We See Everything Dimly
Thinking About the War in Gaza with Alberico Gentili and Pope Francis
When I was working on my doctoral dissertation on theological perspectives on the origins of war, I became fascinated with the sixteenth-century Italian Protestant jurist Alberico Gentili (1552-1608), a noted theorist of the just-war tradition considered one of the founders of modern international law. Exiled from Italy and excommunicated from the Catholic Church, Gentili eventually wound up in England, where he became a professor of law at Oxford and later a practicing lawyer in London. In my dissertation, I had a few lines on Gentili’s contributions to just-war theory, but by the time my dissertation was turned into the book The Origins of War, the treatment of Gentili was unfortunately reduced to a single reference.
What interested me about Gentili was his claim that both sides in a war might be just. What he means is that, although from a purely objective, God-like perspective, only one side can be in the right, where justice lies may be unclear to us mortals because of the limitations of human knowledge and the frailty brought about by sin: “We are driven to this distinction [between objective and subjective justice] by the weakness of our human nature, because of which we see everything dimly, and are not cognizant of that purest and truest form of justice . . .” Both sides can convince themselves that theirs is the just cause, and it can sometimes be difficult to judge who is correct.
Gentili provides an example that is sure to be intriguing for theologians. The Israelites were justified in laying claim to the Promised Land by force because they were commanded to do so by God. The inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, unaware of God’s command, were likewise morally justified in taking up arms in self-defense, even if their cause was contrary to divine justice. In The Origins of War, I proposed a more recent example:
Imagine three men in Nicaragua at the time of the civil war in the 1980s. The first lives in the capital city of Managua, having moved there from the countryside in search of work. At first, he has little luck finding work, but eventually finds it with the help of a Sandinista-supported union. He begins to become involved with a local Sandinista Defense Committee, taking part in local governance, and as the civil war with the Contras escalates, he decides to join the Sandinista Popular Army. The second man is a member of the Miskito people of the Atlantic coast. The Sandinistas burned his village to the ground and sent its members to a re-education camp. He escapes and joins a Contra unit, seeking to defend his people against the Sandinistas. The third man lives in the city of Chinandega. In 1984 he is called to serve in the Sandinista Popular Army by the Patriotic Military Service draft, but refuses, claiming that he cannot in good conscience resort to arms, and he is put in prison. (p. 110)
Each of the three men has a plausible case that they are acting justly given their individual contexts, even if it’s impossible that all three have taken the just position regarding the “big picture” of the conflict. The mixture of justice and injustice on both sides makes it possible for the three individuals to take very different stances based on their personal circumstances.
Gentili argues that because the question of justice is doubtful, both sides must treat the others’ troops according to the laws of war. On the other hand, when one side in the conflict is manifestly unjust (a possibility he does not deny), those fighting on the side of justice have no obligation to treat enemy soldiers, whom he says are better referred to as “brigands,” according to the laws of war. In modern international humanitarian law, in contrast, enemy soldiers must always be treated in a way consistent with the laws of war, even if they are fighting unjustly or fight for an unjust cause.
To a degree, Gentili’s belief that both sides in a war can be just, at least subjectively speaking, prefigures later international jurists who abandoned the idea of a just cause entirely, arguing that the sovereign can without question wage war for raisons d’État. But only to a degree. As I already noted, Gentili believes that some causes for war are manifestly unjust, and his treatment of the just-war theory is quite similar to that of his Catholic contemporary Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) and the younger Dutch Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who drew significantly from Gentili’s work. What distinguishes Gentili is his sense that claims of justice are often ambiguous.
The distinctiveness of Gentili’s position can be illustrated by comparing it to that of the earlier Spanish Catholic thinker Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546). Vitoria raises the question of whether a cause for war is just because the prince believes it is just. Vitoria answers that is not the case because “the result would otherwise be that very many wars would be just on both sides, for although it is not a common occurrence for princes to wage war in bad faith, they nearly always think theirs is a just cause.”
Vitoria recognizes, however, that in some cases it is doubtful which belligerent has justice on their side. Unlike Gentili, however, Vitoria seems to assume that even doubtful cases can be settled sufficiently to determine who has the just claim. He proposes that doubtful cases can be adjudicated from the perspective of a “wise man’s judgment,” a notion akin to the “reasonable person” standard used in modern jurisprudence. Vitoria argues that if such judgments could not be made,
a war could be just on both sides and would never be settled. For if in a doubtful matter it were lawful for one side to assert his claim by force, the other might make armed defense, and after the one had obtained what he claimed, the other might afterwards claim it back, and so there would be war without end, to the ruin and tribulation of peoples.
One suspects that the more pessimistic Gentili would respond, “Yes, that’s the point.” What Vitoria here considers intolerable is in fact the human condition, corrupted as it is by sin.
I believe a middle ground between Vitoria’s trust that a wise man can determine where justice lies in even the most doubtful disputes and a cynical refusal to make moral judgments due to obscurity and ambiguity is possible and necessary. And indeed, as we have seen, Gentili himself believes moral reasoning is possible in the midst of war. The principle of “comparative justice” introduced in the United States Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace is a good contemporary illustration of this middle ground.
The bishops define this principle as assessing “which side is sufficiently ‘right’ in a dispute, and are the values at stake critical enough to override the presumption against war?” (92). Taking a middle ground between Vitoria and Gentili, the bishops explain that, “Given techniques of propaganda and the ease with which nations and individuals either assume or delude themselves into believing that God or right is clearly on their side, the test of comparative justice may be extremely difficult to apply,” although it is not impossible (94). Like Gentili, the bishops also insist that there are some cases where one side is manifestly unjust, such as cases of “blatant aggression” (94).
Interestingly, the bishops, like Gentili, link the notion of comparative justice to the conduct of war, although in a distinct way:
In a world of sovereign states recognizing neither a common moral authority nor a central political authority, comparative justice stresses that no state should act on the basis that it has “absolute justice” on its side. Every party to a conflict should acknowledge the limits of its “just cause” and the consequent requirement to use only limited means in pursuit of its objectives. Far from legitimizing a crusade mentality, comparative justice is designed to relativize absolute claims and to restrain the use of force even in a “justified” conflict. (93, emphasis in original)
In a class I am teaching this semester on Catholic social teaching, we just finished a close reading of Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti. In that document, Francis expresses a perspective on war that shares more than a passing resemblance to Gentili’s awareness of “the weakness of our human nature” and the US bishops’ warning of our tendency to “assume or delude ourselves into believing that God or right is clearly on [our] side.” Pope Francis writes:
War can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses, and even resorting to the manipulation of information. In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly “justified.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the possibility of legitimate defense by means of military force, which involves demonstrating that certain “rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy” have been met. Yet it is easy to fall into an overly broad interpretation of this potential right. In this way, some would also wrongly justify even “preventive” attacks or acts of war that can hardly avoid entailing “evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” (258)
As someone who’s insisted on the continued relevance of the just-war tradition, I at first bristled at this passage. But I think it is a valid rebuke of the ways we tend to overestimate the efficacy of violence in achieving our political goals and to rationalize why violence is necessary. Like Gentili, Francis does not seem to think it is particularly important whether these justifications or excuses for war are made in good faith or not.
Unlike Gentili, however, Francis believes that the ambiguity surrounding the justice of war is a good reason to seek to avoid it. He writes:
We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a “just war.” (258)
Francis argues that skepticism regarding war should be aroused when we consider the issue from the perspective of war’s victims:
Let us not remain mired in theoretical discussions, but touch the wounded flesh of the victims. Let us look once more at all those civilians whose killing was considered “collateral damage.” Let us ask the victims themselves. Let us think of the refugees and displaced, those who suffered the effects of atomic radiation or chemical attacks, the mothers who lost their children, and the boys and girls maimed or deprived of their childhood. Let us hear the true stories of these victims of violence, look at reality through their eyes, and listen with an open heart to the stories they tell. In this way, we will be able to grasp the abyss of evil at the heart of war. Nor will it trouble us to be deemed naive for choosing peace. (261)
One certainly senses this “abyss of evil” when considering the conflict in Gaza, not only in the sheer barbarity of the attacks on October 7 that set the conflict in motion, but also in the suffering of civilians, including thousands of children, as violence engulfs Gaza. I have turned to Gentili, the US bishops in The Challenge of Peace, and Pope Francis to help me make sense of this abyss. As I stated last month, Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 was an atrocity, and Israel has the right to use military force to defend itself, even to neutralize Hamas’s ability to carry out a similar attack in the future. And yet this conflict takes place in the context of Israel’s unjust occupation of the West Bank and covert bolstering of Hamas in the Gaza Strip to hinder efforts at establishing a unified Palestinian state. As I likewise noted, Israel’s response has been criminally disproportionate, including cutting off water and electricity to Gaza and mercilessly bombing civilian areas (one study calculates that in Gaza, Israel is tolerating civilian casualties at a rate several times higher than that considered justifiable by the U.S. in the earlier conflict against ISIS). In addition, a number of high-ranking Israeli officials have made comments suggesting an intention to inflict massive civilian casualties in retaliation for the October 7 attacks, or to perpetrate ethnic cleansing. With Gentili, we can recognize the paradox of finding just claims on both sides, even in the midst of massive injustices.
As the US bishops warned in The Challenge of Peace, both sides in the conflict have resorted to propaganda and deception to minimize or deny the legitimate claims of their opponents and to mask the injustices they have committed. Tragically, Americans (and others around the world) who are merely observers of the conflict, driven by the polarizing dynamics of social media in which we are compelled to take a side, have adopted the same patterns. One or the other side possesses “absolute justice,” and no competing claims can be tolerated; any accusation against the opposing side is accepted at face value and without any critical evaluation. One side decries Israeli attacks on hospitals and schools while ignoring that establishing military installations in or around those buildings is itself a war crime, while the other absolves the Israeli Defense Forces of any responsibility for civilian casualties by pointing to Hamas’s tactics.
In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis uses the parable of the Good Samaritan as a lens for interpreting our global situation. In one poignant passage, he writes:
The parable begins with the robbers. Jesus chose to start when the robbery has already taken place, lest we dwell on the crime itself or the thieves who committed it. Yet we know them well. We have seen, descending on our world, the dark shadows of neglect and violence in the service of petty interests of power, gain and division. The real question is this: will we abandon the injured man and run to take refuge from the violence, or will we pursue the thieves? Will the wounded man end up being the justification for our irreconcilable divisions, our cruel indifference, our intestine conflicts? (72)
In righteous anger, we become so consumed with “pursuing the thieves” that we become indifferent to the victims. In its violent struggle against Israel, Hamas uses the Palestinian people as human shields. Israel has risked the lives of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 with its indiscriminate attacks on Gaza, and it likewise puts its own people at continued risk by perpetuating the cycle of violence rather than carrying out a more limited and targeted military solution and working to help build a stable Palestinian state. As Andrew Bacevich has recently written at Commonweal, no military solution can bring lasting peace to Israel and Gaza, and I think Gentili and Pope Francis can help us see the moral and theological reasons behind this strategic reality.