Augustine on War

Phillip Wynn’s Augustine on War and Military Service offers the revisionist these that Augustine is not the source of the just war tradition. Even the medievals didn’t consider him to be such. Though they quoted Augustine’s various writings on war frequently, it wasn’t until the modern period that a genealogy was established that traced the just war tradition back to Augustine. Some of Augustine’s statements about war (e.g., it must be waged for peace) were truisms already when he wrote, deriving from Cicero and others.

Alfred Vanerpol’s work was most “responsible for cementing the position of St. Augustine in modern historical scholarship as the founder of a Christian doctrine of just war” (15), and Vanerpol was writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even after Vanderpol, scholars were aware that nothing like a developed “theory” can be found in Augustine’s writings, but they continued to treat him as the source of the tradition.

Wynn’s argument about Augustine is convincing, and along the way he performs other services of historical clarification.

His treatment of pre-Constantinian views on war is superb. He recognizes that there was a diversity of views, pointing to the sheer fact of Christians serving in the Roman military as proof against any consensus against war (40). This is a point against pacifist historiography, but he has criticisms on the other side too. Some have characterized Tertullian’s attacks on Christian military service as deviations from some “mainstream” opinion, but there was no mainstream. There was just diversity. Further, he observes that, despite the variety of viewpoints, it’s significant that the explicit treatments from the period are all opposed to war.

Wynn not only refutes the view that Augustine advocates just war, but gives a helpful summary of Augustine’s actual views. For Augustine, war is an evil; it brings out the worst in people and makes them worse. This is, Wynn points out, a contrast with Augustine’s treatment of capital punishment. Though he is restrained in advocating the latter, he never treats it as an evil. Augustine knew of a just war tradition, the one summarized by Cicero, but his expressed views on it are mostly cynical ones. He knew the Romans were able to justify their lust for conquest by covering it with claims to be serving justice.

Though an evil, war is sometimes necessary. Christians rulers must engage in war, and Christians may fight and kill in wars. Augustine never expresses the qualms about killing in war that are found in earlier writers, nor does he believe that killing in war defiles the warrior. In an intriguing discussion, Wynn shows that the link between war, defilement, and penitential purification is an early medieval development, which he connects with modern notions about the psychological damage of war. Augustine sometimes sounds bloodthirsty, but his overall approach to war is sober.

God’s providence in war is crucial for Augustine: “Though wars were evil, they nonetheless fell within the purview of divine providence. God used war to punish the wicked, or to test the virtue of the good. In wars that served particular ends of divine justice, God of course was ultimately in charge, but he chose boni , good men found in the appropriate rank in human society, to wage wars under divine auspices. Such boni , unlike ancient and some contemporary Romans, eschewed the pursuit of power and gloria for their own sakes.” Most of these wars took place in the Old Testament, but Augustine found occasional more recent examples, such as Theodosius’s victory at Frigidus (322).

Wynn’s is a convincing, detailed treatment of Augustine, and, by giving us a more accurate picture of Augustine’s views on war, advances contemporary theological discussions of war and peace.