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Saint Augustine by Antonio Rodriguez |
Over the summer and into
the fall, Americans watched, horrified, as the self-proclaimed Islamic State in
Iraq and the Levant known as ISIS beheaded journalists, aid workers and
soldiers from several countries in what the members decreed was a command in
the Koran: “So when you meet those who
disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted
slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor
afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens.” (Qur’an, 47:4) The surreal videos were posted on social
media and usually did not show the actual moment of beheading, but included a
lengthy speech by the knife-wielding jihadi
before the murder, and the graphic carnage immediately following. Although the material was quickly removed
from most websites, enough people saw the films in the west to incite
widespread anger and outrage, especially when parents and spouses of many
victims had pleaded with ISIS before the murders to release their loved ones
unharmed. These acts committed by Islamic
extremists present new challenges to the world because unlike previous
conflicts, many of these perpetrators are rogue actors or members of terrorist
cells not fighting under the banner of a specific state or government. It is, as we now understand, immensely
difficult to declare war on an individual or a rogue group operating within a
country with whom we are not, technically, at war. We saw this difficulty play out with our
pursuit of the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan. In light of this new threat, and because of
the long history of conflict between Christians and Muslims, it is beneficial
to re-examine the Christian perspective on what constitutes a just war, and to
ascertain if Just War Theory as outlined by Augustine and the U.S. Catholic
Bishops in their 1983 statement is applicable to acts of war against a
terrorist or violent extremist group in the world today, and if the theory might
offer some justification for pursuing these perpetrators and bringing them to
an end, even if that end is annihilation.
The document, The Challenge of Peace, was written during
the last decade of the Cold War and concerned itself with the rise of nuclear
arsenals in America and in the Soviet Union as well as the proliferation of
those weapons systems to other countries around the world. Five American Catholic bishops led by Joseph
Cardinal Bernardin authored the document after careful consultation with
religious, military, and government officials.
The writing was not without precedent: the bishops based their teaching on documents
from the Second Vatican Council, specifically, Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965); the writings of
Augustine; and of course, the Bible.
John Paul II, the pope at the time the bishops gathered to write the
document, also had a profound effect on the drafting and revising of the final document. The pope and the bishops wished to reassure
Catholics concerned about a nuclear holocaust.
It was a time when both the United States and the Soviet Union had
stockpiled enough weapons to blow up key strategic targets around the world
several times over. The bishops wrote
that the world was “at a moment of crisis, the effects of which are evident in
people’s lives.” Most Americans, and
most likely many Soviets, believed nuclear weapons were the most dangerous
threat facing the world at the time.
Of course, it must be
noted that America was the first country to develop and deploy a nuclear weapon
on the field of battle. On August 6,
1945, the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb nicknamed, “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, Japan,
following up on August 9 with a second device, “Fat Man,” dropped on
Nagasaki. The two detonations killed
close to 250,000 people, many of them civilians. In any discussion of Just War Theory, this
killing of noncombatants will be a significant consideration in determining
what constitutes a just war. To date,
America is the only country to have used these weapons of mass destruction, or
WMD, on an enemy during conflict. The
bishops responded to this fact by writing:
“As Americans, citizens of the nation which was the first to produce
atomic weapons, which has been the only one to use them and which today is one
of the handful of nations capable of decisively influencing the course of the
nuclear age, we have grave human, moral and political responsibilities to see
that a ‘conscious choice’ is made to save humanity.”
The bishops agreed
that the nuclear threat “transcends religious, cultural, and national
boundaries…” and that “The Catholic tradition on war and peace is a long and
complex one, reaching from the Sermon on the Mount to the statements of Pope
John Paul II.” Specifically, the bishops
referred to something first mentioned in Gaudium
et Spes: the Church has a duty to
scrutinize the “signs of the times” and interpret them “in the light of the
gospel.” It was this scrutiny that
influenced the drafting of the document in 1983. The bishops clearly stated, as did John Paul
II, that the world needed “fresh applications of traditional moral principles”
of Catholic teaching on war and peace.
The bishops wanted to give American Catholics something concrete that included
elements taken from theology, philosophy, and biblical study that would
hopefully transform the world while assuring people that a nuclear holocaust
could be prevented. The key to this
transformation was a return to the concept of a transcendent God and the
dignity of the human being. Indeed,
every step must be taken to protect the dignity of those created in God’s image
and likeness. Because nuclear war
threatened to destroy great swaths of humanity, the Church was tasked with
urging the removal of the weapons and stopping the proliferation of them across
the globe.
To do this, the
bishops wrote that “Catholic teaching on peace and war has had two
purposes: to help Catholics form their
consciences and to contribute to the public policy debate about the morality of
war.” The teaching was directed at two
audiences, one religious and the other secular.
However, what was happening in the world meant that the world’s nations
and their people were increasingly divided and therefore, there was no central
authority, much less a unified ideology between the east and the west. The concept of the communist state was in
direct opposition to the religious ideology of Catholics, and this antithesis
had been a subject for encyclicals and Catholic social teaching going back to
the late 19th century. The
bishops placed their hope that these divisions could be overcome in a passage
from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “It
is [Christ] who is our peace, and who made the two of us one by breaking down
the barrier of hostility that kept us apart.
In his own flesh he abolished the law with its commands and precepts, to
create in himself one new man from us who had been two and to make peace,
reconciling both of us to God in one body through his cross, which put that
enmity to death” (Eph. 2: 14-16).
The passage must be
considered symbolically because Paul’s letter originated in a completely
different cultural milieu. “It is he who
is our peace” is actually a fragment of an early Christian hymn that was most
likely inserted into the text of Paul’s letter at a later date, according to The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Prentice
Hall, 1990) The “barrier of hostility”
is a reference to the wall separating Gentiles from the inner court of the
Jerusalem temple, and the word “enmity” indicates that the imagery was meant to
indicate the end of ethnic hostility.
Paul speaks of humanity as flawed when he writes of creating a “new man”
from the one marked by the sin of Adam and therefore not redeemed in
Christ. This “new man” would be a
combination of Jew and Gentile, reflecting the view of Christians as a single
body from what had been two. It is
highly unlikely that the bishops were naïve enough to believe that the Soviet
Union and the United States could ever unite as one people. The reference is undoubtedly to the need for
Catholics worldwide to unite, and possibly even the followers of world
religions to come together as one. In
any case, this is, as of this date, an unrealized dream in any interpretation,
and more so now with the conflict between Islam and the west.
What is clear from the
bishops’ writing is that a new theology of peace needed to be formulated, and
that any such formulation must be within the purview of the Church’s pastoral ministry
and contain a clear message of hope. The
only way to combat the fear among people of the world over the possibility of
nuclear war meant constructing a concrete path to end, or at least mitigate,
the threat. That is what the bishops
hoped to do.
The first strand of
this new formulation of peace meant returning to Scripture. However, the bishops felt that three factors
had to be considered: peace meant
different things at different times and in different contexts; the biblical
texts themselves were written over a vast swath of history and therefore
reflected cultures, events, and histories vastly different from the 20th
century global village; these texts described God’s influence on the world and
his “intervention in history” rather than a “specific treatise on war and
peace.” If these three factors could be
reconciled in a coherent fashion, the writing would be deemed a success.
The Old Testament
accounts of war and peace mostly involved God as a warrior with human beings as
his foot soldiers. When the tribes won,
God was obviously on their side. The
losers had somehow failed to keep covenant, or had betrayed God in some way
thereby raising his ire. Indeed,
everything in the Old Testament had to be processed through the lens of
Israel’s relationship to God, according to the bishops. They also wanted to take into account man’s
changing relationship to his all-powerful creator, namely that as human
intellect evolved, God became a deeper and more layered entity, “less dominant”
as a warrior and more “profound” and “complex” as a divine figure. The bishops found evidence for this interpretation
in Leviticus 26: 3-8: “If you live in
accordance with my precepts and are careful to observe my commandments, I will
give you rain in due season so that the land will bear its crops, and the trees
their fruit; your threshing will last till vintage time, and your vintage till
the time for sowing, and you will have food to eat in abundance, so that you
may dwell securely in your land. I will
establish peace in the land, that you may lie down to rest without
anxiety. I will rid the country of
ravenous beasts, and keep the sword of war from sweeping across your land. You will rout your enemies and lay them low
with your sword. Five of you will put
your foes to flight, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand of them till
they are cut down by your sword.”
The passage strikes a
balance between a God of war, a God of the harvest, and the God of the
Covenant. The imagery of the passage promises
protection from any firestorms raging across the land, something audiences at
the time of the bishops’ writing feared in the aftermath of nuclear
holocaust. In short, war was a product
of breaking covenant with God, of sin and betrayal. War was punishment. Peace would come when people kept true to
their word and remained faithful to their God.
And if the peace could not be achieved now, it was promised in the
future after the end times, an eschatological peace.
The bishops draw clear
distinctions between Old and New Testament writing about war and peace. They characterize Old Testament peace as “a
gift from God, inclusive of all creation, grounded in salvation and covenantal
fidelity, inextricably bound up with justice.”
Whereas, in the New Testament, the warrior God is replaced by a more
loving and nurturing Jesus Christ. The
references to war are of a preparatory nature, meaning that one must be
prepared for what is to come. When
swords do appear, as in Luke 22: 49-51 when some of the disciples draw weapons
to prevent Jesus’ arrest and injure a high priest’s servant, Jesus quickly
rejects weapons and violence, and heals the servant’s wound. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he tells
early Christians to “put on the armor of God in order to withstand the
onslaughts of the evil one. The very
armor with which God clothes himself in the OT (Isa 11: 5; 59: 17) is to be the
armament of Christians,” says the New Jerome.
This is the “armor of God…the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet
of salvation, the sword of the Spirit…” according to the bishops. Inherent in this change of philosophies from
the Old to New Testament is the recognition of the radical ideas of Jesus. He knew his message was a complete reversal
of tradition, and therefore, families might find themselves “divided as if by a
sword. Hence, the Gospels tell us that
Jesus said he came not to bring peace but rather the sword,” as recounted in
Matthew 10:34. Jesus called for love
beyond family and friends, a love that had to encompass even one’s enemies. The bishops refer to Matthew’s gospel where
Jesus says: “But what I say to you
is: offer no resistance to injury. When a person strikes you on the right cheek
turn and offer him the other” (5: 39).
But this is not to say
that Jesus did not have a violent side, the bishops point out, like when he attacked
the moneychangers in the temple (Mt. 21: 12-17). Although Jesus refuses to take up arms to
defend himself when the men come to arrest him, he cannot escape the violence
of his world. His death is especially brutal
and bloody, a capital punishment reserved for the most grievous crimes. Yet, as the bishops point out, he does not
hesitate to cry out for forgiveness for his killers at the moment of his
death. The bishops remind us that “To
follow Jesus Christ implies a continual conversation in one’s own life as one
seeks to act in ways which are consonant with the justice, forgiveness, and
love of God’s reign.” To be like Jesus
is the ultimate challenge, and continues to be so today in the face of so much irrational
violence. However, the bishops write
that “it is our task to seek for ways in which to make the forgiveness, justice
and mercy and love of God visible in a world where violence and enmity are too
often the norm.” They go on to say that
“we are a pilgrim people in a world marked by conflict and injustice.”
At this point, the
bishops transition into a thorough discussion of Augustine’s Just War
Theory. This means looking not at the
world as we want it to be, but the world as it is. “The view is stark,” they tell us, “ferocious
new means of warfare threatening savagery surpassing that of the past, deceit,
subversion, terrorism, genocide.”
Countries must be allowed to defend themselves only if every peaceful
settlement option has been exhausted first.
This is the Christian’s “inalienable obligation.”
Augustine of Hippo
(354-430 AD) is considered a church father from the Patristic era. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes him as an
important bridge between Platonists and early Christian theologians, as
Augustine, in different periods of his life, fit into both schools. He was a convert to Christianity, and felt
wisdom to be the only spouse he needed.
Among the many
startling pieces of philosophy and theology he formulated and wrote about in
his lifetime was his development of a Just War Theory rooted in several key
precepts: Christians must first, do no
harm to the neighbor, which would seem to exclude all acts of war, however this
leads to the second key idea which is that how we treat our enemies is a
reflection of how we love our neighbor. Another
key precept is that taking even a single life is something that should be considered
with intensive deliberation. Augustine
considered the consequences of sin in history as the root of war. He considered warfare a tragedy in political
society, and he bemoaned the overweening ambition that led human beings to
engage in mortal combat. However, he
also recognized that evil must be restrained, and the innocent must be
protected. Therefore, when innocents are
in peril, the precept to do no harm to the neighbor is rescinded. An enemy bent on destruction of innocents
must be restrained. This could be
extrapolated to governments who must often act in self-defense to protect
innocent civilians or the threat to security and well-being.
Just War Theory can be
divided into three areas: jus ad bellum (justice before war); jus in bello (justice in war); and jus post bellum (justice after war). Within these three divisions are moral guides
for behavior during conflict. Under jus ad bellum, the following
stipulations must be met: the cause must
be just, war must be the last resort after all other options have been
exhausted, the action must be declared by the appropriate authorities, the
actors must possess the right intention, and have a reasonable chance of
success, and in the end, the outcome must be proportional to the means
used. In The Challenge of Peace, the bishops expound on each of these
stipulations. For just cause, they write
that “war is permissible only to confront ‘a real and certain danger,’ i.e., to
protect innocent life, to preserve conditions necessary for decent human
existence, and to basic human rights.”
Under the competent authority provision, the use of force must be taken
up only for the common good and declared only by responsible government
authorities. This corresponds with the
American idea that the president cannot declare war by himself, but instead
must seek an act of Congress to deploy troops to a battlefield. After war is declared, some thought must be
given to how the war will be waged. This
is known as comparative justice, meaning that the rightness of a particular
side must be considered, specifically, what values are in question or
considered important enough to wage war on another party leading to
casualties. The bishops write that
“Every party to a conflict should acknowledge the limits of its ‘just cause’
and the consequent requirement to use only
limited means in pursuit of its objectives.
Far from legitimizing a crusade mentality”—something with which
Christians and Muslims have been concerned with for centuries—“comparative
justice is designed to relativize absolute claims and to restrain the use of
force even in a ‘justified’ conflict.”
In this “justified conflict,” the only proper goal is peace and
reconciliation, and for the conflict to be justified, all other alternatives
must have been explored and exhausted.
One area within jus ad bellum is problematic, and that
is the stipulation of probability of success.
As outlined in Augustine’s work and the writing of the bishops, this
means that war should never be waged in the face of hopeless causes or when the
outcome would be futile. On the surface,
this might seem like an argument that a nation should only wage war when
victory is assured. In reality, there
are always uncertainties in the success or failure of the conflict. And some conflicts involve values and ideas,
as well as threats, worth fighting for and against, even if the situation seems
hopeless. However, when much is at
stake—a livelihood, a culture, a religious belief, indeed a the very lives of
innocent people—this stipulation could be suspended and the battle, even a
hopeless one, must be fought. Finally
under jus ad bellum, the concept of
proportional response must be observed, meaning that “the damage to be
inflicted and the costs incurred by war must be proportionate to the good
expected by taking up arms.” In fact,
all such damage—on the nations involved and the world community—must be
considered before war can be declared.
Proportionality also
plays a role in jus in bello, or
justice in war. In fact, two principles
are important to consider:
proportionality and discrimination.
There is great potential in war that circumstances will explode from a
regional conflict into a worldwide global disaster. Therefore, a nation cannot respond to the
aggression of another nation without considering the magnitude and far-reaching
effects of that response. So the
response must be measured and proportional to the aggression, and the act of
war, including bombings, destruction of infrastructure, civilian casualties, must
never be indiscriminately waged. The
question must be asked—what are the objectives of this military response? It is the ethical debate: do the ends justify
the means? Or, is it the deontological
idea of the means determining the end result?
For example, should a nation resort to torture to gain information
crucial to the conflict? Getting the
information might mean saving hundreds, even thousands of lives. Or, does a nation take the higher ground and
refuse to violate a prisoner’s basic human rights thereby foregoing
intelligence that might prevent deaths and defeat? Remember as stated above, Augustine’s primary
anchor of his theory is that Christians must do no harm to neighbors, and in
war, how the enemy is treated is a test of that idea. The bishops believe that “no end can justify
means evil in themselves.”
It is interesting to
note that the bishops did not discuss the final area of Just War Theory in
their document. In jus post bellum, or justice after war, the punishment meted out to
the defeated must be proportional as well.
Alexander Moseley writes: “The
principle of discrimination should be employed to avoid imposing punishment on
innocents or non-combatants; the rights or traditions of the defeated deserve
respect; the claims of victory should be proportional to the war’s character;
compensatory claims should be tempered by the principles of discrimination and
proportionality; and, controversially, the need to rehabilitate or re-educate
an aggressor should also be considered.”
He goes on to say that just because a nation is victorious does not mean
that “unduly harsh” or “punitive” measures can be imposed on those were
defeated.
Why do the bishops not
address jus post bellum issues in
their document? Possibly because the
goal as stated from the start of Just War Theory is to reestablish peace so
that “disordered ambitions” are kept in check and evil is restrained while the
innocents are protected. These are the
only objectives after war has concluded.
The bishops do spend a considerable portion, approximately the last
third of the document, discussing the “Shaping of a Peaceful World,” which
begins, “Preventing nuclear war is a moral imperative; but the avoidance of
war, nuclear or conventional, is not a sufficient conception of international
relations today. Nor does it exhaust the
content of Catholic teaching.” This
section comes after a number of pages dedicated to all facets of nuclear
warfare and concepts related to nuclear weapons, like that of mutually assured
destruction. The bishops write: “Today, the destructive potential of the
nuclear powers threatens the human person, the civilization we have slowly
constructed, and even the created order itself…At the center of the new
evaluation of the nuclear arms race is a recognition of two elements: the destructive potential of nuclear weapons,
and the stringent choices which the nuclear age poses for both politics and
morals.”
The 21st
century so far has been one of terrorism and the suicide bomber. These are individuals and organized groups of
extremists who are committed to waging jihad
on the west. The questions continue to
plague nations around the globe: how is
this enemy, without allegiance to a particular country, to be engaged and
neutralized? Islam is not a violent or
murderous faith, we are told, yet the ones who detonate the roadside bomb,
behead the journalist, and fly planes into our skyscrapers profess a faith that
looks exactly like Islam, albeit an extremist version. Does the Just War Theory apply to waging war
on individuals or organizations? Of most
critical concern is the rise of ISIS, the self-proclaimed Islamic state now
occupying parts of Iraq and Syria.
Under the question of
just cause, a threat must be a real and certain danger. In their words and deeds, the members of ISIS
and other terrorist organizations profess their desire to destroy America, its
people and their way of life. Given the
very public murders, the events of September 11th, and the maiming
and killing of military personnel, the threat is genuine and the intent of the
individuals involved certain and deadly.
ISIS, Al Qaida, and other terrorist groups have declared they will not
end the attacks until America is vanquished, therefore, the U.S. has no
recourse but to work toward the annihilation of these groups. Since the jihadists
have vowed to fight to the death, this annihilation is unavoidable, but the
probability of success, meaning to rid the world completely of this threat, may
never be accomplished. The War on Terror
may be an endless war, and this is problematic.
Recently, Pope Francis has stepped into the breach to try to encourage
peace, but even he has stated that “the use of force can be justified to stop
‘unjust aggressors’ such as Islamic State militants.” Many different news outlets, both religious
and secular, reported the pope’s words: “In
these cases where there is unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit
to stop the unjust aggressor. I
underscore the verb ‘stop’; I don’t say bomb, make war—stop him. The means by which he may be stopped should
be evaluated. To stop the unjust
aggressor is licit, but we nevertheless need to remember how many times, using
this excuse of stopping an unjust aggressor, the powerful nations have
dominated other peoples, made a real war of conquest. A single nation cannot judge how to stop this,
how to stop an unjust aggressor. After
the Second World War, there arose the idea of the United Nations. That is where we should discuss: ‘Is there an unjust aggressor? It seems there is. How do we stop him?’ But only that, nothing
more.”
Francis is actually in
line with the bishops writing in 1983. They
believed the U.N. had the best potential to bring about world order and
increase development possibilities for all people. The bishops were referring back to the words
of Pope John Paul II as well as the encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) and
the documents of the Second Vatican Council where the United Nations was also singled
out as the best hope for the preservation of peace and human dignity. Pope John XXIII professed his desire that the
U.N. and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights “may become ever more equal
to the magnitude and nobility of its tasks, and may the time come as quickly as
possible when every human being will find therein an effective safeguard for
the rights which derive directly from his dignity as a person, and which are
therefore universal, inviolable and inalienable rights.”
As for Pope Francis’
words about an “unjust aggressor,” there is no greater act of violent, bloody
aggression than to take a man, bound and kneeling, and decapitate him. The perpetrators have given themselves over
to what Augustine called the love of violence that war invokes, and therefore,
it is indisputable that a war against ISIS is a just war. Francis gives us one admonition that must be
considered: who is the competent
authority to declare this war? It is not
for America or the American government alone to declare. It is not for the countries in the region
where these atrocities are taking place to declare. Clearly, as Francis, the bishops in 1983, and
the Second Vatican Council have said, it is the responsibility of the world,
the United Nations, possibly, but indeed the nations around the world who
proclaim the dignity and sanctity of human life to stand up to this new and
most egregious threat. This is not a
religious war or a culture war; it is a crime against humanity. A just war needs no further justification.
The following books and articles
were used to write this post:
Brown, Raymond E.,
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, eds. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1990.
DeBerri, Edward P.,
James E. Hug, Peter J. Henriot, and Michael J. Schultheis. Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret. 4th Rev. and
Expanded ed. New York: Orbis Books, 2003.
Moseley, Alexander.
"Just War Theory." Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. November 24, 2014. Accessed November 24, 2014.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/justwar/.
New American Bible. New York, NY: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1971.
"Noble Qur'an
#47" The Noble Qur'an. Accessed
November 19, 2014. http://quran.com/.
O’Brien, David J., and
Thomas A. Shannon, eds. Catholic Social
Thought: The Documentary Heritage. 2010 Expanded ed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 2010.
Portalie, Eugene.
"St. Augustine of Hippo." Catholic
Encyclopedia. New York, NY: Robert Appleton Co.,1907. Accessed November 19,
2014. http://www.newadvent.org/
Rocca, Francis X.
"Pope Talks Airstrikes in Iraq, His Health, Possible US Visit." National Catholic Reporter. Kansas City,
MO: The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Co., August 18, 2014. Accessed
November 19, 2014. http://ncronline.org/.