Saint Augustine’s Views on the ‘Just War’

Extract

A long and very respectable tradition of thinking about the morality of warfare has accustomed us to looking at Augustine’s views on the ‘just war’ through the wrong end of a telescope. By common consent, Augustine is the fountain-head of a tradition almost ubiquitous in medieval thought, and still to be discovered lurking, as recently as last April, in a leading article in The Times. In reading Gratian, Thomas Aquinas, Vittoria or Cardinal Bellarmine, one is constantly reminded that, as the author of the most recent study of the just war in the Middle Ages put it, ‘the influence of Augustine was all pervasive.’ The best of modern studies are, indeed, informed by a sense of the ambiguity of Augustine’s legacy to medieval thought; but even so, and unavoidably, they reinforce the tendency which leads us to think of Augustine as the father of this tradition of thinking. There is no need to question this consensus—indeed it seems to me to be very largely correct—to be conscious that there is nothing that can obscure the true nature of an original thought as radically as the tradition to which it gives rise. What, therefore, I am trying to do in this paper is, for once, to turn the telescope the right way round and to look at Augustine’s thinking not in the long perspective of the tradition which his ideas inaugurated, but in the immediate context of his own intellectual biography.