No . 138 The Trusty Servant
War and Peace
Edmund Jessop ( Coll , 67-72 ) reminds us that there are less martial forms of service than taking up arms .
Our thoughts at the War Cloister Centenary Service have rightly been focused on the many Wykehamists who served their country , and in many cases gave their lives , as members of the armed forces . But we should also remember those who served their country differently but equally - as advocates for peace . Donald MacKinnon has been described as ‘ by far the the most influential British theologian of the twentieth century ’, and George MacLeod was an outstanding figure of the Scottish church , most famous for rebuilding Iona Abbey but also a prominent pacifist . Wykehamists , Scots , pacifists - it seems their lives must have intersected but there is , as far as I am aware , no record that they ever met .
Donald MacKinnon ( Coll , 27 – 32 ) Donald MacKinnon was born in 1913 in Oban , in the west of Scotland , where his father was procurator fiscal . He attended Cargilfield in Edinburgh , the oldest prep school in Scotland ( still going strong ), and came 7 th on Election Roll in 1927 . He won prizes in history ( Vere Herbert Smith prize ) and divinā ( Moore Stephens prize ).
He was a keen debater , engaging early on in questions of war and peace . One such debate reported in The Wykehamist of 31 st March 1932 saw him arguing that ‘ peace must be a natural state of affairs , not an interval between wars … thoughts must turn from war to the world commonwealth of nations ’. In a debate during Short Half the previous year , he had proposed the Motion that ‘ Patriotism under modern conditions is a mischievous emotion ’. MacKinnon argued for Internationalism , since patriotism was ‘ a narrow-minded idea ’.
Donald MacKinnon ( Coll , 27-32 ) in the 1932 College Prefects ’ photograph
The motion was lost by 27 votes to 16 but The Wykehamist judged his speech ‘ well thought out and fluently delivered ’.
From 1932 to 1936 he was an undergraduate at New College Oxford , completing the four year course in Greats in three years , thus allowing him to study theology in his final year . He then spent a year in Edinburgh before returning to Oxford in 1937 as a tutor at Keble .
MacKinnon produced a steady stream of pamphlets and articles over the next few years condemning what he saw as failures by various Churches to uphold Christ ’ s teaching . He was appalled by the Catholic Church ’ s silence in the face of atrocities against civilians committed by Franco ’ s troops . Italy ’ s conduct in Abyssinia had likewise drawn no condemnation from the Church . By 1938 MacKinnon was accusing the Church of England of moral and spiritual impotence so grave that it seemed to be not the Church but merely ‘ another self-seeking human corporation ’.
He was himself medically unfit for military service because of his asthma , but became particularly concerned about indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations , which he thought called for ‘ qualified non-cooperation ’ - conscientious objection . He accepted that war might be necessary as a last resort , but it must be fought in accord with Christian doctrines of just war . Catholics could not support a ‘ total ’ war which ignored any limitation on conduct of the war , particularly the need for non-combatant immunity .
MacKinnon foresaw , in 1938 , Britain ’ s willingness to enter into total war with Germany and wrote that ‘ There are some things which we cannot do … many English Christians would find themselves involved in grave moral problems if they were called upon to take part in an aerial bombardment of the enemy civilian population ’. He wrote of the ‘ demonic of Hitlerism as a Satanic phenomenon ’ but added that ‘ we can be sure that by the end of the war Western democracy will have become so too ’.
After the war MacKinnon was appointed Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen , where he worked from 1947 – 1960 , and subsequently Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge . His academic style was to chew at problems ( and pencils ) with no oversimplification . One commentator noted that ‘ MacKinnon was not always the ideal teacher for a particular student . On an off day he could leave a whole class utterly baffled ’. In 1971 he gave a lecture in School on the problem of evil . As always at Winchester , the men present didn ’ t quite realise the full stature of their distinguished guest .
MacKinnon retired to Aberdeen in 1978 and died in 1994 .
George MacLeod ( D , 09 – 13 ) George MacLeod was born in 1895 into a prominent Glasgow family : his father was MP for Glasgow Central and the Chief Recruiting Officer in Scotland during World War I . He arrived in Winchester in 1909 and left in 1913
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