The Lessons of Poetry: Part Two - The "Good War"

War is a basic reality of human existence. Individual human beings cannot live together without generating friction that sometimes bursts out in disagreements, disputes, and fights and the same is also true of human societies. When societies clash in war destruction is generated on a much larger scale then when individuals clash and it has long been a dream of many that one day man would lay down his arms forever and war would be no more. The Christian Scriptures speak of such a day but they place it in the world-to-come, beyond the end of history and the Return of Christ. Only those with a naïve and foolish faith in the ability of human ingenuity to overcome each and every limitation placed upon us by the realities of our nature – we call such people “progressives” – envision the abolition of war as a human accomplishment to be achieved inside of history. The schemes they propose to achieve this end generally strike those of us who are not progressives as being unduly optimistic at best, pathways to evils greater than war at worst, and for better or for worse, inevitably doomed to fail.

Once we accept that war is a basic reality of our existence that we cannot, however much we may wish it to be otherwise, do away with forever we are forced to consider how we will deal with this reality. Two questions stand out as being of utmost importance. The first is what limits or boundaries, if any, we may place on war so as to lessen and minimize its destructive potential. The second is how we can best prepare our countries so as to be ready for war when it comes. This second question has two quite different facets depending upon what we have in mind when we think of preparation for war. We might think of such preparation in terms of fortifications, arsenals and military training of a strategic and technical nature. Or we might think of it in terms of the cultivation of the virtues, the habits of character, of the warrior. Since the virtues that serve a man on the battlefield serve him elsewhere as well the second would seem to be clearly the more important of these two perspectives and it is a powerful indictment of the modern mind and the education that forms and feeds it that it thinks of military preparation almost exclusively in terms of the first.

These two questions, of how we may limit war so as to lessen its destructiveness and how we may cultivate the virtues of the warrior so as to prepare our country for war are the subjects of two long-standing traditional discussions in the civilizations of the Western world and it is a further indictment of modern education that it has, to a large extent, cut the modern mind off from these discussions and the traditions which contain them. The first question is what philosophers and theologians traditionally sought to answer in their discussion of justice in war – for what causes may we justly go to war and how, once we have gone to war, we may conduct it in a just manner. The second question is the subject of an older and longer discussion that goes back at least as far as Homer in the eighth century BC, a discussion carried out in the language of poetry.

It was poetry that took the Greek word for a man of war – hero – and exalted it into a term of adoration and praise. Although poetic language is not exactly noted for its realism, poetic licence being a byword for exaggeration, hyperbole, and the dressing up of the facts, the inescapable realities of human existence – life, death, joy, suffering, love and yes, war – are its subject matter. Of the themes that recur throughout the poetry of the Great Tradition when war is the subject, it is that of the hero and his mighty deeds which stands out. It is a theme which the modern mind, formed by utilitarian education and fed by comic books, video games, fantasy novels, television, and cinematic film easily misunderstands and in such a mind the concept of the hero is inevitably reduced to that of the “good guy”.

The good guy is the person you are supposed to cheer for because he is on the side of Light opposed to Darkness. The hero is not so one-dimensional a character. He is good in a sense, for otherwise he would not be the object of praise, but his goodness does not consist of his being on the side of Light or even of his being a particularly moral person. It consists of his possessing, as evidenced through his actions, the qualities that befit a warrior. While these include such natural traits as physical strength (Achilles, Heracles) and crafty intelligence (Odysseus) it is traits of character, foremost of which is that of courage or valour, that are awarded the highest praise. Indeed, gallantry is held to be of such importance that it is worthy of glory regardless of whether it ends in victory or defeat, or even if, as is the case in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, it is wasted due to some grotesque mistake.

This immortalisation in verse and song was justly due the warrior for risking or even laying down his life in duty and service to his country and it fell to the poet to pay this due on his country’s behalf. It also served a pedagogical purpose. To hold up examples of courage and other martial virtues for adulation is to also hold them up for emulation, particularly when the learning of these verses by heart played so important a role in the training of young minds.

In one of the earliest known discussions of educational theory, that which takes place between Socrates and his friends in Plato’s Republic, the pedagogical aspect of poetry is a major concern and it is famously proposed that lines from Homer that might teach the wrong lessons be bowdlerized. It is a repugnant proposal, of course, but the concern behind it is one the poet may very well have shared, as there are varying degrees to which heroes are worthy of adulation and emulation and even the best of them possessed less desirable or even undesirable traits and qualities in addition to the heroic virtues. With this in mind, consider how Homer presented his heroes.

The main hero of the Iliad is Achilles, king of the Myrmidons. The epic begins with the poet evoking the Muse and asking her to sing of the wrath of Achilles and is structured around that wrath as first, in anger against Agamemnon, Achilles withdraws himself and his men from the siege of Troy causing the tide of the war to swing against the Achaeans then later, in sorrowful anger over the death of Patroclus he returns to battle to slay Hector, crown prince of Troy. Yet the poem ends by honouring the latter in a funeral that is made possible by divine intervention. This intervention is necessary because Achilles in his wrath is determined to defile the body of Hector by dragging it behind his chariot and leaving it to be devoured by dogs, thus incurring the anger of the gods.

It is Hector, not Achilles, nor any of the other Greeks for that matter, who comes across as the noblest, the most worthy of emulation of Homer’s heroes. It is significant that while it takes Achilles, Greece’s bravest and strongest warrior, to slay Hector, Achilles’ own death, which takes place outside of the time-frame of the Iliad but is prophetically alluded to, is at the hands of Paris, Hector’s weak and cowardly brother.

Achilles is portrayed as the embodiment of the follies of youth. He is arrogant and impetuous, easily swayed by passions, and overly concerned with his own glory. Indeed, the latter seems to be his only real purpose for going to war for, while he hints, when he reminds Agamemnon in their dispute that he has no personal quarrel with the Trojans (1), at the mercenary motivation that had shocked and offended Plato, he and his mother make frequent reference to his having been presented with a choice by fate – he could stay at home and live a long but unsung life or he could go to Troy where he would die before its gates but win a name that would live in song forever. He chooses the latter and accordingly is remembered as the greatest of the Greek heroes, with the possible exception of Heracles, but in the discontent of the words of his shade in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, expressing a preference for the lowest station on earth over the highest in the underworld, the message comes across that there can be no satisfaction in glory sought for its own sake.

It is Hector, by contrast, who fights for worthy reasons. Hector, “tamer of horses”, fights not for his personal glory but out of a sense of duty to his father and mother, his wife and son, and to their city. He fights for family and home and is all the more noble in doing so because he is aware that it will ultimately be to no avail, that he will die, the house of Priam will fall, Ilium will be destroyed, and his wife taken away into captivity. To fight and die for these things is what the poets have honoured heroes for down through the centuries from Homer to Horace to Thomas Babbington Macauley.

This view of war and the warrior, of what is worth fighting and dying for, and of the standard by which the warrior is judged worthy of praise or shame, is worlds removed from an image that has pervaded the popular consciousness in recent decades. This image began as a way of looking at and explaining the Second World War but it has grown into a paradigm by which all new conflicts are to be parsed and which has even been superimposed upon previous wars including the First World War and the war the American states fought between themselves in the 1860s. The image is the “Good War” narrative which has supplanted both the poetic idea of the heroic warrior, winning praise and renown for his gallantry as he lays down his life for family, friends, home, and country and the traditional discussion about what constitutes justice in war.

It is in keeping with the older traditions to say that the Allies were justified in going to war with Nazi Germany. By the fall of 1939 Hitler had proven himself to be thirsting for war, a threat to his neighbours, and a pathological liar who could not be trusted to keep his word given in negotiations. He had given Britain and France more than enough of a casus belli to justify their declarations of war. For countries like my own, Canada, and Australia, it was loyalty which moved us to enter the war and stand by our king and mother country in their hour of need. What could be more in keeping with the older traditions than this?

The Good War narrative goes far beyond any of this. It declares the war itself to have been good because the character of the two sides was such that it was a microcosm of the great struggle between Good and Evil. The Allies were the Forces of Light, embodying all that is pure and good, and the Axis were the very Forces of Darkness. What need is there to find a just cause for such a war? It is its own just cause. Who dare speak of limitations on how war can be justly conducted when the enemy is the avatar of Evil?

This narrative embraces a cosmology that is considered heretical by the standards of traditional, orthodox, Christianity. Dualism, the idea that the cosmos is eternally engaged in a battle between the matched forces of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, is part of the mainstream of several Eastern philosophies and religions but within the Christian West was a doctrine of Gnosticism, historically the heretical rival of orthodox, Apostolic, Christianity. The growth of the Good War narrative is, therefore, yet another evidence, as if more was needed, that the period after the Second World War is a post-Christian as well as a post-modern age.

Both of the traditions which the Good War narrative has supplanted have been accused of being instruments in the hands of hawks and warmongers. Not infrequently those who make these accusations on the one hand embrace the Good War interpretation of World War II on the other. Yet today, whenever a politician wants to bomb or invade some country it is to the rhetoric of Winston Churchill of which he can provide a poor imitation at best rather than the arguments of Cicero, St. Augustine, or St. Thomas Aquinas that he turns to make his case. The leaders of the country he wishes to attack are inevitably new Hitlers and those who oppose his plans for war are inevitably compared to Neville Chamberlain. Not to be outdone, the radicals who pour contempt on the poetic ideal of the hero and heroism and traditional just war theory and who automatically condemn any and every military action taken by their own country – or any Western country, especially the United States – regardless of the particulars, make use of the Good War narrative as well, except that in their rhetoric it is the Western leaders who are Hitler.

However did this image of the Good War arise? It could hardly be said to have been born out of the facts of the Second World War. The most repugnant and repulsive characteristics of the Third Reich – its tyrannical dictatorship, secret police, network of prison camps, and repressive totalitarian state which held the lives of its people extremely cheap - were shared by the Soviet Union. The war began with an alliance between these two powers that included a secret deal to divide the spoils between themselves. After this alliance was broken by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union the Stalinist regime joined the Allies and one of the most obvious results of the war was a significant expansion of that regime’s territory. At least as strong of a case can be made that Stalin and his Bolshevik regime were the greater of the two evils as can be made that Hitler and his Nazi regime were. More people died in this war than in any other and well over half of these were civilian deaths. Those who were the Forces of Light, according to the Good War theory, invented weapons whose destructive potential was exponentially greater than any the world had known before and brought the war to an end by dropping two of these weapons on heavily populated cities. Then, when the war was over, the Forces of Light put the leaders of the Forces of Darkness on trial before a court that operated in accordance with a concept of “justice” far closer to that of Stalin than that which is traditional to the English-speaking world. No, the facts of the Second World War do not support the Good War narrative at all.

It is surely no coincidence that this narrative arose in a period in which the old tradition of celebrating heroes and their deeds in verse and inspiring through such verse the cultivation of virtues such as courage, loyalty, and dutifulness to home, family, and country was all but dead. It had been alive and well in the Victorian era but seemed to sing its swan song in the first World War, which saw a plethora of soldier-poets, some of whom, writing in the old tradition, produced the poems that remain part of our annual ceremonies of remembrance to this day, while others concentrated on the horrors of the war and expressed cynicism towards the old tradition and the heroic virtues. War has always been horrible, of course, but poets from Homer to Housman had managed to lament the cruel reality of war with its waste of so many lives struck down prematurely while at the same time praising the patriotic valour of the warrior. This became more difficult as modern technology changed the nature of warfare. It is easy to see the gallantry of light cavalrymen charging with sword in hand against a battery of artillery at the end of a valley with enemy guns on all sides. Where can it be possibly found in the dropping of bombs that kill civilians by the thousands from aircraft miles above?

It is not just that poets have found it difficult to maintain the old tradition in the face of new, modern, technological, warfare. It is also that poetry itself has come to be supplanted, first by other forms of literature such as the novel, then later by media such as film and television that have supplanted the written word altogether. It is films and television, novels and comic books, which form and feed the modern mind. These are the genres that have reduced the complex hero to the simple good guy and it is in the minds fed by such junk food that the image of the Good War was born.


(1) Achilles was the only one of the Greek kings who could say this. Paris, prince of Troy, after enjoying the hospitality of Menelaus, king of Sparta, had absconded with his wife, Helen. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Menelaus’ brother had organized the retaliatory expedition against Troy. In doing so, according to the myth, he had reminded all of the other kings that when, in their youth, they had been rivals for Helen’s hand, the contest had been resolved when they swore an oath to support and uphold whomever Helen had chosen, which was Menelaus. Achilles, being much younger than the others, had no part in either the contest or the oath.

War and Peace: Part Three

The concept of just war has been an important part of the discussion of war and peace in the Western tradition of thought. The concept, stated simply, is that only under certain circumstances and conditions is it right to fight a war. Late in pre-Christian classical antiquity, the Roman senator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, inspired in part by ideas from earlier philosophers like Plato, gave a basic outline of these conditions. A few centuries later the influential Western church father, St. Augustine of Hippo, articulated a similar view from a Christian perspective. In the late middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas drew upon St. Augustine, to present a systematic defense of the concept of just war in his Summa Theologica. To be just, he wrote, a war must meet three conditions – it must be declared and conducted by legitimately constituted authorities, it must have a just cause, and it must be fought with the right intentions of the heart. An idea common to all these thinkers, was that only those whose intent was to establish a secure peace, could fight a war justly. They saw the concept of just war, not as an instrument to enable and justify warmongers, but as a means of limiting and lessening the horrors of war.


The Augustinian and Thomistic concept of just war has not been universally accepted by all Christians. Indeed, many of St. Augustine’s arguments for just war occur in letters in which he is responding to the idea that the Christian religion forbids all wars, indicating that this idea was in circulation at the time. While it would be accurate to say that the Augustinian/Thomistic concept of just war has been the mainstream view of orthodox Christianity throughout history, the idea that war is always wrong, never justifiable, and always forbidden, has also had a strong voice within Christianity. It is has historically been a minority voice, an opposition voice, in the small-o-orthodox and small-c-catholic tradition (1) and the official, majority voice of some of the radical, but still Trinitarian sects. (2)

Which view is most consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures?

I have framed the question in those terms deliberately, because I wish to discuss the conflict between the view that war is sometimes justified and the view that it can never be justified, as a disagreement amongst orthodox, Trinitarian, Christians. Of course this disagreement is not merely an in-house debate between Christians. It a broader ethical debate, that includes Christian believers, those of other faiths, and unbelievers alike. What orthodox, Trinitarian, Christians on both sides of the debate have in common, however, is a high view of the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures (3) and therefore, although the general principles over which the broader debate is carried out interest us, the question, ultimately, for the orthodox Christian is which side is Apostolic, Biblical, and Christian.

The answer to our question, ultimately hinges upon the interpretation of certain key New Testament texts and the consistency of either position with the general ethical principles taught in the New Testament. Before we look at these texts and principles, however, there are two other questions that we need to answer. What do the Hebrew Scriptures teach about war? What is the view of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Tanakh, found in the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the New Testament Scriptures?

The Hebrew Scriptures are not silent on the subject, and they were the sacred canon of the faith community to which Jesus and the Apostles belonged. Therefore, we need to know what they teach about war, and what Jesus and His Apostles thought and said about the Hebrew Scriptures, in order to make sense of their own teachings about war. Jesus Himself stated, that His view of the Tanakh is vital to our understanding of the passage in His teachings which is most crucial to the debate over just war v. non-resistance.

What does the Tanakh Say About War?

Let us consider what the Hebrew Scriptures have to say about war and then look at what Jesus and His Apostles had to say about the Hebrew Scriptures.

Jewish people call their Scriptures the Tanakh, a word formed from the acronym of Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim, which are the three sections into which they divide the books that Christians call the Old Testament. The Torah, which means “the teachings” and is usually translated The Law, is the foundation of the Tanakh and the Jewish faith. It consists of the five books of Moses, Genesis – Deuteronomy. The Book of Genesis introduces the God of Israel as the Creator of the whole universe and all mankind, and then the patriarchs of the House of Israel, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom God made promises. It sets the stage for the book of Exodus, which tells the history of how God saved the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and made a covenant with them at Mt. Sinai. The details of that covenant are recorded in Exodus and Leviticus. The book of Numbers tells the history of how the Israelites wandered in the desert under Moses leadership for forty years because of their disobedience and distrust. Finally, the book of Deuteronomy records the final speeches Moses gave to the Israelites, before his death and the beginning of their conquest of the land God had promised them.

In Genesis, the chapters before the calling of Abraham, include the account of the first murder, of Abel by Cain, and God’s judgement of Cain for this evil. Then it tells of how the world became full of corruption and violence, which God judged by sending a flood to destroy the world, saving only Noah and the inhabitants of the ark. After the flood, He declared that He would hold man and beast accountable, for the shedding of man’s blood, saying “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (9:6) A lesson the pre-Abrahamic chapters of the Book of Genesis appear to be teaching, is that God holds human life sacred (4), detests violence and bloodshed, but authorizes mankind to act as His agent in punishing violence with death. Is this lesson maintained throughout the Torah and the rest of the Tanakh?

The answer is an unmistakable yes. When God establishes His covenant with Israel at Mt. Sinai in the Book of Exodus, the first commandments He hands down are the famous Ten Commandments. These begin with religious duties, and end with civil duties. The first of the civil duties (5) is the commandment “thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). When, however, God shortly thereafter lists the punishments that are to be made, death is the prescribed penalty for murder, (21:12), smiting his father and mother (21:15) , kidnapping (21:16) and cursing his parents (21:17) (6). It is even the penalty for an ox owner whose ox gores someone to death if the owner knows the ox is dangerous and does not take appropriate measures to keep him from goring (21:29). It is the prescribed penalty for several other offenses as well.

It should be obvious, therefore, that the carrying out of the penalty of death for these offenses was not considered to be a violation of “thou shalt not kill”, for the penalty was prescribed by the very code which contained the commandment against killing. This was not regarded as a contradiction, because the commandment against killing was a general commandment, personal obedience to which was demanded of all, whereas the judgements of death were to be administered by those to whom God had deputized the authority to pass such judgements, i.e., the community, the Israelite nation, and its representative leaders (7). The judgements of death within the Sinaitic code are a specific example, of the general rule laid down by God in the Book of Genesis after the Flood – that “Whoso” – whichever person acting in his own capacity- “sheds blood, by man” – the community, in its existential representatives – “shall his blood be shed.”

Just war and the death penalty are closely related matters. Those who oppose the idea of just war tend to oppose capital punishment as well, and on the same grounds, just as support for the idea of just war and the death penalty tend to go together. This is so for a very logical reason – if the organized community, in its existential representative leadership, has the legitimate authority to use lethal force in the punishment of heinous crimes then it surely has the legitimate authority to use lethal force in conflicts with other societies in which its peace and security and the wellbeing of its people are threatened.

The Hebrew Scriptures would seem to agree with that logic. In the Book of Exodus, after God delivered the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, before they arrived at Mt. Sinai they were attacked by the Amalekites. Joshua led them into the battle of Rephidim, which they won. During their forty year trek through the wilderness, they were attacked by Canaanite and Amorite kings, usually after being refused permission to pass through their territory, and each time they win and seize the territory of their enemies. These victories are attributed to God’s having been on their side, and at the end of the Book of Numbers, just before their arrival at the River Jordan, Moses received a commandment from God to attack and crush the Midianites, and he assembles a twelve-thousand man army to do so. The reason given for this war was that the Midianites had sent their prostitutes to seduce the Israelites into idol-worship bringing a plague upon them. It is clearly implied that God approved of Israel’s defending herself when attacked in the wilderness and it is outright stated that He ordered her to avenge herself against the Midianites.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, in Moses’ final speeches to Israel on the bank of River Jordan just before his death, he gives them two distinct sets of instructions with regards to war. One of these, which is found in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, is a general set of instructions about how they are to conduct themselves in war. The first instruction in this set is that they were to go into war trusting in God rather than in their own strength or numbers. They were to demonstrate this faith in God by having their officers announce than anyone with any excuse for not fighting, even if it was mere cowardice, was to go home. Earlier in the Torah, they had incurred the anger of God by doing the opposite of this, by shrinking back from the conquest of Canaan because of reports of the strength of the peoples who dwelt there (Numbers 13-14). Their forty years wandering in the wilderness was punishment for this. Later in the Tanakh, King David would again incur the judgement of God for violating these instructions by taking a census (II Samuel 24, I Chronicles 21), and it is notable that the idea that Israel and her kings should trust in the Lord rather than in the strength of their fortresses and the numbers of their armies is a recurring theme in the Davidic Psalms. The second instruction in the general principles of war laid down in Deuteronomy, was that when they went against a city, they were to first make an offer of peace. If that offer was accepted, they were to abide by it, and accept tribute from the people of that city. If the offer was rejected, then they could go to war with the city. The third instruction was that they were not to use fruit-bearing trees in war, only trees that did not produce edible fruit.

The second set of instructions, pertained specifically to the conquest of Canaan that the Israelites were about to undertake. This was to be an exception to the second instruction in the general set. They were not to make peace with the seven nations on the other side of the Jordan – the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. They were to show no mercy to them. They were to utterly destroy them, to cut them off from the land, to enter into no treaties with them, and to have no social interaction with them. This set of instructions is repeated several times throughout Deuteronomy, but in the twentieth chapter it is clearly identified as being an exception to the normal rule, and as such a reason is given for it. These nations commit abominable practices in the worship of their idols and God did not want His people to be tainted by these abominations. The Israelites are told that in doing this, they would not only be coming into possession of the land which God had promised them, but they would be the agents of the wrath of God against these nations for their abominable practices. (8)

The Israelites did not follow these instructions. The history of the conquest is told in the Book of Joshua and the first chapters of the Book of Judges which picks up the history at the death of Joshua. In Joshua, the Hivites of Gibeon, trick Joshua into signing a treaty with them by pretending they came from a far off land. In the first chapter of Judges it tells of how most of the tribes made treaties with the Canaanites and Amorites and accepted tribute from them, and at the beginning of the second chapter God pronounces His displeasure with this disobedience, saying that the survivors of these nations would become a thorn in the Israelite’s side, and that their idols would be a snare to them. The rest of Judges tells how in the period before the establishment of the kingdom, the Israelites were seduced into worshipping the idols of these nations, how God would send Mesopotamian, Moabite, Canaanite, and Philistine enemies to enslave them, and then, when they had repented, raise up judges, leaders who combined the role of magistrate and military commander, to fight these enemies and liberate the Israelites. God actively assisted the judges in war, as He did Joshua during the conquest.

The concept of war that the Hebrew Scriptures appear to teach, is therefore a complex one. From the prehistory in the Book of Genesis, and the promises about the Messiah, the New Covenant, and the Kingdom of God in the writings of the prophets, comes the idea that war, violence, and bloodshed are not ideal, that they entered God’s creation through the sin of mankind, and that in the Kingdom of God, they will be eliminated and peace and justice established. King David was forbidden to build God’s Temple because he was a man of war (II Samuel 7, I Chronicles 22:7-8, 28:3) and so the task fell to King Solomon, whose reign was an unusually long period of peace (I Chronicles 22:9-10). This has two sides to it. It was not an expression of divine disapproval of David’s wars. The wars King David fought, a continuation of the wars against the Philistines that had plagued Israel from the time of the judges through the reign of Saul, were the necessary means to the end of the established peace during the reign of Solomon, and David certainly had God’s approbation for fighting them. Nevertheless, the fact that the martial nature of his reign made it inappropriate for him, rather than his son who reigned in peace, to build the Temple, suggests that even wars that God approves or even commands, taint a person. They are not unjust, but they render a person unclean, an idea also suggested by the requirement in Deuteronomy for ritual purification after killing someone in battle. God’s people are not prohibited from fighting wars, indeed, they are sometimes commanded to do so, but rules are laid down for the conduct of war in the Deuteronomic Code, the first and foremost of which is that they are to trust in God for their victory, rather than in their strength and numbers, which is one expression of a major theme throughout the Tanakh, that God’s people are to trust in God for their safety, security, and salvation.

This teaching is clearly more compatible with the classical just war theory taught by Cicero than with the idea of non-resistance or pacifism.

What did Jesus Say About the Hebrew Scriptures?

This leads us to the question of what view of the Hebrew Scriptures is found in the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. For if Jesus and His Apostles taught pacifism or non-resistance, as is sometimes alleged, then their teachings would seem to be inconsistent with the Hebrew Scriptures, and if that is the case the nature of that inconsistency will need to be explained.

There have been those, who have seen the teachings of Jesus and those of the Hebrew Scriptures as mutually exclusive and contradictory. Sometimes, those who see things this way prefer the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures over those of Jesus. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, approved of the Hebrew Scriptures as teaching a “master morality”, similar to that of the pre-Socratic Greeks, while He disparaged the teachings of Christ, as well as those of Euripides and Plato’s Socrates as “slave morality.” (9)

More often, however, it has been the other way around, with people who purport to be followers of Christ, rejecting the Hebrew Scriptures in whole or in part as being barbaric. This idea is not something that has just popped up in modern times, but has been around since almost the beginning of Christianity. Marcion, a second century bishop in Asia Minor taught that the God of the Old Testament was not the God Whom Jesus Christ spoke of as His Father, but was rather the evil Demiurge. This was a common doctrine among the Gnostics of the early Christian centuries, including Mani the third century Persian, whose teachings St. Augustine of Hippo was a follower of before his conversion to Christianity. Faustus of Mileve, a Manichean bishop, pointed to the wars of Moses as evidence of this claim (10).

While this idea has been around for a very long time it has been officially condemned by the Church from the very beginning. By the very beginning I mean the Apostles themselves in the New Testament. St. John the Apostle, in his first and second epistles, warned that deceivers, whom he called “antichrists”, had entered the Church, claiming to have been sent by the Apostles but denying the doctrine of Christ. (11) The “doctrine of Christ” which they denied, was that “Christ was come in the flesh”. Since the Gnostics believed that the material world was intrinsically evil, having been created, in their doctrine, by the evil Demiurge that they identified with the Old Testament YHWH, they taught the doctrine of docetism, that the purely spiritual Christ only appeared to be human, to suffer, and to die, i.e., they denied that “Christ was come in the flesh.” Therefore, the early Church was clearly in line with the teaching of the Apostles, when they excommunicated Marcion, condemned the teachings of the Gnostics, and began the Nicene Creed, that would become the standard of orthodoxy throughout the Christian Church, by declaring “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”

The view of the Hebrew Scriptures that is found in the recorded teachings of Jesus Christ in the Gospels is very different from that of the Gnostics. After His baptism and before His public ministry, the Synoptic Gospels record that He went into the wilderness to fast, where He was tempted by the devil. His responded to each of the devil’s three temptations by quoting from the Tanakh. When He returned from the wilderness, He began an itinerant ministry in which He would travel, mostly through Galilee, preaching a message He called the Gospel, i.e. Good News, of the Kingdom. That message was that the Kingdom of God had come, and that God’s people Israel were to respond with repentance and faith. The Kingdom of God that He referred to was that predicted by the Old Testament prophets and throughout His teaching ministry it would become clear that what He meant by saying that the Kingdom was at hand, was that He Himself was the Christ, the Messiah promised in those writings. St. Luke records that towards the beginning of His ministry, Jesus went to the town of Nazareth in which He had been raised, and gave the Scriptural reading in the synagogue on the Sabbath. (12) He read from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, and after the reading announced that “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”

Jesus connected belief in the Tanakh with belief in Himself. St. John, in the fifth chapter of his Gospel records that after healing a man at the pool of Bethesda, He was persecuted for healing on the Sabbath. In His response to those who persecuted Him, He pointed to witnesses that would, in accordance with the Torah’s requirement that testimony be established in the mouth of two or three witnesses, bear witness of Himself. The witnesses were John the Baptist, His own works, and His Father. He then went on to explain that the Old Testament was the testimony of His Father about Himself:

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me… Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me; for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words? (vv. 39, 45-47).

In the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Jesus placed this same argument in the mouth of Abraham. In the parable, which Jesus addressed to the Pharisees at some point after the events recorded in the eleventh chapter of St. John’s Gospel (13), the rich man asks Abraham that Lazarus be sent to his father’s house to warn his five brothers and Abraham tells him “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them”, and when Dives pleads that they will repent if someone comes to them from the dead, Abraham says “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”

Jesus treated the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative in His disputes with His enemies. He rebuked the Pharisees for abusing human tradition to circumvent obedience to the commandments of Scripture (Matthew 15:3-6), and told the Sadducees, who only accepted the Torah and not the rest of the Tanakh as Scripture and as a result did not believe in such things as an afterlife and the resurrection (14) that they “err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29) and went on to argue against their disbelief in the resurrection, on the basis of the tense of a verb in Exodus, one of the books they did accept.

Jesus unmistakably regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God and treated faith in those Scriptures and faith in Himself as inseparable.

Does the New Covenant Contain a Higher Standard Than the Old?

This is acknowledged in a number of traditions that are Trinitarian, orthodox about the Person and Work of Christ, but which teach that Jesus taught an ethic of pacifism or non-resistance. These traditions acknowledge the Hebrew Scriptures to be as much the Word of God as the Christian Scriptures but maintain that Jesus taught a higher ethical standard than that contained in the Law of Moses, that has superseded the Law of Moses, and that this higher ethical standard contains the principle of non-resistance.

The Christian Scriptures do contain a number of ideas that seem to lend weight to this teaching. The very name we traditionally give to the Christian Scriptures is one of them. “New Testament” means “New Covenant”, and we call the Christian Scriptures this, because Jesus, as He instituted the Holy Eucharist at His final Passover seder with His Apostles, on the eve of His Crucifixion, took the cup and said “this is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” This refers back to the promise in the Old Testament prophets that God would establish a New Covenant with His people, in which His law would be written upon their hearts, rather than upon tablets of stone. This New Covenant is based upon an act of salvation, which took place on the anniversary of God’s deliverance of His people from slavery in Egypt, to which that earlier act of salvation pointed – the Son of God’s offering Himself up as the one, true, and perfect sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world and makes His people right with God.

This salvation is available, the New Testament teaches, to all people, Jew and Gentile alike, who will receive it by faith, and so, under the New Covenant, all believers comprise the people of God. It is not that God replaced His people of the Old Covenant with a new people as is taught in the doctrine known as Replacement Theology, or that He has two different peoples at the same time as is taught in the doctrine known as Dispensationalism, but that, as St. Paul explained in the eleventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans, God’s people is like an olive tree, into which God has grafted believing Gentiles like branches from a wild olive tree, while breaking off some of the natural branches due to unbelief.

The establishment of the New Covenant has changed some of the things God requires of His people. The ceremonial requirements of the Old Covenant – circumcision, dietary restrictions, the keeping of the Old Testament holy days are no longer required under the New. These requirements had been part of the Old Covenant, not because they commanded things which were intrinsically righteous or forbade things that were intrinsically sinful, but to distinguish Israel as being set apart from other nations for God. Throughout the New Testament, the fact that these are no longer requirements is connected with the integration of Jewish and Gentile believers into one Church with one faith, one Lord, one baptism. The dietary restrictions were lifted in a vision God sent St. Peter, in the tenth chapter of Acts, the vision that persuades him to preach the Gospel to the Gentile Cornelius. The Apostles ruled, in the first ecumenical council of the Church in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, that circumcision was no longer a requirement. The occasion that necessitated the calling of this council was the conversion of Gentiles and the need to incorporate them into the Church. In the second chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, he wrote about how the Jews and Gentiles had been made one in the Church, through Christ’s death, which has broken down the wall that divided them – the “law of commandments contained in ordinances”.

Yet it is also clear that the ethical requirements of God’s people under the Old Covenant have continued into the New Covenant. We do not achieve salvation through our efforts to meet these requirements, but nobody achieved salvation that way under the Old Covenant either. Our having been justified before God by His grace through Christ does not give us permission to sin but is rather the reason we are to avoid sin (15). The difference between God’s ethical requirements under the two Covenants is that in the Old Covenant they were an external standard, a list of dos and don’ts, written in stone, whereas in the New Covenant God’s requirements would be an internal standard that God would write upon the very hearts of His people (16). This refers to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of believers, that began with His descent upon the Church on Pentecost as recorded in the second chapter of Acts.

As an effective means of producing righteousness, the internal indwelling of the Spirit of God in the hearts of believers to actively change them, and produce repentance and obedience, is a superior law to an external standard that merely threatens and promises, as St. Paul argued in his epistle to the Galatians. Does that mean that the content of what is defined as right and wrong has also changed, that God’s people under the New Covenant are held to a stricter standard, and that now they are forbidden to participate in war even for defensive purposes?

Resist Not Evil

Those who think so, find their strongest supporting evidence in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the fifth through seventh chapters of the Gospel According to St. Matthew. In the Beatitudes, the blessings which open the Sermon, Jesus declared “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” (5:9) The most important passage, however, is the following:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? (vv. 38-47)

The idea that Christ forbade His followers from participating in wars takes a number of different forms. One of these, the doctrine of nonresistance, derives its name from the words “resist not evil” in this passage. Nonresistance is more than just opposition to war, it is an ethical philosophy that holds that even in the interests of self-defense one should not respond to violence with violence. Those who believe in this idea, regard it as a higher ethical standard than that which allows people to fight back in their own defense, because the person who submits to violence without responding in kind is not lowering himself to the level of his attacker.

Is this what Jesus meant?

The verses in question follow a format in which Jesus introduces a quotation with “Ye have heard that it hath been said” and then, following the quotation, introduces His own remarks with “But I say unto you”. This occurs a total of six times in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, and the six “Ye have heard…But I say” constructions, are divided into three pairs each of which has a common idea. In the first pair, for example, the quotations are straight from the Ten Commandments, the commandments against murder and adultery, and the common idea to Jesus’ commentary on these commandments is that it is not enough to keep them outwardly, one must keep them internally as well.

It is a mistake, however, to think that Jesus is here replacing the Old Testament Law with a “higher standard”. Jesus Himself warned against interpreting His words this way. Following the Beatitudes, and the verses where He tells His followers they are the salt and light of the world, Jesus introduces this section of the Sermon by saying:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (vv. 17-20)

This introduction was necessary, because the “Ye have heard it said….But I say unto you” construction could easily be taken as a form of contradiction, i.e., “The Scriptures say this, but don’t mind them, do this instead”. In this warning, Jesus says it is a mistake to read His words that way. The Hebrew Scriptures – the “law and the prophets” are the established, authoritative, Word of God, and He has not come to abolish them.

He had, however, come to fulfil them. Now the Christian Scriptures as a whole teach that Jesus fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptures in a number of ways – He fulfilled the prophesies of the coming Messiah, He offered Himself up as the ultimate sacrifice to which the Old Testament sacrifices pointed, etc. This is not what Jesus was talking about when He said “I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” (17) The word translated “fulfil” here is pleroo, which means “to cause to be full” or to “fill up.” This is a way of saying that He is going to explain the full meaning of the Law, that He is going to fill it up with meaning the way you fill up a cup with water.

So in these three pairs of “Ye have heard it said…But I say unto you” constructions, He is not contradicting the Old Testament, but explaining it. His overall point, as He immediately goes on to explain, is that the righteousness God requires is a greater righteousness than that of the scribes and Pharisees. The first pair make the point that the righteousness God demands involves internal obedience to His ethical commandments and well as external obedience. The second pair make a similar point about the civil provisions of the Law. While the Law contains civil provisions for divorce and the swearing of oaths in court, God’s righteousness requires marital fidelity and truthfulness on all occasions.

What point was He making in the third pair, which is the pair we are considering?

The point which He was making is that God has not given to us, as private persons, the authority to punish evil that He has given to lawfully constituted authorities, and that we are not to assume that authority unto ourselves.

The first quotation “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, in the Old Testament law, was the standard that the civil authorities of the commonwealth of Israel were to use in administering justice. It was not a license for private individuals to hunt down those who have wronged them and to exact personal revenge. To interpret “Resist not evil…” as a revolutionary command to abolish the death penalty and the Lex Talionis in general would violate Jesus warning against thinking that He is come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. So, therefore, would interpreting “Resist not evil” as forbidding the civil authorities to engage in war. His point must therefore have been that these civil penalties are not to be privately administered in revenge.

The second quotation is only partially taken from the Old Testament. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour” is taken from Leviticus 19:18. The second part of the quotation, “and hate thine enemy” is not found there. Exactly what Jesus was quoting there we do not know. It may have been an interpretive gloss on the first part of the quotation but we have no written record of it. At any rate, it is not from the Tanakh, which is why when Jesus went on to tell His followers to do the exact opposite, He was not contradicting the Law or the Prophets.

While Leviticus 19:18 does not include a commandment to hate your enemies, it does include more than just the words “love thy neighbour”. Here is the whole verse:

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.

In its original Old Testament context, then, “love thy neighbour” was thought of as the opposite of seeking vengeance and holding grudges. The word Jesus uses for “enemy” in both the non-Levitical part of the quotation and in His commandment to “love thy enemies”, is not the word ordinarily used to refer to one’s enemy in war (18), but rather the word echthros. This word refers to a personal enemy, usually someone who was once a friend but with whom one is now at odds.

Note the significance of this. The part of the quotation which is not taken from Leviticus 19:18, “hate thine enemy”, actually contradicts the verse. The use of the term echthros, that ordinarily refers to a personal enemy, someone in your own community with whom you have had a falling out, as the object of a command to hate, conveys the opposite meaning of Leviticus’ command to not avenge yourself or hold a grudge against “the children of thy people”. Therefore, when Jesus told His followers to “love thine enemies” He was emphasizing the Levitical commandment against personal vengeance and grudge-holding.

In this final pair of “Ye have heard it said…But I say unto you” constructions, then, Jesus was telling His followers not to seek personal revenge, not to hold grudges against people. Other interpretations, that He was forbidding the death penalty and war, are not consistent with His statement that He is not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfil them.

Then Would My Servants Fight

Another statement of Jesus, frequently cited as evidence that Christ taught nonresistance to His followers, is His declaration to Pilate that “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight”, found in the eighteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. The “if…then” kind of argument Jesus was making, relies on the opposite of that which follows the “then” being true. “Then would my servants” fight, only works as an argument for “My kingdom is not of this world” if His servants did not fight.

The problem with using this as an argument for nonresistance is that the argument only works if this declaration is cut short after the word fight. (19) The full declaration reads:

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

Read in its entirety, Jesus’ argument does not require absolute nonresistance from His followers to demonstrate that His Kingdom is not of this world, just that His servant not fight to prevent His arrest and trial.

St. Peter had, in fact, attempted to fight to prevent His arrest, and Jesus had stopped him from doing so. This is recorded in all four Gospels, and St. Matthew records Jesus saying the following to St. Peter:

Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. (v. 26:52)

This verse too, is cited in support of nonresistance, but the two verses that follow demonstrate that the reason Jesus stopped St. Peter is that His arrest and trial are necessary parts of God’s plan.

These verses show that Christ taught that His followers are not to use force to establish His kingdom on earth. A similar point was made by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesian Church. He wrote:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (6:12)

In its immediate context, which describes the spiritual armour of God, it is clear that when this verse refers says “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood” by “we” it means the Church qua the Church, and not believers acting in some other capacity, as policemen or soldiers, for example.

Military Duty Was Not Forbidden To Earliest Believers

These verses do not teach that civil governments are forbidden from using force to maintain law and order or to defend the security and peace of their countries, or that Christ’s followers are forbidden to serve as soldiers or policeman. It would be very surprising if it did, considering the number of places in the New Testament where it explicitly identifies the civil authorities as God’s servants, acting with authority given them by God, and enjoining Christians to pray for the civil authorities and to be good, dutiful, citizens (for example, Romans 13, 1 Timothy 2:2, 1 Peter 2:13, 17).

In fact the exact opposite of the idea, held by those who teach nonresistance, that Christ’s followers were forbidden to serve as soldiers or policemen is the case.

When St. Augustine argued that just war was consistent with the teachings of Christianity, liked to point to the soldiers who came to be baptized by John the Baptist, and were told “be content with your wages” (Luke 3:14) rather than “find a new career.” In St. Matthew’s Gospel, the chapter immediately after the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, tells of a Roman centurion who comes to Jesus and asks Him to heal his servant. Jesus commends the man for His faith, saying to those present “Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” and fulfils his request. He does not condemn the man for his military career or require that he abandon it. Later, in the tenth chapter of the Book of Acts, another centurion, Cornelius, is described as a “devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God always.” Upon the instructions of an angel, he sends away for St. Peter, who comes, preaches the Gospel to Cornelius and his household, and, when they have believed and received the Holy Ghost, and baptizes them. Again, there is no mention of an expectation that Cornelius would abandon his military career.

A Higher Standard?

The fact of the matter is that there is one thing, and only one thing, in Jesus’ teachings that suggests that He has imposed a higher standard on His followers than that contained in the Old Testament. Jesus, when asked what the greatest commandment was, said:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matt. 22:36-40)

Many read this passage as if Jesus said that “these two commandments summarize the new ethical teachings I am giving you” but that is not what He said. He said that the entire Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, hang on these commandments. In the upper room, after the Last Supper, Jesus did give a new commandment to His disciples:

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. (Jn. 13:34)

Like the two commandments that summarize the Old Testament, the verb in the new commandment for the Church is love. This commandment does, in fact, raise the standard from that of the Old Testament. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” does not tell people to place the needs of others ahead of themselves, only on par with themselves. The statement “as I have loved you” in the new commandment, has a double meaning. It means both “because I have loved you”, which provides Christ’s followers with the motivation to keep the commandment, and “in the way I have loved you”, which implies that the love is to be self-sacrificial. Later, Christ makes this point explicit, when He repeats and explains the commandment:

This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (15:12-13)

Does the new commandment contain the idea of nonresistance?

Look at it this way. Suppose that a foreign enemy has determined to conquer the country in which you live, and it is a merciless, barbarian, foe. Its modus operandi is to pillage, rape, and enslave, and to lay waste to the countryside. The call to arms, to fight off this invader goes out. Which person, do you think, better demonstrates the kind of “love for one another” in which a man lays down his life for his friends? The man who answers the call to arms and goes out to fight the barbarian horde, willing to sacrifice his own life, for the good of his wife, children, relatives, friends, neighbours, and countrymen? Or the man who recites “resist not evil” to justify allowing his wife to be raped, his children enslaved, and his brothers, friends, and neighbours to be killed?

Nonresistance does not look very much like a “higher ethical standard” when considered in that light, now, does it?

(1) The tradition of churches that hold to the faith expressed in the creeds of the undivided church.

(2) During the Reformation, for example, the Anabaptists were radical reformers, who like the Puritans in England, went much further than the mainstream Reformers – Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Knox, etc. - while remaining Trinitarians. The Anabaptists preached an ethics of non-resistance that they claimed to be based on Christ’s teachings and example, and this remains the official doctrine of churches in the Anabaptist tradition, such as the Mennonites and Hutterites, to this day.

(3) Someone without a high view of the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures, is, of course, not an orthodox Christian.

(4) Note the second part of Genesis 9:6 “for in the image of God made he man” and its broader context 9:1-7.

(5) The duty to honour one’s parents is a religious duty not a civil duty. This is seen more clearly in the numbering schemes of the Jews, Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestants, than in the Augustinian scheme accepted by the Roman Catholics and Lutherans. In the Augustinian scheme, the commandment against murder is the fifth commandment. In the other schemes, the commandment to honour one’s parents is the fifth commandment – five religious duties, five civil duties. This may not make sense to many people today, because the division of the commandments that is more obvious to the modern mind is into the commandments ending in the Sabbath commandment, and the commandments after. The last six commandment include instructions as to how to behave towards other people, the first four do not. Nevertheless, to the ancient mind, the duty to honour one’s parents would have gone together with the duty to honour God/the gods. Giving proper respect to God or the gods and to one’s ancestors was considered to be a single moral virtue – pietas, or piety.

(6) See previous note.

(7) Not “representative” in the sense of democratic/republican theory, but in the sense of what Eric Voeglin called “existential representation”, i.e., the way a government represents its community/society/city/nation by acting for it, making decisions for it, on the historical stage. See The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 36-51.

(8) Leviticus 18 gives a description of these abominable practices. While the bulk of the description pertains to various types of sexual immorality, note especially verse 21 “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.”

(9) Nietzsche argued that in every language, the words used to describe that which is praiseworthy, were originally terms coined, used, and defined by the strong, the master class, to describe their own characteristics, while the words used to denote the opposite concept, originally referred to the characteristics of those whom the master class subjected, the weak, the slaves. Thus such things as physical strength and beauty, strength of will, and courage were “good”, whereas their opposites were “bad”. Then, he argued, there was a change, and the meanings of “good” and “bad” were inverted, to create a morality that favoured the weak over the strong. He argued this most fully in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, although a version of this concept was present in his earliest book The Birth of Tragedy.

(10) As noted in Part Two, one of the times in which St. Augustine defended the concept of just war, was in the context of refuting this position, in Contra Faustus.

(11) I John 2:18-26, 4:1-3, II John 7-11.

(12) This was a liturgical Scriptural reading, a practice that carried over into the Church from the synagogue.

(13) Although the parable is recorded in the Gospel According to St. Luke, which does not record the raising of Lazarus, it is obvious that the parable was given after that event. St. John records that after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, the chief priests and Pharisees did not respond by believing in Jesus, but began their conspiracy to kill Him. They did not believe – “though one rose from the dead”. This is the whole point of the parable. Note that Dives, who is described by Jesus as being dressed in purple and fine linen – the robes of the high priest - has five brothers who live in his father’s house. The leader of the conspiracy to kill Jesus, according to St. John, was Caiaphas. Caiaphas, the high priest, was the son-in-law of Annas, a previous high priest, who, although he had been removed from office by the Romans, still had tremendous influence. Annas had five sons, who, like their brother-in-law Caiaphas, all held the office of high priest.

(14) The House of Annas, referred to in the previous note, were Sadducees. Note that in the parable Abraham speaks of “Moses and the prophets”.

(15) Romans 6.

(16) Jeremiah 31:31-35, Hebrews 8:7-11, 10:15-17

(17) Although it would be included in His statement “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” The Greek word represented by “fulfilled” here is ginomai, which means “to become” or “to come to pass”.

(18) Polemos is the Greek word for war. The adjective, polemios, -a, -on, which is built off of its stem, means “of war” or “hostile”. In its substantive use, i.e., as a noun, the adjective polemios means enemy, and its plural form, hoi polemioi means “the enemy.”

(19) Examples of nonresistance advocates who use the truncated version of this verse to support their arguments include: Harold S. Martin, “The Christian and Nonresistance” , BRF Witness: Volume 3. Number 1, 1968 and “A Christian Declaration On Peace, War and Military Service”, August 22, 1953, General Conference of the Mennonite Church USA,

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.