Augustine on War and Military Service

5. Interpreting Augustine

5 Interpreting Augustine In retrospect it is understandable that there would eventually emerge an interpretation of St. Augustine that would make him an authority on the Christian view of war. To begin with, more of his writings survive than is the case for any other Christian writer of the first millennium. In the small-print Migne edition of the Patrologia Latina, they fill fourteen quarto volumes. The survival of so much material is in itself a testament not only to how much he wrote during his lifetime, but also to the authority with which his works were regarded in subsequent centuries, since succeeding generations were motivated to the laborious task of repeatedly copying works of his that were often quite lengthy and involved. Furthermore, since Augustine wrote in the late fourth and early fifth century, the very time when Christian writers were grappling with issues presented by the rise to prominence and dominance of their fellow believers in the Roman empire, it is only to be expected that in the vast bulk of his writings one can find instances where issues of war and military service were addressed. Yet there is actually relatively little to be found in his works on these issues in comparison to the amount of material devoted to other subjects. In evaluating both the place that Augustine’s thoughts on war and military service occupied in the context of his time and how his views were regarded by succeeding generations, there arises for a modern interpreter the question of how common or unique his ideas were in comparison with those of his Christian contemporaries. Nowadays we tend to prize originality in a writer, and consequently a modern interpreter of Augustine might tend to emphasize his distinctiveness among contemporaries. Such was not the way his ideas were viewed during, for example, the medieval period. In becoming one of the premier Latin Fathers, what became valued in his work was evidence of its congruence with the consensus doctorum. By that reading, Augustine’s difference with his contemporaries would be minimized, and anything that fell outside that consensus marginalized or ignored. This consideration sets up a conceptual 147 filter, so to speak, which in succeeding centuries tended to constrict the content of his original views on war and military service. One must seek to set aside the constraints placed on that material by especially his medieval interpreters, the canonists and theologians who helped to construct him as an authority on war. It is true that at this date it is arguably impossible to free oneself entirely from the accumulated weight of the intervening centuries of scholarship on Augustine that has often been shaped by the conceptual filters of his medieval interpreters. But even a cursory attempt to do so reveals that much of what has been written on Augustine’s views on war and military service in especially twentieth-century scholarship is at best misconceived, and at worst simply wrong. It would not be very productive to engage in an unenlightening “ordeal by footnotes” whenever anything in what follows contradicts one writer or another. Although arguably there is at least something new in what follows, it is also true that there is much that is familiar here to those who have looked at Augustine’s views on war. In particular, there is marked congruence with the path laid out in Herbert Deane’s classic work The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine.1 One could argue that that work presented an Augustine that was overly schematized and inadequately historicized, but the same could be said to some extent of any interpretation of Augustine, including the present one.2 1. Herbert Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). The following works have been especially useful for the next three chapters: On Augustine’s biography, Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); hereafter Brown, remains fundamental. On the Donatist conflict in particular, and more generally on the state of the African church in Augustine’s day, there is now the excellent book of Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); hereafter Shaw. On Augustine’s works in general, and The City of God in particular, Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); hereafter Fitzgerald; and Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s...