Augustine on War and Military Service

4. The Roman Just War and Early Christianity

4 The Roman Just War and Early Christianity I. BELLUM IUSTUM ET PIUM Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto—“In God is our trust.” These lines from the last stanza of the American national anthem, penned by Francis Scott Key in 1814, illustrate strikingly the persistence across time and space in the Western world of the fundamental and interrelated elements of the just war concept of the ancient Romans, that a war fought for a just cause ensures divine support and consequently victory.1 This concept of divinely 1. Important recent discussions on this theme include: Hans Drexler, “Iustum Bellum,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 102, no. 2 (1959): 97–140; Herbert Hausmaninger, “‘Bellum iustum’ und ‘iusta causa belli’ im älteren römischen Recht,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht 11 (1961): 335–45; Sigrid Albert, Bellum Iustum: Die Theorie des “gerechten Krieges” und ihre praktische Bedeutung für die auswärtigen Auseinandersetzungen Roms in republikanischer Zeit, Frankfurter Althistorische Studien 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Michael Lassleben, 1980); Silvia Clavadetscher-Thürlemann, Πόλεμος δίκαιος und bellum iustum:Versuch einer Ideengeschichte (Zürich, 1985); Helga Botermann, “Ciceros Gedanken zum ‘gerechten Krieg’ in de officiis 1, 34-40,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 69 (1987): 1–29; Mauro Mantovani, Bellum Iustum: Die Idee des gerechten Krieges in der römischen Kaiserzeit (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990). See also the works cited in Clavadetscher-Thürlemann, 135, n. 44. Despite its title, Mantovani’s work, though valuable, contains relatively little as a whole on the use of the just war idea in the imperial period, as a good part of his treatment deals with the Augustan period or literature written then, especially Livy’s history, which deals with the Republican period. 123 sent victory as a consequence of fighting in a just cause appeared not only in antiquity, but in the medieval period as well. It is of course possible to overemphasize the role of cultural conservatism in explaining this phenomenon. Such an explanation would suggest a continuity of ideas over millennia. Another, perhaps more credible explanation for this apparent continuity was advanced in the early twentieth century by Joachim von Elbe, who remarked that “the states in their practice, that remained constant over a period of several centuries up to recent times, always attempted to justify their wars with cogent reasons of law or equity, in obvious response to a deep-seated spiritual need of human nature to base political actions on just and equitable grounds [italics mine].”2 This need of polities to justify their wars on the grounds of equity seems well nigh universal, and is not restricted to the West.3 Although the impetus to justify war may be universal, its verbal expression is culturally specific, and there is often observable a continuity in its verbal expression over the centuries. The reflection of just war rhetoric not only in Augustine, but also in both the ancient and the medieval Western world, justifies a brief look at the ancient Roman concept of just war. Questions surrounding the archaic fetial ritual of declaring purum piumque duellum4 against Rome’s enemies such as the history and ultimate disappearance of that ritual and the extent to which Cicero’s later theoretical formulation of the bellum iustum was influenced by Stoicism have been treated exhaustively elsewhere and have limited relevance for the purposes of this study.5 Other 2. Joachim von Elbe, “The Evolution of the Concept of the Just War in International Law,” American Journal of International Law 33, no. 4 (October 1939): 685. 3. See von Elbe, 686, n. 164, on the declaration of war against China by the Japanese emperor in 1894. On ancient non-Western examples of just war, Paul Christopher, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 8–12. On the ancient Greek “laws of war,” both in terms of ius ad bellum and ius in bello, see op. cit., 10–12, and Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 3–4. Despite its being usually coupled with the ancient Roman just war in discussions of the origins of the Western just war idea, the Roman bellum iustum, demonstrably the fons et origo of the idea in the West as a practice and as a term in political culture, owes nothing functionally to the Greek idea, and hence the discussion here need not address the...