Critiquing the "Warrior Ethos"
St. Augustine Speaks to His Own Day, and Ours
On Friday, the US military carried out a fourth strike on a boat allegedly carrying drug smugglers off the coast of Venezuela and traveling toward the United States. Last week, I argued that these strikes lack a solid legal justification and violate the principles of just-war doctrine that guide Christian ethical reasoning about war. Meanwhile, a Trump administration memo obtained by the New York Times and the Associated Press last week claims that the military strikes are justified because drug cartel activities “constitute an armed attack against the United States.” The memo contends that the US is therefore in a state of armed conflict with the cartels and that cartel members can be considered “unlawful combatants.” As Geoffrey S. Corn, the Director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University and a former legal adviser to the US Army during the George W. Bush administration, tells the New York Times, however, criminal activity (even the sometimes violent activity of drug gangs) does not qualify as the sort of armed hostilities characteristic of an armed conflict. The designation of cartel members as “unlawful combatants” also raises troubling questions about the treatment of alleged members identified on US soil, a legal conundrum left unanswered by US courts during the War on Terror.
Last week, I linked the seeming insouciance regarding the laws of war demonstrated by these recent strikes with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth’s broader pattern of tolerating and excusing war crimes. Secretary Hegseth, in particular, has repeatedly called for the military to adopt a “warrior ethos” unshackled from the restraints of the rules of engagement imposed by the laws of war. In an unprecedented speech to senior military leaders at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia given just days before the most recent strike in the Caribbean, Hegseth returned to this theme. Although the speech mainly focused on fitness standards and eliminating “woke” policies from the military, he also stated:
We have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We’re training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend. Defense is something you do all the time. It’s inherently reactionary and can lead to overuse, overreach and mission creep. War is something you do sparingly on our own terms and with clear aims. We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.
We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.
As the centuries-old just-war ethic and practical experience both attest, however, the purpose of the rules of engagement prohibiting attacks on civilians and insisting that military strikes are proportionate are not intended to unnecessarily tie the hands of warfighters, but to ensure justice. The laws of war are also born from the knowledge that injustice in war sows the seeds of future conflict.
The fourth-century bishop and theologian St. Augustine taught that an unjust war is fought with “love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power [libido dominandi]” (City of God, 22.74). The just-war criteria further developed in later centuries were intended to restrain these unruly passions unleashed by war and to help ensure that war remains focused on just aims and a lasting peace.
St. Augustine’s concept of the lust for power, or libido dominandi, does more than just serve as a contrast to the just-war ethic, however. In the City of God, Augustine explains that the libido dominandi serves as a foundation for an unjust political order—in his own day exemplified by the Roman Empire—that he contrasts with the City of God, the community of those who place the love of God at the center of their lives. Augustine’s broader reflections on the libido dominandi in the City of God, I believe, shed further light on the contemporary fascination with the so-called “warrior ethos.”
Augustine’s primary purpose in the City of God is to refute those who argued that the political, social, and military woes of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century were caused by the decline of the ancient pagan religion and the rise of Christianity. Readers of the City of God tend to focus on the later, more theological, books where Augustine contrasts the City of God (civitas Dei) with the earthly city (civitas terrena), that is, the community of those who do not recognize God and who are ultimately motivated by love of self. In Augustine’s view, the earthly city is composed of the mass of humankind since the Fall.
In several of the earlier books, however, Augustine surveys Roman history, religion, and culture to counter his opponents. He argues that the seeds of Rome’s destruction lie in its own history and cannot be blamed on the Christians. It’s in this counter-narrative where I believe Augustine has something to say about today’s “warrior ethos.” Here I’m relying on the interpretation of the City of God offered in the doctoral dissertation of Brian Harding, now a professor of philosophy at Texas Woman’s University.
In Book III of the City of God, Augustine recounts how the founding of Rome and the reign of the seven kings of Rome was marked by the libido dominandi, a fact glossed over in Virgil and Livy’s semi-legendary histories of the city. Romulus, the first king of Rome, killed his own brother Remus soon after the founding of Rome; he later orchestrated the kidnapping and rape of the Sabine women and then war against the Sabine cities after they objected to those crimes. Tullus Hostilius, the third king of Rome, waged war against the nearby city of Alba based on an unjust pretext, made all the worse by the fact that Alba was in a sense the “mother” city of Rome (Romulus and Remus were said to have been born in Alba).
Harding explains that, according to Augustine, this crude lust for domination characteristic of the monarchical period was masked or sublimated by the development of romanitas—the cluster of civic virtues like piety, glory, and honor said to define Roman culture—during the time of the Roman Republic. Romanitas, however, was only the transmutation of the libido dominandi into a new form. In Harding’s interpretation, this transmutation involved three factors.
The first was the foundation of the Roman religious rites by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome (c. 753-672 BC). In Livy’s telling, Numa’s founding of Roman religion was intended to promote civic glory and virtue not only by instilling fear of the gods in the people, but also by promoting the myth that Rome’s founders had descended from the gods and that heroic Romans like Romulus (whom Livy claims was deified at his death) could become gods.
The second factor was the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Roman Republic at the end of the sixth century. In response to the rape of the Roman noblewoman Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the then king, Tarquinius Superbus (or Tarquin the Proud), Lucius Junius Brutus led a revolt against the pride and domination of the monarchs, overthrowing Tarquin the Proud and establishing the Republic. As Livy himself pointed out, however, Brutus had long had an ambition for rule, and the rape of Lucretia only served as a pretext for overthrowing Tarquin. Augustine adds that Brutus sought vengeance against the king before the latter had a chance to pursue justice against his son, while allowing the actual perpetrator to escape during the revolt (Augustine is here subtly suggesting that the revolt failed to meet the criteria of a just war he lays out elsewhere).
Augustine argues that Brutus’s appeal to civic virtue served as a rhetorical mask for his own libido dominandi. This lust for domination was confirmed, according to Augustine, by Brutus’s consolidation of power once the Republic was established; he exiled his co-consul Collatinus after a failed effort to bring the younger Tarquin to the throne, not because Collatinus had participated in the attempted coup, but simply because he was related to the Tarquins. For Augustine, this founding narrative of the Republic demonstrates that romanitas—glory, honor, and piety—and Rome’s supposed commitment “to spare the humble, beat down the proud” in the words of Virgil (Aeneid, VI.853) masked an underlying lust for domination.
Harding points out that Augustine’s famous saying on the nature of political rule— “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms?” (IV.5)—is not just a witty observation on the nature of politics, but a summary of the history of Rome recounted in the previous book!
The third factor is the transfer of the crude libido dominandi of the Roman kings toward the domination of external enemies. The civic virtues of the Republic restrained the desire of the Romans to dominate and exploit one another, instead focusing their collective efforts on the domination of other nations. The civic virtues were instilled out of fear of the enemy, and honor and glory were achieved above all through service to Rome in its conquests. Augustine therefore concludes that these civic virtues were the source of Rome’s worldly success, even though they masked underlying vices. The Roman commitment “to spare the humble, beat down the proud” was itself a hypocritical reflection of Rome’s own pride and libido dominandi.
Augustine’s theology of sin is quite familiar, but here, in this less well-known section of the City of God, he gives a sophisticated account of how sin was interwoven into the cultural values and practices of Rome. Augustine’s counter-narrative of Roman history sets up his solution to the problem motivating the City of God. The weakness of Rome in his own day and the loss of civic virtue are not due to the growth of Christianity, but rather to the moral rot lying beneath the surface of those virtues.
As Harding explains, the Romans themselves believed that the fear of enemies was a crucial factor in inculcating civic virtue. The Roman historian Sallust argued that with the defeat of Carthage in 146 BC at the end of the Punic Wars, Rome lost its last great rival in the Mediterranean region. The lack of an enemy, then, led to the decay of civic virtue. Augustine adds that this is why, after the fall of Carthage, Rome quickly descended into a series of civil wars in the first century BC, leading to the founding of the empire by Augustus. The lack of civic virtue also accounts for the avarice and decadence of the ruling class up to Augustine’s own day.
According to Augustine, external peace allowed the introduction of the theater into Roman culture, but the theater brought with it the portrayal of stories that illustrated the ignoble behavior of the Roman gods. These stories brought to the fore the underlying viciousness of Roman religion (the libido dominandi of the gods) and further undermined civic virtue.
Augustine therefore provides a sophisticated analysis of Roman history and culture that in the later books of the City of God he places in the context of the Christian account of salvation history. Roman society is simply one manifestation of the earthly city. His account of the City of God and its members, who follow Christ and make use of the goods of the earthly city without belonging to it, is therefore also meant at least in part as a guide to how Christians of his own day could live faithfully amidst the Roman society decaying around them. Despite its original context, however, Augustine’s work continues to speak to us.
I’ve only provided a brief summary of Harding’s more extensive and detailed work, which is worth reading in full. Similarly, I can only provide a brief sketch of how Augustine’s counter-narrative of Roman history can offer insights into our current moment.
Hegseth’s mission to restore a “warrior ethos” to the US military is certainly an attempt to restore what he perceives as civic or martial virtue to the armed forces. In Hegseth’s telling, the “woke garbage” that has been imported into the military is the source of the decline in virtue—in his recent speech, he declares that things like DEI policies that promote people based on their identity rather than real achievement, “dudes in dresses,” and compromised fitness standards have weakened the armed forces and will no longer be tolerated. The “warrior ethos,” therefore, in Hegseth’s view, represents a virtuous alternative to moral decay.
Augustine’s critique of Roman culture, however, reminds us to keep before our eyes that what Hegseth means by the “warrior ethos” (as I explained last week) is the slaughter of unarmed civilians, the murder of detained combatants who no longer pose a threat, and the desecration of corpses. Although rolling back “overbearing rules of engagement” to hand more decision-making authority to troops on the ground and to more efficiently defeat America’s enemies may sound sensible, these words serve as a rhetorical mask for eroding the moral norms that ostensibly distinguish the American military from its enemies and unleashing the libido dominandi.
Augustine argued that the Romans’ fear of their enemies helped instill civic virtue, and the eventual defeat of those enemies eventually led to the decay of that virtue. In the late 1990s, the American neoconservatives famously argued that the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, although a great success, had left the United States without an enemy, leading to a loss of both unity and sense of purpose. The September 11 attacks, then, provided the US with a new enemy and birthed a renewed sense of purpose as the War on Terror began. Today, the War on Terror all but over, the Trump administration seems desperate to conjure up enemies for America to overcome. The designation of drug cartels like Tren de Aragua as “terrorist organizations” and the claim that the US is in an “armed conflict” with those cartels is one example.
More dangerous, however, is the administration’s effort to identify and vanquish a supposed internal enemy. In a speech to the same senior military leaders addressed by Hegseth, President Trump said:
You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security.
The president here links military action against Democratic-controlled cities with the so-called “invasion” of the country by immigrants. In Augustinian terms, these repeated references to a “war from within” and “invasion” are a feeble attempt to mask a lust for domination over the administration’s political opponents and the US’s vulnerable immigrant population.
Finally, although Augustine believed that Roman religion had been a major factor contributing to the Romans’ civic virtue, he concluded that the religion’s internal contradictions—namely, the gods’ own lack of virtue—helped reveal the moral rot underlying Roman culture. Christianity, in contrast, was a source of real virtue, and those who followed it belonged to the “true Commonwealth,” the City of God. The Trump administration, however, openly identifies with Christianity. For example, earlier in September, Secretary Hegseth posted a video on social media of himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer juxtaposed with scenes of the US military in action. How might Augustine respond to this juxtaposition?
Augustine certainly thought that Christians could justly govern the empire and that Christians could serve as soldiers. I also think, however, he would easily identify the idolatry of conflating the Our Father’s call for “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done” with the exercise of US military might. After all, as Harding explains, Augustine thought that Rome’s presumption to “spare the humble, beat down the proud”—when in fact, as the Scriptures attest, “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” (Jas. 4:6)—was the root of its sin. So-called “Christian nationalism” is not just another mask for the libido dominandi, however, but one that distorts Christianity’s call to properly order our loves.
For Augustine, the Christian faith shed light on the truth behind romanitas, namely that lurking behind what was perceived as civic virtue was in fact the libido dominandi, the lust for domination. I would argue that today, US Christians are likewise called to recognize how “America First” often serves as a mask for the libido dominandi. This should lead us to recognize, for example, when the laws of war are being violated, but also, more broadly, to resist rhetoric meant to instill fear and to justify the domination of others. Christians are called to resist the libido dominandi, however imperfectly, and to follow instead the path of humility and love.
Coming Soon…
Last week, the Vatican announced that on October 4, Pope Leo XIV had signed his first major document, the Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te, which will be focused on love for the poor. The document will not be published until October 9, though. That’s perfectly timed, however, for me to cover the document next week in Window Light, so stay tuned!