, then consider what you think of as Christianity isn’t it. Because it most likely isn’t. Christianity was so powerful in its early stages and so persecuted by those in power because it followed the most radical belief of all – that we must love our enemies, do good to those who do evil to us, serve those who would hatefully use us, and never hurt or kill another person nor take any job that depends on us doing so.. This caused Christians not only to reject war but to challenge the very underpinnings of the state itself, which is why it was treated as such a threat by those in power. The abandonment of this truth for Augustinian lies ripped the heart out of the faith and made it a tool of imperial conquest, colonization, warmongering, domination, and oppression. If you want to reclaim the power of Christianity to transform the planet, to create a better world, to form Zion, then you must start by reclaiming the beating heart of Christianity, the thing that gave it power to change human society to start with. Nothing less will work. Nothing less will matter.