War and

Christianity
▹ The early Christians were
divided in their attitude
towards the use of military
force by the state.
▹ The dominant view among
the leaders of the church
was that political authority
was divinely instituted for
the benefit of the individual.
▹ When force was used justly,
they believe, it was good and
not a moral evil.
▹ The state may resort to force
at times as an instrument of
justice for the common good.
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▹ The decision to initiate violent hostilities could not
be taken by a private individual, but only by public
authority. Rulers were enjoined against resorting
to war unless they were morally certain that their
cause was just (jus ad bellum) that is, that their
juridical rights had been violated by a neighboring
ruler.
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▹ Even then, they were exhorted to exhaust all peaceful means
of settling the dispute before initiating the use of force, and
these means usually included arbitration.
▹ Furthermore, there had to be a reasonable prospect that the
resort to force would be more productive of good than of
evil and would restore the order of justice.
▹ The war had to be waged
throughout with a right
moral intention, and it had
to be conducted by means
that were not intrinsically
immoral (jus in bello), for
what begins as a just war
could become unjust in its
prosecution.
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▹ Emphasis was placed on what would later be called the
principles of proportionality and discrimination. Under
the first, the suffering and destruction caused by the
war should not be disproportionate to the cause
justifying the resort to war; under the second, innocent
populations were considered immune as targets of
military action.
▹
“
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church
attempted to impose ethical controls on the conduct of
war by specifying times when fighting could not be
carried on, sites where battle was prohibited, types of
weapons that could not legitimately be employed and
classes of persons that were either exempted from the
obligation of military service or protected against military
action.
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▹ In the period of transition from medieval to modern
Europe, three outstanding exceptions to the
dominant theory and practice of morally limited
warfare can be identified. These were invariably
expressions of ideological conflict that ran counter
to the distinctive tendencies of medieval culture:
1. the Crusades of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, fought against an
alien and infidel civilization
2. the wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, especially between the
French and English, in which the forces
of national feelings made themselves felt
for the first time on a large scale
3. the religious wars that followed the
Reformation
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▹ In these cases, war ceased to be a rational instrument of
monarchical policy for the defense of juridical rights. The
concept of war as a small-scale affair of skirmish and
maneuver lost its primacy when large numbers of
nonprofessional (i.e., nonchivalric) warriors, both
volunteers and mercenaries, became enmeshed with
cultural, national, or religious antipathies