Just War and Tragedy

In his memoir, The Brass Ring, World War II military journalist and cartoonist Bill Mauldin recalled a Memorial Day address given in May 1945 at the Anzio-Nettuno U.S. Military Cemetery by Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott. Mauldin was the creator of cartoon strips about the two poor U.S. Army infantrymen Willie and Joe and was a well-known disrespecter of military officiousness and martinets. But Truscott was not among his targets. Truscott had commanded the Third Infantry Division in North Africa and Sicily, then II Corps and Fifth Army in Italy, and as Mauldin reports, he had something to say: Normally I am allergic to Veterans Days and Armistice Days and the like, but Truscott was somebody special.... The Anzio-Nettuno cemetery was a collecting point and there were about twenty thousand American graves. Families hadn't started digging up the bodies and bringing them home. The speakers platform, covered with bunting, was arranged with its back to the endless rows of white-painted temporary wooden markers.... When Truscott spoke, he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded there. It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics. The general's remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. One of the Senators' cigars went out; he bent over to relight it, then thought better of it. Truscott said he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do. (1971, 272)1 Having finished his remarks, Truscott turned and walked away, giving not a glance to his other, living, audience.The shock of Truscott's act, the frankness of his words, the directness of the emotion and judgment they convey, hold a lesson for any of us who would dare to make moral arguments in favor of war. Such words as we would use must stand up not just to the doubts of the living but also to the unanswerably reproachful silence of the dead. Was it worth this? they seem mutely to ask. It is the attempt to give an intelligible, and respectable, answer to that question that drives just war thinking, or should drive it. Biggar's work is exemplary on these matters, not least in the rigor with which he tries to provide such an answer.As should be clear from what I said in my blurb for this book, I think this book stands a chance to become this era's De iure belli ac pacis (Grotius 2005), or perhaps more modestly, Ramsey's The Just War ([1968] 2002). Others have done crucial work on aspects of this, but no one has brought it all together in so synoptic a way. Biggar calls this book “a series of essays” (3), but that is overly modest.2 These are not simply distinct essays—diverse assaults, if you will, from different jumping-off points, on a common fortress; there is a relentless systematicity to the work. Because it extends across the whole field of topics in the ethics of war (discrimination, directing the intention, prudential counsels and first-order criteria, statecraft, etc.) and because it engages so profoundly with both theological themes and historical cases old and new, it is a uniquely systematic, powerful, and deep vision of how the Christian tradition thinks about the ethics of war. Furthermore, by doing that, it also explores the theological ethics of statecraft, law, and politics more broadly. To conscript the military metaphor one more time, In Defence of War is a strategic campaign, not a haphazard set of sallies. That seems to me to be a powerful and impressive achievement.Nonetheless, I think it needs complementing, or leavening, by some more explicitly theological reflection on the inscrutable character of divine judgment in history. For war is likely to be tragic, and the tragedy of war should be acknowledged and rendered theologically bearable, if not intelligible, in just war thinking. So after noting several of the facets of this work that seem especially important and valuable to me, I will end by asking questions about where to go next, and the answers I will suggest will lie in the direction of thinking about how to make this tradition more articulate about the tragedies of war.Beyond rendering coherent the many details of the just war tradition, this book also represents a powerful vision of theological ethics in a broadly conservative way and is an exemplary model of such theological ethics as counsel. Biggar is quite conservative when it comes to radical challenges to the tradition of just war—in the best possible sense of being sagely skeptical of and cautious about those challenges. Typically such challenges rest on at best partial apprehensions of the value of the tradition, and thus overestimate the weight of the problems they identify, and undervalue the losses they are willing to incur to avoid those problems. That is a Burkean attitude to take toward these challenges, and indeed the general tone of the book is captured in the line he quotes from Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons: “This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man's laws, not God's—and if you cut them down ... d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake” (quoted at 217), and in the larger, broadly Burkean perspective that underlies it. In our contemporary political climate, where genuine conservatism seems, to many at least (myself included) to have been replaced by a certain kind of insanity, such a mature, antiutopian attitude toward civic order is refreshing, and perhaps even salutary. It would be especially interesting to have this developed more fully, perhaps in engagement with Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition, particularly where that book interestingly rehearses the semidebate between Paine and Burke over the poor and argues that Paine has the better argument. I suspect Biggar is better able to engage this aspect of Stout's work than almost anyone who has engaged him so far. (It is an odd fact that Stout's work, which seems so interesting to many of us here, even theologians, does not seem to translate well across the Atlantic; perhaps it reveals a certain parochialness to the challenges we feel on this side of the pond, or at least a certain more local character than we like to think.)But Biggar's work does not simply offer a broadly conservative position; it also offers that position as a device for counsel. Biggar is proposing not just a set of views, but a particular stance or disposition, a perspective from which to see the world, and that is the perspective of the counselor. I think that that perspective is quite important; we lack counselors today, and perhaps that is part of what the church, and the church in the academy, can provide. As bearers of a millennia-long tradition, theologians have seen, and reflected upon, much statecraft before, and we can bring to bear the powerful, brooding history of all that wisdom onto the matters of the present.3To offer counsel in these times is deeply unfashionable. Too little work in theological ethics these days tries to reach out beyond a purely academic audience. Not so Biggar; his rejection of what he calls “the virus of wishful thinking” is best understood, I think, as this—as a determined effort to make us escape the various intellectual maladies that beset our thinking, an effort to make us attend more seriously to reality, and so be counseled to wisdom by attention to the possible. Wishful thinking plays a role in our everyday personal cogitations, not just in those related to geopolitical concerns; how many of us, in our daily life and work, are constantly struggling against temptations toward fantasy, purity, and escapism that are analogous to those he diagnoses in thinking about war? So the realism that Biggar discerns in the just war tradition is part of a larger theological-ethical counsel of realism that he wishes to urge on us all as well. Biggar is not proposing a new version of Niebuhrian realism per se (see his partial critique of Niebuhr [21]); but his work partakes of the same attention to multiple voices and similarly insists on testing its propositions against the unforgivingly concrete particularities of actual events and phenomena.Now, these two points may be related. It may be the case that a stance of counsel may be inherently, structurally conservative—that counsel, because it seeks to inform another authority, to which it shows deference, presumes that things are broadly in proper working order, and not in need of radical, revolutionary, transformation. I mention that merely as a suggestion for further thought.The critique of wishful thinking, and the development of counsel, takes different forms in different contexts, but it repeatedly returns to the same idea, namely, that the domain of statecraft is a recognizably, if shadowy, ethical domain, where moral categories apply even though their application may seem harder, much harder, to render intelligible in our eyes. His engagements with biblically informed theological pacifism, represented here by Hauerwas, Yoder, and above all Hays, is the most powerful direct engagement with those thinkers on an issue that they claim as their home turf; and Biggar offers an enlighteningly powerful exposition of how deeply ambiguous the scriptural evidence is. In this, he achieves two aims. First, he usefully undercuts the assumption of such biblicist pacifists that only a perverse willfulness would cause anyone to read the texts other than how they do. Second, he helps us see that that disagreement is motivated by larger hermeneutical and theological presuppositions—that is, choices made by exegetes, choices that shape how they read the Scriptures, before they begin reading them. Biggar finds in such thinkers a blithe refusal to engage in detailed scrutiny of the arguments of just war thinking, which engagement could trouble their depiction of such thinkers as obviously wrong. He discerns in them an unexamined assumption that all uses of force are of a piece, all, that is, a matter of hateful violence (which blinds them to the complicated character of human life in this world) and a vague affirmation of “the vocation of suffering” as the primordial form of the imitatio Christi. In each way, he finds them choosing glib simplicity over a genuinely serious complexity. They may not like it, but I suspect that those tempted by Hauerwas, Yoder, or Hays will find in Biggar's book the arguments that take them on most seriously, most directly, most richly, and very, very profoundly—on the question of whether their reading of the tradition on war, governance, and statecraft is funded by “wishful thinking.”An analogous argument takes shape in Biggar's engagement with Rodin. Here he shows that Rodin has simply failed to attend to the full range of reflection on war, in ways that overflow beyond the categories of liberal individualism and legal positivism, categories he simply posits. As Biggar says of him, among others, “If modern liberals are not much impressed by [Augustine's] concern for order, then that is only because they are privileged to take so much of it for granted” (194). While this may sound ad hominem, it is actually directed at a larger number of homini than one. Biggar frames the dispute, ultimately, as one between his moral realism and Rodin's moral nihilism, but on this I think the crucial matter, at least as regards politics, is legitimate authority—of any sort, but especially, in this case, political authority. Rodin's moral nihilism, or at least his ethical individualist contractualism, is utterly blind to the continued reality of legitimate authority in our world.4 Indeed, it is not clear that Rodin can have any ontology of “the political” at all, or whether everything is simply individuals and the ethics of individuals. That is to say, Rodin seems incapable of imagining a realm of the morally political—of imagining, that is, that statecraft can be brought under the kind of ethical reflection that politics can admit of, without the phenomena of statecraft being distorted out of all recognizability by procrustean ethical assumptions. Biggar allows us to recognize the relative integrity of genuinely political reasoning (not raison d'état!) in a way that Rodin cannot, it seems, manage.5In comparison to the alternatives of hermeneutically naive Christian biblicist pacifism and a certain kind of degenerate (if dominant) liberal individualism, Biggar is better. In contrast to the former, he has a richer understanding of the whole scope of Christian moral reasoning, a richer understanding that allows him to see more of the complexity in the tradition, in Scripture, and in the phenomena we are to bring into In contrast to the Biggar has to a kind of moral realism that allows him to that, when it comes to between in a can and should be he insists that if ethical is possible when it comes to and because it is it is also this is very to it, he must get beyond the of and in the case he does testing his against the of concrete In this he from and others, who suggest that the moral should take as perhaps the of general in other words, their vocation is one of counsel. the of the on the of the where he back and for this seems to me quite with Biggar on The just war tradition must be in must be to concrete Biggar does this the book, in and I he had done more to those when the just war tradition is not or but it this is not a just of the cases Biggar is one that he the just war tradition to that is we actually see how the tradition have beyond which it will not It would have been to have a case that where the between and actually the above are quite I would like to here, is one that, for my Biggar's work does not and that is the theological of the just war tradition, or perhaps what we could the theological of that me it this way. The just war tradition the of both a and a theological though have the developed the The does provide a powerful which to and render the and of reality that is war, and that can in fact provide a certain kind of and and render our ethical of various ad and in ways that can be genuinely here, I us to our and ethical in our the in doing this is that it can provide much can us the of the with the of the reality we and so us with a after the is the about the tradition, namely, that it has away from this even the just war tradition has also had a and theological So the tradition is not simply a a device for it is also a an to us see what it is that we are this can and when it is does well beyond the of the military the just war tradition a that is to say, a of the and the of the human in the and before the As such a this theological stands in a to other such of the human interestingly and directly, I think, it stands in a complicated to a vision of the that does not much of a role the most in the of from to and to and in to my is the of war given such and powerful In the book of the when the of the dead comes to to his had but one to an and I am not even him as he for I am here in trouble to you and your It is, we may say, the and perhaps the of what I to think of as not simply but I have better things to to I to and here I have become of to other than my possible point is there to this war? one a here we you and to one and bring to both our some has us to this It is the of to what you you not to but must do. there is a to this it is worth noting that the of the is but the fact is, we is in some sense what matters is where we are and what we are to about it. in statecraft, that fact is the for of the just war tradition, it seems to me, is at least to such because it does not work to the theological of the I think this is both in the moral of the book and in its of what the just war tradition is doing as a of in the the moral Biggar as for I if the is to the of the after the war, which we can only on if we see that it from the side of moral than from the more side of I that does more than that can be and made Furthermore, these problems may be related to what I suspect is a of the moral I can recognize a and depiction of the but Biggar does not what has he Christian Christian will not be to or I think, but will recognize this in their and not attempt to set those in any we admit that the is beset by a more complicated than the just war tradition, in its In the developed and to in their and the just war tradition needs to that reality as As and Biggar does a case can be made that the of war lie not in death and but in the moral that can all those who in war. all, no one would that moral is any more in war than it is in where we are in a to this, what can it to your can it to as a I am not these are but I think our affirmation of them needs to be with more sense of than a legal with categories of legal and may in of the of the that the just war tradition to the of and as a for just war reasoning is to a is it there any and as it for a of that does not translate without into a moral way to this is to really then are we with if it is the In the just actually in a way distinct from other in the actual of and just war, in is the just war simply the device is in the world, with all judgment to this is not a critique of what Biggar has done so much as a of what he has for future work to do. are other thinkers in Christian thought that Biggar could have to articulate such a Christian just war to I am partial to the line of reflection we can from through to modern such as and and a line of reflection inscrutable judgment over a of just war that insists on it as a judgment of and part of the judgment of on this tradition must take not to be as a of those who that it must War is not of a has all in that what is like this one more of could have been for For it is clear that war is a matter of just or but something at least genuine as the can read this as the of a Niebuhrian who to the Christian ethical tradition in I think that that is though I think about The of ethical so in war, and perhaps more broadly in statecraft, is in with more of ethical the about and that war on the back into our everyday it under an that we are who must constantly for and In this way, being Niebuhrian does not being a moral I am simply that of Christian moral thought that is more than morally tradition more in the line of and than in the line of or that as it I am for Biggar's work. Not only will it be a that one can give to it will be so because it the All I have done is suggest ways in which I the further

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