Images of Peace

Cynics have argued that if Tolstoy were to publish his novel War and Peace today, he would probably have chosen "Peace-Restoring and Peace-Keeping Missions" as a title. The notion of war is increasingly banned from the official political vocabulary, and we are more and more using expressions such as "restoring peace" when talking about the use of armed force in conflict. To put it even more clearly, we are using the word "peace" when meaning "war" (Hippler and Vec 2014). It would be an error, however, to presume that this inversion of meaning is just a matter of intellectual dishonesty. There is good reason to believe, on the contrary, that this semantic confusion has to be understood as being part of a particular conceptualization of what "peace" actually is. This paper will address some evolutions in the conceptual history of peace, admittedly in a fragmentary form.¹ In a first step, I will point out some features of medieval peace concepts, before turning, in a second step, to early modern developments of "internal" and "external peace." The last section will address Enlightenment concepts of peace, including Kant's famous Perpetual Peace. In all these cases, I will try to establish a parallel between conceptual and visual history, through the analysis of particularly striking images in which peace is represented.

I.

Pax Romana had been a central part of the official ideology of the Roman Empire since its inception. However, the word pax (peace), and even more the verb pacifari (to pacify), clearly conveyed a hardly dissimulated justification for political domination. In his political will, the Res Gestae, Emperor Augustus, thus described his military conquests as the advent of peace: "I extended the boundaries of all the provinces which were bordered by races not yet subject to our empire. The provinces of the Gauls, the Spains, and Germany, bounded by the ocean from Gades to the mouth of the Elbe, I reduced to a state of peace [pacavi]."²

Hence, it is no surprise that the very concept of peace became suspect. Pax clearly signified Pax Romana, and as such, it was the outcome of violent submission and, indeed, of a criminalization of any potential enemy. Peace, in short, was an ideological construction for purposes of imperial domination. This explains a very interesting twist in the conceptual history of peace during the later antiquity. The most interesting—and indeed one of the most influential texts until today—is certainly Augustine's Civitas Dei (The City of God). Roman etymologies insisted on the link between pax and pactum (contract or treaty) and derived both from the verb pango, to bind. Thus, "peace" clearly involved the existence of asymmetrical power-relations and, as such, pax was a concept that designed social and political realities: there could be peace between humans.

This changed in the Christian outlook. Peace would now become a cosmic principle and was conceived of as being at the foundation of an ontological order. Christian authors were obviously drawing heavily on the platonic tradition here. Plato conceived of reality in ideal terms. "Ideas" as cosmic principles are the most "real" things in Plato's philosophy. The lower, earthly things are nothing but pale copies of this ideal reality. Plato famously spelled this out in his analogy of the cave in chapter 7 of The Republic. Something very similar happened with the concept of peace in Augustine. Augustine's thinking about peace has been of crucial importance until today.³

Augustine places peace on top of all other values; it is indeed said to be the highest of all goods.⁴ It is also an ontological category that defines "being," as such.⁵ There is no being without peace, and this principle holds for the cosmos in general, as well as for particular beings, because a "peaceful" assemblage of elements constitutes an entity, as such. Augustine defines peace as "tranquillity of order" (tranquillitas ordinis). But what is "order" in this framework? Drawing on Plato, he defines order as "the disposition of all things according to their place."⁶ The three concepts of order, justice, and peace basically signify...