Just War

by Stephen White

Two words. Say them slowly, one and then the other, and hear how strange it is that anyone ever set them down together. Just. War.

The first is the word we reach for when we mean what is right, what is fair, the word a child wails at the kitchen table when the cake slices come out uneven. That’s not fair. That’s not just. The second is the word for the patient, organized undoing of human beings: the burning of their houses, the killing of their sons, the leaving of their daughters to walk the roads with whatever they can carry. Set the two side by side, and you have worked a small, dark miracle of grammar. You have taken a horror and made it sound like the sum of the two words comes out even.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

The people who first worked that dark miracle were not monsters. Say that at the start, before anything else, because it is true and because forgetting it is exactly how we go on making the same mistake with cleaner hands. Augustine wept over war. He was no lover of the sword. He was a man sick at heart, writing in the wreckage of one catastrophe and, years later, dying inside the siege of another, trying to answer a question that has no clean answer. What is a man to do who loves his enemy with one half of his soul and is responsible for a city full of frightened people with the other half? When the wolf comes for the lambs, is love supposed to stand there with its hands open? He did not think so. So he began, with enormous reluctance, to mark out a line a Christian could not cross and still be one. Everything on the near side of it, he was willing to permit.

The marking-out took centuries. It did not arrive whole. What we call the Just War theory grew like a reef, a little stony certainty laid down by each generation on the bones of the one before, until by the time they were done with it, the thing had the look of something finished: cool, complete, a cathedral of paragraphs. And there is real mercy in those paragraphs. Some of it is even still there. They said there must be a just cause, not merely an appetite for conflict. A right intention, the aim being peace. War must come last, after everything else has failed, and carry some honest hope of working, and do no more harm than it prevents. Even at its worst, it must spare the farmer in his field, the woman at her well, and the child at his desk.

Read it slowly, and it sounds like a fence built at the edge of a cliff. It sounds like someone who has seen the steep drop and wants the children kept well back from it.

But a fence at the edge of a cliff also tells you exactly how close you are permitted to stand.

There was a garden once, and a night cold enough that the men had built a fire, and a clatter of torches coming up through the olive trees. One of his own had a sword under his cloak. You can hardly blame him for it. He drew it, this fisherman, this Peter, who had never once in his life been good at the thing his heart told him to do, and he swung it the way a terrified man swings, wild and high, and took the ear clean off a slave named Malchus, a nobody, somebody’s doorkeeper or cook, dragged along in the dark to hold a light. And there, in the torchlight, with the blood already going black down the side of the man’s head, Jesus said, Put it away. Put it away. He reached out and touched the ruined ear, and that was meant to be the end of the church’s whole career with the sword. He let them take him. He went without a single blade lifted in his defense and died, when it came to it, with a word of pardon on his lips for the very men who drove the nails.

That was the scandal at the heart of it. A God who will not kill his enemies and lets them kill him instead. It was absurd, and the early Christians knew it. For three hundred years, they staked everything they had on that absurdity. They would sooner go to the lions than join the Roman legions. When the Lord disarmed Peter, Tertullian said, he unbelted every soldier.

Then, over the slow centuries, the church learned not to wince. That is the quiet trouble with the Just War, and quiet trouble is the worst kind because it does its work for generations before anyone thinks to question it. The doctrine was built to be a restraint. For a long while, everyone spoke of it as a restraint, and the speaking was sincere. But a restraint that the one being restrained gets to fasten on his own neck and to unfasten is no restraint at all. It is a decoration.

Here is the trick of it, and no one meant the trick, which is what makes it so nearly devilish. The nation going to war is also the nation grading its own paper. Just cause? Ours, surely; theirs is the wicked one. Last resort? We tried everything we were willing to try. Right intention? Our hearts are clean. Go down the whole sober list, century after century, and you will not find one army anywhere that marched out under a banner reading Our Cause Is Evil and We Know It. They all checked the boxes. They all came out even. The man who killed at Antioch had done his arithmetic, and so had the man he killed. Brothers have knelt to one God on opposite sides of a single valley and risen in the morning to slaughter each other, each dead certain the sum was just. And I am thinking of one war in particular on this continent, though I could be thinking of almost any.

So the thing handed to the church as a way to say no to nearly every war became, in its use, a way to say yes to very nearly all of them. It became the form you fill out in triplicate so that the killing, when at last you reach it, feels less like sin than like paperwork properly filed. It taught the conscience how not to flinch. And a conscience that has learned not to flinch has lost the one thing it was for.

I do not say any of this from the high ground. I say it as one who would want to defend. If the torches came up through my own trees, for my own, I am not at all sure my hands would stay open, and I am not at all sure they should. I know (and this is the part that frightens me) that the very first thing I would do afterward is reach for the doctrine and start filling out the form. That is why I cannot trust it. A teaching is never so dangerous as when it is mostly kind, because the kindness is what gets the rest of it swallowed whole.

I think of Malchus sometimes. The servant with the ruined ear, nobody’s idea of a man, healed in the dark by the very man he had come to help drag away. That is the road the church was offered and mostly did not take: the hand reaching not for the hilt of a sword but for the wound. We took the other road. We built a beautiful, careful theory to light our way down it, and it was made by people who loved God and meant well, which is the saddest and truest part. I would have walked that road too. The honest thing is to admit I am walking it now. The wonder is that somewhere back at the very beginning, in a cold garden, in the smoke and the torchlight, there was a hand that reached out and made a broken thing whole, and a voice that asked us, before we had given any of the wrong answers, to put the sword away.

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