Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

Memorial Day is a deeply important solemnity of the civil American calendar, devoted as it is to mourning and honoring those who have fallen in conflicts for the nation. The sea of memorial flags – each one representing a life lost – is a deeply moving and vivid sight each year on Boston Common. 

The roots of this observance clearly have a profound connection to the American Civil War (1861–1865) which is thought to have claimed around 620,000 lives, which was about two percent of the entire U.S. population at the time. The first national observance occurred on May 30, 1868, when General John A. Logan, commander of the “Grand Army of the Republic” (comprising Union veterans), issued a proclamation at Arlington National Cemetery calling for a nationwide “Decoration Day” — when the graves of the fallen could indeed be decorated. 

New York became the first state to declare Memorial Day a legal holiday in 1873, and by the late nineteenth century, the observance had spread across the nation. The First and then Second World Wars (with over 405,000 Americans slain in the latter) led to the transition to the title – Memorial Day – which was then officially promulgated in 1967 and became a national holiday in 1971.

The visually powerful sea of flags echoes the sight of the red poppies that blossomed across the battlefields in Flanders after the First World War. This flower thus became a symbol of remembrance and is widely worn for Armistice Day every year in November in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries, in a tradition linked to the famous and deeply evocative poem “In Flanders Fields,” by the Canadian Lieutenant Colonel and Army Doctor, John McCrae (1872-1918).

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place; and in the sky
    The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved, and now we lie
        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 
To you from failing hands we throw
    The torch; be yours to hold it high. 
    If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
        In Flanders fields.

Honoring those who have paid “the ultimate sacrifice” in war is so natural an instinct that it may lead us to neglect reflection on both why and how we actually do this. This engages some of our deepest human concerns, regarding the meaning of death and of sacrificial death in particular, through to the obligations of the living to the dead, the relationship between the individual and the community, as well as the nature of civic virtue and the relation of all these questions to our religious and cultural perspectives. 

Commemoration indeed involves a view of the past that necessarily reflects the values of the present that is inextricably tied to both the individual and our communal approach to – and quest for – meaning in the face of mortality, the nature of the good life and the great questions of transcendence.

In classical Greece, the retrieval and proper burial of the war dead was not merely a cultural courtesy but a sacred religious obligation and those who had died were understood to be in some sense the property of the gods, and proper burial was actually required in order for them to transfer from our human world to that of the shades below. Moreover, there was a kind of covenantal relationship between the polis and the divine order, vital to the continued existence of the polis such that dishonouring the dead could imperil the community and its good standing with the gods. 

Pericles’ Funeral Oration, delivered in 431 BCE at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, as recorded by Thucydides, took the form ultimately of a eulogy for Athens – in a way we would recognise as familiar now. The underlying logic was that the fallen soldiers were best honoured not by individualised lament but by celebrating and perpetuating the political order they died to defend. Thus it celebrated what Athens represented to Pericles, namely democracy, freedom, and high culture, even as – with rhetorical grandeur – he proclaimed that ultimately “the whole earth is the tomb of famous men.” 

The Romans strengthened the civic dimension while articulating further the personal dimensions of virtus (manly excellence) and the language of honorable death in service to the res publica – a view powerfully expressed in Horace’s line dulce et decorum est pro patria mori — “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Dying for one’s patria was intrinsically noble and the supreme act of a virtuous life which therefore merited perpetual commemoration. The soldier embodied the highest form of human excellence and thus represented an ideal of Roman virtue.

With the rise of Christianity, there was an initial ambivalence about the state and military service. Before Constantine many Christians had died at the hands of the State and its military for refusing idolatrous divine honours to the Emperor. Many Christians refused military service in consequence, while it was those who died as witnesses (martyrs) for their Christian faith, who occupied the supreme place among the honoured dead among the saints in heaven.

But by the time of St. Augustine, writing in the shadow of Rome’s collapse, caused him to bring a new perspective to whether a Christian could kill in war justifiably, and when killed be honored. The sophisticated answer was that in the case of a just war, fought under legitimate authority with right intention and for just cause, there was no act of culpable private violence but rather one of ordered love undertaken against evildoers who were rightfully to be stopped. The soldier who died thus, was a participant in the providential ordering of human society toward peace. Commemoration is thus grounded in recognising that such a death was morally purposive, not merely morally neutral. Such a death was also not at all assimilated to the unique sacrifice of Christ or to martyrdom in the theological sense (where dying for the gospel as it were and dying in service of the temporal peace that makes the gospel’s proclamation possible are to be carefully distinguished). And by the time of Aquinas, the three requirements of just war — sovereign authority, just cause, and right intention –– came to constitute the conditions under which military service became (in an echo of ancient Rome) not merely permissible but potentially an expression of virtue, and more specifically of justice. But now justice was grounded in a different metaphysic, namely one in which justice is a participation in the divine order, not merely a civic virtue.

Nonetheless, Christianity has always opposed any conflation of a soldier’s death with the unique redemptive sacrifice of Christ and this has entailed caution in respect of such a phrase as  “the ultimate sacrifice.” For the soldier this is the loss of this earthly life whereas the sacrifice of Christ was of cosmic scale by virtue of Christ being the only begotten Son of God who alone therefore could through his death offer a sacrifice equal to the sins of the whole world. The soldier’s death, however noble, remains an act within the fallen order of this world; Christ’s death is the singular act of cosmic redemption. We therefore honour the dead within a framework of prayer and resurrection hope and not a theology of redemptive military sacrifice. Nonetheless the laying down of one’s life for others in war is an act that points to transcendent meaning which also means that such death is never in the classical sense tragic.

We can thus acknowledge the horror of war, in awareness that is not always glorious, as we can also uphold the sorrow of the bereaved, and still affirm that the dead are not forgotten and that is not because of mere passing earthly remembrance, but because they are known to the God in whom we all have our being.  

There is too the deep warrant of the Christian theology of resurrection and the communion of saints. To remember and honour the dead is not merely a civic act, but a theological one with an eschatological horizon. This affirms that the dead are not simply gone, but in Christ await the resurrection of the body and the life to come –– in the community of the faithful which transcends the boundary of death.

When we commemorate the military dead we do so not only because they died for our freedom (the Periclean answer), nor simply because they died for their country (the Horatian answer), but because as human beings made in the image of God, they lived out a most costly fidelity to their vocation and in their deaths laid down their lives for our good  It is in the fulness of Christian hope and faith that we therefore remember them and entrust them not merely to the earth for cherishing but with confidence in the life to come and the mercy of God.

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If these last theological reflections seem abstract, we can find very human particulars in the life of John McCrae the Canadian Army doctor and poet who wrote the famous lines quoted above from “In Flanders fields.” Having served through the course of the First World War extensively on the front lines in Belgium, he had just been promoted to Colonel and appointed Consultant Physician to the British Armies in the Field, when he contracted pneumonia and died on January 28, 1918.

On February 14th, 1918, a Memorial Service was held in the Royal Victoria College at which the Principal, Sir William Peterson, presided and one John Macnaughton gave the address. He  lamented that one “so young in the prime of life” should so suddenly have died, but went on to discuss his faith observing that:

“He never lost the simple faith of his childhood. He was so sure about the main things, the vast things, the indispensable things, of which all formulated faiths are but a more or less stammering expression, that he was content with the rough embodiment in which his ancestors had laboured to bring those great realities to bear as beneficent and propulsive forces upon their own and their children’s minds and consciences. His instinctive faith sufficed him.”

Mcnaughton then went on to recall that:

“To his own students John McCrae once quoted the legend from a picture, to him “the most suggestive picture in the world”: 

What I spent I had: what I saved I lost: what I gave I have;

—and he added: “It will be in your power every day to store up for yourselves treasures that will come back to you in the consciousness of duty well done, of kind acts performed, things that having given away freely you yet possess. It has often seemed to me that when in the Judgement those surprised faces look up and say, Lord, when saw we Thee an’ hungered and fed Thee; or thirsty and gave Thee drink; a stranger, and took Thee in; naked and clothed Thee; and there meets them that warrant-royal of all charity, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me, there will be amongst those awed ones many a practitioner of medicine.”

And in the words of his later biographer Sir Andrew Macphail: 

“Beyond all consideration of his intellectual attainments John McCrae was the well beloved of his friends” who thus remembered with poignancy in the Miltonic phrase that in this life,

    But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

    Now thou art gone, and never must return!

(from Lycidas by John Milton. 1608 –1674)

A short Philosophical end note on some of the paradoxes regarding self-sacrifice

There are some seemingly paradoxical aspects to the concept of self-sacrifice…

Thus we might ask: 

1. If self-sacrifice can really be the praiseworthy act, when it involves the deliberate risking of something as precious as a human life. But this sense of the paradoxical dissipates if we reject evaluation of an act in the light of the way it balances the worth of our lives against other goods and hold instead that acts are to be evaluated on other grounds, such as whether or not they provide the best way of helping ourselves and others towards being perfected (in the sense of being that which we are truly called to be (or sanctified)). 

2. Why we should give up things for others and is it because there is some kind of claim upon us involved? Here we could answer that we can feel impelled to do so not because others have a claim on us, but because in the endeavour to preserve and enhance values (or virtues) as human beings, we must so act both on our own and on their behalf.

3. whether we gain anything when we sacrifice and if so, is not sacrifice then an act of strategy or of folly? But while we may well suppose that there ought to be a gain when we sacrifice (if it is to have an adequate meaning or purpose) nonetheless, paradoxically we ought not sacrifice in order to gain (i.e. it should be simply a second order good consequent upon the primary one motivating us). Thus the giving and the gaining can be seen as supplementary parts of a single act designed towards the end of human perfection.

4. How can we both recognise the value of something (as valuable as life) and yet choose to give it up freely and even gladly? After all, is it not paradoxical (again) to think of an act as both freely  engaged in, in one respect, while also compelled, or reluctantly engaged in, in another? (As we can readily see may be the case for a conscript in war.)  We do not want to sacrifice, yet it would seem evident that in some circumstances doing that which is good may quite properly demand this of us – though we nonetheless have to choose to accept it if the action is fully to embody the good.

5. Is the life and death of Jesus Christ the ultimate instance where a single being (albeit one understood classically as a human who was also divine) could actively sacrifice and be passively sacrificed all at once (as in the language of being both high-priest and victim) and again something we might conceive in terms of an active interior agency and passive exterior that is kenotically able to become subject to being sacrificed.

“All men have an excellence of some kind setting them over all others; all are deficient in some respects, the inferior of others. Because men are both together they must sacrifice but can never merely sacrifice. They must give as well as receive, receive as well as give. There is no question then as to whether one ought to sacrifice or not; there is only the question of how much one should sacrifice, and when and how. Man is a relatively excellent but absolutely deficient being. Since he seeks to become perfected with others, and since in that state he but prepares himself to interplay with them, that is best for him to do which makes him and others good men who need never sacrifice.”