William R. Stevenson, Jr.: : Christian Love and the Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in St. Augustine and His Modern Interpreters. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 27, 1988.
Many early Christian theologians abhorred war and embraced pacifism. One of the greatest minds of the early Church, and one of the most humane men who ever lived, Origen of Alexandria, taught that the Gospels prohibit all violence. He constructed an elaborate system of allegory to explain—some would say explain away—the God-commanded battles of the Pentateuch.
With the professed conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, Christians found themselves politically responsible for the first time. They had to decide whether or not to defend themselves forcefully with the legions they inherited from pagan Rome.
Rome already had a doctrine of just war, elaborated by Cicero centuries before. Augustine as it were baptized Cicero’s teaching, a transformation Professor Stevenson says nothing about. But errors of omission, or of commission, rarely shadow this scrupulous essay, conducted with sensitive intelligence and firm scholarly justice.
How can the religion of spiritual love go to war with carnal weapons? Augustine answers that it can do so because human nature and its condition itself embodies tensions and even contradictions. Their nature mixing goodness and sin, men cannot escape paradox in any action, or even in thought. “The actualization of even a diluted sense of justice in the world was for [Augustine] an intensely complicated and inevitably tragic process.” War’s extremities only heighten the fundamental paradoxes of human life itself.
Observing that “Augustine’s thoughts on war cannot be divorced from his thoughts on God,” Stephenson presents a well-considered, concise reading of Augustinian theology. His familiar doctrine of the “two cities,” heavenly and earthly, serves as an image of every human being’s “most important decision,” the “choice between turning toward and turning away from God,” of loving the Creator or loving His creations, bodily or intellectual. Because these two cities will intertwine until the Day of Judgment, Augustine finds “no true justice in this life.” In the true sense, there is no more a just ‘carnal’ or earthly war than there is any just earthly peace. Constantine’s conversion didn’t perfect the Roman Empire, although it made it more hospitable to Christians.
Still, men rightly cherish earthly peace, here and now. It “both moderates the misery [of this life] and provides an atmosphere for necessary contemplation of God’s presence.” There may be no atheists in foxholes, but neither are there saints. War can be a tragic necessity in order to attain this modest peace. “The polity’s ‘moral’ purpose, while very real,” is for Augustine “only indirect: to keep the peace.”
Political authority issues from God’s providence, the intelligent direction of His agape. This does not free such authority from the perversity of the human will. Decisions to wage war are often unjust even by the modest standards attainable on earth. The injustice of many wars does not excuse disobedience to rulers; no sentimental populist, Augustine regards subjects as corrupt as rulers, and he requires their obedience in all but extreme cases. The only example he gives is not war but state-enforced idolatry.
“For Augustine, war was justifiable only as an action arising out of right love”—love of God and of neighbor for the sake of the divine image in him. “To love one’s fellows is not to condone their wrongdoing. Rather, it is to distinguish between the person and the wrongdoing.” War does not necessarily prevent the love that brings this distinction to light. Indeed, “if circumstances are appropriate, love [agape] requires rebuke,” including physical coercion. A father punishes lovingly, and a ruler may order war lovingly; Augustine himself made no objection to the military defense of besieged Hippo, where he served as archbishop. This stern ardor has nothing to do with romance or sentimentality, which accounts for its near-implausibility to modern sensibilities.
Augustine recognizes a problem with agapic love. Original sin clouds our thoughts, including our introspection. Even rules or principles do not suffice; they are all-too-human. How does a statesman who goes to war know his motives to be right? He doesn’t. He remains in need of God’s unmerited grace, as do all human beings; his weaker and fallible agape calls forth God’s all-powerful and perfectly wise agape.
Stevenson concludes with a chapter on two twentieth-century just-war theorists who take Augustine as their guide. Paul Ramsey departs from Augustine in his optimistic opinion that a just war is a positive good, not a necessary evil, seen in both his confidence in reason to discern right conduct and in his absolute prohibition of the deliberate killing of innocents. Reinhold Niehbuhr, though a Protestant, in Stevenson’s view comes closer to Augustinian pessimism, always a product not of despair but of humility. Reason does not suffice because thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction fails to address the irremediably contradictory character of human life and also because reason too, ruled by perverse human will, cannot ascend from the cave that is the earthly city.
Although the machines generated by modern scientific rationality wax more formidable with every year, “war remains a contest of human will.” Both Ramsey and Niebuhr, following Augustine, see this. And in following Augustine with fidelity, Stevenson helps readers see Augustine’s thoughts with near-prelapserian clarity—so much so that I am tempted to think his book calls into question the anti-rational pessimism it conscientiously portrays.
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