Augustine and War

Hunter summarizes a 1983 article by RA Markus on Augustine and just war.  By examining Augustine’s statements on war and Christian society in the context of his intellectual biography, Markus comes up with “a highly nuanced account that stresses Augustine’s deepening pessimism regarding the rationality of human actions and, simultaneously, the collapse within Augustine’s own mind of the ‘rational myth of the state.’”

Markus discovers “two major shifts in the context of Augustine’s thinking about the ‘justice’ of warfare. In the earliest discussion in On Free Will 1.5.11-13, written sometime before 388, Augustine sees war as ‘part of well-ordered society’s means of conforming to God’s universal order and . . . thus rightly sanctioned by law.’ (3). By the time of Against Faustus , however, about ten years later, the first shift has taken place. War is no longer justified by its relation to some aeterna lex ; rather, the issue at hand is the Manichean rejection of the Old Testament.”

In combating the Manicheans, Augustine focuses on the “prophetic truth of the Old Testament.”  Thus, “in the late 390s Augustine’s justification of warfare stood as part of what Markus calls ‘the spell of the collective illusion of the Theodosian epoch.’   In Against Faustus Augustine saw the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy occuring in his own day with the anti-pagan policies of Theodosius. Sharing for a time the ‘horrifying self-assurance of his contemporaries,’ Augustine found in the Old Testament prophetic sanction not only for warfare but also for religious coercion.”

But that Eusebian perspective was not Augustine’s final position: “The second major shift forms the backdrop for Augustine’s later discussion in The City of God . After the year 400 Augustine became increasingly conscious of the contradictions inherent in human society and grew markedly critical of the attempt to invest political society (and its wars) with religious significance. In the context of his teaching on the ‘two cities,’ Augustine affirmed the ‘justice’ of warfare only as ‘one of the tragic necessities to which Christians must at times resort in order to check the savagery which is liable to break out between, as well as within, political societies.’  War is still justified, but in a very different context. While Augustine did not repudiate warfare, he did challenge, according to Markus, ‘a more fundamental mood of Christian self-identification with a whole social structure, a system of institutions and functions, including that of war.’  In Markus’s analysis, therefore, Augustine should not be regarded as someone who ‘checked the pacifist inclinations of early Christian thought,’ despite his clear acceptance of the morality of warfare.”

This leads Hunter to two conclusions.  The historical conclusion is that “distance between Augustine and his predecessors is not very great.”  The ethical conclusion is that Augustine is persuasive in his combination of “an acceptance of the necessity of warfare,” which is always “coupled with a radical distrust of all existing political societies.”