Unjust war: Holy, Historic, and Civilising

I.               Historical Introduction

The brutal Spanish invasion and eventual colonisation of the New World elicited some of the first coherent arguments against accepting war as a natural, largely unavoidable, and easily justified part of the human condition. A few Christian lawyers, most notably Francisco de Vitoria (Vitoria, 1991), argued that the conquistadores’ superior military strength did not justify their conquest of these already well-settled lands, let alone the massacre of a large portion of the existing population. Vitoria declared that deadly attacks could only be justified to avenge a clear injustice or to provide some great gain for the vanquished. Such a harsh ethical judgement of an ongoing military venture by the author’s compatriots was almost unprecedented.

Historians of Christian thinking about just wars often miss the novelty of Vitoria’s analysis (see Reichberg, 2105). These highly partisan scholars think that Christians should oppose almost all wars, and they want earlier writers to have thought the same. This bias encourages systematic misreading of pre-19th century discussions of war: too much attention to the obligatory, effusive praise of peace, too little to the very low proposed standard of what qualifies war as just. (Bainton, 1960) is a good example.

The casual acceptance of wars that today’s just-war thinkers condemn might seem to undermine the many beautiful words about the necessity and excellence of peace. However, until the late 19th century it was universally understood, inside as well as outside Christendom, that the order of all polities always included the disorders of war. The minds, hearts, and economic resources of rulers were in large part dedicated to war. War was inevitable and always quite likely to come soon. It was part of the human condition, less regular than rains but no more avoidable than death or taxes (Neff, 2005; Rogers, 1995). All rulers, who were often expected to lead their armies into battle, both sought and feared military power. Belligerent reality precluded Christian rulers giving much thought to Jesus’s teaching to prefer receiving to giving violence (cf. Matthew 5. 38-40).

In Christendom, any heirs to titles and thrones who did think like that could generally take up holy orders, but very few ever did so. Vitoria was one of the first important thinkers to suggest that the Christian preference for peace should actually be taken seriously as a guide for policy. The perspective surprised and irritated the Spanish conquistadores. It would have been incomprehensible to the natives they encountered (Cervantes, 2020). The conquistadores arrived prepared to fight, as they assumed that at least some inhabitants of the new lands would go to war against them. That assumption was correct. The well-armed newcomers were easily absorbed, as both enemies and allies, into the nearly continuous warfare among the rival tribes and kingdoms. There were vast linguistic and cultural differences between the Spanish and the natives, but as far as the killing and being killed in battle was concerned, they understood each other very well.

Back in Europe, though, times were changing, sort of. Erasmus, a leading northern European scholar, was arguing that rulers should avoid all war on principle – almost directly the opposite starting position from that of all actual rulers (Erasmus, 1974; Erasmus, 1989). Vitoria considered Erasmus to be a frivolous near-heretic, but his own approach to war was closer to the wandering Dutch scholar’s than to that of his own intellectual master, Thomas Aquinas (Justenhoven, 2012). Even more novel than the declarations of lawyers and intellectuals was the Spanish court’s respect for the doubts about the justice of their subjects’ attack. The King went as far as declaring that the settlers could only make war on natives who refused to accept the incalculable gain of learning about Christianity, the religion of universal peace. In reality, though, the new rules did little if anything to slow down the violence of the Christian settlers (Cervantes, 2020).

Vitoria was far less radical than Erasmus. The Spanish lawyer did not seriously question the conventional understanding: peace is desirable but war is inevitable. The denial of that claim first became politically and intellectually respectable with the rise of just war thinking during the decades of preparation for what turned out to be the first of two Great Wars.

The starting hypothesis of just war thinking is that wars should always be avoided. The only exceptions are the rare situations where there is no other way to counter a huge injustice. This thinking has become the political norm, at least in treaties and rhetoric. As Vitoria would have wished, almost all governments now claim to respect tough criteria for the justice of war.

The advent of this new standard is generally portrayed as an ethical and practical advance. Ethically, it seems obvious that it is better to kill with justice than without. Practically, the demand for a truly just cause of war must, it seems, discourage taking recourse to arms. I reject both positive judgements. Ethically, I consider war to be so horrible that even politically appropriate decisions to take up arms cannot be considered just. I will not explain that judgment in this paper. My concerns here are the practical effects of the raising of the standard of justice in war. I will argue that the effects of grafting of the good of justice onto the evil of war amounts have been, and had to be, dire. To explain why the combination is so toxic, I will sketch out three explanations or justifications of war that are not related to justice. I hope to show that the addition of justice to these models inevitably encourages greater carnage.

II.            Holy war

Religion guided all war-making in all pre-secular cultures. The gods, or the true God, routinely blessed or even commanded war, with its suspension of the sacred peacetime constraints on killing, enslaving, raping, and destroying. The divine powers also established and sanctified rules for behaviour in battle, for the establishment of truces, and for the wartime negotiations that would always, eventually bring some sort of peace. The sacrilege of disobeying the heavenly will – whether in going or not going to war, in how wars were fought, or in negotiating peace – was always thought to be an invitation to disaster.

The God of the Old Testament was typically warlike. The Bible recounts received several dozen commands to the kings of Israel and Judah to “charam” various enemies. This Hebrew verb means, “ban, devote, exterminate” (Brown-Driver-Briggs, 2006). In other words, God often ordered great and especially holy slaughters. The mandated killings generally extended to women and children, and sometimes to herds and crops.

The political rise of Christianity brought few changes in the actual practices of war. While popes and some bishops sometimes made serious efforts to maintain or achieve peace in particular situations, the religious and secular leaders of Christian countries saw more harmony than contradiction between their Christian faith and the regular practice of military destruction.

Sometimes, the firm belief in the Catholic Church’s divine authority encouraged premodern Christians “by arms [to] protect the Christian people against” the enemies of the orthodox faith, including Christian heretics. What came to be called crusades were holy wars against these terrible enemies. The holiness of the combat allowed the ecclesial authorities to promise the remission of all the sins of any soldiers who “oppose this scourge with all their might” (Third Lateran Council, 1990: Canon 27, emphasis added). The quotations come from the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which declared a crusade against the Albigensian heretics in what is now southern France.

Not all Christian fighting brought such great spiritual blessings, but Christian rulers and fighters consistently believed, or at least hoped and prayed, that God would support their frequent military campaigns. In effect, Christian rulers engaged in two types of war. In the great majority of contests, they merely asked for a divine blessing for their death-dealing efforts to increase their own power and gain fame and respect from their peers. For a select few campaigns, however, they were fighting to fulfil a divine command.

Crusades and Old Testament presumably influenced the writers of the 1566 Catechism of the Catholic Church. This official guide to Christian belief and practice dedicates only two brief paragraphs to war. The first confirms that killing by real soldiers (i.e. not brigands) was not murder. The second notes, without comment or excitement, that there are “instances of carnage executed by the order of God” (Catechism, 1816, 1982).

Times have changed. Practicing Christians are almost as likely as their secular neighbours to say that the whole idea of a Holy War is sacrilegious, that God always wants to minimise military destruction. The most recent Catholic catechism has a much longer section on peace and “avoiding war”, but no mention of divinely approved carnage (Catechism, 2003: 2302-2317). It seems absurd to think that God could bless a Russian military effort to return the rebellious Ukrainian Orthodox Churches to the Moscow Patriarchate.

Or does it? Wars that are considered just are generally fought with the fervour previously reserved for holy causes. The leaders, fighters, and most of citizens on both sides of most the unprecedentedly deadly conflicts of the last 250 years have been persuaded that justice obliged them to do whatever it takes to defend or promote some quasi-sacred honour or principle: the nation, freedom, democracy, Kultur, tradition, Communism, or the American way of life (see Kalpokas, 2015, Moyn, 2022).

III.          Historic war

After holy wars come what might be called historic wars. The concept was largely developed by G. W. F. Hegel (Hegel, 1977; Hegel, 1975). For the early 19th century Prussian philosopher, justice is irrelevant to war. Wars are a historic necessity, largely because they are part of the inevitable expansion of human freedom. Hegel’s historical-philosophical vision is complex, but his own favourite example brings out the basic idea. The civil and international wars of the French Revolution were both the precondition and the means of Napoleon’s rise, triumph, and freedom-increasing reconstruction of the French government and French society. In turn, the Napoleonic conflicts created similarly profound political and social reconfigurations in most of the rest of Europe. Hegel was certain that the slaughter and destruction of the revolutionary wars had led directly to the creation of states and societies which were more rationally organised and freer than their pre-revolutionary predecessors.

More generally, Hegel declared that wars can push history forward by bringing enough death and disorder to incapacitate many physical, political, and social structures that were outdated but secure in peacetime. Also, combat develops and brings forward bold, ambitious, and desperate men, new leaders who bring new ideas, new configurations of power, and – crucial to Hegel – new manifestations of freedom. In the impossible counterfactual of a world without war, human societies would all have remained small, primitive, unfree tribes that were largely guided, and greatly inhibited, by irrational religious fears. Instead, the Spirit has brought a series of ever more violent wars between ever-larger polities (Oka et al, 2017), leading, said Hegel, to ever larger, more sophisticated, more rational, and freer polities.

Hegelians can make a good case that the process of creating new and better states and customs through the military destruction of old and established ones has continued since Hegel’s day. The late 19th century wars of conquest of Africa and large parts of Asia eventually forced or allowed much of the world to accept more advanced (in Hegel’s understanding) European notions of order and freedom. In the 20th century, the two Great Wars reshaped much of the world in the more socially free American image. The mostly civil wars that followed the Russian and Chinese Revolutions replaced old class and economic structures with more modern ones, changes which, arguably, advanced Hegelian freedom.

Four aspects of Hegel’s understanding of war directly contradict the contemporary doctrine of just war.

·   First, there is nothing wrong with military aggression. On the contrary, history advances through the disorder and new order that conquering “world-historical” states bring along with and after fire and sword.

·   Second, the existence of agreed rules of negotiations, truces, does not imply that better ordered wars could bring less individual suffering. Such rules modulate war, but they cannot and should not restrain fighting. War’s mass desolation is simply the price of historic progress.

·   Third, while the universal desire to fight is integral to history’s forward drive, most wars actually do little or nothing to advance history. Since the combatants are generally ignorant of the historical role they are playing – history, says Hegel, is cunning – the lack of higher purpose in any particular war is neither bad nor good. It is simply inevitable.

·   Finally, even if peoples and their leaders want to avoid war, they will fail. Exactly as the implacable desire of individuals to gain power for themselves will always lead to violence, unless there is a higher authority to restrain them, the equally implacable desire of individual States and their leaders for power will always lead to violence, because there is no higher power to restrain them. Peace requires a unity of wills which separate States cannot have. On the contrary, the differences between States inevitably create conflicts that lead to war.

Hegelians might admit that the differences among some nations, for example those within Europe, could be abolished by a war that is great enough to end with the creation of a new and more advanced State, a European Union. That creation would bring historical progress, but not lasting peace, because the will of this larger European polity would inevitably clash with the contrary will of some other large State, leading to larger wars, to greater unions, and, to the progressive expansion of what Hegel called freedom. (Non-Hegelians might not see real progress in Hegel’s own idea of full freedom: the total unification of the will of all individuals with that of the enlightened state.) How will the process – increasingly destructive wars, followed by more extensive political unifications – end? The Hegelian logic points to only two possible conclusions: total global unity in full freedom or universal and totally destructive war.

IV.          Civilising war

Hegel’s vision of wars that are ever larger and never just leads me to the never just but always civilising wars of the French theorist René Girard (Girard, 1977: Girard, 2010). Girard, a broad thinker, confidently explained how his theory of mimetic violence deepens Hegel’s understanding of war. He starts by postulating a universal human desire to have what others already have. If my neighbour, my friend, or especially my brother has a shiny toy, a nice meal, or an attractive wife, I will always want to imitate him, to have what he has – just because he has it. The imitative desire is violent. If nothing stops me, I will grab the desired object from him. My brother’s own violent mimetic desires will then lead him to copy me, by grabbing the thing back. The mimetic quest naturally escalates, so I will bring in friends to beat up my brother. And so forth, until we either kill each other or find some way to turn our violent urges away from each other.

Girard says that civilisation develops from the way that humans have found to tame their mimetic violence. People have not stopped being violent. Rather, they have learned to agree that instead of fighting each other, they will substitute a third party: someone, some thing, or some group that does not have the power to respond to violence against them with the ever-increasing violence of mimetic revenge. This third party, which Girard calls the “scapegoat”, innocently bears all the blame for humanity’s anti-civilisational (and ante-civilisational) destructive disorder. Loaded with our guilt, the scapegoat is sacrificed, that is both destroyed and made sacred, and then treated as a divine bringer of internal peace. The Girardian peace-through-violence can only be maintained with frequent offerings, more or less violent, of sacred victims.

For Girard, the enemy-victims of warfare are a large-scale scapegoat, recipients of a sacred violence that would otherwise be expressed internally. The Aztecs whom Vitoria wanted to protect exemplified the principle with vivid brutality. They tore the hearts out of their prisoners of war as offerings to their literally bloodthirsty gods. In most wars, however, the fighting itself does the sacrificial, peace-making work. Victory and defeat are almost irrelevant to war’s sacralisation of violence. So are justice and injustice. Girard’s vision of the non-justice of wars is just as firm as Hegel’s, but while the Prussian sees war as a means to something better, the French thinker sees war as a substitute for something much worse: the total destruction of any possible community.

Girard saw a great difference between the sacrificially ordained violence of premodern wars and the purely secular destruction of modern military conflicts. In the latter, the religious framing of war has been replaced by something closer to what Vitoria wanted. Wars are now supposed to be just. In Girard’s view, this substitution has two implications: one distressing and the other terrifying.

The distressing implication is that the search for justice in war is always pointless, because wars are never essentially contests between just and unjust combatants. Whatever the initial justice of the two sides’ political claims, the actual conduct of combat still expresses its anthropological purpose: to engage in a rule-bound, ritual expression of displaced mimetic violence. The destruction of the enemy’s lives and property strengthens and pacifies our own social order.

The terrifying implication is that fighting for a supposedly truly and totally just cause logically leads to the destruction of as much of the supposedly truly unjust enemy’s population and resources as we, the defenders and promoters of justice, can manage. Unconditional surrender is the only just conclusion to just conflicts, and the only way to obtain total victory is by tremendous destruction of the enemy – who had it coming. Modern technology ensures that the destruction which arrives before surrender in today’s just conflicts will indeed be tremendous (Hadas and Ledwidge, 2021).

In effect, modern just wars maintain the underlying logic of scapegoat-war: the unity created by a common enemy and the internal peace created by a shared, outward-directed violence. However, as long as war was sacred, the tutelary gods of war could control the violence. Indeed, well-ordered polities sometimes shared gods who would set rules to limit the scale of fighting among themselves. Once wars become secular and just, however, there are no divinely sanctioned rulers and rules to counter mimetic violence’s inherent escalation. On the contrary, the quest for justice amplifies violence, because any peace that involves anything less than the total destruction of the unjust enemy is unjust.

For Girard, the well-meaning commitment to justice in warfare always encourages the recourse to uncontrolled violence. It inspires attacks by fanatical terrorists, regional militias, and polities with new or old grudges against unjust neighbours. The thirst for justice also encourages rival superpowers to engage in proxy battles. Ultimately, Girard feared, the thirst for justice in war will require the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war (Girard, 2010). That prediction might sound like an idle nightmare, but consider the fairly common saying in the United States when the fight against global Communism was considered a cause worth any sacrifice, ours as well as theirs: “Better dead than red” (see Anscombe et al, 1961).

V.            Three arguments, one terrifying prospect

The three non-just arguments for war come together. In the post-religious world, Holy War has been secularised and transmogrified into unrestrained and always escalating just war. The Hegelian “progress through destructive conflict” has developed into the acceptance that ever-greater wars can produce evermore progress. And the sacralised and ultimately controlled violence of premodern war has been secularised into quasi-sacred, ultimately uncontrolled military violence – committed in the name of justice.

Is there no way to avoid modern war’s rush to ruin? Girard argues that the Christian promise of divine forgiveness offers the only real alternative to the now broken scapegoat mechanism (Girard, 2010). Even if his theological and anthropological arguments are correct, they remain totally theoretical. To judge from the support for Ukraine among non-Russian Christians, believers’ support for quasi-sacred violence remains quite firm.

All three arguments for war demonstrate the futility of the noble intention behind modern just war thinking – that a higher standard for justice will limit wars. Combatants can always persuade themselves that their cause is pure, holy, and historic enough to meet even the most constraining standard of justice. The mutual conviction of fighting a for a just and quasi-sacred cause leads only to increasingly uncontrolled violence, which is only occasionally and very imperfectly limited by any humanitarian scruples (Slim, 2021). 

I certainly hope that Girard is wrong about the direction of history, as he did himself. Right or wrong, though, I do think that both separately and in combination, the three presentations of war that I have given – as holy, historical, and civilising – have greater explanatory power in the analysis of conflict than any analysis based on justice.

August 2023

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