Augustine’s justification of war consisted in an attempt to harmonize the violent deeds of Old Testament leaders with the “pacific precepts” of the New Testament. A. concluded that love can justify killing. I examine the structure of his argument.
There are three parts to his argument: 1. justification of war in the OT; 2. justification of war according to the NT; and 3. the results of the previous two parts for a Christian justification of war.
Exodus 32 and Joshua 8 describe wars that A. justifies as obedience to a divine command that must be obeyed.
The NT did not clearly support recourse to war, nor did it condemn all wars. So Augustine revalued the pacific precepts so that they applied to the intention, rather than the outward act. This meant that a warrior must observe love toward the enemy even while killing him.
A. compares killing in war to the loving punishment by a father of his child. The analogy breaks down because fathers don’t usually kill wayward children. He revalues the Sermon on the Mount to mean that peacemakers are those who fight to guard peace.
His argument contrasts the intus with the foris, the loving inward disposition and the fierce outward act. But in other contexts he argues that sin estranges one from oneself, and that he is a mystery to himself, so how can a warrior know even his own conscience, much less that of an enemy? It appears that A.’s tendentious argument sacrifices a defensible just war theory to his interpretation of divine authority. I argue that A. sacrificed the coherence of a Christian just war to his exegesis of the OT divine command, that he didn’t think through the implications of his argument. In the broader context of his thought, he violated the literal meaning of scripture to serve his own exegetical purpose. The OT became a model for Christian behaviour.
A’s arguments are foundational for subsequent Christian thought on war. I and others have trod this ground before. Now I think A.’s just war has collapsed.
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