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Dec 29th, 2019
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Are there reliable sources that can be consulted on the following:
1. What is the thinking in your Church on major social and economic issues?
2. What perspectives do clergy and laity in your Church bring to their involvement in the world of business, the field of education, popular culture, family relationships, international relations, relationships with non-Christians (and the list goes on).
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1. Define what you mean by "in your Church". Does this mean the attitudes of the laity, or the official policy of the hierarchy, or both?
2. I know where you are going with this, but I will not rise to the bait.
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1. The preposition is "in" not "of". I would hope to learn not only what might have been officially promulgated (which might be rather limited), but also what other "thinkers" in the Churches are saying about these issues. I hope to discover any unique Eastern perspectives that our Western brothers and sisters may have overlooked.
2. I suggest that you are imputing motives that aren't there. I am trying to find out if there are Eastern perspectives on these matters that we ought to be considering further, and perhaps sharing with those in the West.
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For my part, I'm the only professional military historian and analyst I know who approaches his profession through the Byzantine-Orthodox perspective on war.
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The church teaches us the principles that inform us on how to interact in all those spheres. I am glad we do not support political activism, and that this is not brought in to the parish by anyone.
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I gather from Stuart's recent post that there is a "Byzantine-Orthodox perspective on war." Perhaps he will share with us his insights into what that is, where it has been expounded, and whether there are differing views on its content. It would be helpful also to hear from others who are familiar with non-Byzantine/non-Orthodox Eastern Christian perspectives on war.
I would also welcome further insights into AMM's statement that "the church teaches us the principles that inform us on how to interact in all those spheres." Where are these teachings found in Orthodoxy? In the Eastern Catholic Churches?
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The Beatitudes.
There may be wars we are forced to fight, but there are no just wars.
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I think that Father Maximos of Holy Resurrection Monastery summarized nicely in this essay: A Just War
Stavrophore Maximos
Around 1537, the Moldavian prince, Petru Rares, an important figure in Romanian history, commissioned the painting of holy icons on the exterior of the man church of the monastery of Moldovitsa. Among the icons he had painted, one in particular stands out: a depiction of the seige of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The painting retains to this day much of its vividness. Nothing of the horror is left out. Cannons boom. Missiles fly. The massed ranks of the invaders stretch into the distance, while within the city the doomed people take up their holy icons along the walls to beg for a miracle of deliverance. A miracle that never came.
Why is this picture on the wall of an Orthodox church? Surely it is there as catechesis. A common view among Orthodox monks was that Constantinople fell to the Turks because of the sins of the Orthodox people. Petru Rares was engaged in a struggle against the Ottoman Turks. His monastic painters were warning the people about the danger of sin.
The idea that sin leads to war, and even to defeat, is an important one in the tradition of Eastern Christianity. In a prayer service of the Slavonic tradition, the first troparion of the canon puts it clearly: “On account of our sins and transgressions, O Righteous Judge, You have permitted our enemies to oppress us”.
It is important for us as Byzantine Christians, in this time of war, to be aware of this theme in our Tradition. But it is also important to understand the subtlety of the teaching. We cannot support the view put forth in the immediate aftermath of 11 September by some conservative Protestant figures that God had “withdrawn his hand” from America due to the specific failings of named groups. This idea sits very ill with orthodox Christianity.
“You came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first”. Echoing the worlds of St. Paul (1 Tim 1:15), we remember the truth at every Divine Liturgy in the prayer before Communion. Petru Rares did not show his people the fall of Constantinople to remind them of the sins of the Greeks a century before. He did it to remind them of their own sins in their own time.
There is a great mystery here. It is too simplistic to think that divine justice functions according to the laws of Newtonian physics. Every action does not have an equal and opposite reaction. The guilty are not always punished in proportion to their wrongdoing, and the innocent are certainly not spared according to the measure of their purity.
“Why do the wicked prosper?” asks the prophet Jeremiah (12:1). Our faith teaches us that all evils in the world—natural and man-made—are the result of sin. If 11 September teaches us anything, it is that the geometry of evil is of a kind to ghastly for comprehension. “Between the Holy Trinity and hell there is no other choice” says Father Pavel Florenksy. We can live either within the perfect order and harmony of God’s life, or we can exist amid the chaos that is outside of Him. Through sin, we choose chaos. Fallen with the rest of creation, the laws of cause and effect have themselves been corrupted. A single evil can produce untold and unpredictable consequences. How apt, for once, is the jargon of military analysis, which describes terrorist attacks as “asymmetrical”.
Perhaps this is why Byzantine theology has never attempted to devise a theory of “just war” as has been done in the West. The East has seen no point in trying to make a system of what is essentially the antithesis of system. You cannot herd cats, and you cannot make chaos neat. The East has not sought to open up the ethics of war to dialectical analysis. War is not an intellectual problem to be solved so much as it is an existential fact, or rather, an existential disaster. Reflecting on the asymmetry of the fallen world, war must be endured as a necessary evil—but with the emphasis on evil.
Even when we must take up arms for protection (as is surely the case in the present conflict), we must never forget that to fight a war is to participate in evil. God ordered His world out of chaos and called it “good”. Wars are the eruption in creation of that same chaos. How can this ever be called “good” or “just”?
“Save your people O Lord, and bless your inheritance. Grant victory to the emperors over the barbarians. . . “ So goes the Troparion of the Cross in its original Greek, pronouncing as best it can, a blessing on the warfare of Christians. But it immediately adds: “and protect your city by your Cross”. Ultimately, it is the Cross which is our true salvation. Caesar must fight, of course, and we must support him. Our sin has made such warfare inevitable. But we must never forget that true victory is not to be found in superficial things. No “system”, be it military, political, economic or even theological, can ever succeed against the chaotic asymmetry of evil that my own sin has unleashed on creation. No system can succeed, but only a Person, and a Cross.
Which brings me back to the painted siege on the wall of Moldovitsa. The ultimate collapse of the entire Byzantine political system is depicted here. A little further along the wall, the onlooker will see revealed an even more profound collapse: the end of time, and the Last Judgement. The artists’ aim was to put into perspective all our attempts to improve the world by means of politics, social action and war. The catechesis is this: do not fear the dissolution of human systems. Do not fear and do not despair. Work to make these systems bear fruit by uniting them more completely with the One who alone can order eternal life beyond the collapse of earthly existence.
Looked at in the light of the end of all things, the eschaton, all our human activities show up their myriad imperfections and corruption. Christian life is seen in the East as an ascesis, as the process of purifying our lives and actions by careful exposure of all that we do and think to the cathartic light of Christ’s judgement. War is no exception. For Eastern Christians there is something utterly stupid about debates between warmongers and peaceniks. In the light of Christ, we see that there is rarely an “either/or” when it comes to war. What matters is that the choices we make be examined constantly in that same penetrating spiritual Light. We must seek out evil wherever the Light reveals it to be: in our enemy, in our national and international policies, and above all, in our own hearts. There is no room for the sentimentality either of either the jingoist or the pacifist. There is room only for the intellectual and spiritual honesty of ascesis, as individuals and as a nation,
Eastern Christians can wholeheartedly embrace the following statement of Vatican II, quoted in the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that deals with War. “insofar as men are sinners, the threat of war hangs over them, and will continue to do so until Christ comes again; but insofar as they can vanquish sin by coming together in charity, violence itself will be vanquished and these words shall be fulfilled: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Gaudium et Spes, 6, quoting Isaiah 2:4)
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There may be wars we are forced to fight, but there are no just wars . You have no idea how much grief I catch over that from the "natural law" Just War Theory types--or from the fact that Orthodox canons require soldiers who kill in battle to abstain from communion for two years (the same canonical penalty as murder). That all killing is sinful runs contrary to the Western grain, largely because sin is understood from a juridical perspective--violate the law, pay a penalty. That sin is a disease, from which one needs healing, does not compute.
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Stuart,
Would you say that that is a fundamental distinction between east and west. Sin seen in a judicial sense in the west, and sin seen as a disease needing healing in the east?
If, so then, this makes a lot of sense why the just war doctrine doesn't fit into an eastern perspective.
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There is, of course, a juridical element in Eastern spirituality, and a therapeutic element in Western spirituality, but the general emphasis of each is as you stated.
Another reason why the West developed a Just War doctrine, and the East did not, is the West had a good pastoral reason for so doing, which did not emerge in the East.
Just war doctrine, though it has some latent elements going back to Augustine and maybe Ambrose, really emerges in the Middle Ages as a response to the endemic private wars of the feudal nobility (which, by the way, included a number of important bishops of the Western Church). With weak central authority, wars were fought by feudal lords and their retainers against other feudal lords and their retainers for purposes of personal aggrandizement, glory, and revenge. Because the wealth of the nobility was in their landed possessions, and because the serfs were the principal generators of wealth by their working of the fields, feudal warfare usually took the form of mounted raids (chevauchees) through the other guy's fiefs, burning his crops and villages, and killing his serfs.
The Church thought this was naughty and bad for business (the Church was a landlord, too, and collected taxes from those serfs!), so it developed a series of regulations defining and constraining the situations in which war could be considered "just" or "righteous". In theory, one could wage a just war with the blessings of the Church, while he who waged an unjust war could be excommunicated and his followers placed under the interdict.
The fundamental tenets of Just War doctrine point to its medieval origins:
1. The war must have a just cause (yes, this is tautological)--to protect the innocent from oppression or death, and not merely for retribution or to reclaim that which was taken.
2. Legitimate authority--only the state can prosecute war (intended to strengthen the hand of kinds and ruling princes)
3. Right intention--war can only be waged to redress an evil (see 1).
4. Probability of success--war cannot be waged strictly for glory, or as an act of defiance, but must have some chance of winning (prevents vainglorious leaders from dragging down their followers with them)
5. Last resort--gotta try everything else, first.
6. Proportionality--this does not mean tit-for-tat, but that the means use must be proportional to the injustice being righted.
7. Distinction between combatants and non-combatants, easy when the combatants wore armor and carried swords and spears, not so easy today.
8. Military necessity, meaning only do those things necessary to attain legitimate military objectives.
I have long maintained that in the era of industrialized warfare, and now asymmetrical warfare, some of these principles are difficult if not impossible to follow, most especially the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Also problematic is the matter of "duly constituted public authorities", which would seem to imply that revolt to overthrow a tyrannical government (e.g., the American Revolution) could never be just. Proportionality is also difficult to gauge in an era of highly destructive weapons. And of course, those same weapons beg the question of preemption, which is not addressed at all by just war theory.
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I don't think it's a matter of divergent views of sin based on theological tradition in terms of understanding the issue. In war the innocent suffer, and that is never just.
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