Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives (review)

The constituent conflicts that comprise the so-called “Global War on Terror” have brought the various legal and moral issues of the use of force to the fore in recent years. This edited volume is a series of essays presented to the American Political Science Association in 2000. While most of these works have appeared in print in the intervening years, this is their first appearance as a collective whole. The book is divided into two parts, with the first examining the morality of war, specifically the development of just war theory, while the second looks at a multitude of topics in the same genre in its modern idiom, tending more towards actual practice.

The first section includes pre-Christian and Christian foundations of the ideas surrounding the permissible use of force. They examine classical commentators such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; then move on to early Christian writers such as Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, and St. Ambrose. Saint Augustine and his more complete elucidation of just war take an entire chapter. From there, the examination moves to Aquinas and, later, to two less common medieval theorists, Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan. Thus, the contributors offer an interesting juxtaposition between the classical and early and later Christian writers.

The essays are arrayed thematically, but also roughly chronologically. So although discussions in the first three chapters take the reader from classical to medieval theorists, the fourth returns to the early Christian era by examining the seeming contradiction between St. Augustine’s discussions of the use of force against non-Christians and his advocacy of force against schismatics. Although the language in this part sometimes becomes technical, one need not be an expert in philosophy or theology to follow it.

Accompanying the chapters of the first half is a commentary by Gerson Moreno-Riaño of Regent University, who is not shy about disagreeing with the contributors. This is, of course, as it should be, but some collections fail in this. This commentary goes beyond critique by raising the interesting and provocative question of “whether Christianity itself justifies violence in certain situations…” and “where [do] some Christian writers go to find justifications for violence…?” (p. 139). It is important to note that when the author refers to the “Christian” church, he means the Roman Catholic Church.

Unfortunately, Moreno-Riaño, in his discussion of the bases of Augustine’s and Aquinas’ just war theories as being extra-biblical and derived from other traditions, betrays a not-too-subtle bias when he states that “‘for seventeen hundred years (the [Catholic] Church) has engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord.’ There is little doubt that this indictment is correct.” (p. 138). He continues later in his tirade saying the Catholic Church “‘is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry…’” (p. 139). It is not so much that Moren-Riaño seems to equate the actions or statements by individuals as the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, or the uncritical, unsupported and blind acceptance of this worn-out cliché, but the amateurish attempt to escape responsibility for it, by stating that it is only one interpretation, that has no place in a scholarly work. By declaring, “There is little doubt…” the attempted escape is an adult version of “was that my out loud voice?”

Further, one would have to question the overall scholarly nature of this part of the commentary based on the glaring omission of any reference to what Catholics call “Sacred Tradition” as being part of this background from which he supposes Augustine and Aquinas drew. This basic fact is entirely missing. Fortunately, this bias does not taint the other contributors.

From this inglorious conclusion of the first half, the volume moves to the present and deals with a wide variety of use of force...