In the last two years since the beginning of the war against Ukraine, it has become even more clear that the conflict is existential, challenging Ukrainian national identity and the authority of its self-governing institutions. Explicit in Russia’s war on Ukraine is the idea that the Ukrainian state is illegitimate: it is controlled by “Nazis,” or is a “puppet” of the Western powers. As Putin’s propaganda would have it, the Ukrainian people are part of the larger “Russian world,” a sphere in which they properly belong. These tropes endure as part of Russian shaping of public opinion, at home and abroad, revealing the basis and end goal of the war: incorporation and domination.
Putin’s policies on the “Russification” of the occupied territories, including the deportation of children, and the annexation of Ukrainian territory and its resettlement by Russian nationals, lend credence to the seriousness of his intent. The Russian military continues to target civilian infrastructure, including residences and public facilities that are hard to construe as legitimate targets. These seem like direct attacks on Ukrainian society, the threat of which will not end until that society dissolves. The war is not a quibble about borders, but about identity and authority.
A war that challenges the legitimate authority of the Ukrainian government and its very basis foregrounds the importance of authority in Christian thinking about war. Thomas Aquinas, one important codifier of what later became just war theory, identified due authority as one of three markers of a just war (ST. II-II, q.40, a.1). Wars may not be waged by anyone, but only by those in authority: a requirement intended as a constraint of war-making power rather than a checklist for its implementation. As Oliver O’Donovan points out, bellum is not simply duellum: war is the projection of a public, not a private, authority, even when it ventures into the contested space between nations (The Just War Revisited, Cambridge: CUP, 2003, 22).
Augustine, one of the authorities drawn on by Aquinas, assumed that rulers may wage just wars. “A great deal depends on the causes for which men undertake wars, and on the authority they have for doing so; for the natural order which seeks the peace of mankind, ordains that the monarch should have the power of undertaking war if he thinks it advisable, and that the soldiers should perform their military duties in behalf of the peace and safety of the community” (Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, XXII.75; trans. NPNF). Notice that even in this early work, Augustine couches his discussion of war in the vocabulary of peace.
In his later work, The City of God, Augustine’s assumptions about just war sit uncertainly alongside his analysis of the unjust Roman commonwealth. In Book 2, Augustine repeats Cicero’s assertion, through the historical figure of Scipio, that a commonwealth is “an association united by a common sense of right (ius) and a community of interest” (2.21, trans. Bettenson). Cicero’s point is that the Roman republic has become corrupt and ceased to be a commonwealth. According to Augustine, however, the Roman commonwealth in fact never existed, as it never embodied authentic justice. Augustine adds that it was a commonwealth “to some degree … and it was better ruled by the Romans of antiquity than by their later successors. But true justice (iustitia) is found only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ … in that City of which the holy Scripture says, ‘Glorious things are said about you, City of God’” (2.21).
Augustine picks up the thread of this discussion later in Book 19, when he returns to Scipio’s definition of a commonwealth. “Therefore, where there is no true justice (iustitia) there can be no ‘association of men united by a common sense of right’ (ius), and therefore no people answering to the definition of Scipio, or Cicero” (19.21). He repeats his contention, argued in the earlier books, of Roman corruption and their service of evil demons, rather than the true God. The wars waged by the Roman Empire are “grievous evils” (19.7).
Then he proposes another definition: “A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love” (19.24). These objects of love may be unworthy and despicable, but no matter what they are, those who share them are still a people. “And, obviously, the better the objects of this agreement, the better the people; the worse the objects of this love, the worse the people. By this definition of ours, the Roman people is a people and its estate is indubitably a commonwealth” (19.24). This is the case, not only with the Romans, but with all the other peoples who have established commonwealths or exercised imperial rule. There is no real justice “in the city of the impious” (19.24), the earthly city, in the absence of the worship of the true God.
Augustine’s proffered definition of a commonwealth undercuts the claims of all regimes, even “Christian” regimes, to embody true justice. As O’Donovan points out in his analysis of Book 19, Augustine gives very little away to the newly baptized Roman empire, modestly claiming for its Christian rulers the ability, at best, to exert a kind of justice in the exercise of its affairs (“The Political Thought of City of God 19” in Bonds of Imperfection, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, 62-63). “We Christians call rulers happy, if they rule with justice … if, more than their earthly kingdom, they love that realm where they do not fear to share the kingship … It is Christian emperors of this kind whom we call happy; happy in hope, during this present life, and to be happy in reality hereafter, when what we wait for will have come to pass” (5.24). Even the form of justice exercised by Christian rulers bows before the justice of the heavenly city.
There are places where Augustine seems to concede a relative justice to earthly kingdoms. Augustine acknowledges that there were times when Rome was better ruled than at others (2.21). The reign of the good is markedly different from the reign of the wicked (4.3). But it is a backhanded compliment when Augustine writes, “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms?” (4.4). The key phrase, of course, is “remove justice”: that which distinguishes a kingdom from a crime syndicate. Is Augustine claiming that kingdoms are simply gangs of criminals, or that without relative justice they would more closely approximate them? As O’Donovan remarks, “But must we take away justice?” (62).
Yet even in the absence of justice, there are real goods present in the earthly city, the chief of which is peace. The earthly peace possessed by peoples now, which falls far short of the perfect peace of the heavenly city, is not to be rejected by the People of God, as Augustine observes:
We also make use of the peace of Babylon … so that in the meantime [the People of God] are only pilgrims in the midst of her. That is why the Apostle instructs the Church to pray for the kings of that city and those in high positions, adding these words “that we may lead a quiet and peaceful life with all devotion and love” (1 Tim. 2:2). And when the prophet Jeremiah predicted to the ancient People of God the coming captivity, and bade them, by God’s inspiration, to go obediently to Babylon … he added his own advice that prayers should be offered for Babylon, “because in her peace is your peace” (Jer. 29:7) — meaning, of course, the temporal peace of the meantime, which is shared by good and bad alike. (19.26)
This peace is used by the citizens of the heavenly city, who desire to enjoy peace forever in the Jerusalem that is above. That city, in Augustinian terms, is shaped by the righteousness (iustitia) that comes from the forgiveness of sins (19.27), and from the hope of the resurrection of the dead (15.17; 22.10).
In Augustine’s view, earthly authorities of every sort are shorn of their pretensions of absolute probity, at best possessing a relative justice. It might seem that only a just society, a true commonwealth in Cicero’s terms, could wage a just war. Yet the authorities of this world pursue a peace that is intrinsically good, and to this extent they are authorized to establish that peace. It is their legitimate concern. As Augustine says in an echo of the earlier discussion in Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, “Peace is the desired end of war. For every man is in quest of peace, even in waging war, whereas no one is in quest of war when making peace” (19.12). In this light, Putin’s war in Ukraine, an attack on Ukrainian identity and its legitimate authority, is nothing less than an attack on earthly peace.
