The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200

8. Disciplining Behemoth: Provisions for Secular Peace

264  Chapter 8 Disciplining Behemoth Provisions for Secular Peace Late in the twelfth century, a canon lawyer and bishop named Rufinus of Sorrento wrote a two-volume treatise, possibly the first of its kind entirely devoted to peace.1 In De bono pacis (On the Goodness of Peace), Rufinus argued that human beings experienced peace as species of a universal PAX: the peace of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.2 Reflective of a century in which peace could be treated as true or false,these species of peace also inhered within Satan and associated Satan with humanity . Humanity enjoyed three types of peace, which derived from angelic and diabolical models: the wicked Peace of Egypt, the ideal Peace of eternal Jerusalem, and the communitarian but coercive Peace of Babylon. Egypt derived from a diabolical parody of tranquility, the “sleep of Behemoth,” and it should be disrupted by any means available.3 The peace of Jerusalem, the blessed concord of the ideal church, was nourished by piety and held together by charity. But Rufinus prescribed for humanity only the Peace 1. Kiril Petkov,The Kiss of Peace:Ritual,Self,and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Leiden, 2003), 1, calls Rufinus’s work “the earliest surviving systematic treatise on the medieval peace.” 2. Rufinus of Sorrento, De bono pacis, ed. Roman Deutinger, MGH Studien und Texte 17 (henceforth DBP). 3. DBP 1.8, 76. Cf. Job 40.16. DISCIPLINING BEHEMOTH 265 of Babylon, a peace that shaped city and government, and which must be regulated by earthly devices. The final chapter of this book describes the intellectual and political changes that shaped Rufinus’s systemization of peace. Rufinus’s treatise On the Goodness of Peace winds up a century of clerical experimentation with turbulent and repressive modes of peacemaking designed to liberate Christians from unseen violence and introduce them to true peace. While essentially denying that peace could be perfected on earth,Rufinus voiced clerical willingness to make peace with the present world, not the one hereafter. Christians could enjoy this peace without feeling that they had settled for a counterfeit or submitted to an unjust captivity. Rufinus’s conception of the Peace of Babylon implicated communes in the totalizing schema of human peace. Accordingly, the context for Rufinus ’s mundane peace is municipal government. Contrary to Otto Gerhard Oexle’s argument that Rufinus classified communes as conspiracies, I suggest that by the 1180s, communes had integrated themselves into a political fabric that supported rather than undermined princely authority.4 Rather than making communes aspects of wicked (Egyptian) peace, this shift would have made them the engines of a more feasible and flexible peace. Following two decades of conflict between papacy and empire during which Pope Alexander III had turned to secular monarchs for help, Rufinus now asked both clergy and communes to participate in the Peace of Babylon. Perhaps unwittingly, by so doing he sowed the seeds for later political theorists to deny churchmen any role in the defense of peace on earth. As described previously in this book, reformers in the late eleventhcentury papacy had justified insurrection as a refusal to be anesthetized with political tranquility in the place of true peace.5 During the Investiture Controversy ,Popes Alexander II,Gregory VII,and Urban II gave monks permission to rebel against an abbot imposed from outside or bishops who were too intrusive; they urged lay reformist movements in northern Italian cities to take over the local churches and deny the sacraments of the ruling bishops; Gregory even excommunicated the emperor and insisted that all Christians 4. Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Peace through Conspiracy,” in Ordering Medieval Society: Perspectives on Intellectual and Practical Modes of Shaping Social Relations, ed. Bernhard Jussen, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Philadelphia,2001),290–291. While communal support for princely authority may have been most visible in France, we can argue this for northern Italy as well, where the ruling prince (in this case usually the bishop) could retain authority, but as guarantor of the commune rather than as the head of the city’s church. 5. See above, chapters 2 and 3. 266 THE SLEEP OF BEHEMOTH renounce their fidelity to him. Early twelfth-century scholars developed moralistic analogies to this revolutionary peacemaking around them, imagining an insurrection of the captive human spirit against flesh, a state of constant conflict that directed the self away from false peace and toward true. False peace...