“If I were not a Christian, I would not continue to serve the King another hour . . . . I know not whence I should derive any sense of duty if not from God . . . . To my steadfast faith alone do I owe the power of resisting all manner of absurdities . . .”
Otto von Bismarck (1871)*
In the Beatitudes, Christ numbers “peacemakers” among the blessed, telling us “they shall be called sons of God.” Many modern Christians appear to believe that Christ used the word “peacemakers” to denote milksops who avoid conflict by living under a white flag. These milksops keep the peace by surrendering everything without delay and without a fight. Indeed, we may suppose that more than a few of these craven Christians have the sophistic guile to tell themselves that their spineless surrenders are a higher, more spiritual, form of courage—that it requires, when you really think about it, a special sort of bravery to lick a boot.
The great German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was not this sort of Christian, and I daresay his understanding of the word “peacemaker” was akin to the understanding of Christ. It is said that Bismarck once asked the court pastor of Prussia, a man named Stöcker, if he, Stöcker, had known any men who were thoroughly brave. To this the pastor slyly replied that “there might be several definitions of courage.” Bismarck laughed and put Stöcker in his place with the gibe:
“Oh, yes, the moral courage of letting one’s face be slapped rather than fight a duel; I have met plenty of men who did that.”**
Although not much of a churchgoer, Bismarck called himself a “staunch Christian” and insisted that his iron discipline and muscular worldview were direct outgrowths of his religious faith. As he says in my epigraph, there is no duty if there is no God. And a man with no sense of duty has little difficulty being a peacemaker because he has nothing (except his own comfort) to fight for.
Bismarck was an aristocrat and a Royalist, and when he became a member of the Prussian Parliament in 1869, he had the following exchange with a democratic opponent by the name of d’Ester.
D’Ester: “You alone in all your party have always treated us with politeness. Let us make a bargain. If we gain the upper hand we shall spare you; if fortune should favor you, you shall do the same for us.”
Bismarck: “If your party has its way, life will not be worth living; if ours is victorious, there will have to be executions, but they shall be conducted with politeness up to the last step of the ladder.”***
Bismarck did not live under a white flag or surrender everything without delay and without a fight. Believing he had a duty to God, the fight for him was not just a political game.
While enrolled as a student at Gottingen in the 1830s, young Bismarck was once reproved by the Rector for the inflexible pugnacity with which he expressed his reactionary opinions. Undaunted, Bismarck told the Rector that he, Bismarck, detested Frenchmen, French principles, and all the revolutionary Germans who were just “Frenchmen in disguise.” Bismark told the Rector that he prayed he would be given “the sword of Joshua” so he could slay them all.
“Well, my young friend, you are preparing yourself for great trouble,” said the Rector with a shake of his head. “Your opinions are those of another age.”
“Good opinions blossom again like the trees after winter,” the stout young Bismarck replied.†
Everyone whose opinions are those of another age would do well to keep this anecdote in his vest pocket. It may serve, like Galadriel’s vial, as a light in dark places.
Bismarck was educated at a time when the philosophy of Hegel dominated the German universities, but he later said he imbibed only so much Hegel as was necessary to pass his exams. He set down Kant before he reaching the end, disgusted by the inflexibility of Kant’s system. Bismarck lived, as we have seen, under a profound sense of duty, but he found the path of duty in the ever-changing circumstances of real life, and not on a map drafted beforehand by a moral cartographer.
“I gradually became a lawyer at the beer-table and on the fencing-floor, and a life of contemplation in the midst of nature influenced me more than the philosophers.”††
Bismarck’s “beer-table” was a place where men argued and were required to think on their feet. It was not just a prop for the elbows of boozy sots. The “fencing-floor” was likewise a place of parries and thrusts, not plans. And a contemplative mind in the midst of nature goes in whatever way it thinks best, and is not led down an engineered road of formal inferences and deductions.
As Bismarck explained, to live by duty is very different than to live by principles, since duty is ultimately responsibility to a person and not to a system, or even a plan. Bismarck’s sense of his religious duty to God was the same as his sense of his political duty to his Kaiser and his sense of his military duty to his commander. It was the duty always to act in such a way that one could later report one’s actions without prevarication or shame.
“I have never lived on principles. When I have had to act, I never first asked myself on what principles I was going to act, but I went at it, and did what I thought good. I have often been reproached for want of principles. In my youth I often talked with a lady cousin of mine, who had a tincture of philosophy, and who wanted to play the aunt with me about the question whether I must adopt principles or not. At last I put an end to further disputing by remarking, ‘If I am to go through life with principles, it seems to me just the same as if I had to pass along a narrow forest path with a long pole in my mouth.’”††
*) Charles Lowe, Bismarck’s Table-Talk (London: H. Grevel and Co., 1895), p. 291.
**)ibid, p. 41.
***)ibid, p. 30.
†)ibid , p. 26.
††)ibid, p. 226.
The Orthosphere 
The “peacemaker” beatitude has been the source of much mischief. A better understanding of the passage was provided by Wyclif, who translated it (correctly, I think) as “Blest are peaceable men.” The idea is that Jesus is promising benefits to those Christians who get along with their own neighbors and don’t go looking for trouble. Nowadays the beatitude is taken as praise for peace activists, arbitrators of disputes, and other moral busybodies — not Jesus’ point at all.
There is a world of difference between looking for a fight and running away from a fight. About five years ago I wrote a post on the statement that the men of Appalachia would “spit no fire and eat no dirt.” Spit no Fire, Eat no Dirt This strikes me as the right attitude.
How exactly did St. Bismarck interpret that remark about turning the other cheek?
This remark by Bismarck may answer your question: “And as for Austria, I will act towards her, as long as possible, as I would to my own wife if I were to quarrel with her—that is to say, with Christian patience. But between a velvet hand and cold steel I know no medium” (p. 136). Christian patience means turning the other cheek as long as possible, but not forever. The “velvet hand” for a long time, and then “cold steel.”
I think that turning the other cheek is a shaming mechanism that can be applied to fellow believers and others who share the same basic values as you. Not something to be extended to mortal enemies, which would be stupid and suicidal. We should avoid creating universal principles, to be applied to everyone in all situations, from Scriptural passages that were intended for a specific audience in a specific situation. Making that mistake is one of the things that has emasculated the church.
I think a Christian should stand out as notably patient and slow to anger, whoever may be provoking him. But his patience need not be infinite and his anger need not be comatose. A Christian can say “enough is enough,” he is just slower to say it than most people.
people who want to know what turning the other cheek means should read the original Greek, then read Schmidt. There’s your answer.
Priests and, presumably, pastors, are forbidden to take up arms except against a foreign enemy, and thus would be religiously prohibited from fighting a duel. Bismarck was an asshole who bungled his way through destroying the Metternichean balance of power that kept European Christendom unified and strong, thus resulting in multiple European civil wars. This sounds like a typical case of Bismarck being a stupid asshole.
Metternich’s balance of power wasn’t good for all time. It contained the eighteenth-century revolution but could not contain the nineteenth-century revolution. We are living through a similar time of transition when the structures of power no longer reflect the reality.
I’m going to have to look into Bismarck. He sounds like an outdoorsman, and so to me a kindred spirit. Like TR.
In the wilderness, there’s no time to deliberate upon principles. One must rather at every moment act toward the good, so far as one can see it.
I grant that the foregoing is an expression of principles. One cannot act toward the good instantly and determinedly and without pause for deliberation in the face of an emergency except upon the basis of a prior and absolute commitment to principles of good – and of prudence, etc. Indeed, one cannot thus respond to exigencies aptly without having rehearsed them aforehand, in thought or deed, many times. Rehearsal is almost everything.
This is why we have, and need, masters, and teachers.
But still. Principles in abstraction are one sort of thing, whereas principles in operation – which we call duty, or prudence, or sagacity, or canniness, or wiliness, or any of the other adjectives applied to Odysseus, to Kit Carson, to Jim Bridger, to Bohemund, to Robin of Locksley, to Crazy Horse or to Sitting Bull, to Nelson or Cochrane or Cook, to Hawkeye, et alii – are quite another.
It is one thing to admire principles from a comfortable armchair in front of a comfortable fire with a comfortable brandy at hand, and quite another to adhere to them on a sinking ship or surrounded by thousands of Zulus or stranded alone at altitude in winter. The two approaches do not at all conflict; many, we may hope, are the men who have survived the crises of the wildernesses of the world so as to arrive at the comfortable chair by the comfortable fire with the comfortable brandy at hand. But, they are different. Who sits that chair without ever having stood the ground thereof does so cheaply, and unworthily – most of all, ignorantly.
In fine: There is no escape from principle into some prior animal impulse. To wit:
… duty is ultimately responsibility to a person and not to a system, or even a plan.
That is a principle. Our basic responsibility is to our others. Our basic responsibility is charity.
I enjoyed this book of Bismarck’s table talk, since he talks in that delightfully bluff German manner. You are right that doing what seems good under the circumstances is a principle, but I think this effectively means choosing what principal to apply at any given moment. In the wilderness scenario, for instance, one might easily decide that “now is not the time for caution” or “sticking to the trail is in these circumstances folly.” I suppose this might come down to the maxim that every man has the right to suspend his maxims when suspending those maxims seems to him a good idea.
With all due respect to Bismarck (and he was a great statesman), anyone who says this is a liar (whether to others only or to himself as well). Christianity distilled down to a secular philosophy is just a secular philosophy; one cannot be a “staunch Christian” without actually practicing the faith.
Bismarck was not piously observant, but there is enough in his table talk to convince me that his Christianity was more authentic than that of many American politicians.
Dear God, let’s hope so! I’ve said for years (decades, even) that to watch even 30 minutes of C-Span is beneath the common decency of any “red-blooded American.” I’m sure history will prove me wrong, but I can’t even begin to imagine an episode so indicative of our current circumstance, Congressionally speaking, as the one that occurred a couple of weeks ago between AOC and the “gentlelady” from Arizona, Marjorie Taylor Greene. As my grandfather might have expressed it upon viewing the same episode, ‘what the *uck is going on here?’ This is what you get when “Problematic Women” take control of the “conservative” ship of state. At least there’s some entertainment value to it all.
They say politics is show business for ugly people. These female politicians are not truly ugly, but then again, they are standing next to male politicians.
If “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” then so is ugly. And I state, without equivocation, or mental reservation, that ugly – physical ugly – was manifest all around in that scene. I’m however quite sure they’re all better looking outside the political scene. They’re probably better looking as strippers too, but that’s another story.
Arizona? MTG was born in and represents Georgia.
<blockquote>Arizona? MTG was born in and represents Georgia.</blockquote>
Oh, yeah. My bad. I didn’t mean to insult the good people of Arizona. Georgians in MTG’s district might want to re-think their choice of representative; the worst man is likely better than the best woman, like in the WNBA. Just sayin’.
Prepare yourself. A session of Congress will resemble a roller derby tournament in a few years. Or maybe mud wrestling.
-tincture of philosophy-
Uptick
The New Testament was written from the perspective of Middle Eastern pastoral tribesmen barely settled into civilization watching the Abrahamic Covenant blow up in front of their eyes, once it turned out the Greek and Roman phalanxes and their Pantheon could utterly smash God’s Chosen People. The theology was understandably meek and humble. “Turn the other cheek.” “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” “If any man take your tunic, give him your cloak.”
Bismarck, in charge of a technologically advanced nation-state with a bellicose national culture, naturally embraced a more aggressive theology.
Post-modern Americans, behind a wall of nuclear weapons and global reserve currency and living standards unprecedented in human history, hector their fellows to “give to whoever asks of you.” When that currency loses its reserve status, we’ll hear more of “if any man would not work, neither shall he eat.”
Religions, including the Christian one, are a lot more downstream of things than we’d like to admit.
I think this is right. Also that Christianity is more concerned with the shape of souls than the shape of societies. One other thing is that the key words of the New Testament have different shades of meaning in different cultural contexts.