Just Materials for Just War-Starting out on Augustine

These last two weeks, I've started looking around and reading materials related to my senior seminar project. Before I go over what I've found, allow me to give a brief overview of what I'm attempting for this semester.

In short, I want to look at the concept of a just war (aka, a war with positive moral content, rather than negative) in the writings of philosopher/theologian St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430). I chose "just war" as a concept to study because, simply put, I plan on going into Officer Candidate School (OCS) after graduation, and I wanted to study the morality of what it is that I'm going to be getting myself into. As for why I picked St. Augustine, there were a myriad of reasons, the primary ones being that (a) I read the Confessions in my Sophomore year, where I was drawn to his personal, dramatic style, and (b) when I went to Ecuador over the summer, I saw a gigantic statue of St. Augustine in a cathedral, where due to the rain and the way the statue was designed, St. Augustine was bleeding from his eyes; I figured anybody who got a statue that metal had to be someone worth studying further.

And so, I scoured the library and the web, where I came upon what many consider Augustine's magnum opus, his City of God (De Civitate Dei). In this gigantic book (over 1000 pages published serially over a decade!), Augustine lays out the idea of there being two cities: the City of God, reserved for the faithful, and the City of Man, reserved for everyone else. Of interest here is Book 19, which devotes itself to commenting on and debunking the writings of Marcus Varro, a Roman philosopher who takes the Supreme Good (SG) of Man to be "primary goods of nature" (which are more or less the virtues) (Augustine, 2003, 845). His task here is to show that the Christian view of the SG of Man "to be everlasting life"(Ibid., 852).

On his way there, though, Augustine has to establish that mortal goods are imperfect when compared to everlasting life and peace in the glory of God. Early on in Book 19, Augustine is able (through a series of logical syllogisms,) to discard most mortal goods, except for the one: peace. For it is true that part of the SG of Christianity to be peace, it is not of the same kind as is normally pictured. What is to be glorified here is "everlasting peace," not an unjust peace which allows vice to flourish and thus denies people their true peace (Ibid., 859). It is for this reason-breaking an unjust peace so that people may have everlasting peace-that Augustine says that "the wise man, they say, will wage just wars" (Ibid., 861). Essentially, for Augustine "Peace is the instinctive aim of all creatures, and is the ultimate purpose in war"; war is fought so that peace may be found" and that "...a man who has learnt to prefer right to wrong and the rightly ordered to the perverted, sees that the peace of the unjust, compared to the peace of the just, is not worthy even of the name of peace" (Ibid., 865-866).

Augustine's thought here is much more nuanced than what I'm (unfortunately) able to present here, but I believe that just this small snippet of what I've found thus far can help show you why I believe this to be such a fascinating topic, and why it's such an important one. For in an age when hostilities (fought as every name but war,) are brought about for purported altruism, we may wish to examine whether such altruism is indeed even enough to justify such a destructive force in our lives.

St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London, Penguin Classics, 2003), 843-894.