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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the view put forth in the immediate aftermath of 11 September by some conservative Protestant figures that God had “withdrawn his hand” from America due to the specific failings of named groups.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)

The East has seen no point in trying to make a system of what is essentially the antithesis of system.

The fundamental difference in outlook is the Eastern Churches believed war and killing remains sinful even when necessary for defense of the weak or innocent, whereas Western just war doctrine indicates that, certain prior conditions being met, neither war nor killing in war incur any stain of sin. At bottom, the differences can be traced to different ways of thinking about sin--the West as a violation of an objective code of moral law, and the East as a spiritual illness.

1. Does the Eastern theology allow sins that will not be punished? What are the effects of such sin?

2. Does the Eastern theology allow positive obligation to commit a sin?

3. Is it true that soldiers in the Byzantine Empire, who killed somebody in war, were automatically excommunicated for three years?

This what IMO "sinful necessity" means. (defending the weak and innocent from a Persian horde, would mean certainty of comitting a sin, so the Emperor should let the weak and innocent be killed, and let his empire be destroyed, if he wants to be holy?

In the Western "military ethics" circles people say so, and there's a belief that it has contributed to the fall of the Empire.

I get worried because I see how aggressive they are, even the so called moderate Muslims.

As Stuart pointed out

Now, if someone is going to say we sit back and do nothing, then I would say you're no better than they are. Stuart laid out some excellent points on what needs to happen. I highly believe we need to stop their immigration into Europe and America. But that won't happen because the Liberal politicians don't see Islam as a threat.

1. Extreme reduction in immigration
2. Greater efforts to assimilate immigrants and minorities already there
3. Insistence on compliance with European values and norms of behavior
4. An end to appeasement of Islamic radicals
5. A European spiritual revival, without which European fertility rates will not increase.

Europeans have done nothing to assimilate them--indeed, they don't know how, having no history of mass immigration like the United States.

Some of the holiest of Emperors were also great warriors.

That is correct. See John Haldon's Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine Empire, 565-1204.

While condemning murder, for example, Athanasius of Alexandria accepted not only that those who killed in war had acted lawfully, but that their actions brought honour and distinction upon them. [...] This is especially clear in later discussions of Basil’s thirteenth canon for, as canonists of the twelfth century noted, its rigorous application would mean that most active soldiers would be permanently excluded from communion. That this was clearly not the case is admitted both by the canonists in their commentaries, and is also evident in the presence in Byzantine armies of clergy, the holding of services before battle and to bless the insignia, and indeed the presence of religious symbols and images of great potency.

Throughout its history, the Orthodox Church always resisted calls by the secular authority, whether Byzantine or Muscovite, to declare certain wars to be "holy", and absolve in advance all who participated in them from any sins they may commit along the way.

Warfare waged against the enemies of the empire was warfare to defend or extend the religion favoured by the emperor and, from the time of Theodosius I, the official religion of the state as such. Enemies of the empire could be portrayed as enemies of Christianity, against whom warfare was entirely justified, indeed necessary if the True Faith were to fulfill the destiny inhering in divine providence. To a degree, therefore, warfare of the Christian Roman empire against its enemies and those who threatened it, and therefore God’s empire on earth, was holy war. That this was a paradox within Christian attitudes to warfare is clear, but pragmatic considerations made a solution essential.

In military contexts, this becomes especially apparent on the occasion of imperial triumphs, staged entries into the capital city involving the whole senior bureaucracy and court, the clergy of several churches, set acclamations orchestrated by imperial officials at key points along the processional route, frequent stops for prayer at churches along the route, the distribution of largesse, the display of prisoners and booty, and the close association of Christian spiritual with secular concerns.

Is there a list of emperors venerated as saints available somewhere?

The book you recommended argues that this canon wasn't observed, and the belief in sinfulness of killing in war wasn't universal in the East.

Clergy assisting the display of prisoners and booty, in a triumphant manner!