Volume 5, Number 9 · December 9, 1965
A Martyr for Conscience
By J.M. Cameron
In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter
by Gordon C. Zahn
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 277 pp., $5.95
Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self
by Melita Maschmann
Abelard-Schuman, 223 pp., $4.00
Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan
translated and edited by Abraham I. Katsh
Macmillan, 350 pp., $6.95
'It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.' (The Latin original has for 'the wars,' iusta bella.) So runs the thirty-seventh of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the doctrine of the Church of England. It is directed against one of the horrible heresies of the Anabaptists, who held that the world and all its doings were under the power of the evil one. The Anglican Article represents fairly enough the consensus in practice of most Christians (apart from the Anabaptists and other small sects) in this matter from the age of Constantine down to modern times. It is still the doctrine, it is safe to say, of Cardinal Spellman, of Archbishop Makarios, and the Patriarch of Moscow, and of a variety of other divines, Catholic, Prottestant, and Orthodox. It has persisted in somewhat uneasy partnership, uneasy in theory if not in practice, with another theological doctrine, that of the Just War. Aquinas asks, in that section of his Summa Theologiae entitled De Bello, utrum bellare sit semper peccatum. There is a whole battery of implications in that semper. It suggests that the presumption is that war is sinful, but that under certain very carefully defined and restricted circumstances it may be justifiable; and these conditions, as they are stated by Aquinas and elaborated by later theologians in the same tradition, are such that most of the wars of history are by these criteria to be condemned. What certainly follows, as a matter of logic, from the doctrine of the Just War, is that in any given war (for the sake of simplicity, I take only those cases where there are not more than two parties concerned) there are only two possibilities: that the war is sinful on the part of both parties; or that the war is sinful on the part of one of the parties.
Review, 2532 words
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