While the idea of a "good war" sounds appealing only to the savage, many think that a case can be made for a 'just' war, a war which—perhaps, even from a Christian perspective—cannot, or should not, be avoided, if justice is to prevail.
The idea of a just war first arose among the Greeks. Ancient Greeks shared two contrasting views of war. The Spartans saw war as a way of life, and children were trained from young for a life of violence. Warriors who surrendered and returned home would be subjected to the humiliation of their mothers lifting up their skirts and told to crawl back in where they came from. Athenians, on the other hand, took peace to be the ideal of life. It was there in Athens, however, that Aristotle first coined the term "just war." For him wars made as an end in itself was unacceptabel but it is, he argues, legitimate, and therefore, "just" when it is employed by the state to defend itself from falling in slavery (Politics, I.8). Strangely, he also added in this category wars made to enslave non-Hellenists deserving of slavery or or to conquer an empire for the sake of the inhabitants of the conquering state. And there lies the sting of the idea; what exactly is "just"? Later Roman laws asserts that a war is justified if a party of a contractual relationship broke the agreement; from this came the requirement that war should thus be declared before it is fought.
When Christianity became the state religion under Constantine in the 4th Cent, these ideas of a just war were, as were many other practices Roman, absorbed into the Church as the Church was absorbed into the state. No where is this more clearly seen than in the works of Ambrose of Milan. Not unnaturally, as a former imperial officer, Ambrose argues that, just as the wars ancient Israelites fought he fought for God, so Christians should now fight the wars of the empire as the wars of the Church. Within this circle of conception, heretics, dissenters, and unbelievers quickly became natural traitors and enemies of the state who could be preyed upon.
If it is felt that Ambrose gave away too much, it fell to his younger contemporary, Augustine the Great, to bring the idea of just war back within more markedly biblical bounds. Not surprising, Augustine begins his formulation with sin; sin causes war but it could also be combated by war. As with Aristotle, Augustine thought that the right end to war was peace, with later Roman laws, that wars should be declared, that it should be the injustice caused by the opponent that should provide the cause for war, and that it should also be waged only upon valid authority. A Christian soldier does not break the law forbidding killing when he wages the war on the authority of God ()
©ALBERITH