Waging Peace
A Speech before the
The Rev. Dr. Louis R. Tarsitano
I hesitate to mention Sylvester
Stallone before the English Speaking Union, but back in 1993, in the days when
many historians were discussing “the end of history” and the “inevitable
triumph” of democracy, he made a movie called Demolition
As of last September 11th, the end of history appears to have been indefinitely postponed. Jokes about political correctness have also lost their charm as clergyman after clergyman (not to mention the new breed of clergypersons) has climbed into the pulpit to caution us that we must avoid violence, understand our enemies’ anger, turn the other cheek, and think pleasant thoughts about the redistribution of wealth until the war goes away.
This sort of thing did not happen in my own parish, by the way. First of all, I don’t agree with it. Second of all, my parishioners are sensible people, and I would have been lynched. I am ashamed to admit, however, that most of the clerical leaders of Western Christianity lined up to invite Western Civilization to schedule its own wake and funeral. Their gormless inability to interact with reality has even revived the Demolition Man scenario, if in a slightly more sophisticated way.
In January, Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, published his answer to our cultural weakness, a book entitled Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. I don’t disagree with Kaplan that the clergy or their academic and political equivalents have been childish and basically immoral in their failure to comprehend the necessity of force to preserve Western Civilization in a hostile world. Nor can I disagree with him that human nature is corrupt and violent. As a Christian who believes in original sin, I could hardly believe anything else.
But there’s
the rub. Because I am a Christian, I also cannot accept his analysis that it is
biblical Judaism and biblical Christianity that have left the West morally
flabby, or that a return to paganism is the cure. Edward Gibbon made much the
same case for Christianity’s manhood-sapping effect in The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire, the most
beautiful book with which I have ever disagreed, but in the two centuries since
Gibbon wrote, the Enlightenment jettison of biblical Christianity as a basis
for our civilization has neither led to a revival of the Classical component of
our culture nor produced a sturdier civic virtue.
On the contrary, romantic paganism and the
Enlightenment are the problem—the sources of our intellectual and moral
debility today. It is a fine thing to study Classical authors, whom every
educated person ought to have read, but it is foolishness to forget that we
possess them today only because Christian monks read them, appreciated them,
and copied them. One needn’t be a pagan to learn from Livy, Caesar, or Tacitus
about the conduct of war. Nor are the ten centuries between the fall of the
Meanwhile, the Enlightenment insistence on
inevitable progress and on the mind of man as the measure of all things has
undercut any sort of instruction by the past, pagan or Christian. Furthermore,
the Enlightenment focus on the mind inclines toward a contempt, or at least a
lack of concern, for the physical world and its duties. The human body itself
becomes a mere instrument of amoral pleasure, to be protected from pain or
societal obligations.
St. Anselm’s “I believe that I may
understand” (d. 1109) becomes Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” (d. 1650).
Without a reference outside himself, deracinated “modern man” produces a
newfangled definition of “peace”: “an absence of war, achieved by the rational
efforts of mankind.” It follows from this definition that if nobody fights, or
fights back when attacked, there will be no war, and mankind will have
established “peace” on earth, and all without the need of the Prince of Peace.
The homiletic capitulation of the clergy to “peace as the absence of war” may
make them modern men, but it also leaves them no kind of Christians.
I recognize the harshness of this
accusation, as well as the existence of a heroic tradition of Christian
pacifism. But pacifism has always been a fringe movement in Christianity, and
true pacifists, willing to die without defending themselves or their families,
have been somewhat rare. Few of today’s self-styled pacifists would pass this
test—withhold their paychecks and see what they do next.
Let us, therefore, be very clear. The
Christian religion, as taught by the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, the
medieval Schoolmen, and the Reformation divines, is not a species of pacifism.
On the contrary, Christian morality is a system of obligations owed both to God
and man, imposed and abetted by the grace of God. One of these obligations, in
particular, is the duty to make war, when warfare is necessary and unavoidable.
A simple summary of this consistent
Christian doctrine regarding war may be found in the Articles of Religion of the
Church of England, adopted in their present form in 1571: “It is lawful for
Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons and serve
in the wars.” Behind this summary lies the whole history of what is called “the
just war doctrine.”
Some, of course, will protest that the Bible
teaches “Thou shalt not kill” and think that they have put an end to the
matter. But the Scripture doesn’t say this at all, even though the Sixth
Commandment (the Fifth, in the Roman reckoning) is mistranslated in most
English versions of the Bible, including the Authorized Version. The original
Hebrew says, as the traditional Book of Common Prayer renders it correctly,
“Thou shalt do no murder.” The Hebrew word at issue is ratsach, and it
means “murder”—to kill another human being for malice, personal gain, or
perverse pleasure.
Someone else might counter that a different,
higher standard applies in the New Testament, where “all is love.” The same God
governs both Testaments, however, which form together a single, inspired
expression of his will. It is the New Testament, moreover, that establishes the
Christian doctrine of the just war.
St. Peter expresses the same doctrine of the
divine appointment of earthly governments to do justice and to punish evil:
“Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be
to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him
for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well” (1
Peter 2:13-14).
From a Christian perspective, therefore, war
is not the mere multiplication of private enmities and strifes, as so many seem
to believe in our overly-personalized and self-centered age. War is a positive
duty of nations, administered by those who have received the divine calling to
govern, for the purpose of correcting and punishing evil.
Such a great calling is obviously open to
abuse, and it needs to be said that the Apostles were not endorsing the
so-called “divine right” of kings, but declaring the Christian obligation to
respect the authority of rulers, including the power of the sword, whether
those rulers are Christians or not. The king, however is God’s servant, and not
his equal, and the subordination of kings to God and God’s law is the necessary
context for understanding Christ’s pronouncement, “Render therefore unto Caesar
the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's” (Matthew
A Christian conscience is certainly not a
blank check rendered to the State. Over the centuries, great theologians, most
notably Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274), worked
to define the requirements and limits of a just war. The key elements are
these: (1) the declaration of war by the proper governing authorities; (2) a
just cause, namely some clear and objective evil to be corrected or averted;
and (3) a rightful intention on the part of those who fight, “so that they
intend to advancement of good or the avoidance of evil” (Summa Theologica,
P(2b)-Q(40)-A(1)).
Under these rules, a Christian nation or a
Christian soldier is waging war only to wage peace. Augustine explains this
apparent contradiction:
Think, then, of this first of
all, when you are arming for the battle, that even your bodily strength is a
gift of God; for, considering this, you will not employ the gift of God against
God. For, when faith is pledged, it is to be kept even with the enemy against
whom the war is waged, how much more with the friend for whom the battle is
fought! Peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as
a necessity, and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity
and preserve them in peace. For peace is not sought in order to the kindling of
war, but war is waged in order that peace may be obtained. Therefore, even in
waging war, cherish the spirit of a peacemaker, that, by conquering those whom
you attack, you may lead them back to the advantages of peace….(Letter 189, 6).
Just war is fought as much for the benefit of the opponent as for the benefit of one’s own nation, since to be ruled by evil men and to be engaged in doing evil at their command is the worst condition possible on earth. Thus, Augustine writes: “Those whom we have to punish with a kindly severity, it is necessary to handle in many ways against their will. For when we are stripping a man of the lawlessness of sin, it is good for him to be vanquished, since nothing is more hopeless than the happiness of sinners, whence arises a guilty impunity, and an evil will, like an internal enemy” (Ep. ad Marcellin. 138, quoted in ST, P(2b)-Q(40)-A(1)-RO(2)).
To reduce two thousand years of
thought to a few lines, Christians have traditionally held that “peace” is a
right relation to God the Father, in and through Jesus Christ, by the grace of
the Holy Ghost.
Peace, therefore, is not an achievable human goal, but a divine gift of grace, to be perfected at the Second Coming, when all the distractions of sin (and the human weakness that gives them power over us) will be done away (cf. Romans 8). Under such a definition, moreover, “an absence of war” is not necessarily peace at all. A failure by nations to fight when the weak and the helpless are harmed is actually war against God, who is Justice, Mercy, and Love.
Most important of all, to seek peace in relation to God in this way is to aspire to something more than being ruled either by the State or by self-preservation. Peace with God is love, and peace in God is love towards our neighbors, even when they are also our enemies. We helped Germany and Japan when we defeated them in World War II, and we are helping the people of the Middle East now by seeking to defeat their worst enemies, whether they recognize them as enemies or not. And it is for this reason that Aquinas places his entire discussion of just war under the heading of “Charity,” the divine sort of love that St. Paul described as the greatest of all virtues (cf. 1 Cor. 13:13).
So, where does that leave our soldiers today? A Christian soldier is a subordinate minister of God, deriving his authority to make war from the divine appointment of his superiors. In terms of his derived authority to act, he is little different from the Christian priest. The ministerial priest receives his authority to minister to the spiritual needs of God’s people from God the Father, through Jesus Christ, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, and at the hands of his superiors in the ministry. The Christian soldier receives his authority to bear arms in a just cause from God the Father, through Jesus Christ, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, and by the appointment of those earthly governors that God has made his ministers for the restraint of evil.
The spiritual
ministry and the temporal ministry also have this in common: they exist for the
sake of those they serve, and not as ends in themselves. The medieval system of
Estates reflected this reality. The First Estate consisted of those ministers
who protected the spiritual welfare of the nation. The Second Estate, “second”
because the
The principles of a just war, it must also be said, have value for any human being, and not just for Christians, since they are true whether anyone assents to them or not. These are not principles of piety or political science, but of reality. They can certainly be discovered in the Old Testament alone, and many of them, perhaps most of them, can also be derived from those common or cardinal virtues discovered by Plato and Aristotle in their contemplation of the same reality we all share by virtue of our being human: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice.
The advantage
to the Christian is simply this—a hope that goes beyond the nobility of
self-sacrifice in a good cause and the clarity of purpose that comes from
submitting to a God who leads from a Cross. A reversion to a pagan ethos to
fight our wars will not make us better warriors, and it will make us poorer
men. Sixteen centuries ago, when the doom of the
Wherefore,
let those who say that the doctrine of Christ is incompatible with the State’s
well-being, give us an army composed of soldiers such as the doctrine of Christ
requires them to be; let them give us such subjects, such husbands and wives,
such parents and children, such masters and servants, such kings, such
judges—in fine, even such taxpayers and tax-gatherers, as the Christian
religion has taught that men should be, and then let them dare to say that it
is adverse to the State’s well-being; yea, rather, let them no longer hesitate
to confess that this doctrine, if it were obeyed, would be the salvation of the
commonwealth (To Marcellinus, Letter 138, 15).
And as for my clerical
colleagues, I would hope that they would recall that their duty is to Christ,
and not to their secular education or politics. The next time they are tempted
to use their pulpits to undercut our warriors in the field, burdened with their
arduous, just, and sacred duties, they might want to recall the muscular
reality of historic Christianity, as Aquinas summarized it:
Prelates and clerics may, by the authority of their superiors, take part in wars, not indeed by taking up arms themselves, but by affording spiritual help to those who fight justly, by exhorting and absolving them, and by other like spiritual helps. Thus in the Old Testament (Joshua 6:4) the priests were commanded to sound the sacred trumpets in the battle. It was for this purpose that bishops or clerics were first allowed to go to the front…( P(2b)-Q(40)-A(2)-RO(2)); and
Now, among the faithful, carnal wars should be considered as having for their end the Divine spiritual good to which clerics are deputed. Wherefore it is the duty of clerics to dispose and counsel other men to engage in just wars (P(2b)-Q(40)-A(2)-RO(3)).
I hope that I have done some of that duty this evening.