Augustine on War and Military Service

Introduction

Introduction The early twenty-first century has witnessed a continued, heightened, and widespread interest in the idea of just war.1 This renewal of interest began early in the twentieth century prior to and especially after the First World War, after a centuries-long period when the idea was largely banished to the realm of moral theology. As the idea of just war gained increased visibility in intellectual discourse, it also acquired a history. In this account it emerged that the idea of Western just war was ancient, its origins traceable to statements made by St. Augustine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. As James Turner Johnson recently expressed it, “the origins of a specifically Christian just war concept first appeared in the thought of Augustine.”2 This Augustinian just war was first systematized in Gratian’s Decretum and received its classic formulation in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae in the late thirteenth century, from which point the just war idea became part of the Western Christian intellectual tradition. What I have just outlined could be considered a summary of the standard narrative of the development of the just war idea in the West. Unfortunately, there are a number of serious interrelated flaws in this narrative. Like all such reductive narratives, it tends to efface the influence through time of ideas divergent from a privileged “main” line of development by ignoring or even attempting to appropriate what are actually opposing intellectual trajectories, an approach that has been termed “tunnel history.”3 The prevailing narrative of just war’s development also tends to view the idea as a set of propositions transmitted by a series of intellectual “torch-bearers,” a view that tends toward rendering the idea ahistorical, at its core little influenced by contemporary historical circumstances. This view also emphasizes the ideational aspect of the justification of war and largely ignores its reality as an expression of political culture.4 1. One measure of the idea’s topicality is in the references to just war in President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in December 2009; for a transcript, see www.csmonitor.com/ World/Global-News/2009/1210/text-of-barack-obamas-nobel-peace-prize-acceptance-speech (accessed 14 May 2013). 2. James Turner Johnson, “Just War, As It Was and Is,” First Things 149 (January 2005): 14. 3. David Hackett Fisher, Historians’ Fallacies (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 142–44. 1 But the fundamental flaw in the prevailing narrative of the history of just war in the West, a notion that binds together the narrative with all its other flaws, is the role it assigns to Augustine. The African Father provides the authority necessary for privileging a core set of propositions on just war ascribed to him, a core that is always potentially recoverable by reverting to his original statements. Since by this view just war is an idea transmitted by a series of intellectuals, there must have been an originator of the idea, and that individual was Augustine. As will be shown, however, Augustine himself did not originate the Christian just war idea. This view of his role perverts what he thought and wrote about war and military service, and any subsequent scholarly interpretation of that material. More importantly, such a view tends to obscure and misrepresent what Christians in the first millennium, and later, actually thought about these matters. This book’s origin lies in work done for my article published in 2001 on the views of Gregory of Tours on war.5 There I noted that Gregory seemed to have a conception of the justification of war that apparently did not stem from Augustine.6 Subsequent reflection on the issues raised in that study, and research in the relevant texts and the body of scholarly interpretations intervening between Augustine’s time and our own, led to my realization that the standard narrative linking Augustine to the origination of the Christian just war doctrine was fundamentally flawed and, in the most important sense, utterly wrong. Such considerations inform the background for the current work, which basically has two goals. First, I have attempted to determine the content of and the context for early Christian ideas on war and military service, having set to one side the erroneous notion of Augustine’s magisterial influence on such thinking during this period. Second, I have tried to set Augustine’s actual thinking on the matter in its original historical and literary context, and to illustrate how he...