F. Brendle, A. Schindling, Geistliche im Krieg (Robert Bireley)

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Francia-Recensio 2010/2 Frühe Neuzeit – Revolution – Empire (1500–1815)

Franz Brendle, Anton Schindling (Hg.), Geistliche im Krieg, Münster (Aschendorff) 2009, 445 p., ISBN 978-3-402-12790-2, EUR 29,80.

rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par

S. J. Robert Bireley, Chicago

This is the third volume to emerge in the subsection »Religion und Kriegserfahrungen« of the Sonderforschungebereich 437, »Kriegserfahrungen – Krieg und Gesellschaft in der Neuzeit« at the University of Tübingen. A first volume appeared in 2001, »Das Strafgericht Gottes«, that dealt exclusively with the Thirty Years War in Germany, and a second in 2006, »Religionskrieg im Alten Reich und in Alteuropa«, that embraced the period from the Hussite Wars to the Napoleonic Wars. The present volume’s nineteen contributions range from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and reach beyond Europe.

In his introduction Franz Brendle broadly defines clergy in opposition to laity, so that the definition applies to Jewish rabbis as well as to Catholic priests or Protestant ministers. They appear in the volume in many and varied capacities. Brendle indicates three types of clergy here, ruling princes as with the German ecclesiastical princes, preachers, and military chaplains, but they turn up in other capacities as well in the volume, such as moral theologians and chroniclers or diarists. The findings of the volume, Brendle notes, point to a need to revise the conventional wisdom that war was secularized with the Enlightenment, and one can only agree. Clerics appealed to religion to interpret war so as to give it meaning for victors and defeated alike. War as a punishment of God for sin recurs regularly throughout the contributions into the twentieth century as does the conviction that God ultimately controls the events of history.

There follows the introduction an illustrated essay by Dennis Schmidt who discusses several representations of warlike clerics from the early modern period including St. John Capistrano and Ulrich Zwingli.

In a long, dense, and difficult contribution that ranges well beyond the limits of the others, Andreas Holzem brings out the role of Christian clergy regarding war from the valuable perspective of the history of religions. This enables us to understand the clear difference in this regard between Christian and pre-Christian religions (with the exception of Judaism). He develops three theses. First, war created a highly ambivalent situation for Christian clergy. This difficulty consisted, according to the second thesis, in the vast expansion in the range of functions expected of them and its division into three main areas: (1), celebrant of a ritual, that is, the sacraments, fundamentally different from the sacrificial and expiatory rites of pre-Christian religions; (2), theologian and moral educator, who develops, implements and practices an ethic of war; and (3), preacher who explains the deadly danger of war, the activity of God, and the suffering of men, in such a way as to give meaning to both death and survival. Thirdly, the Christian minister represented an institution that though often related to or combined with the state and society, could not be simply identified with them. The author then shows how these theses were realized in many and varied ways from pre-Christian to modern times.

The rest of the volume is divided into four sections, each with four essays.

The first section deals with the religious wars of the seventeenth century. Susanne Häcker investigates the activity of theologians at the universities of Reformed Heidelberg, Lutheran Tübingen, and Catholic Freiburg. Two Jesuit professors apparently manned cannons during the Swedish siege of Freiburg in late 1632. Peter Damgaard shows the importance of the clergy for the interpretation of Denmark’s wars between 1611 and 1660. The »Excidium Germaniae« (1640) of the spiritualist theologian, Joachim Betke, pastor in Linum near Fehrbellin from 1628 until his death in 1663, is the subject of Julian Kümmerle. Relying heavily on the Old Testament, Betke blamed the war on widespread apostasy from God and was particularly hard on the clergy for their partisan spirit and promotion of religious war. Andreas Neuberger discusses the diaries of three abbots of Wurttemberg monasteries, the Cistercian Nikolaus Brenneisen of Herrenalb and the Benedictines Georg Gaisser of Sankt Georgen in the Black Forest and Karl Stengel of Anhausen. All three regained their monasteries by virtue of the Edict of Restitution of 1629 but lost them again with the Peace of Westphalia.

The next section turns to clergy »in service of the fatherland« in wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Angela Strauss investigates the handbooks prepared for the military chaplains in the Prussian army, the pillars of the Prussian military ecclesiastical establishment, in order to determine how their collective self-understanding differed from that of civilian pastors as a result of their experience of war; Laure Ognois studies Reformed pastors in Zurich and the canton of Waadt during the period of the Helvetian Republic during the French Revolutionary Wars (1798–1803) and finds them to have been divided with more inclined to favor the Austrians over the godless French. For Wolfgang Wust several diaries and correspondence of Catholic clerics of southwest Germany during the Revolutionary Wars characterize the war as God’s punishment but also reveal a trust in his providence.

They expressed a sentiment often echoed by clergy throughout the volume: friendly armies could ravage an area as harshly as hostile forces. Several pastors of Ulm in chronicles dating from the same period and studied by Ingrun Klaiber complain of the pillage of churches and assaults on pastors while maintaining a trust in a benevolent God and his providence. In the first contribution of the third section, Annette Jantzen draws upon archival sources for her study of French priests from the diocese of Nancy and Germans from the diocese of Strasbourg during World War I. She notes that their experience of war had no clear impact on their theology; there was no »Theology after Verdun«. A fascinating contribution by Margit Schad uses Sabbath Letters dispatched regularly to its members on the front to show the enthusiasm with which a small Orthodox Jewish community in Frankfurt supported the German war effort. The war, it was thought, would lead to the end of hatred of Jews. The Hungarian Bishop of Székesfehérvár, Ottokár Prohászka, according to Bettina Reichmann in her study of his pastoral letters, consoled and strengthened his people in their sufferings. He paid little attention to political developments but saw in the war a means by which God would bring about a Christian restoration in Europe. In the last contribution of this section Jörg Seiler follows efforts of the rector of the seminary of the diocese of Bamberg, Johann Schmitt, himself a veteran of World War I, to encourage and instruct the seminarians serving in the army during the early years of World War II. Among other things, he sees in their service an opportunity to gather experience of the modern world.

Magnus von Hirschheydt opens the final section with a study of the conflict over possession of the bishopric of Ösel-Wiek in Livonia in the 1530's between a Protestant and a Catholic claimant. Though violence was threatened, it never came to this, so that there was no real war. Two contributions by Mathis Mager and Vladimir von Schnurbein discuss the self-understanding of the Knights of St. John in their defense of Rhodes in 1522 and on the front against the Turks in south-eastern Europe in the sixteenth century. Fabian Fechner, then, ascertains that in the Guarani Wars of the eighteenth century in Paraguay, Jesuits helped to prepare the Indians for battle but very rarely participated in battle themselves.

All these contributions have something worthwhile to offer. Yet one would like to know how these topics were selected and how representative they are. One would also have appreciated a summation or conclusion at the end of the volume. Though religion was regularly employed to interpret the meaning of war, there are, surprisingly, virtually no examples of a summons to religious war or enthusiasm for it in the volume (apart from the representations in the essay by Dennis Schmidt), a finding that echoes the results of a study of Catholic sermons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reported in his contribution here by Andreas Holzem. Yet we know that such summons existed, for example, in the preaching of Domenico a Jesu Maria on the eve of the Battle of the White Mountain or in the counsel given to Elector Maximilian of Bavaria and Emperor Ferdinand II by their Jesuit confessors. Perhaps these were the exception. This and the other Tubingen volumes have contributed greatly to our understanding of the relationship between war and religion, and they will certainly stimulate further research into this important and fascinating topic.