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Saint Augustine’s Views on the ‘Just War’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

R. A. Markus
R. A. Markus*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 20: The Church and War , 1983 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1983

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References

1 The Times, 24 April 1982.

2 Barnes, [J.], ‘The just war’ [in Cambridge history of her medieval philosophy, eds. Kretzmann, N., Kenny, A., Pinborg, J. (Cambridge 1982) pp 771–784,]CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p 771 n 3.

3 Russell, F.H., The Just war in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1975) p 26 on Augustine’s ‘ambiguous legacy, worked out with great inner turmoil’ Google Scholar; also p 10 n 1. On the neglect of ‘genuine Augustinián opinions’ p 27; on its crucial ‘imprint’ on medieval views pp 213, 292: on Aquinas and Augustine p 269.

4 [De] Lib[ero] arb[itrio] 1.5.11-13. Book 1 was written before Augustine’s return to Africa in 388.

5 De ordine 11.8.25.

6 Cranz, F.E., ‘The development of Augustine’s ideas on society before the Donatist controversy’ HTR 47 (1954) pp 255–316 Google Scholar, reprinted in Augustine [: a collection of critical essays,] ed. Markus, [R.A.] [(New York 1972) pp 336–403]Google Scholar at p 346.

7 Ibid.

8 F.p 57:5. On its dating, A. Goldbacher in his edition of the letters Pars V (CSEL 58 Vienna 1952) pp 18-19.

9 Retractûtiones II. 33. 1.

10 C[ontra] Faust[um] XXII.74. The discussion extends to cap 78.

11 See above n 9.

12 [De] Cons[ensu] ev[angelistarum] IV. 10.20.

13 Augustine of Hippo (London 1967) p 147.

14 Ad Simplicianum de diversis quaestionibus 1.2.22.

15 Lib. arb. 1.5.12; see above n 4.

16 1 have discussed this in my Saeculum: [History and society in Saint Augustine’s theology (Cambridge 1970)] pp 87-91.

17 Enarrationes in Psalmos 149.7. For all this see my Saeculum cap 2.

18 Cons. Ev. 1.14.21.

19 Ibid 1.26.40.

20 C. Faust. XIII.7, 9; XXII. 76.

21 See Brown, P., ‘Religious coercion in the later Roman Empire: the case of North Africa’ History 48 (1963) pp 283–305 Google Scholar repr. in Religion [and society in the age of Saint Augustine (London 1972) pp 301-331] and my Saeculum pp 36-37 and cap 6.

22 See Saeculum, passim especially cap 2. I have noted the anomalous survival of the ‘prophetic’ notion in Augustine’s correspondence with Boniface in 417 at p 33 n 2.

23 [De] Civ[itate] Dei XXII. 22. 4.

24 Ibid XIX.6. See my discussion in Saeculum pp 99-100.

25 Epp 189.6; 220.10; 229.2. cf. 138. 14-15.

26 For the most recent example of this common view see Barnes, ‘The just war’ p 772.

27 See Duval, Y.-M., ‘L’éloge de Théodose dans la Cité de Dieu (V.26.1)’, Recherches augustiniennes 4 (1966) pp 135–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Brown, P., ‘Saint Augustine’, in Trends in medieval political thought, ed. Smalley, Beryl (Oxford 1965) pp 1–21 Google Scholar repr. in Augustine, ed. Markus, pp 311-335, at p 319.

29 Barnes, , ‘The just war’ p 771.Google Scholar