Koinonia

A Last Word on the Just War Tradition

One of the criticisms that proponents of the just war tradition often raise is that those who oppose a just war are engaging in moral leveling.  What is meant by this is that the critics of the just war tradition fail to distinguish between the aggressor and the defender in a war.  This distinction is crucial not only to a proper understanding of the just war tradition—and so the limits that the Church places on the war making power of Caesar (and more broadly, the coercive power of the government)—but also for a proper understanding of peace.

If you recall, we saw in an earlier post that peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of divine justice.  Justice in the sense I am using it here is not vengeance but right relationship, of shalom, to use the Hebrew term.  Whether there are overt hostilities or not, the absence of justice—whether between nations, within a sovereign state or (if I may be daring) or in some part of the Church—means that there is an absence of peace.  Again, peace is not the absence of conflict or hostilities, but the members of the community being  in right relationship with each other and (ultimately) God.

Where I think we often go wrong in our consideration of war is that we don’t always seem to realize that war is not a “substance,” it isn’t a thing.  War is, and here I must bow to St Augustine, an absence of right relationship.  Or, if you rather, war (like all sin) is the fruit of a disordered love.

But this disordered love is not (necessarily) present in both sides of a war.  The insight of the just war tradition is that while war is evil, it is an evil that resides in the will of the unjust aggressor.  Defenders in war, even though they kill the enemy, do not do so as a reflection of a disordered will.  It is not, in other words, sinful to exercise force—even deadly force—to defend the innocent and repel an unjust aggressor. The moral onus in war is on the side of the aggressor not the defender.

This does not mean, as several have pointed out here, that the defender does not suffer the physical, emotional, moral and spiritual consequences of war making.  But as I have already pointed out, part of the nobility of the Christian warrior’s vocation is precisely that he risks all this in defense of the innocent in the face of an unjust aggressor.

Granted this all is rather more complicated in practice than it is in theory.  And yet for all that the practice of war will always fall short of the theoretical limits it impose on Caesar, I think it is essential that the Church continue to teach the just war tradition.  Only the Church has the moral authority to stand against the power of Caesar’s armies.

To speak pastorally for a moment, most of the young men and women I know who serve in the military do so out of a great sense of duty and love of country.  Duty and patriotism are virtues to be sure but like all virtues the wax and wane and most never be allowed to overwhelm the other virtues.  In teaching from the ambon, in the classroom and in the public square the limits of war the Church is providing a necessary limit to the virtues not only of duty and patriotism but the real limits on Caesar’s power and authority.  Though by no means exhaustively, the just war tradition is an essential element by which the Church fulfills her vocation to be a peacemaker and a source of reconciliation.

My defense of the just war tradition, however, does not simply reflect my interest in politics.  When I reflect on this tradition and the vocation of the Christian warrior, I come to understand more fully what it means for me to be a priest and (ultimately) a Christian.  Grieve me though it does to say so, I think that many in the Church have come to value the absence of conflict more than the presence of justice.  That many of those who do so are bishops and clergy merely compounds my sadness; that I have more than once been one who has sought this false peace adds shame to my sorrow.

As part of the service of ordination the bishop will take the Lamb (the consecrated bread of the Eucharist) and place it in the hand of the newly ordained priest saying “Take this . . . , and guard it until the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are going to be asked for it back by Him.”  If this means anything to me, it must mean that I cannot be afraid of conflict if it is only through conflict that justice can reign in the human heart and among us.

Meditating on the just war tradition I realize that to guard the Body of Christ requires that I stand against those who refuse to live according to divine justice.  Some of these who reject just are physically violent to be sure.  But most practice a subtler form of violence.  How easy it is to speak of mercy and forgiveness but to do so in a way that serves not justice, not right and God pleasing relationships within the Church, but merely the absence of conflict.

The just war tradition reminds me that divine justice is not something that I can ignore.  It is also not something that I can simply assume, much less presume against.  There are many—both outside the Church and within—who, in seeking merely the absence of conflict, set themselves up (even if unintentionally) as the enemies of justice and the advocates of a false peace.

I am, in this, reminded of the words of the prophet Jeremiah:

For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of My people slightly,

Saying, ‘Peace, peace!’

When there is no peace.

Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination?

No! They were not at all ashamed,

Nor did they know how to blush.

Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;

In the time of their punishment

They shall be cast down,” says the LORD.

“I will surely consume them,” says the LORD. (8:11-13)

St Augustine in one of his sermons that we, that I, should “proclaim the Gospel out of genuine . . . love.”   He continue:

Let them come to the house and say “Peace be to this house.”  They [ought] not only say it with their lips, but they pour out what they are full of.  They preach peace, and they have peace.  They are not like those of whom it is said, “Peace, peace, peace and there is no peace.”  What is the meaning of [this]?  They preach [peace] and do not have it.  They praise and do not love [peace].  They say, and they do not do (“Sermon,” 101.11, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament, XII, Jeremiah, Lamentations, p.77).

Peace it seems is rather easier to proclaim then live.  And if Augustine refrains, unlike Jeremiah, from condemning these preachers of a false peace, he nevertheless reminds me that I cannot proclaim what I don’t love.  And so I cannot proclaim peace with my lips unless justice reigns in my heart.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory