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13) WAR.
James V. Schall, S. J.
The issue of war and its legitimacy is a perennial issue, though more heatedly debated at some times rather than others. There has been an ongoing discussion about war during the past forty years within which I have written a number of essays, listed in the bibliography below.
However, it might be useful to include, beneath the bibliography, several shorter columns here. These are: 1) "On War"; 2) "Religion and War Reconsidered"; 3) "UN Disarmament Message," and 4) "The French Bishops on War and Peace," and 5) "Christians and War: Playing God."
Under “New Series,” I will add the following reflections from mostly from On-Lins sources on the War on Terrorism: 1) “What Kind of a War Is It?” 2) Wartime Clarifications: Who Is Our Enemy?” 3) “Assessing What Is at Stake in This War,” 4) “Remarks on the War,” 5) “The First Line of Defense,” 6) “On the Duties of Soldiers and Police,” 7) “Human Control Is Gun-Control,” 8) “Terror and War: Sorting It Out,” 9) “On the Duty of a Nation to Its People,” 10) “The Justice and Prudence of This War.”
1) From Midwest Chesterton News, 3 (May, 1991).
ON WAR
When the war in the Middle East began, Saddam Hussain called it, in the Muslim tradition, a Holy War, though he seems to have been his own Allah. President Bush likewise prayed, but talked to his bishop who was, typically these days, against the war. The cynics will say, "What's the use? God cannot be on both sides." Their conclusion logically follows: "Therefore do not pray in war."
On October 23, 1915, during the Great War, Chesterton wrote:
The cheapest and most childish of all the taunts of the Pacifists is, I think, the sneer at belligerents for appealing to the God of Battles. It is ludicrously illogical, for we obviously have no right to kill for victory save when we have a right to pray for it. If a war is not a holy war, it is an unholy one -- a massacre" (CW, XXX, p. 307).
Such common sense is in short supply. If the war is not a holy one, it is surely an unholy one., The dogmatic secularists say the cause of war is the fanaticism of the believers. The believers know that religions differ, that unholy wars also end in massacres.
As I have looked at the so-called "opposition" to war in recent years, I have been puzzled by the implications. Scripture seems to suggest we will have wars and rumors of war until the very end -- some in fact think this era, this very time, may be the "very end" with apocalyptic struggles in Babylon, Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus, Tyre.
If this is so, that only wars worth praying for are worth dying for, we must be ready to think about war, know what it is about. On the other hand, many good (and not so good) people actually seem to think that war is some sort of project to be eliminated by good will or by, of all things, more discussion, by treaties and radical economic or political or social reforms of the whole world. When their "beliefs" do not produce results, they are shattered, devastated, because what "ought" not to happen, did happen. They believed their own theories and found them wanting.
In 1916, Chesterton wrote two columns on war. President Wilson thought that war was to make the world safe for democracy. And others, as Chesterton noted, thought that World War I would be "the war that will end all wars." Chesterton, however, immediately recognized that the ending of wars logically implied something more sinister, something more fundamentally dangerous than war itself.
I cannot see how we can literally end War unless we can end Will. I cannot think that war will ever be utterly impossible; and I say so not because I am what these people call a militarist, but rather because I am a revolutionist. Absolutely to forbid fighting is to forbid what our fathers called "the sacred right of insurrection." Against some decisions no self-respecting men can be prevented from appealing to fortune and to death (CW, XXX, 531).
We cannot end war until we can end will. This is a remarkable sentence because, as he often does, Chesterton here points to what is behind wars. Wars are not "things," but choices, wills in conflict, with their varying motivations for glory, for power, for money, for whatever.
To the degree that we have given up understanding that old asceticism (and praying about what is in our own hearts), to that degree we have allowed ourselves to think that the prevention of war is an easy thing and requires no arms. If men were "different," to be sure, there would be no wars. But would they still be men? Chesterton did not think so. Wars and liberty were correlatives in some fundamental way.
Chesterton understood the real danger of pacifism, the danger of being unable effectively to stand for the right. "It is sometimes necessary to have a civil war, if it be the civil war of civilization. What is lawless can really become law" (p. 532). We would be naive to think that our laws contain no "lawlessness," against which lawlessness we must be free enough, brave enough, to employ our revolutionist and insurrectionist instincts.
On November 11th of the same year, Chesterton wrote of reading an essay in The Nation entitled "On Chivalry in War." The idea that there are rules or manners or traditions in war might at first sight seem outlandish, though it was the whole effort of the Middle Ages to bring such practices about.
The essay in The Nation began by affirming that today all people think that war is "fundamentally criminal." This sort of thinking seemed to Chesterton to be very sloppy. Anyone who believes this proposition about the essential criminality of war -- pacifists must believe this -- is someone who simply "refuses to think." Rather, "war, like weather, cannot in itself be either criminal or saintly; and war as an action undertaken by certain persons may be either one or the other. Only in a state of fallen intelligence akin to fetish-worship could (we) ever have dropped into the habit of talking about the wickedness of war" (pp. 538-39). War is one of those things that has within its very structure "two quite opposite purposes."
Thus, "that all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon." There are certain intellectuals who are too bright "to be content with merely praising peace" but who are "infuriated by anybody praising war" (p. 549). If no war is possible, all criminality has its chance.
Indeed, Chesterton wrote:
Some of the most beautiful instances of modern military courtesy occurred in a war in which both sides were citizens of the same great democracy. They occurred in the American Civil War; several of them redeemed the rather cynical politics of Grant and gave a glamour like that of Galahad to the greatness of Robert E. Lee (p. 542).
The Civil War in terms of weaponry and strategy was the first modern war, but it was the last medieval war, wherein the end was to restore the union and not to eradicate the enemy. Perhaps this had something to do with the faith of Lincoln and Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
When I thought of the carefulness with which modern weapons could be used, precision bombing, attention to strictly war capacities, to enemy troops and material, I thought that Chesterton had already anticipated the better direction of modern war and sane thinking about it. This was a thinking that knows about will and bravery and service, but one that realizes that rules exist and can be followed even in war.
"Those who, like myself, doubt whether war can ever be impossible unless liberty is impossible, will not easily accept the prospect of battle becoming more bestial every time it is renewed. They will think this view as dangerous as it is false; and count it a curious instance of how all intellectual perception, including that of peace, work out in practice to the wickedness of modern tasks."
Wars in the Twentieth Century have not often been fought with this spirit, yet, it is the spirit that we see, perhaps, coming back into focus.
We do not need to deny that, at times, we must fight. But neither need we accept the notion that the "prospect of battle" will become "more bestial every time it is renewed."
Chesterton, unfortunately, has been an unknown voice in the war debates of recent years. He would not, in the end, "sneer" at the belligerents "for appealing go the Gods of Battle."
"If a war is not a holy war, it is an unholy one." "I cannot see how we can end War unless we end Will." "What is lawless can become law." "War, in itself, cannot be either criminal or saintly." "War can never be impossible unless liberty is impossible."
Thus far, Chesterton on war.
2) From The Monitor, San Francisco, November 11, 1982.
RELIGION AND WAR RECONSIDERED
Now that we have had more than a year or so in which the media has been full of wars, of statements coming from clergy, bishops, and academics in bewildering array, we can perhaps relax a bit and estimate where we are.
The Holy Father (John Paul II) in at least three basic statements (Dec. 13, 1981; Jan. 1, 1082, and June 11, 1982) has stated the legitimacy and need of national defense, of soldiering, of deterrence, of political freedom. (Cf. my articles in The Monitor, April 15, August 5, 1982).
This teaching has been within the consistent teaching of the modern papacy. Furthermore, other hierarchies and countries have a stake, so that we cannot expect the U. S. hierarchy to come up with something very much different from what the Holy Father or other hierarchies have suggested.
Whatever form it takes, then, perhaps partly as a result of the efforts of Manu citizens, politicians, academicians, military, refugees and diplomats, the final statement of the U. S. Bishops on war, if there is to be one, will follow, when read carefully, the Holy Father's basic direction, allowing for defense, deterrence, work for secure verifiable, guaranteed disarmament, without deception or illusion.
There are, it strikes me, just too many sane and practical bishops around ever to expect anything else. The homework is being done; the workings of reason are having their effect. No American administration, Democratic or Republican, moreover, is going to come out for a nuclear freeze, unilateral disarmament, reduction of forces, or sacrifice of research, that will substantially leave this nation or the West or other free peoples essentially defenseless. In all prudence, we can expect the Soviets to continue increasing their nuclear capacity in one way or another, whenever they can.
The relative preponderance of Soviet power can have vast political effects, if we allow it. I have never thought there is much of a danger of nuclear war, but great danger of using fear of war as a weapon for political advantage. Thus far, the best statement in support of this position comes from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (New York Times June 24, 1982), while Edward Luttwak's "How to Think about Nuclear War" (Commentary, Aug. 1982) and Vladimir Bukovsky's The Soviet Union and the Peace Movement (New York: Orwell Press, 1982) are basic in understanding why we have heard so much "peace" talk recently and what it means.
Deterrence simply works when carefully carried out. Placed in a reasonable political context, as Mrs. Thatcher argued, it will continue to work in the direction the Holy Father suggested. The Soviet strategists, however, are not unskilled in using religious or academic or other groupings obviate the clear consequences of successful deterrence, namely, that the Soviet power is contained, contrary to its own theory of itself. If it is possible to disarm or weaken one's enemies by argument, why not try?
My suspicion is that a not inconsiderable degree of recent controversy has come from such analyses, something Bukovsky, Dorothy Rabinowitz, Arnaud de Borchgrave, and others have followed. Things can get used outside the intentions of those being used, a recurring political fact. I suspect, in other words, that this whole matter will rapidly die down as soon as it becomes clear that responsible private sector people in the West in religion, media and other places make it clear that they are not going to give up or yield on "moral" grounds, however this comes to be stated in the fine print.
When we have time to look at all of this from the perspective of political philosophy and basic religion, furthermore, it will become increasingly evident, I think, that many in these churches, academia, media, and other bastions seemed pretty close to teaching a pure Hobbesian principle that before death, nothing mattered, so that all one needed to do to destroy any religious or philosophic value was graphically to present the alternative of death.
Many will begin to wonder about the ease with which this teaching could be propagated in our culture. They will wonder, in other words, if religion and philosophy really believe their announced positions. The long-range danger of this recent spate of anti-nuclear-war fever will be a wonderment about whether religion or ethics means anything before death.
Philosophers, like Joseph Cropsey, often seemed to be the ones who upheld the relevant teaching, while few heard much discussion of the meaning of human life if war did come, especially since it was often claimed that it was "inevitable." The irony is, then, that the real effects of the nuclear bomb may well prove, in the end, intellectual, not physical. There will be a gnawing sense that religion and ethics seem to stand for nothing more than the raw, undistinguished Hobbesianism, that death is indeed the end.
Fortunately, I think, an increasing awareness of these matters will, immediately, produce a rather careful, responsible doctrine about defense that will give clue enough to the Soviets that this "peaceful" path in the West to shortstop deterrence is a dead end. The Soviets will seek other ways, I have no doubt, but in the meantime the issue is mostly over. We are merely waiting to see it spelled out in the lines and between the lines. Whether the long-range issue turns out as I suspect is might depends mostly on the clarity of thinking about how we explain ourselves.
If we explain ourselves to ourselves, finally, as if nothing at all counts except staying alive for as long as possible no matter what the cost of principle and value, many will begin more seriously to look for a new faith, one which would have principles, dogmatic content that would suggest that sacrificing everything to stay alive is itself a denial of human worth. Once this is clear that we need not in principle accept the worst, we can begin to discuss war precisely on the grounds of principle.
3) From The Monitor, San Francisco, August 5, 1982.
UN DISARMAMENT MESSAGE
On June 11, Cardinal Casaroli delivered a formal message of John Paul II to the UN Disarmament Session. In view of the considerable confusion on this topic, the Holy Father's wise remarks are of particular significance. They again remind us of the careful way he thinks on this topic (cf. "National Defense," The Monitor, April 15, 1981). What is striking about this recent address is its practical realism, its quiet note of encouragement, its awareness of what factors actual politicians responsible for nuclear defense and a nation's good must face.
Here, there are no dramatic gestures for "surrender," no "better red than dead," no calls for unilateral pacifism. We find no one-sided analyses of the dangers which exist, no lack of awareness of military, political, or spiritual issues. The Pope does not think that wars are caused by "arms." "These (inalienable) rights are demanded in countries where the space (of freedom) is denied them to live in tranquility according to their own convictions. I invite all those struggling for peace to commit themselves to the effort to eliminate the true causes of the insecurity of man of which the terrible arms race is only one effect." In this, the Pope would seem more to agree with Margaret Thatcher, who told the same forum: "Let us face reality. The springs of war lie in the readiness to resort to force against other nations, and not in "arms' races," whether real or imaginary. Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace" (New York Times, June 24, 1982).
John Paul II acknowledges a widespread desire for peace, but not just any sort of "peace." He does not think disarmament is a "utopia," but it must be "mutual and surrounded by such guarantees of effective controls that it gives everyone confidence and necessary security." In everything he has said on this subject, the Pope has insisted on effective, assured controls.
The Pope is the first to recognize the complexity of the issue, an area in which "there are divergent viewpoints that can be expressed." But the steps to disarmament must be clear, \secure, thought out, guaranteed. "(The Church) has deplored the arms race, called none-the-less for mutual progressive and verifiable reduction of armaments as well as greater safeguards against possible misuses of these weapons. It has done so while urging that the independence, freedom, and legitimate security of each and every nation be respected." The Pope doe snot want to see disarmament talks used to gain covertly advantages of other kinds.
Contemporary peace movements are taken as good signs, but they too must be squarely analyzed. "The ideological bases of these movements are multiple. Their projects, proposals, and policies vary greatly and can often lend themselves to political exploitation." No one, presumably, is obliged either to deny "exploitation" of peace movements if they happen, nor to bind himself to unverifiable nuclear promises.
The Holy Father holds that deterrence remains a legitimate political means, as Vatican II held. "In current conditions, 'deterrence based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself, but as a step in the way towards a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable." The Pope makes a reasonable case about why deterrence can and ought to lead to real guaranteed negotiations: "Today once again before you all, I reaffirm my confidence in the power of true negotiation to arrive at just\st and equ9itable solutions. Such negotiations demand patience and diligence and must notably lead to a reduction of armaments that is balanced, simultaneously, and internationally controlled."
The Holy Father does not talk either, about arms without talking about liberty. He is concerned about other world problems, but sees that conventional arms are as much problems as nuclear ones, perhpas more so, as no one is pronouncing on recent conventional wars. The Pope also wants to put the whole issue at a higher level. Arms reduction cannot happen by itself or be secured by itself. "Peace" ... is the result of respect for ethical principles," he continued. "True disarmament that will actually guarantee peace among peoples will come about only with the resolution of this ethical crisis. To the extent that the efforts at arms reduction and then of total disarmament are not matched b parallel ethical renewal, they are doomed to failure."
These latter are vital words in John Paul II. As I have suggested in my Church, State, and Society in the Thought of John Paul II, the Pope seeks true discussion and communication at a level wherein people are really free. But he knows that this freedom is a spiritual reality that can be rejected or impeded. He does not suggest that we claim it is present if it is not. John Paul II remains one of few realists in the world who can on this basis talk to us of ethics and higher law.
4) From The Monitor, San Francisco, January 12, 1984.
THE FRENCH BISHOPS ON WAR AND PEACE
At Lourdes on November 8, 1983, the French bishops issued an extraordinarily lucid and persuasive letter on war and peace. This makes the third pastoral on the same subject (the German, April 18, and the U.S. on May 3). In addition, Basil Cardinal Hume, the English primate, following the general lines of the French and German documents, issued a letter on the same subject on November 17. (These three European documents are published in Out of Justice, Peace [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984).
As almost all commentators have noted, the French statement is astonishingly different in tenor, argument, and conclusions from the well-known U.S. pastoral. It follows the general line of the French military and political thinking about how to prevent war. (See my Monitor columns "Active Politicians and War's Morality," March 17, and "French Deterrent Doctrine," March 25, also my "Civil and Military Responsibility for a Just Peace," Vital Speeches, November 15, 1983). Fundamentally, the French hierarchy begin with a realistic analysis of the military and ideological threat against free powers. Only in this context do the French bishops discuss military power and its use.
Like the German bishops, the French hierarchy understood the essentially political nature of the threat against them and did not ever argue that weapons or ideologies could be considered in the abstract. They argued from a constant position of adequate strength and recalled that World War II was largely caused by the failure of western powers to contain Hitler in time. But the French bishops are more concerned that today military power is useful without being used. "Some countries are very well skilled at seizing the advantage of war without paying the price of its having been unleashed: simply by fomenting the threat of war, they exercise a permanent state of blackmail."
To this, the French bishops respond simply: Don't be blackmailed. that is, understand what kind of forces we are up against and how they operate. Couneract this. For the French hierarchy, this means adequate military and deterrent capacity, which the actual enemy fears to the point of ceasing his blackmail. This requires that politics as a test of wills be clearly understood.
The French bishops do not see the world in anything but realistic terms: "In a world in which man is still a wolf to other men, to change oneself into a lamb could provoke the wolf. Less enlightened acts of generosity have sometimes provoked the very evils that they were believed to be capable of eliminating. A poorly adapted nonviolence can unleash a series of chain reactions of inexplicable violence." The French bishops, in fact, are not particularly enamored by nonviolence. As a form of personal testimony, perhaps, it might have its uses provided it does not create a worse evil. To it, they always counter-balance the military and civil vocations which make any nonviolent vocations possible in the first place.
The French bishops pointed out that "the Church does not encourage unconditional pacifism. She has never preached unilateral disarmament, knowing full well that this could be a signal for violence on the part of an aggressive military, political, and ideological complex." Moreover, pacifism or nonviolence is not an option for the state, which has the objective duty of defending peace, liberty, and national independence, both in the internal arena and in foreign affairs.
The French bishops did not hesitate to approve nuclear deterrence or "dissuasion," as they called it. They do not think it is a "good" world situation in which even the smaller French deterrent must be necessary. But they also understand that there are values of life and freedom that must be protected, that keeping alive at any cost is a very dangerous position. They recall in this very context the virtue of prudence which insists that morality in dire situations can still be in effect for a free and intelligent people.
The central question which is being asked is the following: "in the present geo-political context, can a country, which is being threatened in its life, in its liberty, or identify, morally have the right to fend off this radical threat by effective counter-threat, one which is even nuclear? Up until now, while stressing the limited character of such a parry, and the enormous risk which it entails, the Catholic Church has not believed it necessary to condemn it."
The French bishops have, in other words, provided a clear, reasonable, moral method of deterrent doctrine which can be used by any conscientious people. The French bishops' pastoral, along with that of the German bishops and the letter of Cardinal Hume, will be most welcome Catholic documents to the many responsible people throughout the world who recognize that peace can be won and preserved by a clear-headed use of politics and counter power when there is an adequate understanding of the power in being and ideology of one's major enemy. These documents deserve careful and constant study for anyone at all interested in this issue.
5) From The Hillsdale Review, V (Fall, 1985).
CHRISTIANS AND WAR: PLAYING GOD
Issues arising later in time sometimes have an uncanny way of illuminating brief, often
cryptic, remarks from an earlier argument. The current philosophical-religious controversy,
particularly in Catholic circles, over the wide divergences between the statements of the United
States, French, and German bishops on war and peace, with many Protestant commentaries on the
same subject, requires that we return to the great minds to discover what is fundamentally at issue.
Here I want briefly to recall a very short passage found in the last essay in Strauss's
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, entitled, "Perspectives on the Good Society."
Strauss began with an observation that not all Christians would agree with (though, say, a Solzhenitsyn would), namely, that "what divides the human race today in the most effective manner is the antagonism between the Liberal West and the Communist East." Professor Winter held, however, that there had to be some common ground of dialogue between the two powers based on the recognition of a greater danger, evidently acknowledged by both sides. This is the need to achieve nuclear limitations. At a deeper level, however, the common ground of dialogue (though not necessarily recognized as prior by either side) concerned hunger and human rights.
The subordinate dialogue on weapons, in the meantime, meant first that "the 'purpose and intent' of 'our enemies' be respected and, above all, that the 'apocalyptic framework' for the dialogue be recognized." In view of what he had said earlier about the fundamental division of East and Wet, and the ideological grounds on which it is based, Strauss would probably have felt this position of Winter to be a bit enthusiastic, on the basis of the actual history of East-West negotiations and Marxist theory. In any case, this analysis in Winter's view meant that the choice that leads to "thermo-nuclear annihilation" would be God's judgment, if it ever came about. Strauss did not comment specifically on the validity of this obviously theological view; he merely reported Winter's judgment. It seems clear, though, that other forms of moral annihilation might also be "God's judgment."
Winter next suggested that what would enable us to dialogue with the USSR, in spite of all the hazards, would be "faith." Strauss immediately noted that this "faith" was to be, apparently, "faith in God," not in the Soviet leaders. But what about the Soviet leaders? What criterion would they be expected to follow? Surely, no such "faith" in God could be anticipated from them. "Faith in God," then, became a distinctly one-sided affair. Yet, "unilateral disarmament is out of the question," and this same faith "equally forbade preventative wars." Apparently continuing his exposition of Winter, Strauss next said that we dare not simply "assert" that under no circumstances could this country "initiate the use of nuclear weapons." The key word for Strauss seems to have been that this position of Winter was "asserted," not argued. Strauss next touched the deterrence question, which he cited from Winter in this form: "The most difficult problem in the use of nuclear power" remains retaliation. Again citing Winger, "retaliation after a destructive nuclear attack becomes simply vengeance."
In his own words, Strauss gave Winter's reason for this latter view: that it seems "therefore to be incompatible with Christian ethics." What are these ethics? Strauss then quoted Winter: "to choose the life of others over our own -- this is the message of the Cross." It is to be noted here, however, that this position was not presented as a principle of justice, that is, of politics. In effect, it substituted the New Law for politics. From Strauss's viewpoint as a Jew and a philosopher, Winter's reasoning was specifically said to be drawn from "Christian ethics," and presumably binding only on Christians, since there is no reason of politics or Old Law given in the argument. That is to say, Winter did not pursue the reasoning from, say Plato, about not using evil to achieve good, the so-called consequentialist controversy. Thus, Strauss did not address himself to the question of how the Platonic argument might apply to the issue at hand, that is, the United State being already wiped out, but still maintaining its own retaliatory power for use against Soviet citizens and positions. What followed was rather a conclusion about Winter's final remark, which set the whole situation in some irony: "the possibility of retaliation is the power which restrains aggression."
At this point Strauss reflected on Winter's arguments. His first remark was straightforward., If the enemy knew, by reading Christian ethics, that, because of faith (not shared by the enemy, the philosopher, or the Jew), the West would not retaliate if first attacked and destroyed, then it would have to lie and dissemble to make it appear that its actions would conform with its words, if the West wished to prevent a first strike. In other words, one would have to bluff for the faith. Strauss's laconic words were, "the tongue must pronounce the opposite of what the heart thinks."
The second element of Strauss's position was more cryptic and enigmatic. Here he reverted to Winter's remark about the hungry world being somehow prior in ultimate importance to the fundamental difference bet between East and West. Christian readers again should attend to the fact that this is a Jewish philosopher thinking about what Christianity seems to demand on the basis of the faith according to a Christians's own presentation. Thus, on the assumptions presented by Winter -- namely, the West is destroyed, but prevented from retaliation by its faith in God (not faith in the Soviet larders, who get off scot free) -- the lives of the Soviet people are saved. Logically, of course, the Soviet leaders remain in power and except for the bluff, have absolutely no reason, in their own philosophy, for not launching a first strike.
What does this mean? Obviously, it means that the Soviet system is now the only power in the world. What then happens to have-nots, apparently the whole object of a common dialogue between East and West on a "higher" basis? They are, of course "deprived for all the foreseeable future of the possibility to be non-atheistic nations or, more generally, to have a future of their own neither Russian nor America." Consequently, the whole major premise of the higher dialogue is defeated on either alternative. That is to say, Christian morality, as Strauss encountered its presentation in Gibson Winter, leads necessarily to the submission of the world to communism. The effect of Strauss's argument was to suggest that Winter's initial premises were faulty, that the "status-quo position of the hungry world" might, in effect, be far better than either alternative presented in the "name of Christian ethics or faith."
However, it was at this point that Strauss concluded with his most devastating, and interesting, remark on the whole issue: "in other words, Mr. Winter's proposal is based on a tacit claim to know what God alone can know." I have reflected a long time on what Strauss must have meant by this observation, which in one sense can be better directed at Catholicism than Protestantism. But before coming to this issue, let me first cite Strauss's last two observations. The first is that Winter deplored the fact (more evident a decade or so ago than today) that "the institutional weight of our religious traditions falls ... on the conservative side in the struggle which separates the world." Evidently Winter seees himself on the "liberal" side, which meant that there was in fact some higher dialogue possible or at least that it was more rational to fall under Soviet control than take the only effective means that might prevent it. Finally, again with irony, Strauss noted that Winter first pleaded for "universal prosperity and freedom," but then turned around to maintain that the current prosperity of Judaism deflected it from tits true vocation and that external oppression "can fortify the (chosen) people." Needless to say, Strauss was skeptical of both of these views, particularly the Christian advice that the Jews were better off in holocaust, while Christians themselves were busy promoting "universal prosperity and freedom.
Let me go back to Strauss' remark that Winter's views were tantamount to "a tacit claim to know what God alone can know." There are, in fact, not a few today who, embracing arguments similar to Winter's, claim that they speak in God's very name, a claim for omnipotence in particular, contingent circumstances. (I take it that the Catholic doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope is not directly at issue here, if only because the papacy does not follow the Winter position). Questions of war and peace, which both Testaments seem to have finally left to the prudence of responsible civil rulers, are in this latter view superseded by political judgments based directly on Christian "faith." On this basis, Strauss would simply suggest that the notion that the whole world must be turned over to Marxism as a consequence of the Christians faith simply proved that this faith was in radical opposition to reason, and therefore, it was certainly not "believable" to the philosopher or the Jew, let alone to the Communist. Yet, as Strauss knew, at least the Thomist tradition specifically claimed that it did not contradict reason, that it did not leave reason out in the lurch when faith was addressed to it.
So what did Strauss mean? In his Natural Right and History, in an extremely important
passage for Catholics in particular, he made some of his few remarks on Aquinas, whom he
respected deeply. He concludes with these remarks: "Montesquieu had tried to recover for
statesmanship a latitude which had been considerably restricted by the Thomist teaching (on natural
law).... But it is safe to say that what he (Montesquieu) explicitly teaches, as a student of politics
and as politically sound and right, is nearer to the spirit of the classics than to Thomas."
On the other hand, Strauss certainly did suggest that in Winter's analysis, which, coming from a Protestant source, would presumably be less subject to a "rational" check than in Thomas Aquinas, "faith" imposed a restraint on the range of statesmanship. The result was that politics must, on the same analysis, yield to the worst regime. Thus, no regime in which faith or truth or freedom might exist could be possible. The Christian end of statesmanship, then, was to tolerate, if not invite, the worst regime as the result of religion's influence in the world.
Politics for Strauss, therefore, was not some sort of vicarious divinity exercised in the name of the statesman. This was the import of his remark about Winter. Statesmanship must have a certain "latitude" that would enable it effectively to prevent or deflect what no one wanted, including especially the Soviet people themselves and the members of the have-not nations.
One could argue, of course, with Maritain or the French and German bishops, that Winter's
sort of Christian "argument" is not at all necessary. The argument of political reason and
statesmanship must remain at the center even on revelational grounds. But this brief recollection
from Strauss does serve to illustrate, in the light of later arguments on war that arise from
specifically Christian sources, that the heart of the issue is the apparent claim made by certain
Christian theologians of a divine mandate to decide particular military and civilian politics, which
has no appeal but "faith," a "faith" not presented to the philosopher or to the Jew or to the Marxist
as itself worked out in reason Strauss would have understood how politics was not an "object" of
revelation, particularly in the New Testament.
Of course, there may be some who are comforted by this ready assurance of immediate divine intervention in statesmanship. But others, like Strauss, will conclude that if this is in fact what Christianity is about, what it entails in strict argument, so that it promotes the worst regime on a world scale, then there will be left for many room only for the Old Testament and philosophy. The proper Christian response, it would seem, is not to give up either philosophy or the Old Testament, but to recover statesmanship. Interestingly, the French ad German bishops treated the subject of war in almost exactly the same in which Strauss did, in leaving the politician a wide latitude to act against an enemy whose contrary will and philosophy are known.
Indeed, Paul of Tarsus seems in fact closer to Strauss: "But if thou does what is evil, fear, for not without reason does it (civil power) carry the sword. For it is God's minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who does evil" (Romans, 13:4). Aristotle's statesman, Paul's Emperor, and Aquinas' just ruler would have found a way to prevent war, keep tolerable freedom, and avoid the worst regime. The contemporary politician or philosopher who is Christian needs to be able to accomplish this goal by giving reasons for his argument or action, reasons that both the philosopher and the Jew could accept, reasons for which even the Marxist would grudgingly take notice.
“New Series”:
1) Published on-line by www.tcrnews.com, 15 September 2001, “War News” “Opinion”
James V. Schall, S. J., Georgetown University
WHAT KIND OF A WAR IS IT?
Most columnists, newspaper editorials, and politicians agree that we are at war. The “war with whom” needs as yet more exact specification, but the general parameters are clear enough. The primary suspect is Osuma ben Laden, a rich Saudi of Yeminese extraction, evidently in Afghanistan, plus a number of interrelated Muslim militant groups and operatives that agree with his general purpose. These groups have cells and bases in as many as forty different countries, including our own. They have made it clear in various ways that they have declared war on us, both in act and in statement. Moreover, we do not have to have a specific “government” against which to declare war unless we find some government that directly supports this effort, as several government may well do. The fact that someone is killing us is reason enough to know we have a war on our hands. We have made it clear that, given evidence of support of such groups, the harboring country is guilty and an object of war.
A formal declaration of war in some detailed form seems both possible and appropriate both to call attention to our seriousness of purpose and to provide legal and moral authorization for it. A declaration of war is also a statement of reasons. An attack on our citizens is itself implicitly a declaration of war by the attacker. We understand what this means. So do those who do the attacking. We retaliate. We have just cause.
At the Prayer Service at the National Cathedral (14 September) the Reverend Billy Graham wondered why God permitted such evils. Graham said that he did not understand it all but knew God was good and this evil has some purpose. Thus, behind these events are more classical problems of philosophy and theology, problems that we ought to ponder in any education or society even aside from an immediate tragedy such as this one in New York and Washington.
Briefly, I think, that God permits evil deeds because He makes us free and does not prevent the deviant actions we choose from having their natural effects in the world. When evil actions do occur, if we survive them, we are given our choice of responses to them, again responses that depend on our freedom. Many ways “can” be found to respond. Likewise, there are many ways in which we ought to respond. The fact that these events in their terror happen is neither a lament against God nor a declaration that we can do whatever we want in response, even if we “can” and should do many things. We “can,” for instance, that is, we have the capacity to nuke Afghanistan or anyplace else. The clear and measured response approach, however, remains an alternative. We measure purposes and means. We know that certain responses can make things worse, even if for the moment we cannot imagine anything worse.
I want to make five points that I think are pertinent to the public deliberation over what kind of a war this is. First, it is wrong to think of it as the attack of “madmen” or “terrorists.” Madmen and terrorists exist in this world, but this is nor their work. This is the work of soldiers, albeit it extra-territorials of a makeshift, but real, army. They are carrying out the orders of a mind. The mind is in command of the army that the men, who killed themselves and so many others, serve. The army seems to be that basically left over from the Afghan-Soviet war when Ben Laden was on our side plus subsequent recruits from all over the Muslim world. Ben Laden learned much in Afghanistan about modern governments. If he could defeat the Soviets, a major, ruthless power, surely he could strike a decisive blow at other enemies, even the strongest enemy left, namely, us.
The mind that conceived this plot has a transcendent purpose, a political purpose for the organization of the world. Initially, it wants to free all Muslim states of any western and especially American influence. All of this is directly or indirectly related to Israel, both in itself and as a surrogate of the West. The plot was conceived and carried out, not flawlessly, but very, very well. At least one plane did not make it. One has to admire its execution and the “bravery” of the men assigned to carry it out. What did these men think they were doing? Committing evil? Terrorism? Not at all. They thought that they were destroying the corrupt enemy of their people and of civilization itself. What was destroyed were symbols and institutions, even perhaps the President himself, of this enemy. The destruction was carried out by men who knew about modern planes, weapons, psychology. They learned how to fly big commercial aircraft, ironically, at our air training facilities. They paid their bills in dollars. So the plot was long in preparation. Some had wives and children.
What was their “theology?” They believed – whether this is exact Islamic theology or not – that they were dying for Allah and his cause. Subjectively, at least, they professed a “good,” even noble cause. According to other standards -- but we must really have them and they must be objectively true – we can argue that this justifying position is in error, a crime, a sin. But these men did not accept such arguments because they had their own first principles from which they operated. If we are going to disagree with them, it is at this level, their first principles. Granted their first principles, what they did was brilliantly conceived and executed. They died for a cause that they believed gave them the heaven of Allah and struck a mortal blow at their movement’s major enemy.
Secondly, let us indulge in a little exercise, to make this point more graphic. Imagine that on 11 September, suddenly before Peter’s gates, there appeared from New York and Washington, at about nine in the morning, some six thousand plus souls. Most were Americans, some were German or British, a few seemed to be Saudis or Iraqi, we are not sure, but presumably St. Peter was. How are they to be judged?
As we know not the day or hour, let alone the mind of our Maker, we might find in the WTC many who had not lived their lives well, even to the previous days, who did not die in what we call the state of grace. Others may have repented at the last flaming moment. Still others may have been prepared for death all along, as we all should be on going to work in the morning. Then there are the twenty or so Muslims who rammed the planes into the buildings and carried the plot out. What is their destiny? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? None of the above? Is there justice in this world? If not, in the next?
One of the convicted Muslim plotters at the first WTC bombing attempt, in 1993, said that he could face death by execution calmly. If he had “lived a good life, he would go to heaven; if not, to hell.” Evidently, he held that blowing up the WTC was part of living a good life. Presumably, we are judged by our subjective conscience, provided that we did not deliberately blind ourselves to the objective evils we do. So it is at least possible, even in these objectively horrid deeds, the Muslims died and saved their souls, while some of the others did not. When we die, whenever or however we die, we cannot blame someone else for the condition of our soul on its passing. C. S. Lewis somewhere talks of the murderer and his victim who become friends in heaven, much to the consternation of certain earthlings. President Bush at the National Prayer Service mentioned the souls of those who died.
I bring all of this up because there is a lesson in these deaths – it is the lesson of being ready. If we do not believe in hell or in anything, then it does not much matter what we think of these considerations. If we only believe in this world, well the ones carrying out the plot have received their reward, such as it is. Since, on this hypothesis, no transcendent justice exists, the world, at bottom, seems to be an intrinsically ambiguous place. On the other hand, if we have a theology that wants to save everyone, no matter what they do, then everyone killed is already happy in heaven and wondering why we are so sad. But if there is a hell and certain sins are not in any way repented or subjectively justified, then hell has some new members after September 11.
But this ultimate situation is not our perspective now. We are currently looking to ourselves, to securing our safety, to requiting what is in any obvious sense an injustice of great proportions. The third point, then, is whether the war still goes on? We are the living. The plot was a rational act. It was formulated in the mind of one man and his collaborators. Someone gave a command that was brazenly carried out. He or they were not killed in the plane crashes or collapse of the buildings. The mind that conceived this operation and the will that decided to do it are still free and operative.
Ben Laden, after the fact, said that he was not engaged in this plot but he “congratulated” those who were. Those who conceived the plot, moreover, must be enormously pleased at its success. They no doubt either have already or will in the near future plan something else unless stopped in advance. That they want a spectacular encore is quite probable. The first one was so easy. So there still exists in this world a plan, a plot that has a purpose with a mind, will, and organization to carry it out. The war declared on us will not stop until either the plotters change their minds, which seems unlikely, or until they either are killed or rendered helpless. No pious wishes will change that.
Fourthly, on campuses and in the society, we have witnessed much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Are we displaying to the world and to our attackers a society that lacks courage, lacks determination? In part, yes, granted that there is indeed objective reason to mourn. Our society has been wracked with subjectivism, wherein feelings and emotions were primary, not their control and guidance by reason as in classical and Christian traditions. We do not now have much time for weeping. We best imitate the Romans who, when they suffered a defeat, went right on as if nothing happened. This is what really frightened their enemies.
Our economy and system are vulnerable. We must get them going again with the realization that a war goes on. We will be tempted, indeed the men who plotted this affair will expect us, to go back to “normal.” When we get back to normal, they will have a better chance to do it again. They know this. It would be foolish to strike us immediately, unless they thought, as they may, but I doubt it, that they can finish us off with a few airplane bombs and perhaps a few nuclear devices or bacteria.
What, fifthly, about turning the other cheek and no vengeance? Has our drive against the death penalty, against retaliation of any effective kind, only served to embolden those not concerned with these things? If we had managed to find one of the pilots alive after he killed a couple of thousand people, would we think it “just” merely to put him in jail? What if somehow we do capture Ben Laden and find him the master mind? This is not a criminal affair. It is not a court problem. Is there a way to look at what we think we must do to protect ourselves that does not fall under the subsequent accusation of vengeance or lack of mercy or justice?
Ironically, religion has often prided itself in recent decades in “promoting justice,” while saying relatively little of mercy. Now, suddenly, we hear discussions of mercy and a silence about justice. Billy Graham had no difficulty in combining justice with a higher way. No doubt, there is a case for justice both in retribution for a heinous crime and for self-protection against future attacks. If we turn the other cheek, and that is perceived as a message that we are weak, we can reasonably expect to be hit again and again. Those who recommend such a meek policy would then be in effect responsible for the results.
Maybe mercy will “work”? There is something in the extremes of these Islamic movements that seems impervious to mercy. Several years ago, the several French Trappists held hostage in Algeria had their throats slit on Christmas by Muslim extremists. No pleas for mercy saved them. Are all Muslims like this? No. But those who are not have to prove not just passively that they are not by not allowing their countries to be so used. We know that almost every Muslim government that is not extremist is under some kind of siege in their own homeland. Moreover, we know that Christianity and Judaism and other faiths find no hospitable grounds within Muslim states who implicitly or explicitly make religion and state one. Muslim states will tolerate historic religious groups but allow them almost nothing else.
So the line of mercy runs into something that is impervious to mercy. The old doctrine of the just war was designed precisely to meet this situation. Will justice “work” then? We should not delude ourselves that seeking justice, trying to prevent more attacks, will not cause much anger, confusion, discouragement. It might indeed make things worse. Will a policy of war against these groups stop this terrorism, as we are wont to call this war against us? Some of it, no doubt. Hopefully all of it. But it means killing those who kill us and who intend to kill us before they can act. If they get to us first again, we will be dead, some of us. This is a terrible logic, we know.
Ben Laden said that he does not recognize any distinction between civilians and non-civilians. This is why he and his followers could kill as they did. They saw the killed, even those whom we call innocent, as “guilty” of the same crimes as enemy soldiers. Do we have to imitate this thesis to protect ourselves? Of course not. Ben Laden and his followers are soldiers in a declared war against us and our way of life. The mind that plotted these strikes takes no prisoners. It does not weep, but congratulates, when thousands are dead. The mind has not been changed.
Aristotle talks of extremes of moral evil, of people who do such heinous things that we cannot imagine it, yet of things we must account for because they happen. My nephew said to me that he could not “imagine” the things that happened. I told him that a good education prepares one for such things before they happen, so that we will not be surprised. But this is a hard lesson. We do not need to “imagine” such atrocities any longer.
Is it “just” to defend ourselves? Is it just not to defend ourselves adequately? If this means killing those who intend by their own testimony to kill us, it forces us to take another look at a distinction we have tended to drop in recent years, namely that between killing and murder. We have forgotten that killing someone who is killing someone else is itself a protection of life. It is not murder. Thou shalt not kill has almost always been understood to make a distinction between the one killed and the one killing, between the innocent and the guilty. This distinction is what is at work here and must be brought back into the centrality of things.
Someone who says he is going to kill us and proves that he is quite capable and willing to do so by killing our friends, will kill us if we give him the opportunity and do not stop him. It is an ancient observation that anyone who is willing to give up his life can kill almost anyone unless stopped. We never imagined that this could include so many. As former Secretary of Navy, James Webb, has put it: “These terrorists have considered themselves to be at war with us for the past twenty years.... They have no intention of stopping on their own. This war will not be over until they are thoroughly defeated....”
In this context, we cannot forget the Crusades and the real lesson of that era, something I believe The Economist of London has mentioned recently. We tend to look at the Crusades as if they, in spite of their admitted aberrations, were not a final, desperate response of self-defense against a deadly Islamic invasion of Christian lands. Had they not succeeded, Europe would be Muslim to this day, presumably. We suddenly find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the Crusaders, of having to do something we prefer not to do, something we have put off, tried not to notice, just to keep alive and to keep our freedom, flawed as it may be. Too, in retrospect, in the light of these bombings, the 17th to 20th century European colonial efforts to establish more liberal and rational forms of rule in Muslim lands looks less intolerable and unjust. We see what happens when these efforts failed, again whatever their admitted imperfections.
Belloc said at the end of his book on The Crusades, that Islam, once it again regained the power, would do exactly as it did before. It, at least part of it, is doing exactly that. Islamic leaders tell us that they stand for peace. Some, many, are revolted by these actions. But others are not. Whether or not the Koran says that it is a noble thing to die killing the infidels is one thing, that some very sincere and determined men think that it does say this, is now a proven fact. This is what must be stopped.
Do many Muslims have a legitimate complaint against American policy of seeming random support of various kinds of regimes and morals over the years? Of course they do. We look often arbitrary, one-sided. We can legitimately think that the official Muslim states are much too rigid and intolerant. We know that Christians are often under persecution in many Muslim states and nobody does anything about it. We have either turned the other cheek or ignored the problem. But Islam, some section of it, hopefully a minority, but a minority with brains and power, has brought death and destruction to us. This has come not randomly or by accident, but by design.
Some of the world is beginning to think that religion as such, including Catholicism, is fanatical because they hold ultimate truths and that some things are worth dying for, something that Socrates also held. This is the price of the great religions pay for not seeing the ordered truth of revelation and of what is their purpose and relation to the world. We are not without faults. We hate to cast any stone. But, as Aristotle also said, that when reason and law do not work, coercion is necessary, necessary to reestablish reason and, yea, goodwill.
Can, as Augustine said, we be merciful while fighting a necessary and just war, a war imposed on us, even when necessary to kill someone who would kill us? With careful, determined effort, I think it is possible. Maritain said that brains, morality, and political strength are not necessarily incompatible. There will be a time for mercy. This is where we are, what we intend to prove.
2) James V. Schall, S. J., Georgetown University, TCRNews, September 23, 2001.
WAR-TIME CLARIFICATIONS: WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
I.
When Christ was asked “who, then, is my neighbor?” He responded with the Good Samaritan story. Christ was never specifically asked, “who, then, is my enemy?” Perhaps He figured it would be obvious in any generation. He did ask us to “forgive” our enemies, whoever they might be. Presumably, this admonition means that He expected us always to be in a world in which there were enemies to what He had asked us to do and believe. He told us in fact, for this very reason, to expect persecution. When He Himself was being executed in Jerusalem by the Roman state, in conjunction with local accusers, He whispered, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But they killed Him anyway. His forgiveness did not stop His own killing. In other words, it is quite possible to have real enemies who seek our lives, to forgive them in our hearts, and find ourselves still having to deal with them, to prevent them from further attacking, killing us or those for whom we are responsible..
Thus far, the most remarkable passage explaining this war was written by Hilaire Belloc in 1938, in his essay, “The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed” (The Great Heresies [New York: Dodd, Mead, MCMXXXIII]). I had seen a reference to this passage on a Chesterton web site. So I went to the library and found the book itself. The abiding questions Belloc asked himself sixty-three years ago were, a) what makes Islam attractive? b) why does it have no converts to anything else? and 3) will it rise again? Islam is the one militant religion that came out of the desert and invariably conquered much of the world with arms, not with words. Several times, Islam was on the verge of conquering all of Europe. Belloc thought it would rise again. Its simple faith remained intact in spite of its modern setbacks. What Belloc did not foresee, almost the only thing he did not foresee, was Islam’s relative, but rapid demographic increases over against our “culture of death” decreases which latter have already killed more of our own that Islam ever will. We adamantly insist that our country’s attack has no “divine” implications about the way we live. But the way we have been living, ruining our families, not begetting, has, like all moral disorder, its own consequences in this world. This is what we are also seeing.
Yet, Christians still die in the Islamic world, often unheralded, a partial chronicle of which is found in Robert Royal’s Christian Martyrs in the Twentieth Century. We have paid little attention to this on-ongoing persecution. Islam has millions and millions of young militants, zealous, ready to sacrifice their lives, with what they somehow consider to be a noble cause. By insisting on calling them by psychological terms – “fanatics”or “madmen” – we utterly blind ourselves to what is going on. These are soldiers longing for a great war, to recall the title of Mark Halprin’s book. We are relatively few, we are oldish, we are, in fact, selfish, self-centered by comparison. We won’t be left alone. We have thought that our technology would save us, but clever men figured out how to use or bypass our security devices. They caused the greatest single day’s slaughter ever to happen on our soil at the price, as a friend said, of an airline ticket.
“Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant, in all material affairs at least,” Belloc wrote in 1938.
We cannot imagine a great Mohammedan fleet made up of modern ironclads and submarines, or a great modern Mohammedan army fully equipped with modern artillery, flying power and the rest. But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Mohammedan Government centred at Constantinople had better artillery and better army equipment of every kind than had we Christians in the West. The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England and of his brother James and of the usurper William III. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna ... was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the Kind of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history – September 11, 1683 (122-23).
A date that ought to be among the most famous in history September 11. Needless to say, no one remembered this date, September 11, 1683, and what happened on it until what happened on September 11, 2001. Surely a bin Laden’s memory is not so sophisticated? We Catholics have long recalled that the Declaration of War, in 1941, was on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Belloc saw that Islam has been, at bottom, a war power from the beginning. He had no trouble in seeing abiding will over time, over centuries. He wondered if Islam could rise again. He noted how individuals like Saladin suddenly arose within Islam to set it afire. “The future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam” (127). What is somewhat eerie about these remarks of Belloc is the comparatively little attention we paid to Islam as such during and at the end of the war against Communism. When we did pay attention to it, it was almost always a concern with oil or with Israel. We could not imagine a civilizational plot.
II.
The Muslim states, it turns out, may well have had another agenda all along, however haphazard. Afghanistan is almost a symbol of this alternate plan, a state that but a few short years ago was a heroic ally attacking the Soviets. Now it is, as we think, attacking us from the world’s most unlikely and inaccessible bastion. It listens to our President’s demands. It replies, “it will be a test of power.” Its view of its own good apparently does not include the surrender of anything to the non-Muslim..
This again brings up the propriety of calling this a war against “terrorism,” that abstraction that prevents us from asking more clearly what terrorists? This is not a war against “terrorism,” as I saw it called not too long ago in a headline in The Washington Post. It is a war against specific forces with a specific agenda, a specific organization. It uses terror, but it uses it very designedly, to destroy our centers of culture, economy, and government. And it is not called terror by its users, however much it is objectively. It is called war by any means. President Bush’s frank delineation of whom he considered the enemies – the organized Muslim groups scattered throughout the world in dozens of countries, including the most “advanced” – delicately exempted from its scope the “peaceful” Muslims, perhaps even the ones that cheer when they see us attacked. We as yet cannot comprehend that we have an enemy that has been, in some form, attacking us since the seventh century. Almost all the lands conquered by arms were once Christian lands. It is ironic that the last three wars we have fought, in Bosnia, in Serbia, and in Iraq were to liberate Islamic peoples from other Islamic or Christian forces. Is our failure to know this history a cause of our being on the wrong side of history?
In 1985, the great historian of science, Fr. Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., wrote an essay entitled “On Whose Side Is History?” In the course of his reflections on Marxism and modern science, he wrote:
What is happening in the Muslim world is not so much an outburst of fanaticism as a frantic last-ditch effort to ward off the specter of – well, not of capitalism, not of Communism, not of hedonism – but of science. What is occurring in the Muslim world today is a confrontation, not between God and the devil, identified with capitalism or Communism, but between a very specific God and science which is a very specific antagonist of that god, the Allah of the Koran, in whom the will wholly dominates the intellect. A thousand years ago the great Muslim mystics al-Ashari and al-Ghazzali denounced natural laws, the very objective of science, as a blasphemous constraint upon the free will of Allah. Today the impossibility of making ends meet without science forces the Muslim world to reconsider its notion of Allah. It is an agonizing process, which, in spite of the bloodshed, may, in the long run, being a more rational mentality to troubled parts of the world (Chance or Reality, p. 242).
These too, like Belloc’s, are remarkable words. Can the meaning and method of these bombings, what we call “terrorism,” have something to do with the Muslim world’s notion of Allah as pure will? Is that hopelessly “intellectual”? But if there is no natural law, no divine order, no secondary causality, then the command to kill in the Allah’s name might well be “reasonable” in some minds. There would be nothing “illogical” about it if there is no order on which to ground logic. Behind wars of the world, it is often said, much to our incomprehension, lie theological disputes about the truth of things, even including the truth of scientific things.
Belloc himself remarked that Islam in theory is composed of a series of classical Christian propositions but themselves abstracted from any notion of a Trinity in the Godhead and of the possibility of Incarnation in the world. If Allah is indeed pure will, then contradictories can be true. This would include in a way the famous “double truth” controversy, made famous by St. Thomas’ opposition to it, about whether we could have a truth of reason and a truth of faith, each of which contradicted each other. Someone who could hold this position, as Belloc intimated, could be a scientist and a believer even if the positions were contradictory. This might explain our evident surprise that many of the recent attackers were trained in science and engineering. It can be true that killing 6,000 people can logically be a command of God because the command not to murder is itself something that can be otherwise.
So perhaps it is more correct to see these recent events in a longer and more historical and theological context, the context of the very validity or grounding of Islam’s conception of itself. It may be God’s way of getting Islam to examine its Allah, as it were. In our liberal society, we are loathe, even incompetent, to consider these things. What we think of first is “tolerance,” not truth. We think, to refer to the opposite of the title of Richard Weaver’s famous book, that “ideas do not have consequences.” These men are simply “madmen.” We impose psychological philosophy on reality and think we have said something about reality. Tolerance is itself an idea that has allowed the present attackers to use our system to destroy us. I recall a quotation of, I think, bin Laden someplace in which he said that he would use our freedom of religion and speech to destroy us. Our opponents understand us perfectly well, it seems, better sometimes than we understand ourselves. If they be “madmen,” they are madmen who understand perfectly well our own system and modes of thinking and living.
III.
We see, of course, a growing concern that our democratic categories, the ones that will not look to the truth or reason for a position, are inadequate. “Islam, the religion of more than a billion believers, has been hijacked,” Martin Kramer, Editor of Middle East Quarterly has written. “If the first week’s suspicions are confirmed, the suicide attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are the capstones of nearly twenty years of terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam. As layer upon layer of violence has accumulated, Islam itself has come to a tragic turn – and one for which the vast majority of moderate Muslims bears some responsibility” (National Review-on-Line, S. 19, ‘01). Can a systematic plan be conceived and carried out over twenty years, over ten centuries?
I cite also, Charles Krauthammer’s recent and very blunt comment about our unwillingness to see what goes on here as nothing but the aberrant actions of a few hundred “madmen.”
Moral obtuseness is not restricted to intellectuals. I witnessed a High Holiday sermon by a guest rabbi warning the congregation, exactly seven days after our generation’s Pear Harbor, against “oversimplifying” by speaking in terms of “good guys and bad guys.” Oversimplifying? Has there ever been a time when the distinction between good and evil was more clear? And where are the Muslim clerics – in the United States, Europe and the Middle East – who should be joining together to make that distinction (between good and evil) with loud unanimity? Where are their fatwas against suicide murder? Where are the authoritative communal declarations that these crimes are contrary to Islam? (Washington Post, S. 21, ‘01).
The major Islamic response -- there are exceptions – has been to hide under our own legal rules, rules nowhere in force in Islamic lands, not to persecute them as they had nothing to do with it.
We are asked to believe that the thousands of cells and men willing and able to carry these atrocities out, while living among large Muslim groups now in the West, were not noticed by any living Muslim or were not reported. Can we believe this unknowingness in the light of the popularity of this attack on our land among so many particularly young Muslims throughout the world, the ones we see on TV cheering out losses? We would like to believe it, if only to exempt our own system from partial complicity in the whole matter. We certainly need much more assurance than we have so far been given.
Norman Podhoretz, writing in the Wall Street Journal (S. 20.01), cites a number of Arab and Egyptian sources that identify the real enemy as America and not Israel, which is conceived to be a lesser fish. It is tempting to think that America is in this only or largely because of Israel. America, however, in a recurrent phrase, is considered to be “the Great Satan.” “The point is,” Podhoretz wrote, “that if Israel had never come into existence, or if it were magically to disappear, the U.S. would still stand as an embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs consider evil. Indeed, the hatred of Israel is in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism.” This position, however much the existence and conduct of Israel has or has not focused and exacerbated the matter, is the one implicit in Belloc, Jaki, and in the general conduct of the ones carrying out the bombing and destruction.
At present, we seen to be in a time of immediate expectancy. Any written word may be obsolete or put into a different context tomorrow by new events. There are voices that caution us to do nothing. We even have on our campus walls a sudden display of the old and tired Vietnam peacenik signs. Despicable signs. Zenit reports an Editorial in L’Osservatore Romano (S. 21, ‘01) that cautions prudence in use of force. It also uses the expression “madness of terror” to describe these events, an expression that I still think misses the mark. Then the Editorial recalls what the Pope said in the 1993 Day of Peace message: Military operations ... “never serve the common good of humanity, violence destroys; it does not build; the wounds it causes can bleed for a long time.” The condition of the poor will only be worse as a result.
We might say that, looking from the outside, these admonitions might be valid, a pox on both your houses. But surely the common good of humanity is served by stopping those who would destroy its very physical and political structure. A world that capitulates to such force will have to be content to live under it. It is quite possible and even likely that seeking to stop these men who seek to impose their religion on us by whatever means they see fit will incite a larger war. We can legitimately wonder if that would be worse than doing nothing, suffering the present damage and whatever else can be caused, on the grounds that civilization is not worth saving by any military means. The Crusaders, I think, were closer to the truth. Thus far, the attempts to deal with these attacks by way of prevention and seeking out those who caused them have been very specific and directed. There is no intention to starve anyone, no intention to kill masses of people in retaliation. Ironically, we are Afghanistan’s primary source of humanitarian relief. But those who attacked us certainly expect us to retaliate against them, though they hold our courage and will to do so in some contempt.
A recent letter in the Washington Times (S. 19, ‘01) suggested that the worst thing that could happen to us would be for bin Laden himself or the Talaban voluntarily to turn him over to us. That would immediately give him a world wide audience and an opportunity to claim he was totally innocent. Our judicial system, itself no place for this sort of thing; it might not even be able to convict him. Surely this approach is what is behind the Muslim clerics’ insistence that we turn over to them what evidence we have of his guilt. It is wrong for a non-Muslim to judge a Muslim. Since it is quite certain that bin Laden could not have been alone in this affair, we still are not secure until whoever did cause these bombings and the network that carried it out is destroyed or until it changes its mind. No doubt this won’t happen, but nothing bin Laden could do would cause more confusion in the West than his voluntarily giving himself up on the declaration of his own innocence. Indeed, he did say that he was innocent but “admired those who did” carry out the plots in New York and Washington.
IV.
So to return back to the initial question, “who is our enemy?” The enemy is very unlikely to be only several thousand “terrorists.” We must think in much broader terms. The enemy is one that has been recurrently attacking us for centuries. It is an enemy that has grown strong as we have grown complacent and introspective. We are but dimly aware that we have or have had such an enemy, even though, as Jack Kemp recently reported, this enemy officially declared war on us a couple of years ago.
The Holy Father himself has done everything he could to engage the widely-diffused leaders of Islam in dialogue. He has insisted on our looking at the points within its system that we can agree with. On questions of family and population he has found them to be allies before the secularist movements of our time. He too, as we must, distinguishes between “peaceful” and “militant” Muslims. He could have no objection to having proof about which is which. He would not think it a frivolous question. He knows the civil, legal, and cultural pressure within Islamic states either to remove Christians or to restrict them from any growth. He knows that there is a mosque in Rome but Mass is not allowed in Saudi Arabia, among other places.
A friend of mine told me recently of talking to the Holy Father several years ago in which he told her that we could expect something worse than Marxism on the immediate horizon. In all likelihood, he had in mind not Islam but our own culture growing more and more intolerant of our own essential Christian positions on a variety of basic human issues. And it may well be that the rise of Islam is itself made possible by our own moral weakness and spiritual disorder, however loathe we are even to consider this possibility. At times we seem more afraid of being told that God judges our personal sins than in being threatened by a vibrant Islam.
But these bombings and the efforts to counter them can have one good effect. The President has bravely said that other nations are either “for us or against us.” We need some binding authorities within Islam itself to tell us that Islam is indeed bent on a mission to conquer the world, step by step throughout history. Or, equally solemnly, they needs to renounce any understanding of Islam that would justify in any way, with the theological presuppositions that might support it, such actions that seem to come out of its center. What Islam lacks, we realize, is, oddly enough, a pope, someone with the power to define once and for all what it is.
“It is very . commendable and very American that we want to guard against harm coming to innocent Arabs and Muslims, especially when most of us have a good idea about the bloodbath, were the tables turned,” Balint Vazsonyi has written.
But I believe we might have the entire question upside down. Americans may have reason to believe it is Islam that has declared war on the rest of us. Many have given passionate assurances on television that the events of September 11 represent an aberration of Islam. The trouble is that the people I have heard were neither Arab nor Muslims. Americans need to hear such expressions of “regret about he loss of life” have come our way, but a word from the Imam at Friday’s national prayer meeting, asking Allah to forgive the crimes committed in is name, would have lent much more substance. Instead, he pleaded that we protect his brethren from harm (Washington Times, S. 18, ‘01)
From what we can tell, many Muslims, not just a few hapless “terrorists,” do think that the West, “the Great Satan,” must be destroyed.
Fortunately, such new leaders are not in charge of the army in control of many Islamic states. The militant leaders, however, do threaten organized Islamic states. In one sense, actions to stop such wrathful new leaders, even military ones, are not enough. We need to hear now both why Islam is attacking us, as it is, and whether this attack stems directly from its faith. Knowing this, we know what we deal with. And if this renewed warfare is in fact at the essence of Islam, does that mean that every Muslim actually holds this? Certainly not. Many Muslims have escapted to Western lands precisely to escape this system. But as events now show, there is no longer any real escape from the central issue of what Islam officially teaches and expects of its followers.
Paul Craig Roberts has also insisted on one last point. The fact is that we have been grossly, if not criminally, negligent in the sort of equipment allowed to be sold to Syria under the Clinton regime and before. “The Clinton regime permitted the delivery of top-end military communications equipment to Syria, a country officially listed as a threat to U. S. Security... The corporations that sold Syria communications equipment capable of evading detection by National Security Agency should publically identified and pilloried. They are prime defendants for class-action suits brought by relatives of the thousands of Americans killed by the transferred American technology that protected the terrorists from detection” (Washington Times, S. 17, ‘01). One suspects that there is a long and thoroughly unpleasant story here.
So, in some sense, our enemies are ourselves, or at least some of us. We have not known Islam’s heart, not known why they hate us. We are slow to recognize that things hateful do exist within us and among us, things that we sometimes perversely call “rights” or virtues. What is even more difficult for us to grasp is that we might well be hated if we had, mirabile dictu, no faults or sins. G. K. Chesterton was a man who also had much to say about Islam. He wrote, “A thing like the catholic system is a system; that is, one idea balances and connects another. A man like Mohammed or Marx, or in his own way, Calvin, finds that system too complex, and simplifies everything to a single idea, but it is a definite idea. He naturally builds a rather unbalanced system with his one definite idea” (Come to Think of It, [1931]108). This is, in other words, a fight for the legitimacy of other ideas of God, more basically for the balanced Trinitarian idea with its Incarnational addendum.
Especially among the clergy, we find many pleas for turning the other cheek, for not resisting, as if that is an obvious solution or itself one without dire consequences. In this particular case, with the long record of Christianity before Islam, the question might be asked, “what do we call those Christians who do turn the other cheek in this context, especially those with the power and obligation to defend us?” What we call them, eventually, are Muslims. The net result of a simplistic view of this virtue of mon-resistence, something historically resisted in the central Christian tradition, is ironically to eliminate Christianity as it has been systematically eliminated in lands lost to Islam over the centuries.
These reflections are, of course, opinions. It is useful at times to spell out what we think, yet with the realization we could be quite wrong. Suddenly, after several centuries of relative quiet, Islam is on the rise. What do we make of this? do about it? Belloc was uncanny in 1938 in expecting the rise of Islam as one of the constituent elements of the public life of men. I have argued here that the methods being used by Islam call its own very principles into question, though only if we have a standard that can confront its own first principle of the primacy of will in Allah. But behind this question, and intimately related to it, is the relation of Christianity and Islam to historic and modern Judaism. If what is being called to our attention is the validity of Islam, what is no less being brought to the fore is the truth of the completion and development of the original Hebrew revelation in Christianity. Islam, in this sense, is a judgment on both of them, or perhaps, a judgment on their failure to see their intimate relationship. And the secular society that tries to explain the world without Islam, Judaism, or Christianity is quite unsatisfactory and empty.
Is this seeing too much world-historical significance into current events? Perhaps, but I think not. Islam, at least a significant part of it -- and I think it not really just a bunch of psychotic madmen – is indeed at war with us, with that civilization that includes Israel, Christianity, and its secular degenerations. Nothing else that could have happened to us, I think, could have made us look so clearly into the souls of Jews, Christians, secularists, and Muslims. What Islam must ask itself is whether the brutal destruction of these lives is what its faith is about? We must protect ourselves, in the meantime, so that we remain free to live our lives. But we are naive if we think that these deeper questions are not what is really at stake, the truth of Islam, the truth of secularism, the truth of Judaism, the truth of Christianity. We must keep ourselves free to say of what is not true, that it is not true.
After September 11, 2001, the date that ought to be the “most famous in history” is September 11, 1683. These dates portend the unexpected decline and equally unexpected rise of Islam, a decline and rise that now force us to inquire more carefully what Islam is and, a pari, what Israel. Christianity, and modern secularism really are. The recent external events of war and destruction do not allow us to ignore these deeper questions. Until such questions are confronted more carefully, no theory or practice of “tolerance” will save us. It will only provide the cover for further efforts to eliminate us.
3) James V. Schall, S. J., TCRNews, October 10, 2001.
ASSESSING WHAT IS AT ISSUE IN THIS WAR
I. Every liberal instinct in the West is against seeing the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as anything but products of “extremists.” The enemies are called “terrorists,” a most unfortunate abstraction. If we have a secular Western mind-set, we cannot easily comprehend a vaster geopolitical or religious project that does not stem primarily from weakness or resentment or a feeling of injustice caused either by Israel or by random use of Western power. Supply food and help the poor, limit retaliation to a bare minimum. The problem will go away.
At the recent Synod in Rome (October 2, 2001), the Cardinal Archbishop of New York warned against feelings of “revenge,” even in his own city, the one most violently attacked. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle writes that “to passion and anger are due all acts of revenge. Revenge and punishment are different things. Punishment is inflicted for the sake of the person punished; revenge for that of the punisher” (1369b12-14). Thus, it is possible to think of punishment without necessarily indulging in revenge. What seems less comprehensible is to think of acts of such “terrorism” without also thinking of justice, of due punishment. The “do-nothing-to-retaliate,” either on religious (turn the other cheek) or prudential (will cause something worse) grounds, makes such attacks appear to be both more successful than they are and worth trying again.
The purpose of just punishment, which was implied by the Holy Father in his comments on the New York attack as well by President Bush in his various statements, is prevention of immediate or long-planned attacks by those still capable of and willing to carry them out. Even though no one so far has had the courage to claim responsibility, such hostile forces cannot any longer claim “innocence” or “ignorance” to describe their moral status before the world. In the current case, punishment, however realized, could not be intended for the “reform” of those who carried attacks out, or even vengeance against them, as they are already dead.
The planners are being hunted down because they threaten, with evident seriousness of purpose and plausible means of delivery, to multiply the attacks almost anywhere in the non-Muslim world. They will not be stopped even by the fear of their own deaths, which is conceived as a kind of perverted religious glory. In this background, none of the commonly applied deterrent tools seem to work. We are puzzled.
II.
Let me cite two very strong, perhaps controversial statements from young men, the first in an American East Coast state, the other resident in a very explosive Muslim country:
1) As a native Irish “cradle Catholic,” I treasure my holy faith and keep somewhat informed. I have never been well-disposed to the Moslem people, since their “Faith” began as one of the early (seventh century) Christian heresies. It has a long history of virulent anti-Catholicism. Though we undoubtedly share some views in common with them, we are ecumenically antithetical. I can conceive no basis ever for the possibility of accord with them. Their missionary outreach is with the sword! Mosques are springing up like MacDonald franchises in our country. I believe that it is fatuously naive not to see the possibility of a networking connection between some of the Islamic leadership here and in the Middle east.
2) Do you recall during the interminable election last year that there was a Catholic rosary campaign started to pray for the protection of George W. Bush’s victory? It was called the “Lepanto Campaign,” invoking the rosary campaign that assured the naval victory of Lepanto (over Turks, 1571). How ironic that seems now. But in fact, I wonder if it really was irony and not the foreshadowing of the Holy Spirit. I am terribly concerned that a tremendous global war between Islam and Christendom (wha |
