Orthodox Christian Perspectives on War

Perry T. Hamalis, Valerie A. Karras

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268102807
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Many regions of the world whose histories include war and violent conflict have or once had strong ties to Orthodox Christianity. Yet policy makers, religious leaders, and scholars often neglect Orthodoxy's resources when they reflect on the challenges of war.

Through essays written by prominent Orthodox scholars in the fields of biblical studies, church history, Byzantine studies, theology, patristics, political science, ethics, and biology, Orthodox Christian Perspectives on War presents and examines the Orthodox tradition's nuanced and unique insights on the meaning and challenges of war with an eye toward their contemporary relevance. This volume is structured in three parts: "Confronting the Present Day Reality, " "Reengaging Orthodoxy's Tradition, " and "Constructive Directions in Orthodox Theology and Ethics." Each exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary reflection on "war" and the potential for the Eastern Orthodox tradition to enhance ecumenical and interfaith discussions surrounding war in both domestic and international contexts.

The contributors do not advance a single account of "the meaning of war" or a comprehensive and normative stance purporting to be " the Orthodox Christian teaching on war." Instead, this collection presents the breadth and depth of Orthodox Christian thought in a way that engages Orthodox and non-Orthodox readers alike. In addition to offering fresh resources for all people of good will to understand, prevent, and respond faithfully to war, this book will appeal to Christian theologians who specialize in ethics, to libraries of academic institutions, and to scholars of war/peace studies, international relations, and Orthodox thought.

Contributors: Peter C. Bouteneff, George Demacopoulos, John Fotopoulos, Brandon Gallaher, Perry T. Hamalis, Valerie A. Karras, Alexandros K. Kyrou, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Nicolae Roddy, James C. Skedros, Andrew Walsh, and Gayle E. Woloschak.

PART ONE

CONFRONTING THE PRESENT-DAY REALITY

CHAPTER 1

THE ASCETICS OF WAR

The Undoing and Redoing of Virtue

ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU

Contemporary discussions of just war theory in Christian ethics focus on whether Christians should be in the business of defining criteria for the decision to go to war and for the proper engagement in combat. There is very little attention to the way in which, debates about just war criteria notwithstanding, combat soldiers are forced to engage in practices, both in training before war and during war, that fine-tune the body to the constant threat of violence—what I term the ascetics of war. If war is seen as fostering a certain ascetics on the body, then the Orthodox notion of divine-human communion (theosis) is relevant to discussions of war insofar as divine-human communion is itself linked to an ascetics of virtue. Understanding the human as created for communion with God shifts the focus of the discussion from just war versus pacifism to the effects of war on the human person and the practices that undo such effects. After briefly discussing the current debate within contemporary Orthodox theology on just war theory, I will draw on the work of Jonathan Shay to illustrate the effects of the ascetics of war on the body. I will then argue that the ascetics of virtue that involves the particular ascetical practice of truth telling has the power to undo the traumatic effects of war on the combat veteran. Insofar as this undoing is an embodiment of virtue, it is also an embodiment of the divine—theosis.

FORGETTING VIRTUE

When it comes to the question of war, the Orthodox are probably most well known for asserting that there is no just war theory in the Orthodox tradition. Beyond that negative assertion, it is very difficult to discern what the Orthodox think about war. For the just war naysayers, it would not be difficult to find among the Orthodox such statements as, “There is no just war, no just violence, no just revenge or recompense, no just accumulation of wealth.”¹ In this statement, it is a little unclear why—other than for rhetorical effect—war, violence, revenge, and accumulation of wealth are grouped together, since the whole point of the idea of just war is to differentiate morally sanctioned forms of violence from those that are clearly immoral, such as revenge. From one of the leading Orthodox voices in ethics in the past fifty years, one hears how

these two seminal writers [Ambrose and Augustine] led the Western Church not only to an acceptance of the military role by Christians, but to its enhancement into a positive virtue through the development of criteria by which a war could be distinguished from an unjust war, and be called “just.” It is my contention that the East developed a different approach to the issue. Rather than seek to morally elevate war and Christian participation in it so that it could be termed “just,” the East treated it as a necessary evil. . . . Contrary to Augustine . . . the Eastern Patristic tradition rarely praised war, and to my knowledge, almost never called it “just” or a moral good. . . . The East did not seek to deal with just war themes such as the correct conditions for entering war [jus ad bellum], and the correct conduct of war [jus in bello] on the basis of the possibility of the existence of a “just war,” precisely because it did not hold to such a view of war.²

This denial of any form of just war theory in the Christian East is often extended to some form of praise for the Christian Roman Empire for embodying a primarily defensive, nonaggressive ethos in relation to war.³

One is tempted to attribute this denial of a just war theory, together with its praise of the Christian Roman attitude to war, as another example of self-identification of the Orthodox vis-à-vis the proximate other—the “West.”⁴ Even though something like this distorted apophaticism—Orthodoxy is what the West is not—may be operative in some Orthodox denials of just war theory, it is irrefutable that a “theory” of just war, consisting of distinctions between conditions for entering war and conditions for conducting war, together with their respective criteria, is nowhere to be found in what has come to be known as the Orthodox trajectory within the Christian tradition. Such an absence makes Fr. Alexander Webster’s defense of a justifiable war tradition within Orthodoxy something of an anomaly.⁵ While admitting that the Orthodox tradition never developed a just war theory—on this point, there seems to be a consensus—Webster argues against the position that the Orthodox consistently saw war only as a necessary evil and never as a moral good. Webster amasses a pile of citations from biblical, patristic, canonical, liturgical, and imperial sources, which he believes point collectively to an affirmation of the moral value of war under certain conditions. As Webster argues, “We hope the abundant textual and iconic evidence adduced in the present volume will restore among them [Orthodox bishops, theologians, and activists] the longstanding traditional moral position that war may be engaged and conducted as a virtuous or righteous act, or at least as a ‘lesser good’ instead of a lesser or necessary evil.”⁶ In an ironic twist, Webster actually attributes the denial by Orthodoxy of its own justifiable war tradition to the “flurry of ecumenical contacts with Western Christians and an accelerated emigration of Orthodox Christians to Western Europe and North America.”⁷ Instead of blaming the West for poisoning the East with notions of just or justifiable war, the West gets blamed by Webster for influencing the Orthodox to forget its justifiable war tradition. One way or the other, the Orthodox always seem to find a way to blame the West.

The Orthodox, thus, agree that there is no just war “theory” in the Orthodox tradition in the form of distinctions between jus in bello and jus ad bellum, and their respective criteria; there is also consensus that within the tradition there is discussion about the need to go to war; the current debate, however, centers on how going to war is characterized: For Harakas, it is always a necessary evil; for Webster, under certain conditions, it is virtuous and of moral value. This difference, however, reveals another, more implicit, agreement between Harakas and Webster: although both agree there is no just war theory within the Orthodox tradition, both seem to operate within the moral categories and framework of the just war tradition. What the just war tradition attempts to discern is whether both the action to go to war and the conduct within war fall on the side of right or the side of wrong relative to the moral divide. Although Harakas and Webster distance themselves from a just war theory, they are still looking for the moral categories that would establish certain actions to go to war and conduct within war as belonging on either one side or the other of the right/wrong divide. To characterize war as either a necessary evil, lesser evil, lesser good, justifiable, or as a virtuous and righteous act is to attempt to do the same thing that a just war theory tries to do—establish the moral rightness or wrongness of an act, given the specific conditions. Even such distinctions as that between killing as murder and killing for defense reinforce this particular moral framework that centers on the rightness or wrongness of moral acts. From a Christian perspective, the concern with the rightness or wrongness of moral acts has to do with one’s positioning in relation to God and, in the end, with one’s positioning within the eschatological consummation, or heaven.

What is remarkable about the entire debate is that there is little attention to what is arguably the core and central axiom of the Orthodox tradition—the principle of divine-human communion. Webster speaks of war as “virtuous,” and yet pays absolutely no attention to the tradition of thinking on virtue either in the ascetical writings or in such thinkers as Maximos the Confessor; in both cases, the understanding of virtue is inherently linked to one’s struggle toward communion with God—theosis. How exactly is claiming to have fought in a virtuous war, or to have killed virtuously, consistent with this tradition of thinking on virtue in light of the principle of divine-human communion? Is it really the case that being virtuous in war means moving toward a deeper communion with God? Webster does not answer these questions. Although Harakas does argue for the patristic bias for peace, approaching the issue from an eschatological perspective, his emphasis is still on how to label the action to go to war, or the conduct during war, and pays no attention to war from the perspective of the Orthodox understanding of creation’s destiny for communion with God.

THE VICE OF WAR

To affirm that creation is created for communion with the uncreated is simultaneously to affirm that all of creation is sacramental, which means that it is always already shot through with the divine presence. There is no “space” between the created and the uncreated (to spatialize God makes no sense); creation is not given the capacity to “jump over” an abyss to meet the divine presence; it is given the task to relate to itself and to God so as to tap the potential of a created “thing” to iconically manifest the divine presence that is already there. Sin is not so much a missing of the target as it is a blocking of the divine that is “in all things and everywhere present.” Whatever the motivation and whichever way it is directed, violence is a form of blocking of the divine presence both in a social sense, that is, in the space of relationships—human-to-human and human-to-nonhuman—and within oneself. War is a space saturated with violence, an engagement in a set of practices that are unsacramental in the sense that created reality is used to foster division, destruction, denigration, desperation, destitution, and degeneration; put simply, it is a manifestation of the demonic. This is not to say that there are not godly moments in the midst of war—loyalty, sacrifice, and even love. As a whole, however, war is the realm of the demonic.

Given this understanding of divine-human communion, one thing is certain: no matter what side one is on, to be complicit in violence of any kind is damaging to one’s struggle for communion with God. Put another way, to be complicit with violence of any kind, even in self-defense, cannot but be damaging to one’s soul. Violence does not discriminate—it does not affect only those who use it unjustly. Even if one were to engage in conduct with noble intentions, even if one were to exhibit moments of sacrifice, affection, and love in the midst of war, violence works in the direction opposite to that toward which humans were created—divine-human communion. What discussions of labeling decisions to go to war and actions during war forget is that war is inevitably spiritually harmful. One result of understanding war from the principle of divinehuman communion is attention to the effects of war on those who live through it, no matter what side one is on. Discussions of justifiable war may create the impression that as long as one is on the morally justified side of war, that should be enough to mitigate the existential effects of war and violence. There is plenty of evidence to indicate that the “side” one is on makes absolutely no difference to the nondiscriminatory effects of violence in war.

In recent memory, the only war on which there is little debate about the “right” side is World War II. Much has been said about this greatest generation of soldiers, who sacrificed themselves in the morally justified cause of fighting either German or Japanese aggression. In the standard American narrative, going to war against Germany and Japan was the morally right thing to do, and few Americans would dispute this claim. World War II veterans should, thus, feel proud of their blameless service, and have since received unequivocal praise and adulation from most Americans.⁸ There is mounting evidence, however, that even given this unwavering support for their service in World War II, which would give the soldiers every reason to believe that they fought in a just war, many World War II veterans suffered from the effects of violence that was inflicted on them, violence inflicted on others near them, and violence they inflicted on the “enemy.”

In Our Fathers’ War, Tom Mathews narrates the effects of World War II on his own father, who, after visiting the ground in Italy where his division fought the Germans, and describing his role for his division, eventually broke down, saying, “‘I killed a lot of people,’ . . . in a strangled voice that turned to a sob. ‘Jesus Christ . . . I killed so many people.’” Later at a restaurant, Mathews’s father looked at him “as if he’d just come out of electroshock. ‘What happened back there?’ he said. ‘I’ve never voiced that stuff. Never.’. . . ‘Not to anyone. Not to myself.’”⁹ The father continues the reflection: “‘I hated the Germans. I did hate them. But it doesn’t matter. You look and you see something you hate in yourself, something atavistic, something deep in the bottom of the cortex. You don’t feel right. It doesn’t make sense. You should feel victorious. You should feel triumph. You don’t. Too much has happened. All you know is that you’re a killing machine.’”¹⁰ This confession of the effects of war on Mathews’s father comes after a life marked by a strained relationship with his son, infidelity, and addiction. There are similar stories from other World War II veterans, but under the so-called code of silence, World War II veterans were not given the space to express the eff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• List of Contributors
• Index