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C H A P T E R F I V E A CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE ORIGINS OF WAR CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS AND political scientists concerned with understanding war can use constructivism as a fruitful source for thinking about war’s origins. Constructivists are critical of several elements of modern political thought, many of which emerged precisely as a departure from the earlier Christian tradition, as described in chapter 2. Therefore, perhaps surprisingly, a constructivist view on the origins of war shares much in common with that of the earlier Christian tradition. This should be of more than antiquarian interest because, as I will show in this and later chapters, Catholic theologians and official Catholic teaching have consistently challenged central ideas of modern political thought by reaffirming three principles from the premodern Christian tradition : that human existence is oriented toward a relationship with God; that this orientation shapes all areas of human life, including politics, and is not relegated to its own isolated sphere; and that politics must be understood within a broad philosophical and ethical framework. Even if constructivists do not affirm those principles, constructivism could nonetheless be useful to Catholic thinkers in their efforts to articulate and apply those principles. Constructivism can also help to reconceptualize the key points of the earlier Christian understanding of the origins of war that have been downplayed in twentieth-century Catholic thought. In this chapter I will show that developments in Catholic theology in the second half of the twentieth century make such a reconceptualization particularly opportune. Constructivism, therefore, can help Catholics articulate insights from their own tradition in ways consistent with the best contemporary theology. LINKING CONSTRUCTIVISM AND THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION As described earlier, modern political thought moved away from the Christian tradition in three ways; constructivism can help Catholics articulate a response to each of them. In the first place, constructivism’s concern with how identities , interests, and norms of behavior are formed by cultural traditions opens the way for a renewed discussion of the ends of human existence. As Alasdair 95 96 Chapter Five MacIntyre argues, we learn the telos or end of a good life through the personal and social narratives, or tradition, of which we are part, and this learning is the very purpose of tradition. The modern rejection of a telos for human existence has gone hand in hand with a denial that we are embedded in narratives at all.1 Therefore a revival of the idea that we are socially constituted can also lead to new reflection on the ends of human life, because it is precisely our culturally formed identities that give our lives purpose. Because it only seeks to describe the way international politics is, rather than to prescribe how it should be, constructivism by itself cannot tell us what the ends of human political activity ought to be, but it at least recognizes that states are motivated by different conceptions of those ends and attempts to describe the processes through which states come to have them. Constructivism’s understanding of politics is compatible with the belief that politics cannot be separated from the transcendent dimension of human existence . Constructivists try to show how political actors’ beliefs about the ultimate questions of human existence shape their behavior and therefore influence international politics. Of course, describing how political actors are motivated by beliefs about the transcendent dimension of human existence does not show that there is in fact a connection between political life and the transcendent, and no constructivist would attempt to describe such a relationship. As I will show later in this chapter, however, some important twentieth-century Catholic thinkers have tried to show that the very fact that human beings ask questions about life’s ultimate significance means that we do in fact have a relationship with a dimension of reality that transcends this world, namely God. If humanity’s responses to these questions play an essential role in understanding political life, then I would argue that it is logical to conclude that ultimately human politics, including international politics, cannot be understood without reference to humanity’s relationship with God. Finally, constructivism rejects the particularly modern way of thinking of politics as an objective science; that is, as understandable apart from metaphysical questions. Modern thinkers have tended to think of politics as an objective science based simply on the observation of facts, whether it is Machiavelli’s science of politics, Pufendorf’s nonsectarian political morality based on the laws of nature, or Waltz...

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