Osborn on the Origins of Just War Tradition
Writing in Commonweal, Ronald Osborn argues that Christians should approach war mindful of the historical context in which just war tradition emerged. Not being a medieval historian or a scholar of Augustine, I cannot vouch for the veracity of Osborn’s narrative, but, if accurate, his picture speaks a thousand plus words to our contemporary thinking about the justification of war. He begins:
During the Middle Ages—the historical context for the rise of what would come to be known as the “just war” tradition—violence under any circumstance was deemed a great evil by the church. In official Catholic teaching, combat was accepted as legitimate only when it prevented still greater evils and led to an otherwise unobtainable peace. The common ecclesiastical opinion, though, was that virtually all wars by the feudal nobility were waged from libido dominandi, lacked just cause, and resulted in far greater harm than good.
The rules of “just war” were not developed in courts by religious advisers keen to justify war. Rather, the tradition took shape largely in the setting of the confessional. It was codified in canon law by priests who wanted to limit the brutality of war and who were responding to a very practical question: Should knights returning from the battlefield be allowed to partake of the Eucharist? “Just war” precepts were applied to determine what sorts of penance soldiers should be made to perform before being fully readmitted to the Body of Christ.
There was no place, then, for triumphal displays in the aftermath of wars or violence, even when a conflict was seen as a tragic necessity or manifestation of God’s providential punishment of the wicked by the sword of the magistrate. The authorities who served as the agents of God’s wrath might themselves reap the violence they sowed. The moral legitimacy of taking any human life made in the imago Dei was always at best a regrettable concession to the violent realities of the “city of man” still in defiance of the City of God. In all cases, the attitude of believers toward wars and killing was to be one of somber soul-searching and even mourning for their enemies.
Osborn concludes with a practical refection on what it means for a Christian to mourn the death of bin Laden: “I feel no love for Osama bin Laden. But Christian mourning for bin Laden requires not a feeling of grief at his passing, nor simply refraining from cheering in the streets. What it demands now is that we refuse to script his death into any myth of redemptive violence, into any nationalistic narrative of the regenerative power of blood sacrifice, whether of fallen soldiers or of those who would do us harm.”
For the Christian, it is not the violence of humanity but the graceful power of God that redeems, sanctifies, and saves.
The confessional/penance aspect of Osborn’s narrative is so important. John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas remind us of it in their work. I talk about it a bit in an article I have coming out this summer.
“What it demands now is that we refuse to script his death into any myth of redemptive violence, into any nationalistic narrative of the regenerative power of blood sacrifice, whether of fallen soldiers or of those who would do us harm.”
YES. Perfectly said.
One thing in my own work that I have found interesting here is that many of our famous new atheists buy the whole myth of redemptive violence hook, line, and sinker, all the while mocking Christianity as a religion of human sacrifice.
Congrats on the article! Where should one look for it?
Brett – Yep, Christoper Hitchens is a good example. Cavanaugh skewers him pretty badly in his book The Myth of Religious Violence.
This essay will be in the spring/summer issue of the Conrad Grebel Review which I think will be out mid-late summer.
Not surprising. If you consider evil solely as a material problem, then your solution to it will also be material. In this case violence.
Amen!
There has always been something unstable here. It is certainly true that for much of the late Antique period and the Middle Ages, war, especially for the soldiers themselves, was seen as morally compromised even when fighting in a cause that was just. After the Norman invasion of England, for example, which was approved as just by the Holy See (Duke William of Normandy’s claim to the throne being recognized as legitimate, and thus Harold’s presence on the throne seen to be a violent usurpation), the soldiers had to do penance for the men they killed. Why? In general, while it was admitted that the emperor (and, by extension, kings, princes, etc.) might be able morally and without fault to command and lead in war for the sake of justice and peace, a soldier was always at least partially doing what he did to gain favor with his (earthly) lord. Thus, his motive was always seen as compromised, and his killings even in justified war were seen to be to that extent sinful.
The instability here is that, structurally and materially, this concern also haunted many other activities in the world, including among some theologians conjugal union (which, on this view, was always compromised by sinful lust, even within the legitimate bond of marriage for the laudable purpose of procreation). So, we need to be careful with this kind of argument, touched as it is by a kind of contemptus mundi which, if not altogether wrong or unjustified, must be held in check by other perspectives. Indeed, one can see this kind of creative tension in the Peace and Truce of God movements of the eleventh century, limiting even legitimized violence within Christendom to ever narrower times, places, and persons, culminating in the declaration towards that end of the eleventh century that to shed the blood of a Christian is to shed the blood of Christ. However, these same gatherings also called upon armed men to swear to uphold the peace and truce against those who would wantonly violate it, i.e. by using violent and coercive force against the felons. What many people forget is that the Council of Clermont, from which was launched the First Crusade, declared inter alia the provisions of the Truce of God.
By the twelfth century and into the thirteenth, a more robust and positive sense of the possibilities of sanctification by living a life in the world (and soldiering, like commerce or raising a family, is one of the paradigmatic forms of secular life, at least historically) led to a more sanguine view of the possibility of non-sinful, even morally upright soldiering. Even so, it was never without some dire warnings about internal dispositions (as in St Bernard of Clairvaux’s treatise De laude novæ militiæ for the foundation of the Knights Templar) nor indeed without the sense that, however laudable, the witness of religious life in general, of a non-coercive life lived in common without recourse to violence or statecraft for its internal discipline, but only the freedom of the vows, was always more representative of the kingdom than even the best of knights.
The instability here is that, structurally and materially, this concern also haunted many other activities in the world, including among some theologians conjugal union (which, on this view, was always compromised by sinful lust, even within the legitimate bond of marriage for the laudable purpose of procreation). So, we need to be careful with this kind of argument, touched as it is by a kind of contemptus mundi which, if not altogether wrong or unjustified, must be held in check by other perspectives.
An important point and why I the historical context in which just war theory emerged should contribute to, but not dictate, our contemporary thinking on the matter.
The instability here is that, structurally and materially, this concern also haunted many other activities in the world, including among some theologians conjugal union (which, on this view, was always compromised by sinful lust, even within the legitimate bond of marriage for the laudable purpose of procreation).
Very important point.
When I was originally reading Kyle’s post last night, this was one of the first things that struck me: that one can actually construct exactly the same narrative in relation to understandings of married life, living in anything other than apostolic poverty, etc.
And, again, part of the key here is that whatever the way in which we got to where we are, the Church’s doctrines of just war, Christian marriage, etc. are not somehow compromises on a true understanding in which all “worldly” activities are essentially corrupt. The Holy Spirit guides the Church in its unfolding of Christ’s teaching such that the development described here is a correct development, not a corruption of a purer original.
Going back to a more primative understanding of just war or of marriage and the lay vocation is not superior to accepting the full teaching of the Church.
It should also be remembered that the just war theory arose in the context of Christian states with Christian monarchical sovereigns (individuals who were capable of having knowledge, consent and will that was unitary in nature, and thus easily analyzed under classic theological categories of the elements of sinful acts and omissions), excepting a few small aristocratic merchant republics. The translation of that theory to modern representative secular democracies remains to be fully developed.
Liam:
Whether the just war tradition can be translated into the language of “modern representative secular democracies” is an open question. I, for one, am persuaded that the Church and the modern nation-state speak incommensurate languages in this respect. I recommend Dan Bell’s recent book, Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State, as an excellent resource, whether you endorse pacifism or the just war tradition, and I share Yoder’s and Hauerwas’s conviction that the two traditions are allies in witness against violence in the service of libido dominandi.
I agree that it’s an open question, and I am not sure the just war theory really fits the modern governmental context.
There’s nothing “just” about a program of “Shock and Awe”–as the name itself makes little attempt to mask. Contemporary warfare is fought using weapons of mass destruction, aimed primarily at civilian targets, and no amount of lying by governments and/or their military spokesmen can change that fact. All one needs to do is to look up the numbers of civilian deaths in 20th and 21st century wars and compare those numbers with the numbers of combatants slain.
If just war was ever possible–back when wars were fought almost exclusively by warriors, against warriors–it is no longer possible now. Again, the discussion is not even couched in real terms. All this talk of “smart bombs,” etc. is just so much smoke blown in the largely willing eyes of pious hypocrites and bleating merinos.
Christ did not kill us and then mourn for us. He mourned for us, and then let us kill him. That is what loving the enemy looks like.
I think the over-arching theme here should be that the Catholic Church deserves some real credit in the world history of ideas developing a notion that war demanded some parsing as to its being just or unjust, but also that it should done in the realm of law per se. Taking it out the the “morality” of politics and into the realm of law, even if canon law, was a momentous development. This has been an enormous benefit for the West, and many ideas of the Enlightenment as to rational justice are traceable to this fundamental development on the part of theologian and canonists of the Catholic Church. Whether or not it was consistently applied is almost a separate question. That it exists at all has been a great boon for the West.
Quite separately let me mention a fly in the ointment for other commenters’ ideas here. I am amazed that no one mentions, not even the confrere of the Angelic Doctor here, the question of Excommunications. A person who had received the grave opprobrium of an excommunication essentially had all his rights taken away. That included his right to life. He or she, or even little children (in the case of little children living in cities like Venice that were intermittently excommunicated) , could be killed in full moral approval of the Church. The Excommunication was a de facto end run around the whole “just war” question. The numbers actually killed on that moral grounds has probably been exaggerated; though probably not so much under Julius II, a very warlike Pope. But what is not exaggerated is the fact that the Church was quite willing to excommunicate whole areas (cities, towns, etc.) and at least in theory assent to the potential premature death of its inhabitants. How seriously this was all taken is another matter, and I sort of suspect on the large scale (cities) the answer is not very. That is, unless an army was lined up outside the gates, But it does speak to some structural wobbliness in all the ideas of the church having held consistent positions on such things.
Thanks for posting this. And we moderns call mediævals barbaric.
I do not think that it is unfair to note that contemptus mundi existed in base teaching throughout much of the 20th century. I, a Gen X Catholic, was raised by two Depression era Catholics and found and read a 1950 era Baltimore Catechism. This taught without doubt that the married life was inferior to the consecrated life of a nun or a priest. This is a thinking mode many of the Reverts and other blogging conservatives have played with. It is a habit of thought within our teaching.
Second observation, is the routine “pass” given to the powerful at all times. The secular powerful never are burdened with by the same rules as the lower class. We too see this habit of thinking throughout this day. One of the grave critiques of liberation theology depends on the promotion of “class war.” For that time and those decades, their was a reactionary obsession with the burden of sin imposed upon the poor by their reputed “class warfare” when it came to a pursuit of a change in the division of wealth in one’s community. Rarely in the past 100 years has a critique leveled grave sin on the head of the wealthy who participate in their own “war on the poor.” I fear that the current theologies of war, just or not, come amidst a clear desire not to make things challenging for the powerful. A populace choosing not to wage war is very challenging to the belly -bucking vainful princes of the medieval times. Or now. This needs evaluation and defense.