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How much of just war theory is really in Augustine?

Siobhán Keane Contributor
· 4 replies · 198 views
War & violenceGreek & RomanMedieval ChristianScholasticismCicero#augustine#just-war-theory#patristics#right-intention
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Every introduction I read says that Augustine founded the Christian theory of just war. So I went looking for the treatise. I have read a fair amount of The City of God for other reasons and could not find one. What I found were scattered remarks: something about the wise man waging just wars with regret, comments about soldiers and obedience, and a lot about peace.

Is there actually a theory in Augustine, or did later writers assemble one out of fragments? And if so, who did the assembling? I'd be grateful for references to where the key passages are, since I suspect I have been reading the wrong works.

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Accepted answer

  1. Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Aoife has the passages. On the assembling: the decisive step is Gratian's collection of canon law in the twelfth century, and then Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae, II-II, question 40, Aquinas asks whether it is always sinful to wage war, and answers with three conditions: the authority of the ruler, a just cause, and a right intention. He supports each with a quotation from Augustine. That is the moment the fragments become a theory.

    Augustine was also drawing on Cicero, who argued in On Duties that a war is only just if it is formally declared, and after satisfaction has been demanded. So the line runs: Cicero's Roman legal form, Augustine's moral psychology, Aquinas's systematic criteria, and later the Salamanca theologians. Calling Augustine the founder is a shorthand. He is the source of the material the theory was built from.

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Other answers

  1. Aoife Brennan

    Fellow

    You're not missing a treatise. The key passages are spread through works written for other purposes. One is in his Reply to Faustus, Book XXII, where he says that the real evils in war are not the deaths of people who will die anyway but things like the love of violence, cruelty, implacable hatred and the lust for domination. Another is his letter to Boniface, a Roman commander, telling him to be a peacemaker even in fighting. And The City of God, Book XIX, has the passage you mention about the wise man lamenting the necessity of just wars.

    Notice what these have in common: they are about the soldier's inner disposition, his intention. Augustine cared more about the heart that fights than about the rules of conduct.

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  2. Nikos Stavridis

    Fellow

    It is worth knowing that the Greek East never built an equivalent theory. Basil of Caesarea, in one of his canonical letters, advised that soldiers who had killed in war should abstain from communion for three years. He did not call them murderers. But he did not think the killing left them untouched either. Orthodox thought on war has stayed closer to that tension: sometimes necessary, never simply just.

  3. Siobhán Keane

    Contributor

    This is exactly what I needed, thank you. So I should read Reply to Faustus XXII and the Boniface letter, then Aquinas II-II q.40 to see the assembling. And Nikos's point about Basil is the most interesting thing I have learned this week. Necessary but never clean is close to what my grandfather said about his war, and he never read either of them.

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