Neo-Manichaeism, Technological “Progress” and the Ethics of War

 

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”  -  Robert E. Lee

 

Suppose that you were addressing an academic symposium on the subject of the ethics of war and you opened with the above quotation.   Further suppose that immediately after doing so you invited your audience for their thoughts on these famous words.

 

In all likelihood what you would get, would not be insightful reflection upon what the Confederate general-in-chief had actually said, either in agreement or disagreement, but a round of vitriolic denunciation of the man who said it.    It would begin with the small handful in the room who were informed enough to recognize who Robert E. Lee was, but would quickly spread to the rest as everyone present, whether they be faculty, administration, student or alumnus, began to compete with everyone else to demonstrate their woke, anti-racist, bona fides by being the loudest to express their opinion about  just what a horrible person you had just quoted.   You would be told that you should not have quoted him, because he led the South which fought for slavery which was racist and that therefore he must be condemned and cancelled.   

 

Should you be so suicidal as to attempt to correct the mob you had incited, by informing them that their knowledge was woefully inadequate and that the real story of man they were subjecting to a “Two-Minute Hate” was far more nuanced and interesting than they thought, explaining how he was the career military officer to whom Abraham Lincoln had offered command of the Union forces at the onset of the American republic’s great internecine bloodbath, but who turned it down and resigned rather than raise his sword against his own home state, to which he then offered his services, consequently becoming the strategist who delayed the defeat of the Southern states’ attempt to break away from the American union for complex reasons of which slavery was only one for longer than would have been possible under any other general and you yourself will be condemned as a racist, bigot, white supremacist and all sorts of other nasty names that have long ago been detached from any essential relationship with their lexical meaning and turned into verbal weapons.

 

Now, it may have occurred to you that in the preceding paragraphs I have myself done one of the things I have been mocking the academic woke for doing, that is, sidetracked what was supposed to be a discussion of the ethics of war, the topic of both your academic presentation in the above hypothetical scenario and of this essay, by going on about something else entirely.    The similarity is superficial, I assure you, and, oddly enough, you will find that the scenario is actually more relevant to our topic than the quotation itself.    

 

Indeed, as far as the words themselves go, General Lee’s remark does not contribute much to the discussion of the ethics of war.   The first clause can be taken as support for the assertion that war is an evil.   This, however, is neither a controversial assertion nor an ethical one.   It would be the latter if the indefinite article had been omitted before “evil”, but “an evil” is not the same thing as “evil”.  Evil, sans article, can be used as either an adjective or a noun.   If used as the former it expresses an ethical judgement on that to which the adjective applied.   If used as the latter, it expresses the idea of that which is the opposite of goodness, or, in terms more acceptable to orthodox Christianity, the defect that occurs when the goodness of creation is damaged.   When used with the indefinite article, however, it does not necessarily have these moral and metaphysical connotations but means merely something that is undesirable to those who experience it and its consequences.   Earthquakes, floods, fires, etc., are all “evils” in this sense.   In this sense, saying that war is an evil is stating the obvious.   

 

For the purposes of this essay the most important thing about the general’s saying is when he said it.   I don’t mean that the date – the thirteenth of December, 1862 – or the occasion – the Battle of Fredericksburg – are particularly significant, just the war.

 

Was the War between the American States the last pre-modern war or the first modern war?

 

If you ask historians that question you will find that they are divided on the answer.   If it is not obvious enough already, note that “modern” here is the designation of a kind of warfare not of the age in which a war took place.   1861-1865 was far closer to the end of the Modern Age than the beginning and so it would be absurd to even ask the question with the chronological sense of the term in mind.   The case for the war being the first modern war rests upon it having been fought with more technologically complex arms and means of communication and transportation than previous wars.   The case against it rests upon the even greater gap in technological complexity that exists between this war and the earliest wars of the twentieth century – World War I saw the first use of armoured motorized land vehicles, i.e., tanks, the Italo-Turkish War which preceded World War I by three years was the first war to employ airplanes, etc.

 

Regardless of the answer to the question, it is apparent that General Lee’s words were stated during a war that was transitional between the old kind of horses and swords warfare that had been a part of human life since ancient times and the high tech warfare of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.    Now think about what that means with regards to the quotation.    If General Lee was right to say “war is so terrible” in 1862, how much more true is this in the world of 2022 in which devices that can kill thousands of people at once can be dropped for airborne vehicles or shot from launchers a continent away?

 

Twentieth century technological development by making war so much more of an evil than ever before made the ethics of war more necessary than before.   Ethics is serious thought and discussion about human acts and habitual behaviour considered with regards to their rightness and wrongness.   Every aspect of war has been examined over the course of the long historical ethical discussion of war but it has long been apparent that the chief questions to be considered are two, the question of rightness as it pertains to going to war and the question of rightness as it pertains to conducting warfare.   These are the questions expressed in Latin by the phrases jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively.   Perversely, at the same time that the development of weapons of mass destruction, rapid delivery systems, and everything that makes it now possible to wipe out entire populations from across the world with the push of a button made the ethics restraining and limiting war more important, these ethics were being subverted.

 

Essentially the complex ethical questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello have been displaced by an over simplistic question of good and evil.   Not the metaphysical and theological question of good and evil.   It is an ontological question – an ontological question, not the ontological question of good and evil, although those asking it demonstrate by doing so that they have much in common with an ancient sect that answered the latter in a way that would be considered heretical by the standards of orthodox Christianity.  It is the question of who the good guys and who the bad guys are.   Or, more precisely, just the question of who the bad guys are because the sort of people who ask this question always assume that they themselves are the good guys.  Again, the way this question is asked it is a matter of ontology rather than ethics.   The good guys are not judged to be the good guys because of the rightness of the actions, the bad guys are not judged to be the bad guys because of the wrongness of their actions.   The good guys are the good guys because that is who they are.   The bad guys are the bad guys because that is who they are.   Identify the good guys and the bad guys and you don’t have to trouble yourself with the question of whether you are justified in going to war with X.    Of course you are.   You are the good guy, X is the bad guy, therefore you are always right to go to war with X, just as he is always wrong to go to war with you or anyone else.   Similarly, you need not be bothered with the question of how you are to rightly conduct war with X.   Since he is the bad guy, you as the good guy, are justified in taking whatever means are necessary to destroy him, whereas everything he does is by definition a war crime.

 

The sort of thinking described in the above paragraph has been prominently on display in the rhetoric of war promoters in every conflict that Western governments have been involved in since the end of the Cold War.    Think about the terms in which Saddam Hussein was discussed in 1991 and again in 2003.   Or Slobodon Milošević from 1993 to 1999.   Or the Taliban in 2001.   Or Vladimir Putin for the last twenty years but especially at the present moment.   It was never enough to say that we had such and such a grievance against these and were prepared to go to war to obtain redress of that grievance.   In each case the foe was depicted as an avatar – avatar in the Hindu sense of the word, i.e., a manifestation of a divine being rather than the gaming sense of a picture accompanying a profile – of evil.   Only so could we justify to ourselves doing everything in our power to destroy them.   The same sort of thinking was evident in the rhetoric of both sides during the Cold War.   Before that the Allies engaged in this sort of thinking in World War II, at least after the Americans joined.  

 

World War II seems to be where it all began.   Germany at the time was under the control of a man who was undoubtedly evil in the adjectival sense of the word described in the fifth paragraph of this essay.   This made it easier for our leaders to paint him as the avatar, the embodiment, the incarnation of evil, even though one of the Big Three, Joseph Stalin was just as evil and the same kind of evil as Hitler.    The fact that this depiction of our wartime nemesis persists to this day, almost eighty years after his defeat, itself shows that a major change in thinking had taken place from one World War to the next.   Sure, there had been plenty of propagandistic atrocity stories told about the Germans in World War I but people knew better then than to take these as Gospel truth and most of them were debunked soon after the war ended.   By contrast, to this day questioning elements of the accounts of what went on in German-occupied Poland during World War II can land one with a hefty gaol sentence in Europe and potentially destroy one’s career, reputation, and life in general in North America.    The contrast is that much stronger when we take into consideration the facts that it was the Soviets who drove the Nazis out of Poland, Poland remained a Soviet puppet state until late in the 1980s, until then we had to rely to a large extent upon the Soviets or Soviet-controlled sources for much of our information about what had happened in Poland, that the Soviets were never known for their trustworthiness and that the Cold War which began almost immediately after World War II ended hardly provided them with an incentive to be more truthful.   Even more to the point, however, was the fact that after the Casablanca Conference in 1943 the American president at the time, who was even more crippled morally and intellectually than he was physically, announced that the Allies would be seeking “unconditional surrender”.   From a strategic point of view this was a particularly idiotic thing to do as Sir Winston Churchill, whom FDR had not consulted before making this announcement and was forced to go along with it or present the world with the image of a divided alliance, knew full well, because it sent the message to the enemy that he must dig in and fight to the very last because he can expect nothing in the way of mercy if he loses.   From the ethical point of view that concerns us here, it is the sort of demand that one would only make if he saw him and his enemy as fighting not a traditional war but a cosmic and apocalyptic one between good and evil, which is precisely how that maniac with a Messiah complex saw it.   How Sir Winston was able to stomach being forced to cooperate with this man and Stalin for so long is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. 

 

In one last detail of the Second World War we find the technological transformation of warfare itself into an evil of exponentially greater magnitude and the subversion of the traditional ethics of war by the Hollywood formula of good guys versus bad guys coinciding into one.   By the end of the war the Americans had found a way to harness the power of the atom to develop bombs with destructive power that had to be measured in kilotons each of which is the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT.   Then they used two of them, one on Hiroshima, Japan and the other on Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945.   The death toll, almost entirely civilian, was somewhere between one and three hundred thousand.   To date this is the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war.   While some continue to repeat the claim that the death toll would have been higher had they not been used, this is utter nonsense.   After the defeat of Germany Japan began reaching out to General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theatre, indicating their willingness to surrender and asking no concessions other than the ones they were eventually granted.   Had Roosevelt’s successor Truman followed the advice given him by former American president Herbert Hoover – drop “unconditional surrender”, promise that Emperor Hirohito could keep his throne and would not be dragged before the kind of Soviet-style kangaroo court that the Allies had in mind for the German leaders (see the eighth and final profile in John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s Profiles in Courage, 1956, for an account of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft’s brave and lonely opposition to the Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that they abandoned the principles of justice long accepted in the English speaking world, even the United States, for those of the Soviet regime) they could have negotiated peace without becoming the only country to have ever committed the barbarous act of dropping nuclear bombs on cities (see Freedom Betrayed by Herbert Hoover, edited by George H. Nash and published in 2011, long after Hoover’s death).

 

Could this ugly episode have taken place had the development of weapons that could wipe out entire civilian populations not occurred at precisely the moment that those who had developed these weapons had thrown out traditional thinking on the ethics of war and adopted the insane notion, evident in their “unconditional surrender” policy, that because they were the “good guys” they could do whatever they wanted to the “bad guys”?

 

Indeed, it is possible that the development of these weapons is itself the explanation of the abandonment of serious thought about the ethics of war for such a shallow, clownish, Hollywood substitute.   Discussion of the weaponizing of atomic energy had begun before the Manhattan Project or, for that matter, World War II itself and was perhaps the inevitable consequence of atomic research.   It might be worth noting, in this context, the famous 1869 conversation between Marcellin Berthelot, Claude Bernard, and the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, that the latter recorded in their Journal, in which it was predicted that a century of research in physical and chemical science would bring man to a knowledge of the atom at which point God would come down from heaven, swinging His big set of keys, and telling mankind it is “closing time”.  Modern science had placed mankind on a course that led to the development of weapons of such destructive potential that could not possibly be used in accordance with traditional concepts of justice in war.   Therefore those intent on using them had to replace the latter with something else.  

 

Think about how the World War II paradigm has been applied to all subsequent conflicts.  Adolf Hitler continues to be described in terms similar to those that in traditional Christian eschatology are applied to the Antichrist.   In traditional Christian eschatology, however, the Antichrist, singular, is the final antichrist and the final tyrant, the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth, a man so fully possessed by the devil that he is basically the incarnation of Satan.   In traditional Christian eschatology there is only one Antichrist, capital A.   His defeat marks the end of history and the Second Coming of Christ.   The point is that if Hitler, evil as he was, was so bad as to warrant this kind of description not only in the propaganda of the day but long after he was gone he would be a historical anomaly.   Yet every foe we have fought since him has been depicted as the “new Hitler”.   Could this be explained by the fact that the genie of nuclear weaponry cannot be put back into its bottle and so this sort of rhetoric has constantly been repeated just in case a “justification” for using it is needed?

 

Today, the Hollywood paradigm of these are the “good guys”, these are the “bad guys”, whatever the former do is right, whatever the latter do is wrong, has been projected even onto conflicts of the past which predated it.    Think about the predictable response of the academic woke to the quotation from Robert E. Lee discussed at the beginning of this essay.   The woke look at the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865 as a war between the “good” North and the “bad” South, basing this entirely upon what they think they know about the aspect of the conflict that pertained to slavery and race.   This was certainly not how the war was viewed at the time, even by the most self-righteous of abolitionists on the Union side.   Nor is this how the conflict was viewed in the period of the generation or so after in which one of the most admirable acts of reconciling a deep societal divide took place as all Americans came to a tacit agreement to honour the heroes of both sides of that war.  That the woke who spend so much of their time in fomenting division between people of different skin colours and ethnic backgrounds see nothing but “racism” and “white supremacy” in such a healing compromise speaks volumes about themselves.

 

How contrary the Hollywood paradigm is to the attitude of the ancients!   Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, composed in the eight century BC, is primarily the story of a falling out that occurred between Agamemnon and Achilles towards the end of the Trojan War.   The Trojan War was the ten year siege of Troy, the capital of the kingdom of Ilium in what is now Turkey, by the Mycenean Greek alliance, that resulted in the total destruction of the city.   Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was the leader of the Greek side, and Achilles, prince of the Myrmidons, was its greatest hero.  The Ionian poet Homer was himself Greek.   Homer’s poetry was instrumental in shaping the idea of a “Greek” identity that transcended that of the Athenian, Spartan, Cretan, or any of the countless other political identities of the autonomous city-states of which Greece then and for centuries after consisted.   The individual that he most consistently depicts as admirable in his Iliad, however, was not a Greek at all but a Trojan, Hector, the son of Troy’s king Priam, and brother of the far less commendable Paris whose behaviour started the conflict in the first place.   Hector is depicted as the model whom every would-be hero should aspire to emulate.   By contrast Achilles, the protagonist of the story, sits out half of it in a sulky fit then, when he re-enters the battle in a fit of rage over the death of Patrocles, proceeds to desecrate the body of the fallen Hector in a way that brings him a swift rebuke from the gods.   Homer shows him at his best at the very end of the story when he shows clemency to Priam, allows the Trojan king to reclaim the body of his son, and promises to hold back the Greeks until the Trojans have had the time to conduct a proper burial.    Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a fifth century BC Greek who was born and raised in the Persian Empire and became the “Father of History” by writing the account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians saw no need to demonize the kings of Persia in his history.   Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta later in that same century, a war in which he had been an Athenian general, was more sympathetic to Sparta than his own city.  So was Xenophon, the friend and disciple of Socrates – the only one of these other than Plato whose accounts of their master remain extant – best remembered for his account of his mercenary service under Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who picked up the history where Thucydides left off.   The Romans were far less generous to their enemies than the Greeks were but they did not demonize them the way the Hollywood-fed West now does.   The greatest enemy that ancient Rome faced in her long rise to empire was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who from his base in Carthagian-controlled Hispania, marched his massive army of infantry, cavalry, and battle elephants – the pre-modern version of tanks – north to the Rhône valley, before moving south through the Alps to invade Italy where he defeated Rome and her allies in a series of battles taking much of Italy, although ultimately failing to take Rome herself.   Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general Rome had defeated in the first of the Punic Wars.  When Hannibal was nine Hamilcar Barca took him to the temple of Moloch and holding him over the fire made him swear eternal hatred and enmity to Rome.   Yet even he is not depicted by Livy or Polybius in the sort of terms with which we speak of Hitler but was rather spoken of respectfully as a worthy, if mercifully defeated, foe.

 

Some might point to the Old Testament as a counterexample to the above.   While it is true that the Old Testament repeatedly speaks of military defeat as punishment for wickedness this wickedness is understood in terms of the actions of those so punished not the fundamental nature of their being.   This can be seen in the fact that far more often than not it is God’s own people who are on the receiving end of this punishment.   In their initial conquest of the Promised Land, it is true, they are commanded to utterly destroy the seven nations of Canaan and to show no mercy in doing so and this is explicitly tied to specific sins of those nations.   Pretty much everyone else in the region was guilty of these same sins, however, and there was no license given to Old Testament Israel to conquer all of these and similarly wipe them out.   It was not merely a matter of punishing sin.   God did not want His own covenant people to be led away into idolatry, child-sacrifice, and the other abominations of Canaan.   They, of course, failed to follow His instructions and very quickly fell into just these sins leading to the cycle that repeated itself over and over through their history – they fall into idolatry, etc., God raises up a scourge to punish them by military conquest, they repent, God sends them a deliverer, repeat, with the whole process intensifying until the Assyrians and Babylonians not only conquer the Northern and Southern kingdoms respectively, but carry them away out of the land as well.   There is nothing in this that would support God’s people holding the view that the world is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” with they themselves as God’s people being the “good guys” and everyone else, the nations that they conquered and the nations that conquered them, being the “bad guys”.  

 

When we look at the long ethical discussion of justice as it relates to war from its beginnings in the ancient times just considered through medieval Christian theology right up to the early twentieth century it is apparent that the goal of those engaged in this discussion and hence the purpose of the discussion itself has been to place limits on war so as to minimize the death and destruction it causes.   It is equally apparent that substituting puerile “good guys” versus “bad guys” talk for this discussion has as its purpose the opposite end – that of the removal of such limits as impediments to the use of the new technology of war that makes it easier to wreak more destruction and death from further away.

 

It is difficult to think of anything that more completely puts the lie to the Modern doctrine of progress than this.   What we call “advancement” and “progress” in the technology of war all consists of making war more lethal and destructive while removing those who wreak this death and destruction further from it.   When wars were fought with swords you had to kill your enemy from within the reach of his own sword.   The fighting therefore was much more fair in the pre-woke sense of the word and the virtues traditionally associated with warfare, most especially courage and strength, were indispensable.   Fighting in such a war was a way to test and prove these virtues in oneself and this is probably what inspired the second part of General Lee’s quotation, the part about us growing too fond of war.   If the terribleness of war from the first part of the quotation means that war is an evil, its value in testing courage, strength, and what used to be called manliness before toxic femininity outlawed that concept which drew so many to it meant that it was not an unmixed evil.   When guns were introduced men could kill their enemies from a distance.   There was still a testing of skill – who had the better aim, who could shoot faster – and courage involved.   It was a step that increased the distance between the soldier and the death he wreaked but two soldiers aiming rifles at each other from across a contested field are still a lot closer to two knights fighting with swords and lances than someone sitting behind a computer somewhere miles away, perhaps half the world away, from the buildings he destroys and the hundreds or potentially thousands of people he kills by the press of a button.   That is the generic “he” by the way.   I have seen those who regard this as “progress” celebrate the fact that it eliminates the “sexism” of war because women are just as capable of sitting behind computer consoles and pressing buttons as men.    That puts a whole new spin on Rudyard Kipling’s “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.    

 

By making war so much more deadly and destructive and so much more remote from those who start it, technological “progress” has made it virtually impossible to adhere to traditional jus in bello standards, such as minimizing harm to non-combatants.  These are sometimes still offered lip service, of course, but this has increasingly become a joke.   Paradoxically, the very thing that makes it so hard to adhere to these standards also makes it all the more necessary that we do so.   This means that it is that much more important to follow jus ad bellum standards.   We cannot do this so long as we continue to follow the Hollywood neo-Manichaeism that has prevailed since World War II.   The sooner we abandon this modern take on an ancient heresy the better.

 

 

Plagued By Dictators

For almost two months now our public health authorities, Dominion and provincial, have been acting like dictators. They have suspended our basic rights and freedoms, denied us access to public facilities such as libraries, gyms and parks, forced businesses that they consider to be “non-essential” even though they are hardly such to the livelihood of the owners and employees to close, locked up the Churches, synagogues and other places of worship, and otherwise acted as if they were the second coming of Joseph Stalin. Our provincial premiers have been no better. Even those I previously had a degree of respect for, such as Upper Canada’s Doug Ford, whose late brother Rob must be spinning in his grave right about now, have shown their true tyrannical colours. The worst of all has been Captain Airhead, the Prime Minister in the Dominion government. While Liberal Prime Ministers since Mackenzie King have behaved like autocratic control freaks rather than the humble servants of Queen-in-Parliament that they are supposed to be, the Trudeaus, who never met a Communist dictatorship they did not admire and fawn over and strive to imitate, have been by far the worst.

Many of those who, like this writer, were fed up with all of this the first hour into the lockdown, might be surprised to learn that creating a dictatorship in response to a plague is not a new phenomenon. Universal quarantines are new – previously, we quarantined only the sick or those we had good reason to suspect might have contracted the contagion. Plague time dictators, however, go back to the very first dictators, those of ancient Rome.

The eternal city was originally a monarchy. Its legendary founder, Romulus, was its first king. Romulus’s fourth successor and Rome’s fifth king, Lucius Tarquinus Priscus, was an Etruscan. Beginning with his reign, the Etruscans gained more and more influence over Rome and this created a growing division between the monarchy and the Senate, the Council of the patriarchs of the noble Roman families which Romulus had established to help him govern the city. In the reign of the seventh and last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who seized the throne through the assassination of his predecessor, his arrogance – which is actually what his cognomen signifies – and his crimes, along with those of his son, Sextus, pushed that division to the breaking point. When Sextus, through threats and blackmail forced himself upon Lucretia, the wife of the nobleman Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, leading to her taking her own life in shame, her husband and father, along with Lucius Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius, drove the Tarquins out of Rome after which the Senate declared the city to be a republic.

This was the first occasion in which the word republic was used to signify a government without a king. Res publica, which literally means “the public thing”, was one of two Latin expressions commonly used to translate the Greek politeia, which simply refers to the institutions which are constitutionally set up to look after the business of the public regardless of whether they be monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or a mixture, and is best rendered in English by “state”, “commonwealth” or even “constitution.” When the Roman Senate borrowed this Latin expression to refer to their new type of constitution, small-r republicanism was born.

As much as Tarquin the Proud deserved being deposed, the problem stemmed from who he was as a person and not from his office of authority. The Roman nobles of the sixth century BC were not thinking of this, however, when they drove him out, and so they created an inferior constitution, a republic. There are many roles and duties in the constitution of a state that can only properly be filled and performed by a king or queen. I do not intend to argue this point at length here, having made it many times in the past, and mention it only by way of introducing the observation that the Romans themselves quickly figured out that they had created a constitutional vacuum that would need, on certain occasions, to be filled. Thus they created the office of dictator.


Today the terms dictator and tyrant are more or less interchangeable but his was not the case back then. The term tyrant was used to refer to a ruler who was the opposite of a king. Whereas a true king came to his office lawfully, a tyrant was generally a usurper. The term tyrant comes from a word that originally referred to usurpation and it came to be associated with the heavy-handed abuse of power because someone who unlawfully seizes power does so because he thirsts for power and is therefore inclined to abuse it in a way that is not generally true of a lawful king. Note that Tarquin the Proud, who became "king" by assassinating Servius Tullius, was properly a tyrant rather than a king. When the Romans created the office of dictator, the term did not carry any of the opprobrium that would later be attached to it and was already at that time attached to the term tyrant.


The Roman office of dictator was a temporary position. The term was six months, half of that of the consuls, the two co-presidents of the Roman Republic, the first of whom were the aforementioned Brutus and Collatinus. When an emergency arose in which the Romans perceived the need for a single individual to wield the undivided supreme Imperium, the Senate would ask one or the other of the consuls, or both in the event that neither was off on a military venture somewhere, to name a dictator. Sworn into office, his first duty would be to name a magister equitum - master of horse. This was his lieutenant, his second-in-command, his "vice-dictator." The title obviously derives from the expectation that he would lead the cavalry that would accompany the unified army led by the dictator. This points to the fact that the emergencies that prompted the appointment of a dictator tended to be military in nature, when some powerful enemy threatened the city.


The first time this happened, at least according to Livy, was in the ninth year of the Roman Republic. War with the Sabines seemed imminent and the Senate asked consul Postumus Cominius Auruncus to name a dictator. He named his co-consul Titus Lartius Flavus, who appointed Spurius Cassius Viscellinus, one of the consuls of the previous year, to be his master of horse. Although war was declared, no fighting ensued, and Lartius laid down his powers before his six months expired.


The final Roman dictator was Gaius Julius Caesar, who was made dictator for life. That life was cut short on the Ides of March in 44 BC, when he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a gang of conspirators, one of the leaders of which was his former friend, Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of the Brutus who had been the first consul of Rome. His death brought the office of dictator to an end because that office existed to fill the vacuum in the Roman constitution that had been created by the absence of a king. A new Roman monarchy would soon be established when Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son and heir, Gaius Octavius was declared by the Senate to be the sole ruler of Rome and given the titles of Augustus (1) which means “exalted one”, Princeps, which means “first, chief, prince”, and Imperator, which had been a military term meaning “general” but from that point on would also mean “emperor”, a connotation the family name “Caesar” would also soon take on.


In between Lartius and Ceasar, the most well-known dictator, and the one who is the most admired, was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who held the position twice. In 458 BC, war with the Aequi left one of the consular armies besieged and the other powerless to help. Cincinnatus, an elderly farmer, was at his field, the legend says, when a delegation from the Senate arrived to tell him that he had been named dictator. With Lucius Tarquitius as his master of horse, he conscripted a large army, marched to the relief of the besieged consul, quickly forced the Aequi into submission at the Battle of Mount Algidus, and returned to his plow in a fortnight plus one day. His second dictatorship was almost as short, and involved putting down an internal conspiracy against the city.


Usually the emergencies were military in nature, but this was not always the case.


It can be amusing, when reading the ancient Roman historian Livy's multi-volume history of Rome from its beginning down to his own era, the Augustinian, to note the many occasions on which the Romans appointed a dictator in order to pound a nail into a wall. This, of course, sounds to the modern reader like a ridiculous thing to do and it is made all the more absurd by the way in which every time this happened the dictator would name a master of horse even though the task for which he was appointed sounds very much like a one-man job and was not military in nature.


Perhaps you are wondering what sort of bizarre carpentry emergency was constantly arising that required a dictator to take up the hammer. This is the funniest part of it all because it had nothing to do with carpentry at all but was done whenever the city was threatened by a plague.


Now if your next question pertains to what they were smoking in ancient Rome and/or where you might acquire some of it, allow me to assure you that while promising to legalize the abuse of mind-altering substances helped Captain Airhead to seize power, it had nothing to do with the Roman custom of nominating a dictator to drive a nail into the wall to stop a plague.


What I have been talking about was a religious ceremony. The nail, a symbol of the goddesses of fate, destiny, and necessity, would be ceremonially driven into a wall once a year, upon an important anniversary, in a number of Roman temples. The most important of these ceremonies was the one that took place in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. Tarquin the Elder had begun construction of this Temple in his reign, but it was not completed until the period in which Tarquin the Proud was driven out and the Republic established. It was consecrated on September 13th in either 509 BC or 507 BC. The reason for the uncertainty is that while the ancient authorities are in agreement that Marcus Horatius Pulvius, the uncle of the famous Horatius Cocles who figures in to story about “Horatius at the Bridge”, was the consul who consecrated the Temple, they do not agree as to whether it was while he was suffect consul in 509 or during his second consulship in 507. At any rate, each year on that date the Epulum Jovis banquet would be held in honour of the temple’s patron deity. On the same day the clavis annalis would take place, in which one of the consuls would ritually attach a nail to the wall of the Temple, on the right side near the shrine to Minerva. Horatius was probably the first to perform this ritual.


The law governing this ritual was itself written out and attached to the wall where the ritual was performed. It specified that only the praeter maximus, or chief magistrate, could perform it. For the annual ritual, this meant one of the consuls. Whenever the Senate decided that there was an emergency calling for a special extra performance of the ritual, only a dictator would suffice. The first time this happened, according to Livy, was in 363 BC. A plague had been ravaging the city for a couple of years. Lucius Manlius Capitolinus Imperiosus was named dictator (Lucius Pinarius Natta was his master of horse if you wish to know) for the purpose of performing this ritual. After he had hammered the nail into the wall the plague stopped. On several subsequent occasions when Rome was threatened by a plague this was repeated.


Exactly why the Romans thought this would work is unclear because the original significance of the ritual has been lost to the sands of time. The seeming success of the first performance might explain its having been repeated but not why it was done in the first place. One explanation is that the nail was thought to be symbolically driven through the spirit behind the plague, fixing him in place and preventing him from doing harm, but nobody really knows for sure.


Today’s epidemiologists would scoff at such an unscientific and superstitious manner of dealing with a plague but I see little evidence that would commend their own approach as being superior. Science and superstition are a lot more closely related than they would like us to believe. The methodology of each involves about an equal amount of guesswork, blind leaps in the dark, hit and miss, trial and error, and sheer dumb luck. Science is more respectable only because it has shinier, fancier, equipment and more impressive technical terminology. Where Roman superstition is truly vulnerable to critique is on the religious grounds. A far better religious response to a plague is to do as the king of Nineveh did in the book of Jonah, and call upon the nation to turn to the true and living God in humility, confessing our sins, and repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Our superstitious medical dictators obviously want none of that, however, as evidenced by their locking up all the Churches during Lent, the annual season of pre-Paschal repentance.


Indeed, the ancient Roman technique has this to commend it in comparison with today’s medical dictatorship. It at least complies with what has been recognized as the first rule of medical ethics since Hippocrates of Kos, who died seven years before the first time a Roman dictator was called upon to stop a plague with a nail. Whether it did any good or not, it could not conceivably do any harm. Shutting down society and the economy and putting everybody under universal house arrests does immeasurable harm – economic, moral, legal, political, social, spiritual, psychological, physical, and even mortal.


The lesson in all of this for Captain Airhead is that if he truly feels this pandemic requires a dictatorial response, he would be better off looking to the example of the ancient Roman dictators rather than modern Communist ones. If he really wants to be useful, he could, if he can figure out the difference between the flat and the pointy end, try hammering a nail into a wall.



(1) Although this was a title that was passed on to all of his heirs, it is also used as the personal name by which historians identify him after his elevation to the rank of emperor.

War and Peace: Part Two

As we have seen, since the dawn of time men have been fighting wars, talking, writing, and singing about their wars, and talking and dreaming about peace. On the one hand we glorify war, build monuments to battles, and honour our warriors. On the other hand we long for and pray for peace. Is there a contradiction between the way we long for the tranquility and security of peace and the way we honour our society’s warriors in our culture?


This question has been around for a long time. The ongoing discussion of war and peace has taken place across the boundaries of several different branches of human thought. One of those is ethics. Ethics, a word derived from the Greek word for habit or custom, is the branch of human thought that pertains to the division of human behaviour into the categories of right and wrong and human character traits into the corresponding categories of virtues and vices. The question of whether or not our desire for peace contradicts the glory we attach to war points to the basic question of the ethics of war and peace – is war right or wrong?

There are three possible ethical positions with regards to war. The first is that war is always right. The second is that war is always wrong. The third is that war is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. All views ever expressed about the ethics of war have been variations of one or the other of these positions.

The position that war is always right would appear to contradict the idea that peace is good and desirable. At the very least the two ideas would be extremely difficult to reconcile with one another. This position is a hypothetically possible answer to the question. It has not played a significant role in the actual ethical discussion of war and peace, and so we will not concern ourselves with it.

That is not the case with the position that war is always wrong. That position is held by a large number of people, such as those who believe in non-resistance for religious or philosophical reasons and progressives who believe they can establish a permanent and universal peace on earth through politics and diplomacy. Those who hold to this position, ordinarily frown upon the way the traditional culture celebrates past victories in war, and honours warriors who have fought and/or laid down their lives for us. If they are progressives who believe that war can be eliminated they may see these elements of our culture as roadblocks standing between them and their goals.

It is the third position, in which war can be either right or wrong depending upon the circumstances, that has been the mainstream traditional position in the Western world. It should therefore come as no surprise that this position is the one which is most easy to reconcile with both our traditional longing and praying for peace and our tradition of lauding and honouring acts of bravery and heroism in war.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Stoic philosopher, orator, and Roman statesman from the last days of the Republic in the first Century BC, is often quoted as having said “the most unjust peace is preferable to the most just war”. In fact he expressed this sentiment more than once. (1) While this is a favourite quotation of those who are opposed to any and all wars, the Roman senator was in fact one of the most important pre-Christian thinkers in the just war tradition. In 44 BC, the last year of his life, Cicero wrote one of his most important works, De Officiis or On Duties. In the first book of this treatise addressed to his son, in the context of explaining that men have just obligations even to those who have wronged him, he addressed the subject of just war. Disagreements, he argued, can be settled in one of two ways – discussion or force, and since human beings, not being mere brutes, are capable of discourse, we are to resort to war, only when discussion has failed us. The only acceptable reason for going to war, he states, is “sine inuria in pace vivatur”, i.e., that we might live in peace, without harm. (2)

This idea, that peace is the only acceptable reason for war, can be interpreted and applied in a number of ways. Cicero lived in a time when his city, Rome, had succeeded in conquering the Mediterranean world and, having become an imperial power, was in the process of converting its republican political structure into an imperial political structure. Livy’s account of the history of Rome depicts Rome’s gradual conquest of her neighbours as an ongoing series of battles against troublemakers bent on disturbing the peace of Rome. Cicero wrote De Officiis in the year of Julius Caesar’s assassination. A little under two decades later, Caesar’s nephew Octavian because the emperor of Rome marking the dawn of two centuries of relatively tranquil Roman order. The wars of the Roman republic could be interpreted as the necessary historical means to the end of the Pax Romana. Throughout history numerous world powers have looked to Rome as an example and sought peace through war by means of conquest.

It is unlikely that this is what Cicero had in mind, even though he does immediately go on to discuss Rome’s treatment of the peoples she conquered. Cicero was an opponent of the transformation of Rome from a republican to an imperial structure, which had placed him in opposition to Caesar and would lead to his being proscribed by the Second Triumvirate and put to death on the orders of Marc Antony. It makes more sense to interpret his statement that peace is the only acceptable reason for war as further commentary on what he had just been saying about how disputes should only be settled by force when discussion is no longer an option. Diplomacy requires the cooperation of both sides in order to work. Sometimes one of the sides cannot or will not be reasoned with. By saying that war is only morally acceptable in these circumstances and that the only acceptable motivation for going to war in these circumstances is that we might live in peace after, Cicero is seeking to place limitations on when and how war is conducted. This is the purpose of the classical concept of just war.

The classical concept of just war is an ancient element of the traditional Western dialogue about war and peace. It is not the only component of that dialogue however, neither is it the oldest component, nor is it the only element to discuss war in terms of justice. To understand the classical concept of just war we need to distinguish it from both the official justification for war and war criticism. These two elements of the dialogue are, of course, opposed to each other and the classical concept of just war differs from both, although it also has similarities with both.

The official justification for war is the oldest element of the dialogue about war and peace. This is true not only of the Western dialogue but of parallel conversations in non-Western traditions as well. Today we have a technical term for this element. That term is propaganda.(3)

When the leaders of one society wish to go to war with the leaders of another society they cite grievances against that other society. This is true today and it has been true for as long as wars have been fought. The purpose of this is to unite their society in support of the war effort. The grievances may be legitimate and serious or they may be fabricated and petty. They might be the actual cause of the war, i.e., the reasons that convinced the leadership of the society to go to war. They might be just an excuse, a pretext given for a war motivated by other, presumably less noble, causes. Late in the second millennium BC, the Mycenaean-led Achaean alliance sailed across the Aegean sea, lay siege to Troy, then captured, looted, and burned the city, putting its men to the sword, taking its women for concubines and its children for slaves. This event, confirmed as having taken place by archaeologists in the 19th Century, became the subject matter of Greek myths, legends, poems, and plays. The legends record the justification Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gave for this war. Paris, prince of Troy had stolen Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon. Whether or not this was the actual justification given at the time for the war its inclusion in the legends demonstrates that even in ancient times, governments felt they needed to give reasons for wars. If the abduction of Helen was the actual grievance cited as the casus belli at the time it was almost certainly just an excuse for a war that was actually motivated by a desire to plunder Ilium. (4) Note that the “wrath of Achilles” which is the subject matter of Homer’s Iliad was caused by Achilles’ feeling that he had not received his fair share of the spoils of war and the honour due him, which erupted into a quarrel between him and Agamemnon over their captured concubines.

Both the official justifications of war and the classical concept of just war identify circumstances in which war is considered to be just. Propaganda, however, starts with a specific war that has already been decided upon and offers reasons why it is just, with the purpose of facilitating the act of war, whereas the classical concept of just war proposes general conditions under which war would be acceptable, which specific wars are supposed to meet in order to be considered just, with the purpose of setting limits upon war. The similarities between the two exist on the surface, whereas the differences in terms of fundamental purpose are much deeper.

If the purpose of the official justification for war is to generate support within a society for its war effort and its political leadership in a time of war, the purpose of war criticism is the exact opposite, to call into question the wisdom and rightness of the decisions of a society’s leaders in wartime, including perhaps, the decision to go to war itself. War criticism is not the same thing as pacifism, although a war critic might be a pacifist. Pacifism, rejects all war as a matter of principle. War criticism, like propaganda, begins with and pertains to particular wars.

The greatest poet-playwrights of ancient Athens wrote in the fifth Century BC. The earliest of these, the tragedian Aeschylus, died before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war (5). The rest lived and wrote during that thirty year conflict between Athens and Sparta. The youngest of the tragedians, Euripides, was much more of an innovator than the traditionalists Aeschylus or Sophocles. While they used their plays to convey ancient moral truths, Euripides used his as vehicles for commentary on the events of his own day, especially the war. Some of that commentary is very critical of how the leadership of Athens was conducting the war. The Troades, for example, commiserates with the women of Troy in their plight after the Greek victory. It came out in 415 BC and is believed to have been a negative commentary on the way Athens treated the people of Melos following their conquest of the island earlier that year. (6) Euripides’s criticism of the Athenian leaders, however, was subtle and moderate compared to that of Aristophanes, the comic playwright. He mercilessly lampooned the war and its leaders in several of his plays. Of his surviving works, the oldest is The Acharnians, written in the early years of the war. The hero of this play is a private citizen named Dicaeopolis who wants an end to the war. He goes to the Athenian assembly, but finds that body to be hopelessly incompetent and uninterested in peace. After ridiculing the buffoons who are wasting Athens’ time and money he sends Amphitheus, who claims to be descended from the gods, to make a private peace treaty between himself and Sparta. Amphitheus succeeds, but incurs upon himself and Dicaeopolis the wrath of the veterans of Acharnae, who are represented by the chorus. In a speech to the chorus, who are eventually won over to his side, Dicaeopolis defends his opposition to the war on the grounds that it had been started for bad reasons (7) and continued for the sole purpose of lining people’s pockets. These have been the primary accusations of war critics ever since.

War criticism of this nature is similar to the official justification for war in that both concern themselves with specific wars, rather than the question of the rightness or wrongness of war in general. In this similarity, war criticism and propaganda both differ from just war theory and pacifism, which are themselves similar in that they address the rightness or wrongness of war in general, albeit from opposite standpoints just as war criticism and propaganda look at specific wars from opposing points of view.

The traditional discussion of justice in relationship to war and peace has largely consisted of these four elements, one of which, pacifism, is a version of the second possible position on the justness of war, i.e., that it is always wrong, the other three of which are versions of the third position, that war is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. (8) The just war element is, is the philosophical, ethical and sometimes theological discussion of two basic questions. The first of these is: Under what circumstances is it right for us to go to war? The second question is: What is the right manner of conducting a war?

That there was a right and a wrong time to go to war, and a right and a wrong way to conduct war, was recognized before philosophers began their enquiry into the justice of war. (9) The war criticism of Euripides and Aristophanes points to such an earlier understanding, and the roots of the philosophical discussion can be traced back to the same era. Socrates was a contemporary of both Euripides and Aristophanes. We only know about him through the writings of others, including the derogatory portrait of him in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, (10) but mostly through the dialogues of Plato in which he appears as the chief character, and often the voice of Plato himself. The Peloponnesian War forms the background setting for many of these dialogues. There is a subtext about the war that runs throughout Plato’s dialogues, in which leading figures of the war appear as characters. According to the Symposium, Socrates himself fought in the Peloponnesian War and was honoured for bravery. In one of Plato’s earliest dialogues, the Laches, one of the dialogues in which Plato is widely thought to have presented the actual Socrates rather than to have merely used him as the voice of his own ideas, Socrates discusses the nature of courage and the necessity of military training. Plato does not discuss the subject of justice in war very often. He does, however, present ideas that would influence later just war theorists such as Cicero.

Plato’s best known work is The Republic in which Socrates, invited to the house of Polemarchus, enters into a debate with several of the people present, including Plato’s older brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus about the nature of justice. Much of the discussion involves the hypothetical construction of an ideal city-state, governed by philosopher-kings whose government is enforced by a guardian class. In the fifth book of  The Republic, Socrates is asked to describe the guardian class in detail. In his response he says a number of things which pertain to war. He says that the children of the guardians should be apprenticed in the art of war by being made observers of wars, that guardians who behave bravely in war should be rewarded, and that those who behave cowardly should be removed from the guardian class. Finally, he draws a distinction between “discord” and “war”. The difference is that the former is a conflict between Greeks, the latter a conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks. Socrates says that there ought to be a set of rules governing discord – Greeks should not enslave other Greeks, the corpses of Greek enemies slain in battle should not be despoiled, Greek territory should not be destroyed nor Greek houses burned. These rules apply only to discord between Greeks, and not to war against non-Greek barbarians.

This is a sort of limited just war theory. It only addresses the jus in bello side of the theory, the question of how to fight justly in war, and the proposed rules apply only to internecine battles among the Greeks.

In Plato’s final dialogue, The Laws, the Athenian stranger, who may or may not have been Socrates, discusses the actual laws and constitutions of Crete and Sparta with Cleinias and Megillus. As we have seen (11), at the very beginning of dialogue the Athenian stranger challenged the idea, put forward by Cleinias that the purpose behind the laws requiring certain disciplines, such as the wearing of arms, was to prepare the city-state for war. Demonstrating the peace is preferable to war, the Athenian stranger declared that no one is “a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the sake of peace.”

This idea, that a state, even in the time of war, should be organized for peace, rather than the other way around, would seem to be reflected in Cicero’s declaration that the only acceptable motivation for war is peace. Cicero was certainly aware of Plato’s statement – his own treatise De Legibus, written about five to six years before his De Officiis, was modelled after Plato’s The Laws. This idea then, should be understood as the first, basic principle of the just war concept, a concept that Cicero developed much further.

After stating that to live in peace unharmed is the only acceptable reason for war, a jus ad bellum principle, he proceeds within the same sentence to give a jus in bello principle. It is similar to what Plato had Socrates’ say in the fifth book of The Republic, except that the distinction Cicero makes, is not between Greeks and non-Greeks, but rather between those who were “crudeles in bello” – “cruel in war” and those who were not. The latter should be spared, upon victory, Cicero wrote, but not the former. He illustrated by pointing to Roman history. Earlier generations of Romans had admitted the Tusculuns, Aequians, etc., to Roman citizenship after defeating them, but, at the end of the third Punic war had razed Carthage to the ground.

Cicero goes on to enumerate several other principles of just war – that protection should be given to those laying down their arms and surrendering, that war is not just unless there has been a formal declaration of war after the other side has been given a warning and the opportunity to settle the grievance peacefully, that a man should not fight in the war unless he is a soldier, legally bound by an oath of loyalty, and that wars fought for supremacy and glory rather for survival, while having to meet all these other standards in order to be just, must also be fought with less bitterness. (12)

This was the fullest pre-Christian expression of the concept of just war to be formulated in the Western tradition.

The largest part of the discussion of just war has been carried out by theologians within the Christian tradition. Not everyone in the Christian tradition has believed in the just war concept – pacifism in various forms has also had a strong voice within Christianity. In War and Peace Part Three, we will address the question of whether the authoritative Scriptures of the Christian tradition, and particularly the teachings of Jesus Christ, support the just war concept or non-resistance/pacifism. We will conclude this essay by looking at the concept of just war as it has appeared in the Christian theology and ethics of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Augustine was born in Numidia in 354 A.D. His mother was a Christian, his father was not. Sent to study at the University of Carthage, he rejected the faith of his mother. He moved to Milan to take up the position of professor of rhetoric, and there converted to Christianity, being baptized by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He returned to Africa, where he was ordained a priest, and made the bishop of Hippo (13).

It was during St. Augustine’s lifetime that Rome was sacked by the Visigoths. This occurred in 410 AD. Two years later, St. Augustine wrote a letter to St. Marcellinus of Carthage in response to some questions the latter had passed on to him. The second question concerned the statements from the Sermon on the Mount about not returning evil for evil, and turning the other cheek. The idea was circulating, based upon these statements, that Christian teaching and practice was not consistent with the duties of a citizen of Rome. Several ideas of this sort were going around at the time, because many were blaming Christianity for the fall of Rome, saying that it was divine punishment on Rome for abandoning the Roman gods for Christianity. Eventually, St. Augustine would respond to those accusations in his treatise De Civitas Dei. In response to this specific question, he pointed out that the men who brought Rome to its position of greatness, were attributed with practicing the very thing Jesus’ commanded. He points to Cicero’s praise of Caesar, for example, as one who was prone to forget nothing except the wrongs done him. This, St. Augustine said, not remembering wrongs done, pardoning rather than seeking revenge, is what Jesus meant by not returning evil for evil. In this context, St. Augustine writes that a commonwealth that practices Christianity, will conduct its wars in such a way, that both sides will be able to enjoy peace and justice after the war has concluded. If the Christian religion condemned all wars, he went on to write, soldiers would be commanded to abandon their profession, when instead they are commanded to be content with their wages. (14)

In another letter, written six years later to Count Boniface, the Roman governor of Africa, St. Augustine pointed to King David, the centurion who came to Jesus and Cornelius in the Book of Acts as examples of military men who had God’s favour, and again mentioned that John the Baptist did not tell the soldiers who came to him for baptism to abandon their profession. He told Boniface that he should consider his physical strength a gift from God and that he should make peace his objective, waging war only when necessary, in order that peace may be restored. (15)

In these letters, we see that some of the qualifications that were identified by Cicero as to what makes a war just have been reasserted by St. Augustine, namely that peace must be the ultimate objective of war, that war is to be fought only when necessary. We also see the bishop of Hippo’s concern with demonstrating that Christianity does not make a person a bad citizen, that civil duty is compatible with Christianity and even required by the faith, and that military service is not forbidden by the Christian faith. These are ideas that keep popping up throughout his writings.

One of his most well known passages on just war is found in his De Civitas Dei. In the seventeenth chapter of the nineteenth book, building upon his argument in the previous chapter, he described the entire world as being the third circle of human society, after the home or family, and city or state. In the world, differences of tongue divide men, but imperial powers impose their language upon the peoples they conquer. This creates unity, but at a terrible cost. Wars are full of slaughter and bloodshed. Imperial conquest of the world would not lessen the horrors of war, because the civil wars bound to break out in so large of an empire, would be even more terrible than imperial wars. Here, he described the attitude of the wise man who wages just wars. Such a man laments the necessity of just wars, he wrote, because they are the only wars he fights, and if they were not just out of necessity, he would not fight them and therefore would not fight any at all. He wages just wars, because of the injustice of the other side, which would be a cause for lamentation even if it did not result in a war.

If we took this chapter in isolation from the rest of De Civitas Dei, it could be interpreted as saying that only defensive wars are just wars. This is not what St. Augustine meant. Earlier, in his account of the history of Rome, he, like Cicero, had counted as just wars, the wars by which Rome had conquered her neighbours. Livy’s history depicts these wars as a long string of responses to provocative action on the part of these neighbours but they were not defensive wars in the sense of responses to invasions that threatened their existence and territorial integrity. Later theologians and other just war theorists, have taken the basic principle St. Augustine has expressed here, that to be just a war must be a necessary response to wicked acts on the part of the other side, to argue, as St. Augustine did not, that only defensive wars can be just.

He does, however, give other qualifications as when a war is just. His Contra Faustum was written as a rebuttal of a book written by a leader of the Manicheans, a sect he had been involved with before his conversion to Christianity. In the twenty-second book he states that war contains many evils – lust for bloodshed, vengeful cruelty, ferocious hatred, etc., but that it is in order to punish such things that good men fight just wars. Their justice in doing so, he goes on to explain, depends upon the cause for which they are fighting, and their authority for doing so. Rulers have the authority to wage war according to the natural order, and if they abuse that authority, a soldier fighting under their orders is not personally culpable for fighting in a war lacking a just cause. (16) St. Augustine made these points as supporting arguments for the argument that if human rulers have the lawful authority to conduct wars, then laws conducted under the authority of God must be that much more just, which was a response to Faustus’ claim that the writers of the Old Testament libeled God by depicting Him as commanding the wars of Moses.

The idea that rulers have the authority to wage war, also contains a limitation upon when war can rightly be conducted. If the lawfully constituted rulers of a society have the authority to wage war on its behalf, this implies that other people do not have that authority, and St. Augustine stated this outright in the same book, a few paragraphs earlier. (17) This principle of just war theory could be implied from what Cicero had written in De Officiis, about the need for a formal declaration of war. St. Thomas Aquinas, would make it the first and most important principle, of his just war theory.

St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian, Dominican priest in the 13th Century. He was a philosopher, one of the Scholastics, as well as a theologian. His most important work, was his Summa Theologica, a massive work of systematic Christian thought. It consists of a series of topics, in which he first presents a question, then a series of objections to his own position, after which he rebuts the objections and presents arguments for his own position. It is organized into three large parts, the first of which deals with theology, the second of which deals with ethics. The second part is itself divided into two parts, the first of which discusses broad ethical principles, the second of which deals with specific moral questions. The fortieth topic, in the second part of the second part, is the topic of war. The first of four articles that appear under this head answers the question whether or not it is always a sin to fight a war. He answers the question in the negative, stating that war is just if it meets three conditions. The first of these is that to be just, a war must be declared by a legitimate ruler, the second is that a just war must have a just cause, and the third is that the intentions of those fighting the war must be good.

Apart from the Scriptures themselves, St. Augustine is the main source St. Thomas Aquinas relied upon in arguing his case for just war. After his initial listing of objections to his position, he quotes St. Augustine’s argument, from the letter to St. Marcellinus referred to above, about how John the Baptist told the soldiers who came to him for baptism, to be content with their pay rather than to abandon their position. When he presents his three conditions for just war, he quotes from Contra Faustum to support his argument that a just war must be conducted by legitimate authorities and his argument that those conducting a just war must have the right intentions, and he also quotes from other Augustinian works. In his specific replies to each of the four objections, he quotes St. Augustine in all but the fourth. The concept of just war he presents in his Summa is essentially Augustinian.

That, of course, does not make it right. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas saw the just war concept as serving the cause of peace, by placing limits on when war can be rightly conducted. Pacifists see the just war concept as justifying that which is morally unjustifiable, and if the pacifist also has anarchistic leanings, he will probably see it as bolstering what he considers to be the unjust regime of the state. Do the Scriptures support the Augustinian/Thomistic concept of just war, which has been the mainstream in Western Christian thought, or do they support a version of the doctrine of non-resistance/pacifism? That is the question we will consider in the third and final part of War and Peace.

(1) It can be found in at least two places in his letters: Epistularum ad Atticum 7.14.3, and Epistularum ad Familiares 6.6.6. The Latin wording is slightly different in each letter, but both contain the meaning expressed in the English quotation.

(2) Cicero, De Officiis, 1.11.34-35.

(3) The term propaganda is also often used for many examples of what I have here called “war criticism.” Nevertheless, it is more often used for arguments put forth by a government to defend its position, and when we apply it to arguments made by opponents and critics of government it is to say that these arguments are similar in style to those put out by the government.

(4) On the other hand, Menelaus is supposed to have held his throne by virtue of his marriage to Helen who had been the daughter of Tyndareus, the previous king of Sparta. In which case, her having run off with or been abducted by Paris, would have been more than just a case of cuckoldry and a personal insult to Menelaus, but threatened the legitimacy of his rule as well.

(5) He had fought, however, in the Greco-Persian wars, including the Battles of Marathon and Salamis. His play The Persians celebrates the Greek victory by depicting the arrival at Susa of the news of Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis. Needless to say, this is not a work of war criticism.

(6) Thucydides records this incident in the fifth book of his History of the Peloponnesian War. His account includes the famous Melian Dialogue, in which, after the Athenians under the leadership of Cleomedes and Tisias, sailed against the island of Melos, with 38 ships, 3000 hoplites, and 320 archers, their generals were invited to dialogue with the representatives of Melos, a Spartan colony that had remained neutral until this incident. The Athenians demanded the surrender of Melos and the Melians attempted to argue against the Athenian demand on the basis of justice. This points to an understanding of rightness and wrongness in war, before the question was taken up by dramatists and philosophers. The Athenians refused to accept these arguments, or subsequent arguments that it was in their own self-interest not to persist with their demands. They insisted that they would look weak if they abandoned their demands, while the Melians insisted that it would dishonourable on their part to surrender without a fight. Ultimately the Athenians destroyed Melos, but this marked a turning point in the war that led to their own final defeat at the hands of Sparta.

(7) Specifically, he claims that the Megarian Decree of 432 BC, banning Megara from trade with the Delian League, was Pericles’ heavy-handed response to the kidnapping of prostitutes from a brothel run by Pericles’ lover Aspasia, itself a Megaran response to the kidnapping of a Megaran prostitute by some Athenian lowlifes.

(8) Although pacifists are war critics in a general sense, war critics in the sense in which I have been using the term are not pacifists. Aristophanes, for example, did not view the Greek resistance to the Persian invasion in the same way he regarded the Peloponnesian War.

(9) See Note 6 above.

(10) Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates, was that of a deceitful sophist and trickster, who thought up clever ways of making weaker arguments defeat stronger arguments. Although Plato, in Apologia, suggests that Aristophanes’ The Clouds was partly responsible for the unpopularity that led to Socrates’ trial and death, in Symposium he portrays the two as being on good terms at a drinking party.

(11) In Part One.

(12) De Officiis, 1.11.35-3 and 1.12.38.

(13) Now Annaba, Algeria.

(14) St. Augustine, Epp. 138.2.12-15.

(15) St. Augustine, Epp. 189.4-6.

(16) St. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 22.74-75

(17) Ibid., 22.70.

When Duty Calls

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (1) - Horace, Odes, Book III, 2:13

Lucy Maud Montgomery is best remembered for her novel Anne of Green Gables which tells the story of a spirited and imaginative orphan girl adopted, by accident or providence, by an elderly brother and sister who raised her on their farm in Prince Edward Island. Anne of Green Gables was the first of a series of eight novels in which Montgomery continued to tell the story of Anne Shirley. The final book in the series (2) Rilla of Ingleside which was published in 1920 is set during the first World War.

The main story in Rilla of Ingleside concerns Rilla Blythe, Anne’s youngest daughter, who is forced by the war to mature into a responsible adult from the vain and frivolous person she seems to be at the beginning of the novel. In the background to this story there is an ongoing commentary on the events of the war by the characters of the novel. While some of the commentary, such as that of Dr. Gilbert Blythe and the Presbyterian minister James Meredith is more educated and informed than that of others, such as that of Blythe housekeeper Susan Baker, there is a general consensus in support of Britain and of Canada’s contributions to the war effort and against the Kaiser. The Blythe boys each feel the call to do their duty to “king, country, and empire” and are ultimately supported in this by their family, friends and neighbors. The only significant dissenting voice is of an unlikable character, Mr. Pryor, derogatorily nicknamed “Whiskers-on-the-moon”, an elder in the church who is an avowed pacifist. His only significant appearance in the story other than in the disapproving conversation of others is in the 20th chapter, where he is invited to pray at a joint prayer meeting of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in support of the war. His “prayer” ends up being a pacifist lecture when is abruptly ended when Norman Douglas, the fiery, opinionated, village infidel who is by far the most likeable character of the book, wrings his neck.

While this is a work of fiction, L. M. Montgomery generally sets her stories in what is recognizably the late 19th –early 20th Century Canada that she knew and experienced. The picture she draws of a community coming together to sacrifice for and support their country in war is a picture of the real Canada of almost one hundred years ago.

There is quite a contrast between that day and our own. Hawks and doves are still among us, and each group is still smugly certain of its own righteousness and of the wickedness of the other. It is the attitude of everybody else, the people who are neither pacifists nor members of war’s cheerleading squad, that is different. Pacifism is no longer held in contempt and barely tolerated. Our attitude towards war has completely changed.

Why is this?

It has to do, I believe, with changes in the way we think about war and the way we think about our relationship to our society. Let us consider these in turn.

For quite some time now it has been customary around the time of Remembrance Day to talk about the soldiers we are remembering and honouring as those who died “for our freedom”. This way of speaking has become so familiar to us that we may not immediately recognize what is wrong with it.

The soldiers we are honouring did not go to war to fight and die for “our freedom”. They went to war to fight and die for “their country”. The difference between these two phrases is of tremendous significance.

If we say that we are fighting a war for “our freedom” what do we mean by “our freedom”?

If the enemy we are fighting against is trying to conquer our territory and enslave our people then “our freedom” could mean “the freedom of our country”. If this is what we mean then fighting for “our freedom” is one way in which we fight for “our country”.

This is not the only possible meaning of this expression, however. When we speak of fighting for “our freedom” we could mean by “our freedom” the liberal concept of the rights and liberties of the individual. If that is what we mean then when we speak of our soldiers as having fought and died for “our freedom” we mean that we are honouring them for fighting and dying for a political ideal, an abstract concept, rather than for a real, concrete community.

If this is what we mean then we are completely out of touch with the nature of the call of duty our soldiers answered when they went to war and with the reason why it is important to honour and remember them.

Unfortunately, it seems to be this second sense that is intended by those who tell us to remember the soldiers who died for “our freedom”. This is because in the 20th Century the idea became widespread among teachers, media commentators and other opinion-formers that it is more noble to fight and die for ideals and higher values than for something as concrete and everyday as “my country”.

Now perhaps you are thinking that such a notion represents an advancement towards enlightenment in our thinking about war. Is it not better to fight for things like justice, freedom, and truth which are eternal, universal, values than to fight for your country?

The answer is no it is not.

Human nature has both a creative and a destructive side. It is man’s creative side, which is the source of art, music, and literature, that responds best to universal values of this kind. These values inspire creative man to reach new heights and this is what makes the difference between a culture and a civilization.

War, however, is a manifestation of man’s destructive side. This does not need inspiration. Rather it needs to be contained and directed so that its harmful energy does the least amount of damage and, if possible, serves the good of the community. For this reason it is better for people to fight for their families, their homes, their friends, their neighbors, their communities and their countries than to fight for things like justice and truth.

It is noble to die for an ideal only when you willingly allow yourself to submit to the injustice of being killed for that ideal. In that case you are a martyr. If you combine the willingness to die for an ideal with the intention of killing others for your ideal you are not a martyr but a fanatic.

Look at what happens when you start to think about war as being fought for universal values. You take what is a conflict between two human societies and you escalate it to the level of a cosmological battle between good and evil. When you think of war as being fought for the benefit of your country you still ask the old questions of just war theory. Do we have just cause to go to war? Are we fighting in a just manner? When you think that you are fighting for good against an enemy who is the embodiment of evil those questions become irrelevant. If you are “good” and your enemy is “evil” all that matters is that you utterly destroy your enemy.

This exponentially multiplies the destructive potential of war. Human beings instinctively recognize this and for this reason universal values and ideals are incapable of stirring the martial spirit the way the call to fight, for kith and kin, heart and hearth, queen and country can.

Lord Thomas Babbington Macauley, the 19th Century British poet, historian and statesman may have been a Whig, but he showed an understanding of what moves men to lay down their lives in battle in his retelling of Livy’s account of the story of Horatius Cocles in his Lays of Ancient Rome:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods

“The temples of his Gods”. It would be unthinkable that anyone today would write these words in the spirit in which Macauley intended them. It is almost universally accepted, in Western society today, that wars should not be fought for religion.

This is because Western countries have become increasingly secular. The state has become more powerful, a wall has been erected between it and the church, and religion, no longer seen as being primarily the corporate worship of a community, has been relegated to the sphere of the private individual. If religion has any value in the contemporary way of thinking it is as a means of making higher values real to the individual, thus providing him with spiritual inspiration.

If we think about religion in those terms then fighting for religion is no different than fighting for ideals. Is this the right way to think about religion however? Secularism has become so widespread that we have perhaps forgotten just how unnatural it is.

Religion, throughout history, and in our own societies until very recently, was not primarily a personal matter between the individual and God. It was a social institution which had a social function. Religion was the heart of the community, the community at worship, the institution which presided over births, coming of age ceremonies, marriages and deaths, which provided a society with its most basic rules and its fundamental identity.

When we think of religion in those terms then a man who fights and dies “for the temples of his Gods” is a man who fights and dies for his community and society, not a man who fights for abstract ideals. This is the difference between fighting for religion and fighting over religion.

As our societies have become secularized religion’s role in war has been greatly misrepresented. How often have we heard from disciples of this new school of militant atheism that religion is “the cause of most wars”? This is, however, utter nonsense. When Xerxes tried to conquer Greece in the early 5th Century BC, when Athens went to war with Sparta for 30 years at the end of the same century, when the Macedonian kings conquered everything between Greece and Persia in the 4th Century BC, and Rome went to war with Carthage for control of the Mediterranean World in the Punic Wars of the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC, when Sulla and Marius, Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, Octavian and Mark Anthony went to war with each other in the civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic, was religion the instigator? Was it religion that drove on conquerors like Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler? Of course not.

Religion has a vital role to play in war but it is seldom the instigator. Religion’s role is to unite a society, to rally the community and the country together in support of the war effort, to remind us of our duties and obligations towards our society. This is not a bad thing, it is a good thing, and ultimately a necessary thing.

The possibility of war will always be present. While we should always pray for and seek out non-violent solutions to disputes between countries, we should not be so naïve as to think that this will always be possible. It is in man’s nature to go to war and the only way to achieve the goal of the elimination of war is by eliminating human beings from the planet.

Various proposals have been made in the name of “world peace” in the last century. Disarmament, the elimination of weapons and armies, has been one of them. The privatization of religion has been another. None of these proposals can bring about world peace because the cause of war lies elsewhere. All these proposals can do is to make the country that adopts them ill-prepared when war arrives.

A country should always be prepared to fight a war, although it should not go out of its way to look for one. If war comes, the country will be in a position of danger. That danger may not be very serious – it all depends upon the strength and goals the enemy. However more or less serious it may be, it will be there, because the state of being at war is by definition the state of being in danger. It is at this point that we are expected, whether we are soldiers going off to fight, or those supporting them at home, to unite behind our country. We have a moral obligation to do so.

We may not like the people who are in government when war comes. Our duty, however, is to our country, which is more than just its government. We may think the war is a mistake, is being fought for stupid reasons, and is against the best interests of our country. That does not negate our duty.

Think of the American aviator and patriot Charles Lindbergh. Before the United States entered the second World War Lindbergh was a leader of and spokesman for the America First Committee which promoted America’s noninvolvement in the war. When the United States was attacked by the Japanese Empire on December 7, 1941, however, his arguments against the war became irrelevant and he sought to rejoin America’s air force. A vindictive FDR ordered that his request to be recommissioned be denied but despite this he voluntarily flew a number of fighter missions as a civilian volunteer.

The men we honour this weekend were men who knew and understood their duty to their country. They knew that life was about more than just earning a living and having fun. They had not fallen into the trap of thinking that they were self-made individuals who owe everything they have and enjoy in life to their own merit and effort. Nor had they fallen into the trap of thinking that the life, the world, and their society and community, owed them a living. They understood that their blessings in life came ultimately from God and immediately from the civilization and culture, the country and the society, the community and neighborhood, the family and the home they were born into, grew up in, and lived in. When the call to do their duty, take up arms, and lay down their lives on behalf of their country came, they heard it in their hearts and answered.

In doing so they bequeathed to us a duty, the duty to honour and remember them, and to follow should that call ever come again.

(1)"It is sweet and right to die for one's country".

(2) In the sense of the internal chronology of the narrative. It was the sixth to be published.