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Daniel Gerrard, The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200, by Jehangir Yezdi Malegam, The English Historical Review, Volume 131, Issue 548, February 2016, Pages 144–145, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev380
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Extract
In this book, Jehangir Malegam ranges widely through the polemical and theological sources for the western church in the high medieval period to consider what clerical intellectuals understood by the terms ‘peace’ ( pax ) and ‘violence’ ( violentia ). He demonstrates that, in contrast to the straightforward modern understanding of peace as the absence of conflict, elite ecclesiastical opinion in the period understood peace more in terms of a properly-ordered community united in the sacraments (most especially in the Eucharist). In consequence, violence must be understood not in terms of physical destruction but as the disruption of that order. From this position, it follows that the Christian must be deeply concerned properly to distinguish ‘true peace’ from the many species of ‘false peace’ based around false sacraments or illegitimate oath communities. While these might offer tranquillity on earth, they represent the torpor of the oppressed under tyranny or the soul trapped by sensuality. True peace therefore must be understood as an act of rebellion by the soul against the body and the church against the world. Conflict is not the enemy of peace but one of its defining aspects.
