Introduction
One recent commentator summarizes a common judgement on the Church of England’s performance during the Great War: ‘[it] was shameful. Its leaders placed a higher value on the approval of the Government than the imperative of the Gospel’.Footnote 2 The principal historian of the wartime Church, Alan Wilkinson, concludes that ‘in Martin Luther King’s phraseology, the Church was, broadly speaking, a thermometer reflecting the temperature of surrounding society, rather than a thermostat trying to change it’.Footnote 3 Wilkinson’s work set the tone for much later evaluation of the Church’s role, not least chaplaincy provision. Though outstanding individuals such as ‘Woodbine Willie’ have been lauded by some as heroes of the faith, Wilkinson argued that most soldiers viewed most Anglican chaplains as ineffectual, out of touch, and spiritually irrelevant.Footnote 4 This picture has since been significantly modified and a more nuanced evaluation offered, not least by the recent work of Edward Madigan.Footnote 5 However, it is difficult to pass over the fact that many chaplains showed a war spirit which today sounds horrifyingly un-Christian: ‘Not only is this a holy war, it is the holiest war that has ever been waged…. Every shot that is fired, every bayonet thrust that gets home, every life that is sacrificed, is truly “for His Name’s sake.”’Footnote 6 It is not difficult to assemble a catena of similarly damning quotations.
Someone who might have thought and acted differently was Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford from 1911 to 1919.Footnote 7 He was intellectually gifted, highly political and unafraid of controversy. He had stirred up English theology with his (partial) embrace of biblical criticism, and his ‘kenotic’ Christology. He supported strikers, and held radical views on industrial democracy and common ownership. He had been a vocal critic of the Second Boer War: ‘I could not say in a prayer “I believe our cause is just,” because I think by leaving the authors of the [Jameson] Raid in large part unpunished, and suppressing the enquiry, and by a good deal of our recent diplomacy we did our best to put ourselves in the wrong.’Footnote 8 Once begun, British conduct in the war also appalled him – above all the suffering and hunger imposed upon the Boer population in concentration camps, which threatened British honour with ‘a stain we shall not be able to obliterate, and the whole Christian conscience of the country will be outraged and alienated’.Footnote 9 In 1910, he became a founding member of the Church of England Peace League, pledged to resist ‘the war spirit’ as incompatible with Christianity.Footnote 10 What would such a bishop make of the 1914–18 war?
The historian is hamstrung by the destruction of Gore’s personal papers in the 1940s.Footnote 11 The war is just one subject on which they might have revealed his mind. They may, equally, have said nothing. Gore’s biographer, G.L. Prestige, offers no sense that the war was a traumatizing, life-defining event for him.Footnote 12 Perhaps we underestimate the degree to which those at home were sheltered from the reality of war, or their need to focus on the manageable. Gore could write, in 1915, a tract entitled Crisis in Church and Nation and mean by ‘crisis’ (in part) the difficulties caused by overseas Anglicans participating in a non-conformist communion service.Footnote 13 Whatever the cause, we have surprisingly little documentary evidence for Gore’s thoughts and feelings about the war. We can draw inferences from his books, pamphlets and sermons and speeches in the House of Lords.Footnote 14 We can surmise, with reasonable confidence, what this kind of bishop was likely to think at this kind of moment. But of his innermost thoughts we know little.
The Decision to Go to War
The 1914 crisis surprised the United Kingdom. Military leaders, politicians and bishops had to react quickly. Gore’s instincts were pacifist – but only in the contemporary sense of that word, illustrated in the peace movement journal The Arbitrator which deemed as pacifist ‘every man who is against unjust war, and who holds that international disputes should be settled by the arbitrament of reason rather than by that of the sword’.Footnote 15 Even ‘pacifists’ then might support just war, when reason was exhausted. So Bishop Hicks of Lincoln, later President of the Church of England Peace League, had called in 1896 for European military action to prevent Turkish assaults upon the Armenians.Footnote 16 Gore was only ever ‘pacifist’ in this qualified sense.
Gore never spends long justifying this basic moral stance. In a 1918 pamphlet, he notes that ‘Christianity inevitably compromises in the matter of war’.Footnote 17 Yet whereas he fiercely condemns other compromises, especially in the realms of money and sexuality, this one he regards as a grim necessity: ‘[The Church] has never refused, it can never refuse, to allow to an unjustly attacked nation the right or duty of self-defence.’Footnote 18 Looking to the coming League of Nations, he argues that ultimately peace must depend upon the threat of force: ‘An international agreement must bring into existence an international force to be used at the last resort against the offender.’Footnote 19 In The Sermon on the Mount (1896) – allegedly found so seditious by one Chief Constable that he banned its distribution throughout 1914–18 – Gore restricts his discussion of Jesus’ instruction to ‘turn the other cheek’ to private matters.Footnote 20 Even here, non-violence is qualified: ‘When our own personal feeling has been utterly suppressed, then it is quite possible that another duty, the duty of justice, the duty of maintaining the social order, may come into prominence again.’Footnote 21 In his The Religion of the Church (1916), Gore returns to the Sermon:
…there is no reason to think He would have forbidden a nation which had received the faith He came to impart to defend its boundaries against invaders or assist in defending some other nation … It seems to me to be idle to argue from what our Lord says about personal submission to injuries that He would have refused to allow a man to defend either his wife and children or his country.Footnote 22
Gore, then, stands firmly and unquestioningly in the ‘just war’ tradition. Yet why did the particular war of August 1914 command his instant and unreserved support? Stuart Bell points to the network of close relationships, friendly and familial, between the Church hierarchy and the wider English Establishment: ‘it would have been remarkable if their perspectives on the war had been significantly different’.Footnote 23 Gore shared educational ties with several prominent politicians, and was related to one member of the War Cabinet, Lord Lansdowne. Yet this had not prevented his opposition to the Second Boer War. A better explanation for his 1914 stance is that the case for war was genuinely strong. Germany had, without provocation, invaded a small, militarily weak neighbour. ‘The duty of justice, the duty of maintaining the social order’ required war. The Allies were doing God’s work:
those who seek to be wholly true to the purpose of God are bound today to identify themselves whole-heartedly with the patriotism of the nation. We can be all of one mind in throwing ourselves heart and soul into the war of the Allies against Germany and Austria, and in fighting it through to the bitter end, till, with God’s good hand upon us, the purpose of Germany is utterly defeated.Footnote 24
Despite such conviction, Gore did not hold Britain blameless. She had pursued the same kind of selfish politics which, magnified in Germany, had caused the war. However, he would have rejected any idea of moral equivalence. Germany had launched the war, and stories of atrocities committed by her forces were swiftly emerging. Many were the inventions of propagandists, but not all.Footnote 25 Philip Jenkins notes that while the crimes committed in Belgium in 1914 ‘would scarcely have earned a footnote in Russia in 1942, (they were) appalling by the standards of an earlier era – at least, when inflicted on white Europeans’.Footnote 26 In many ways the war of 1914 represented a template for the Nazis’ even more devastating onslaught in 1939: ‘the moral differences between the two wars are considerably less than is widely accepted today, and the Good War rhetoric (for the first) more appropriate’.Footnote 27
Just cause, however, is not the sole criterion for a just war. Many scholars have noted the lack of much explicit reflection on the other criteria – such as last resort, proportionality and the prospects for securing a just peace – by Gore and others in 1914.Footnote 28 Bell comments that few ecclesiastical biographies of the period ‘suggest that their subjects stopped for more than the briefest moment to consider the theological implications of the situation in which the country found itself’.Footnote 29 This supports Stanley Hauerwas’s observation that classical just war theory doesn’t acquire its contemporary significance in the Church or wider public discourse until the 1960s.Footnote 30 Before that, Hauerwas suggests, what really operated in most post-Reformation Western churches was (in John Yoder’s phrase) the ‘blank-check’ approach: if the Government says we are at war, it is right to be so.Footnote 31
It is true that Gore did not explicitly and systematically weigh up the traditional criteria in 1914. However, the picture is complicated. His vision of what would come after the war was central to his support for it: he was deeply preoccupied by the prospects for just and lasting peace. Paradoxically, we shall see that this led him to be more vigorous in support for the war than might otherwise have been the case. Furthermore, to suggest that the ‘last resort’ criterion was ignored forgets that the war had begun before any Anglican thinker started to reflect. Belgium was being raped. There was no time for the kind of analysis to which we have grown accustomed today, with weeks if not months of debate preceding most military actions. So while Gore’s decision was undoubtedly swift, it had to be so. Moreover, there is no reason to think that leisurely reflection would have yielded a different outcome.
Once at war, Gore and the other bishops seemed surprisingly determined to remain so, as the Lansdowne letters episode makes clear. Lord Lansdowne (whose brother had been Gore’s mother’s first husband) had served five years as a Conservative Secretary of State for War, followed by five as Foreign Secretary, before serving in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet. In November 1916, he argued within Cabinet that the human and material cost of prolonging the war was prohibitive, and advocated negotiations. He went public in November 1917: ‘we are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it’.Footnote 32 Significant elements of the Establishment privately agreed, including Archbishop Davidson and several leading followers of Asquith (the only recently ejected, and by no means finished, Prime Minister).Footnote 33 As Fest puts it, with the letter ‘the pacifist movement in England had reached its climax’.Footnote 34 A senior politician with impeccable credentials was advocating negotiations, when victory seemed very distant. If others wanted peace, now was their chance to speak. Few did, and Gore was not among them. The killing continued.
Gore’s silence stemmed from what he believed was necessary to secure a just and lasting peace. As we shall see, he thought that the war was worth fighting largely because it would lead to a new international order, based on the principle of co-operation and mutual service. This was symbolized above all in President Wilson’s project for a League of Nations, and in Gore’s 1918 pamphlet advocating this we see why he had not supported Lansdowne. If Germany and Austria were not fully integrated into the League from its inception, the new international order would be stillborn. Such integration could not happen under their present Governments, due to their inherent militarism and the utter lack of trust between them and the Allies:
Thus, the greatest promoter of the League would be such measure of military success on our side as would permanently and publicly discredit the militarist party in Germany, and bring to the fore the pacific and democratic elements in German opinion which really favour the cause of human liberty … (the success of the League) depends upon the war not only being vigorously but successfully carried out, to the point of fundamentally discrediting German militarism.Footnote 35
Gore rejected Lansdowne’s proposal, then, because it risked a premature peace and a second war. That war, of course, arrived anyway. So were Gore and others who rejected Lansdowne’s suggestion wrong? Arguably, the mistake was not pursuing comprehensive victory but mishandling the peace. Gore, like many other bishops, would swiftly join the campaign to reverse some of the most punitive articles of the Treaty of Versailles.Footnote 36 We are, however, in the world of counter-factuals: who can know what might have materialized from negotiations in 1917, or from a better handling of the actual peace in 1918? Negotiations begun in November 1917 might have saved untold lives: however, Nigel Biggar suggests that it was not until October 1918 that Germany was prepared to negotiate on terms even remotely acceptable to the Allies – meaning withdrawal from Belgium and restoration of its independence.Footnote 37 The one thing certain, however, is that looked at from today’s perspective the failure of a politically radical bishop like Gore to rally swiftly behind the possibility of a negotiated peace is remarkable. The temptation is to accuse him, and others, of undue deference to Government, insufficient horror of war, and capitulation to the war-spirit. Perhaps, but we must also acknowledge an element of hard-headed strategic realism about what would best secure lasting peace.
The Duty of the Church in War: The Need for a Counterpoise
If Gore’s thoughts about the decision to go to war and how best to end it were conventional, some of his views were more distinctive. A 1914 address putting the case for the traditional prohibition on the clergy bearing arms significantly qualifies his patriotic enthusiasm:
Military enthusiasm in times of national danger is overwhelming … It carries all before it. It inspires to great sacrifices, but also it has shown in all history a strange power to blind the eyes and harden the hearts. Thus, even at periods of great national necessity it needs counterpoise … It is [the clergy’s] privilege in every way to support our soldiers and sailors in a just war, and to bless the recruits, and to pray for God’s blessing on our arms, bringing to bear upon the war the whole power of organised prayer, public and private. But it is our duty also to remember the perils of military enthusiasm, and to keep our minds full of the ideals and laws of the Lamb of God, Jesus of Nazareth, so that there may be a steady and quiet and constant counterpoise to the emotions of war.Footnote 38
Counterpoise meant, for instance, strongly opposing reprisals after German air-raids killed hundreds of civilians throughout 1917. Even The Modern Churchman, house-journal of the Church’s liberal intellectuals, wanted vengeance: ‘If the only way to protect adequately an English babe is to kill a German babe, then it is the duty of our authorities, however repugnant, to do it. More particularly is this so, when we reflect that the innocent German babe will in all probability grow up to be a killer of babes himself…’.Footnote 39 Gore stood firm: ‘if we allow ourselves to be led by the Germans, the descent is easy and the end certain degradation’.Footnote 40 He was not alone: even Winnington-Ingram of London (often a leader in bellicosity) preached to bereaved parents that they did not really want German infants killed in revenge.Footnote 41 Retaliation, however, duly followed.
On another topic, Gore was largely isolated: the proper treatment of conscientious objectors. Few concerned themselves much with the rights of men considered traitorous cowards. Barrett details their appalling treatment and general social and ecclesiastical attitudes towards them: ‘altogether ten men died in custody, whilst a further sixty three died as a direct result of their imprisonment, mostly within weeks of their release’.Footnote 42 This did not dissuade the local clergy around Dartmoor from complaining about the ‘ridiculously lenient treatment’ afforded COs there.Footnote 43 Gore himself was maddened by their refusal to contribute in any way, even non-lethally, to the war effort: ‘Many of them are among the most aggravating human beings with whom I have ever had to deal.’Footnote 44
Nevertheless, they were men of conscience and that drew Gore and a few allies (Scott Holland, William Temple, Hicks of Lincoln) to their defence. Men should not be persecuted and threatened with execution for conscience. There should be fair hearings – in March 1916 Gore with Temple and others protested that:
in many cases the examination has not been conducted with the fairness and respect for sincerely held opinions, which Englishmen demand and respect … Conscience, however mistaken, ought not to be a subject for public ridicule. We desire to affirm our conviction that the preservation of freedom of conscience is a vital religious principle.Footnote 45
As men of conscience, Gore trusted the objectors would take whatever punishment was meted out to them.Footnote 46 However, if imprisonment was necessary, this should be in civilian prisons under civilian law. In the House of Lords, Gore urged that the aim should not be to break the objectors. They remained:
…men, who after the war, when the time for reconstruction comes, will be most valuable. They possess noble qualities, great powers, great enthusiasm, great self-sacrifice … we should take steps to see that they are preserved alive during the war and so preserved alive that their spirit and capacity for service shall not be broken, so preserved alive that no unnecessary bitterness shall taint [their] spirit and will.Footnote 47
Such wisdom was unpopular and courageous.
A significant element in Gore’s counterpoise was his Catholicism. Wilkinson notes that ‘those Anglicans … whose primary allegiance was to the Catholic Church, transcending nationality, felt the scandal of war between Christian nations more acutely than those whose primary allegiance was to the Church of England as the national Church’.Footnote 48 Catholicism for Gore meant far more than a particular style of worship and theology. It was the pattern of life that God intended for humanity: ‘… a fellowship in which, still loving their families and countries, men should be bound together in a bond which literally and really should be closer than the family, closer than the nation’.Footnote 49 Catholicism was life lived according to the principle of mutual service: where individuals, groups and even nations subordinated their selfish interest to the common good. This great idea had been largely abandoned under the pressure of a political, economic and international order based on selfishness. It had to be recovered:
No victory, not even the most conclusive … will do the nations any good without a change of spirit; otherwise they will be led after the war to build themselves up again with the same or greater concentration of purpose, one against the other in mutual jealousy, until after a period of weariness war breaks out again, and the only prospect is the end of our civilisation.Footnote 50
The war then must be fought and the peace planned to inaugurate a changed international common life, one marked indeed by national distinctiveness – but distinctiveness for mutual service, as opposed to competitive struggle. The guarantor of this new order would be President Wilson’s League of Nations, under which all states would agree to settle their differences not through force but by submitting to binding arbitration. We would surrender some freedom to pursue our own interests, or enforce our own conception of justice. We would submit to a common court, a common law, a common international good. Worshipping ‘the idol of unmitigated national sovereignty’ had led to catastrophe; it must now be abandoned.Footnote 51 Before the war, few patriots could have accepted this. But the war would change everything: ‘this horrible war, when it is ended, will let loose a vast flood of purifying emotion and feeling and thought, and a profound disgust of war and of the military spirit in nations’.Footnote 52 By 1918, Gore was convinced the flood was in full flow. Despite opposition in the House of Lords, he was convinced that people were ready to give up the freedom to wage war: ‘the general feeling of mankind is growing in the direction of a peremptory demand that mankind shall be saved, even at great loss and by measures which involve great risks, from what otherwise seems to be the imminent prospect of a catastrophe to our civilisation’.Footnote 53 This element of the counterpoise was truly radical: Gore thought that the British should be fighting the Great War in order to renounce the right ever to make war unilaterally again.
The best expression of the counterpoise comes in a prayer which Gore encouraged to be used throughout the war:
Give Thy blessing, O Father, to the people of that great and fair land, with whose rulers we are at war. Strengthen the hands of the wise and the just, who follow charity, and look for justice and freedom, among them as among us. Drive away the evil passions of hatred, suspicion, and the fever of war, among them as among us. Relieve and comfort the anxious, the bereaved, the sick and the tormented, and all the pale host of sufferers, among them as among us. Reward the patience, industry, loving-kindness, and simplicity of the common people, and all the men of honest and good heart, among them as among us. Forgive the cruelty, the ambition, the foolish pride, the heartless schemes, of which the world’s rulers have been guilty. Teach us everywhere to repent and to amend. Help us so to use our present afflictions which come from us and not from Thee, that we may build on the ruins of our evil past a firm and lasting peace. Grant that, united in a good understanding with those who are now become our enemies, though they are our brethren in Christ, they and we may establish a new order, wherein the nations may live together in trust and fellowship, in the emulation of great achievements and the rivalry of good deeds, truthful, honest and just in our dealings with one another, and following in all things the standard of the Son of Man, whom we have denied, and put to shame, and crucified afresh upon the Calvary of our battle ground.Footnote 54
Counterpoise: A Critique
Those words are deeply moving. However, overall Gore’s counterpoise was a small and ineffective gesture against the whirlwind of war. In retrospect, it may even be judged impossible to combine the counterpoise Gore wanted with the patriotic enthusiasm he endorsed. He avoided the most excessive holy war rhetoric, but on occasion came close: ‘the courage and the self-sacrifice of the soldier is a magnificent and inspiring virtue, and we are thrilled with a kind of holy exultation in the quality of our soldiers and sailors. A great many of us who cannot be soldiers find ourselves envying them a road so direct and simple into the divine kingdom.’Footnote 55 Gore immediately qualifies this by noting that soldiers are not saints, and they will need the grace of Christ and the prayers of the Church as they pass through purgatory (a belief which made a powerful comeback in First World War Anglicanism).Footnote 56 Nevertheless, he here approaches a dangerously romanticizing and sacralizing view of war. The rhetoric of sacrifice was indeed a remarkably powerful strain of language, emphasizing the purgative, elevating, ennobling qualities of war.Footnote 57 Gore, like many, risked being swept away by it (and sweeping others). He never attains anything like the moral clarity achieved, on occasion, by Studdert Kennedy: ‘You don’t go out to give your life; you go out to take the other fellow’s. You don’t go out to save, you go out to kill … War is pure undiluted, filthy sin. I don’t believe it has ever redeemed a single soul – or ever will.’Footnote 58
Such brutal realism highlights the omissions in Gore’s counterpoise. He writes as if war was a civilized, noble affair. He never mentions the use of poison gas by both sides (the Church certainly knew all about it: Wilkinson chillingly reports the Church’s boasting that one priest was offering national service as a research scientist in a chemical weapons factory).Footnote 59 He is equally silent about a fundamental aspect of Allied strategy: starvation. Philip Jenkins writes:
The Germans tried to sink enough Allied shipping to starve Britain into submission, while the vastly superior British navy ensured that Germany could not import the food it needed to maintain its population … the Germans failed, and the British succeeded … In 1916 and 1917, Central Europe suffered a disastrous famine that claimed perhaps a million lives.Footnote 60
For all the hard-headed strategic realism we observed earlier, there is a certain culpable naiveté in Gore’s understanding of what war actually meant. Perhaps at some level he realized what one of the conscientious objectors on whose behalf he had protested, Herbert Runacres, said in 1935: once started, war takes on an energy of its own and ‘no protest of a hundred Bishop Gores against any of its methods will be of the slightest avail’.Footnote 61
Was Gore’s original decision to support the war itself naïve? By its end, the new order he had hoped for still seemed far off:
after eighteen months of armistice and peace (so called) we see such meagre signs of any new spirit in the nations that we are almost in despair … if we compare the tone of our pulpits advocating the war with its tone in advocating the remedy against war – the supernational spirit and organisation – we cannot but recognise that it is as boiling water to tepid.Footnote 62
A critic might remind him of what he had written in 1890 and reiterated many times since: ‘human nature, as we have had experience of it in history, presents in great measure a scene of moral ruin’.Footnote 63 Gore had a thoroughly Augustinian streak, which while it acknowledged great moral figures and even lasting moral advances, distrusted all human projects. So perhaps he was entitled to be disappointed in 1921, but not surprised. He should have seen through the idealistic rhetoric. He should have been suspicious that this is the kind of story human beings always tell themselves to justify violence, and clearer that in the end violence tends to overwhelm it. The conscientious objector Thomas Attlee put it well: ‘war doesn’t work: to kill one devil you call up seven new ones. Every day it lasts, it puts the triumph of justice further off … I think the growth of envy, hatred, malice, pride, vainglory, hypocrisy and certainly all uncharitableness is enough to drive me crazy.’Footnote 64
In Gore’s defence, however, his hopes were in fact largely vindicated – albeit only after another war. Though much of the post-1945 international settlement was unjust, the nations of Western Europe did abandon ‘the idol of unmitigated national sovereignty’, and embarked upon a peace of unprecedented duration and stability. There are good grounds to hope that this will continue. As Gore argued in 1918, it seems that the more democracy spreads and takes root, the more the warlike tendencies of the world will be reduced – war, as 2 Sam. 11.1 and Erasmus observe, was usually the sport of kings.Footnote 65 The two wars put an end to military autocracies in Western Europe, replacing them with increasingly stable democracies which over time have pooled a degree of sovereignty. Even after the British vote in June 2016 to leave the European Union, war between Britain and France and Germany seems genuinely inconceivable. The catastrophe has done what Gore said it would: there is a new spirit among, at any rate, the Western European nations. The charge of naiveté, then, does not convince.
So we are left with a paradox. Gore was unrealistic about war was actually like, yet right about what might come through it. He was far more realistic than many absolute pacifists. Maude Royden, for instance, not only saw no serious moral difference between the two sides but believed ‘if we [the UK] had disarmed in the first week of last August … there would have been no war. So great a moral miracle would have had its effect. The world would have been changed. No nation would have rushed into war in “self-defence.”’Footnote 66 It is fair to criticize Gore for blinding himself to what war meant: critics, however, often fail to remember that pacifism is also morally ambiguous. A Europe where German militarism had not been comprehensively defeated is unlikely to have become a decent common home.
Gore the Theologian
The ethics of war were not the only pressing business for Christian thinkers in 1914–18. According to Alan Wilkinson, the war confronted Christians with a situation comparable to the Babylonian exile, forcing believers ‘to ask fundamental questions about their inherited mode of faith, forced to reconsider their understanding of their own history’.Footnote 67 For some, war led to reflection upon divine omnipotence and impassibility: Studdert Kennedy’s The Hardest Part (1919) has been hailed by Jurgen Moltmann as more theologically significant than Barth’s Romans.Footnote 68 Or the questioning could be, as for Barth, of the conflation of Christianity with modernity, prompting a recovered emphasis on the tremendous difference between human experience and the knowledge of God. Wilkinson himself, it seems, would prefer a Bonhoeffer style re-evaluation of the secular as the realm of God’s action; the discovery that ‘God’s word emerges through a ceaseless dialectical interaction between the Church and the world’;Footnote 69 and a Tillich-inspired re-evaluation of the relationship between ‘inarticulate religion’ and the institutional Church.Footnote 70 He believes the Church largely failed this test of theological imagination: ‘the three major modes of thought in the nineteenth century – Romanticism, Liberalism, and Evangelicalism, together with their counterparts in the Church of England – were all weighed in the balance between 1914–18 and found wanting’.Footnote 71
What of Gore? Paul Avis is illuminating: ‘Gore called upon his hearers (at the 1929 Gifford Lectures) to “pledge themselves solemnly and seriously to refuse no conclusion, however unpalatable, which on serious consideration appears to be true.” This being so, it is astounding that he never found it necessary to revise his beliefs in any significant way.’Footnote 72 Avis is right. When Gore retired to write ‘big books’, among the chief fruits were the trilogy of books (Belief in God [1921], Belief in Christ [1922] and The Holy Spirit and the Church [1924]) the closest Gore came to writing a systematic theology. They barely mention the war – let alone suggest that it changed his thinking. Modernity posed all sorts of questions (biblical criticism, the relationship of faith and science, the possibility of miracle) which Gore was fascinated by. The war, though, had not changed the theological agenda.
It is not that Gore thought the war raised no sharp questions. However, he had faced them long before 1914. He had always been, like Barth after 1918, alert to the cultural captivity of Christianity. He was instinctively Augustinian: sharply aware of the radical evil in humanity, and sceptical about the myth of progress – the war did not shock him as profoundly as it did more optimistic spirits. His theology had also long emphasized the divine self-emptying, and the perfection of power in weakness. The clearest expression of this comes in his commentary on The Epistles of St John (1920), but it is certainly present in his pre-war thought. Commenting on ‘God is love’, Gore writes:
...theologians have sometimes been at such pains to guard the impassibility of the Father – His incapacity for suffering – that the whole spirit of that self-sacrifice which appears as the very central characteristic of our Lord has been represented as alien to the being of the Father. But St. John conceives of the Son as in his Incarnation revealing nothing else but the mind and the character of the Father. His love is God’s love, and as the very essence of his love is self-sacrifice, such, St. John would have us believe, is the love of the Father.Footnote 73
As for reimagining the fundamental categories of faith, Gore was uninterested. No theological revolution was called for: the way to understand the war theologically was in the traditional biblical manner of understanding catastrophe, as the judgement of God. War is what happens when nations deliberately set themselves against the will of God. Human beings – personally, socially, nationally – have chosen the politics of competition and supremacy, and the natural end of that choosing is war. Gore laid out the indictment unforgettably in Birmingham Cathedral in 1915:
Let us look back on the great industrial epoch which the period of this church stands for in this industrial city. It was based on the principle of individualism which is really the principle of selfishness. Abolish political privileges, it said, such as have been associated with the landed aristocracy … let all have an equal voice, and a fair chance. Let competition be free. Let universal education sharpen men’s wits. Let science explore and exploit the resources of nature for the advancement of man … Let religion be a private concern, and keep its hand off business. Let the civil law confine itself as far as possible to the protection of life and property, and leave us free to live our lives and spend our money in our own way.
… And progress of a kind, progress such as represented in the expansion of Birmingham, was so manifest, so marvellous, that it seemed as if there were at work some inevitable law of human progress, as if progress could be taken for granted. The boundless expansion of wealth, the boundless achievements of science, none could gainsay. They were taken to be the greatest goods. In industry, in international relations, even in religion, free competition would bring the best result out of human capacity. Universal commerce and universal science would surely mean universal peace.
We had become widely sceptical of the glorious vision, long before the war, both in England and America. Gloom and anxiety had succeeded the exultation. Free competition so-called had meant wealth for the successful, but it had meant slums, poverty, disease, sweated labour, the child death-rate, the dwindling of villages, a widespread sense of injustice and discontent. As England’s historical refusal to look with Irish eyes on Irish affairs had bred a hostile Ireland, so the refusal of the governing classes effectively to look at the state of the country from the point of view of labour had bred a hostile and embittered labour world. We seemed in Ireland and England alike at the verge of civil war eighteen months ago…. Poverty and luxury alike had sorely cankered the discipline and sanctity of the home; competition between nations had placed the whole world under a constant threat of war, while science was arming the nations against each other with more and more terrific instruments of destruction. After all, we kept saying to one another, is it so certain we are on the sure road of progress? Are we not rather on the edge of disaster? … And then the blow fell.Footnote 74
The blow was war: the shattering end of that whole way of life which assumed that our basic relation to each other is one of competition. It was, for Gore, a basic truth about human beings that we are not made that way. We were made to love and serve one another, to bring each other to fullness of life. Our pre-1914 economic life, political culture, and international diplomacy had been based on denial of that truth. The war was simply the inevitable catastrophe such denial always brings.
Gore’s mode of thought was sufficiently biblical that for him, judgement was always laced with hope. In Scripture, things are shattered for new possibilities to take their place. Israel goes into exile to be reborn. Jesus is crucified, to make possible new life for all. For Gore, because the war was divine judgement, it was also redemptive – not least because it was so overwhelmingly catastrophic. It had been made unmistakeably and unforgettably clear that the old ways meant death and hell. The nations, through and because of this inferno, would arrive at a new way of living together predicated on justice and peace and common security.
By Wilkinson’s standards, Gore failed the test of theological imagination represented by the war. How much that matters depends on whether one agrees that the war required the bursting of old theological categories. Gore did not. The war fitted perfectly within the biblical model of sin, judgement and hope: it was overwhelmingly terrible, but did not render the traditional understanding of God’s ways with the world impossible or incomprehensible. The very sharp questions raised for Christians by the war were about the failure of their discipleship, not the content of their faith.
Conclusion
How should we judge Charles Gore’s response to the First World War?
He certainly seems never to have grasped the reality of what war meant: the gassing, the deliberate mass starvation. ‘I’ve had the time of my life out here … most exciting’, he commented after a 1914 tour of the front, and it is hard not to judge such giddiness harshly.Footnote 75 His unwavering support for the essential justice of the Allied cause led him to underplay or ignore what the rhetoric of courage and sacrifice masked. The ‘counterpoise’ was a largely vain attempt to ride an especially wild tiger.
Should he, then, have supported the war at all? For Christian pacifists such as Hauerwas the answer is simple: disciples of Jesus do not fight wars. They stand as a sign of resistance to the world about them, witnesses to an alternative way of being. It is a simple, seductive vision – and one with which Gore might be expected to sympathize. Like Hauerwas, he yearned for the church simply to be the church, to let the light of its moral difference burn brightly. Prestige comments:
Gore was a prophet. His primary desire was to make better Christians, rather than more Christians. He thought of the church intensively, as a body charged with witness for God; if the Church of England had done all he wanted of it, it might have become a smaller church than it is, but it would certainly have been more outspoken in its witness.Footnote 76
He disdained the many compromises the Church made with the world, and viewed the English Church’s failure to demand radical discipleship of its members as its most telling fault:
I do not think it is better for the mass of men to take themselves as Christians without serious moral effort … how can it be believed that such a method could commend itself to One who dared to go forward with his full moral claim – who dared to proclaim and to insist on the true life – What moral teacher of men ever showed less anxiety to commend himself to majorities? The method of the established church as we have known it in England seems to me the very antithesis of the method of Christ.Footnote 77
Yet on the specific compromise with worldly standards of behaviour that is war-making, Gore pauses. He cannot shake himself of the conviction that nations have the right to defend themselves, or others, against unprovoked attack. We recall his interpretation of ‘turn the other cheek’: while the instinct for mere revenge is to be mortified, there may remain a duty to use force in the interests of justice and the social order. Recent scholarship, marshalled by the likes of Jenkins and Biggar, has reminded us that there was indeed just cause for the Allied war in 1914, and further that there is little reason to assume that diplomacy could have succeeded in establishing a just peace (or even peace) before November 1918. For Gore, the question of war was morally complicated in a way that other questions – to do with money and sex and class – were not.
Nonetheless, the alacrity and unswerving nature of Gore’s support for the war remains disturbing. That support, and his decision not to back Lansdowne’s appeal for negotiations, may ultimately have been justified, but Gore (absent the evidence of those destroyed personal papers) seems to have arrived at both with remarkable intellectual and spiritual ease. This could be evidence of far-seeing realism, or of uncritical deference to Government and a refusal to ask sharp questions. Gore’s record suggests the former, but the power of the war-spirit and the weight of expectation surrounding an English bishop in the early twentieth century cannot wholly be discounted.
Perhaps Gore sometimes revisited the fundamental question of the justice of the war. Jenkins reminds us that most observers in 1914 expected ‘an intense spasm of violence, but in a short space of time’.Footnote 78 Gore, like others, would have been amazed, horrified and disorientated as the carnage ground on seemingly without end. He will have remembered his opposition to the Boer War, his membership of the Church of England Peace League, and the maddening but noble example of the absolutist conscientious objectors. He saw his ‘counterpoise’ rendered again and again ineffectual, and in some recess of his conscience he must have known the brutal realities that it masked. It would be unsurprising if at some deep level of his being, far below what a senior Anglican Bishop could afford to articulate (perhaps even to himself), Gore had great doubts. He knew that ‘truly, war is not a Christian weapon. It “cometh of the evil one.”’Footnote 79
Yet not that far from Oxford, villages were being torched and civilians machine gunned. Faced with that, or with Islamic State today, it is difficult to see what other options remain than war. It will never be a good thing, never usher in the Kingdom of God or even, in all probability, a great leap forward in human affairs. All wars, however just, mean doing terrible things: the innocent will die, and even the guilty are made in the image of God and loved by Him. Gore took the decision to support war quickly, and seems to have passed too easily over its moral ambiguity and terrible cost. He was, in part, swept along by the very war-spirit the Church of England Peace League had correctly identified as incompatible with Christianity. He might, perhaps, even have acknowledged all this. Yet even then, he would not recant his decision. For Gore, making war as part of the fundamental duty to justice and the maintenance of international order was not sin but grim necessity.
