Love and War in the Writings of St. Augustine.

摘要

Moving St. Augustine away from his realist and just war interpreters, it is the purpose of this dissertation to help rediscover an Augustine who ethically pushes the human actor less towards a normative code of explicit objectives or universal principles and more towards a transformative reconfiguration of the relationship between self and other within the temporal world. By moving the ethics of war from a question of "What should I do?" to a question of "How should I be?," Augustinian love helps to contextualize the proper scope of action by acknowledging both the irremediable impermanence of earthly reality and the devastating inaccuracy of viewing others as radically independent selves in both origin and desire. Though war operates in the temporal world, mindful of the essence of man as an eternal and created being, Augustine suggests that war cannot solve the perennial problem of security which plagues all those who cling to the world in a false sense of self-possession. Rather than simply viewing violence as a necessary evil to protect the innocent, the large-scale use of coercion must serve the redemptive possibilities of one's enemies. Essentially, war cannot find its rationality or justification in the limiting confines of a self-understanding that values earthly life and the end of personal suffering above fidelity to God and love of neighbor.