From the Angels of Mons to the Garden of Gethsemane: Some Theological Reflections on the Western Front

Abstract

The Great War began with widespread public euphoria across the combatant nations, with community leaders, political, ecclesiastical and other, giving enthusiastic endorsement to the ‘war effort.’ In addition to simplistic and clichéd proclamations that ‘God is on our side,’ early in the war stories of spiritual phenomena, such as the so-called ‘Angels of Mons’ and the ‘White Comrade’, captured the public imagination. As the war progressed, however, and particularly in the wake of the Battle of the Somme from 1 July 1916, there is a noticeable shift in the spiritual and theological language of the battlefront (if not the home front) — away from angelic visitations bringing divinely ordained victory, and towards the ‘suffering God’ of No Man’s Land. The primary vehicle for this are the war poets, and the dominant symbolic language that of the Passion of Christ, who prays with great anguish in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest and betrayal that the cup of suffering might pass from him. As that cup will nor pass from Christ, neither would it pass those who endured the trenches of the Western Front. By the end of the war, the transcendent God had become an imminent deity, and the place of visitation was not the heavenly places, but the mud and blood of No Man’s Land.