The Rebel Passion

A Short History of Some Pioneer Peace-Makers

Vera Brittain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367261757
• eBook ISBN: 9781000024081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Originally published in 1964, The Rebel Passion endeavours to tell the continuous story, in terms of their ideas and personalities and the vital flame that inspired them, of a group of very different yet spiritually related Christians who sought to confront a world involved in deeper conflict than any could fully realize, with the basic essentials of peace. Individual and corporate witness, beginning even before 1914, is presented against the dark background of many countries involved directly or indirectly in war, and illustrates the international scene, dangerous and tragic yet revolutionary and apocalyptic, over the tremendous half-century through which the older generation had lived, and which shaped the lives of their juniors.

In 1941 the last revised edition was issued of a factual historic record of the work of the I.F.o.R. up to twenty years ago. The present book aims at a different treatment, which instead of mainly summarizing missions, conferences and committees, seeks to interpret persons and events rather than merely describe them.

It tries above all to indicate how the philosophy and example of prophetic personalities influenced their various communities, in spite of totally different official values and the consistent opposition of 'establishments' to minority opinions based on insight and inspiration. It suggests that the thinking of ordinary individuals with distinguished minds, without the advantage of conspicuous social labels or the opportunity to stand on political pedestals, actually operates as a leaven which changes the thought of a generation. The fact that such a result had been achieved within measurable time should have encouraged those who worked on the contemporary scene to create spiritual foundations for the labours of future man and women.

This book was published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded at Cambridge in December, 1914, and followed by the International Fellowship in 1919.

Chapter 1

THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity. This is especially true of international politics in this twentieth century, which began as ‘the Century of Hope’, but now faces the possibility of going down to history as ‘the Century of Hate’.

It opened with a bitter colonial conflict which is still responsible for the national and racial turmoil that smoulders in South Africa, throwing psychological tentacles of animosity across a turbulent world. But this limited war was a mere curtain-raiser for the unlimited fratricidal wars which wrecked human relationships for two fierce decades separated by twenty years of acrimonious truce, and left behind them the Cold War which has so long divided political mankind into two hostile camps.

Beneath these major manifestations of hate have lain for half a century the subsidiary hatreds which transform human brotherhood into sub-human enmity: the tension between white and non-white races; the inhumanity of the Nazis (and not the Nazis only) towards the Jews; the ferocious intolerance of the respective practitioners of different political creeds. Antipathy matched itself against antipathy, and he whose hatred expressed itself most ruthlessly became the loudly publicized leader of his own cause.

In such a period of moral decadence, the Christian who looks for inspiration to the Cross where love was crucified but not destroyed represents the revolutionary element in his own community, which at periods of maximum strain denounces him as a traitor, and in less dramatic intervals deprives him, with all the ingenuity in its power, of opportunities to bear witness to his faith. His profound impulse of love and pity becomes, as Professor Gilbert Murray called it, ‘a rebel passion’, not only fighting against the brute powers of the world, but seeking to establish in their place a new form of leadership inspired by different standards. Inevitably he becomes an object of distrust and suspicion to the ‘accepted gods’ whose authority he endeavours to dethrone, and penalties which vary from ignominy and deprivation to imprisonment and death will be imposed upon him.

One of the redeeming characteristics of our immature society, dominated by the childish but lethal emotions of fear, hatred and greed, has been the slowly growing Christian minority of men and women possessed by the rebel passion, who have accepted the retribution demanded by ‘the organized force of society’ (that is, the Establishments of their day) as their contemporary share in the Cross of Christ. This book endeavours to tell the story of some pioneer peace-makers—for the most part neither saints nor heroes, though a few have been both—in whose lives charity and compassion have played an organic part which has left them unimpaired by popular emotions and unmoved by the consistent opposition of power-wielding authorities.

They have seldom found their way to conspicuous worldly pedestals, but because the minds of at least some have been distinguished and prophetic, their unpublicized impact on their contemporaries has operated as a leaven which is gradually changing the thought of a generation in spite of the powerful ethics of the amoral State and the contrary standards of the conventional majority. They are a minority—in Isaiah’s language a ‘remnant’ — whose thought speeds in advance of acknowledged values and thus keeps alive the vision of divine solutions for human problems (the Quakers’ ‘way of God for every situation’). In the words of the Abbe de Tourville, they are ‘forerunners … who are ahead of their time and whose personal action is based on an inward knowledge of that which is yet to come’.

The major question of our day is whether their revolutionary influence, wherever it may be exerted, can operate in time to save their society from the suicidal consequences of its infantile malignities. ‘The Christian,’ wrote Professor G. H. C. Macgregor, ‘must learn to live not as a baffled idealist but as a rebel against the world as it is.’ But protest is only the beginning of his mission; his long-term purpose is to replace a decadent and corrupt society by one which creates the right atmosphere for moral impulses to grow. The substantial measure of achievement brought about by a few pioneers in the half-century covered by this story may perhaps encourage contemporary workers similarly moved by the rebel passion to join in the attempt to substitute spiritual foundations for the self-interested worldly standards which have brought mankind to the edge of the abyss, and to achieve this difficult purpose before the hour has grown too late.

‘If there is one thing the world needs above everything it is Time,’ the editorial of a large popular newspaper recently and unexpectedly asserted; ‘Time for the human mind to adjust itself to what it has created.’ The significant men and women of our day may well appear to the future to be those who have contributed to this adjustment, whether or not their names are blazoned in the big headlines.

The advance of science in the twentieth century has made hatred not merely a form of moral degradation, but a threat to the survival of mankind. A main contribution to international hatreds has come from militant nationalism and the national sovereignties created by it. Individuals moved by the rebel passion have learned to transcend frontiers and, in spite of war and man-made political obstacles, to link men and women across the world who subscribe to similar ideals.

Fifty years ago, as we shall see in Chapter 3, a group of citizens joined together to form a Fellowship of Reconciliation which by the end of the First World War had grown international, and became the uniting bond between groups of seekers from many countries who saw the communion that they were creating in terms of a society still to come. They did not visualize their movement in the shape of a new Church, for as de Chardin has written in Le Milieu Divin, ‘the supernatural is a ferment, a soul, and not a complete and finished organism’. Rather it was seen as a witness within the Churches made by those who sought to interpret the Kingdom of God in terms of non-violence and sacrificial love.

The founders of the Fellowship sought individually and corporately to practice a ministry of reconciliation between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, believing all true reconciliation between men to be based on reconciliation between man and God. This, rather than mere protest, was their purpose, for they were united in the belief that love as revealed and interpreted by the life and death of Jesus Christ was the key to a peaceful and attainable human order. Membership meant a quest for social justice and peaceful change by methods consistent with Christ’s teaching, and hence involved the repudiation of war. The members sought less to put pressure on governments than to reach beyond the authority of the State to the failure of civilization, to heal the divisions in the human family from which this failure springs, and to draw together across all barriers of race, nationality, language and class many widely separated men and women linked by their characteristic interpretation of the New Testament.

In a leaflet entitled ‘The Harsh Terms of Peace’, Professor Howard Schomer, elected President of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1959, commented on the ‘soft-sounding’ name of this body (derived from the words of St Paul in II Corinthians v, 18). He contrasted its gentle title with the costly sacrifice accepted by virile revolutionaries perpetually ready ‘to stand up and be counted as unalterable friends of desperately imperilled human values’ amid the strident passions of two great wars, and the fears and suspicions generated by the ‘ghastly witch-hunt’ precipitated in the United States after the initial alarms of the Cold War. The accepted obligation to ‘speak truth’ to the power wielded by amoral governments does not lead to popularity and an easy life in such recurrent crises as this twentieth century has imposed upon itself.

An article by Percy W. Bartlett, one of the first members of the Fellowship and the General Secretary of the British F.o.R. from 1925 to 1936, describes it as being from the start not only a Christian but an inter-church society. What made it, he asks, not merely a peace organization but a pacifist group (or, as we prefer to say today, a ‘non-violent’ community, owing to the prolonged popular confusion of pacifism with ‘passivism’—i.e. standing aside and doing nothing in a challenging situation)? The answer seems partly to lie in the long history of pacifist thought within the churches, dating from the early days of Christianity when its practitioners were closest to the teaching of Jesus. In Him through the ages, and not least today, Christian pacifists have perceived the living embodiment of the rebel passion; the revolutionary leader who teaches reconciliation when the ethics of the Establishment demand not love but hate.

On September 17, 1960, when he dedicated the new headquarters of the International Fellowship in Finchley, London, Canon C. E. Raven described mankind as reaching its maturity only through the full knowledge of the Son of God — ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’. If we accept this interpretation of our God-ordained human destiny, we cannot help but regard war, the least inhibited expression of hate, as the extreme form of immaturity. Through it we press our claims, as children do, to the point of destruction. With its use of obsolete violence, war represents the supreme denial of Christ’s teaching and the chief stumbling block to man’s adoption of His methods. God’s redemptive means of overcoming evil, the conversion of enemies into friends, becomes unattainable when we make a holocaust of those enemies, and put them beyond the reach of either friendship or repentance.

Just before the Second World War, Evelyn Underbill wrote that the Church was moving rapidly towards a moment in which, if she was to retain her integrity and spiritual influence, she must define (one might add ‘unequivocally’, since within recent years a number of skilfully ambiguous pronouncements have been made) her attitude towards war. When an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, that moment came. The problem of seeking and keeping world peace then ceased to be one great social concern amongst others; it became the dominant problem, for our failure to solve it means the end of seekers and solutions alike. Yet it is precisely here that the Christian comes into conflict with the State, for with the priority given to power the State enshrines immaturity in the seat of judgment. By not only permitting but encouraging a double standard of behaviour which the Christian as Christian cannot accept, it compels the rebel passion to become a revolutionary force.

Throughout history this revolutionary force has exerted an influence out of all proportion to its numbers. The handful of religious rebels who stood up for three centuries with unimpaired principles against the pagan might of Imperial Rome found, for example, their modest counterpart in the little Bedford church of John Bunyan, composed of humble local citizens ‘very zealous according to their light’, which became the heart and symbol of the values established by the Puritan Revolution. The light which illuminated their hearts is the same light that gives the 40,000 members of the International Fellowship their place in history.

What meaning, we shall ask, attaches to their fifty years of witness for this catastrophically menaced age, in which human beings, still helpless, face a situation where the mature qualities of wisdom and judgment are demanded to their maximum? This story of a scattered but united group of modern rebels will perhaps show that they have relevance for today in terms of that search for the Kingdom of God which may embody the secret of human survival both spiritual and physical.

We may well find that, in Goethe’s words, ‘Man is only creative when he is truly religious; without religion he becomes merely repetitive and imitative’. And we may conclude, with even more reason than Goethe, that the time for the repetition and imitation of past human errors has gone by, and that our society must try the harsh and painful path of charity and compassion where alone sacrifice achieves a creative end.

Chapter 2

PEACE-MAKING EXPERIMENTS
BEFORE 1914

Long before the Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded, a number of concerned citizens in several countries had been working for international amity. “We need not go back so far as the seventeenth century ‘Grand Design’ of Sully, the great minister of Henry IV of France, or the De Jure Belli et Pacis of Hugo Grotius, published in 1625 as an answer to the anarchy created in Central Europe by the opening period of the Thirty Years War, to realize that a strong impulse towards peace, beginning with the Napoleonic Wars, existed during the century preceding 1914.

In an article on Nuclear Warfare published in The Witness (USA) for May 26, 1960, the Rev. John Nevin Sayre, the veteran American churchman and pacifist who for many years was Chairman of the New York Fellowship of Reconciliation, has written of ‘the creative moving of the spirit in search of life breaking through the obstruction of military thinking and habit which has been shared by mankind generally for centuries’. Military thinking and habit of course had its strong influence during the immediate pre-war decade; Britain’s Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, for example, spent the years between the Boer War and the First World War doing their best to make their equable fellow-citizens become war-minded, owing to the prevalence of conscription in Europe and their fear lest the sheer weight of the growing national military machines would break down the precarious balance of power between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. But the endeavours made to preserve friendly relationships, and the popular expectation that these would continue indefinitely, dominated the international scene to a degree never realized for years even by the survivors of the young generation which bore the burden of the 1914 conflict, and certainly unknown to their modern successors apart from a few students of history.

The first English-speaking peace societies arose directly after the Napoleonic Wars, even though governments then regarded war, or the threat of war, as a normal right of policy-making. An article by Bertram Pickard on ‘Friends and the Organisation of Peace’, published in The Friend for March 10, 1961, described the century and a half since 1815 as divided, as though by a great watershed, by the First World War and the League of Nations. After the foundation of the League, governments began to agree that war should be ended rather than modified, and undertook, at least in theory, to renounce their freedom to make war.

A number of conspicuous Quakers contributed their thinking to the peace testimony of the nineteenth century. According to an unpublished manuscript by Percy W. Bartlett, these included Jonathan Dymond (1796–1828), who wrote a well-known ‘Essay on War’; William Allen (1770–1843), a founder of the London Peace Society; Joseph Sturge (1793–1859), the first person to propose the holding of international peace congresses; and John Bright (1811–1889). Before the Schleswig-Holstein conflict of 1864–6, Joseph Sturge led deputations to the governments of Germany and Denmark hoping to avert war, and John Bright, as M.P. for Birmingham, made a moving speech against the Crimean War in 1857.

Between 1815 and 1914 Bertram Pickard shows that there were two distinct but overlapping movements towards peace. The first concerned itself with the reasons for abolishing war, which was seen as inconsistent with the Christian spirit and the true interests of mankind; the second and later movement was both more proletarian and more international, laying its emphasis on social justice and political freedom. Throughout this century the peace movement was a recognizable entity, with its co-ordinating bureaux and conferences quite unrelated to government bodies. By 1914 about 500 separate organizations were included within the peace movement as such.

Many of these arose in the United States, where as early as 1793 an enterprising free Negro from Baltimore named Benjamin Bannecker had produced a ‘Plan of a Peace Office’, published in Bannecker’s Almanack. In 1863, sixty years after Bannecker’s death, an article in the Atlantic Monthly described him as ‘the most original scientific intellect which the South has yet produced’. His plan, though much of it was naive and fantastic, bore some resemblance to more recent proposals.

A hundred years before the Fellowship of Reconciliation began, a New England Congregational minister, the Rev. Noah Worcester, started a forty-page magazine called The Friend of Peace, not dissimilar from the contemporary American publication Fellowship. An early issue published the Constitution of the Massachusetts Peace Society, which took over the magazine. The numerous Christian ministers who belonged to the Society found it a convenient repository for their religious articles, though it also published occasional political commentaries. In 1829 the Society became an auxiliary of the newly established American Peace Society, and The Friend of Peace was eventually rechristened The Calumet.

By 1835 peace organizations had arisen in most of the States, and The Calumet had given way to The Advocate of Peace as the organ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontispiece
• Commemoration Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Chapter 1. The Politics of Compassion
• Chapter 2. Peace-making Experiments Before 1914
• Chapter 3. The I.F.o.R. 1914–39
• Chapter 4. The I.F.o.R. 1939–64
• Chapter 5. British Witnesses
• Chapter 6. The American Testimony
• Chapter 7. Fellowships in Central Europe
• Chapter 8. Peace Leadership in France
• Chapter 9. Continental Crusaders
• Chapter 10. The Commonwealth Story
• Chapter 11. The Fellowship in Asia
• Chapter 12. The Peace Movement Through Fifty Years: Some Changes in Thought and Practice
• Appendix
• Index