A Well-Formed Conscience

The concept of Just War has been done to death. I was going to talk about it a bit, but we all pretty much get it. War is never the ideal, but when pushed to certain circumstances, a war can be considered just. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas pretty well have the subject covered. If you want to read about it, by all means, go nuts.

So instead, I'm going to sort of branch out from it. First off, I want to briefly hit on the issue that many people pick up, namely that war is never ever ever okay ever for any reason ever. Basically, I tend to agree, except for the tiny issue that humanity is profoundly messed up at a very fundamental level. Everything we do turns to dust and ruin. It's messy being people. Imagine you're a parent, and you come home one day after work to find your entire kitchen has been smeared with brown paint and there sitting in the middle of it all is your naked, smiling toddler, proud at his contribution to household beautification.

God, for all intents and purposes, deals with that every moment of every day with every single one of His billions of children. Thank goodness He's more understanding than we are.

The reality is that war and conflict exist, and nearly always have. This does not make violence the human ideal, but it does make it the human condition. They are a reality that we need to deal with directly, and with the understanding that we can't just simply wave them off with claims of Christian pacifism.

But all that aside, what I really want to talk about is a slightly more complicated issue. Just War very explicitly touches on if a conflict is Just, and that would naturally extend to the soldiers fighting on the just side. But what about an unjust conflict? What about the soldiers fighting for that side? Are they sinning by participating? How about soldiers compelled into service in one way or another?

You know, culpability is a funny thing. It can vary from sin to sin, and person to person. There is no "one-size-fits-all" answer to explain it. So I'm going to focus in on the criteria that we use to determine a mortal sin: The sin must be a grave matter, you must have knowledge that what you're doing in sinful, and you must be doing it with full consent of the will.

Patriotism is a great thing. Being willing to step up when your country calls you to duty, to fight for and defend your principles, those things can be noble. But patriotism alone isn't a theological mandate, or some sort of excuse for invincible ignorance. Now, if your country steps into a conflict with the intent to resolve it for the sake of peace and ending human suffering, or if you, as a soldier, are led to believe as such, an argument could be made that your duty as a soldier has not conflicted with your faith.

And excellent example of the other side of this though would be the Nazis. German soldiers were very much held accountable for their sins, and their attempts to hide behind the flag simply didn't fly. They knew the atrocities being committed, they participated with consent of the will. Nobody held a gun to their head.

Except maybe they did. Many killings have occurred in history through force. This is a tricky area, but I will say one thing about it. There's always a choice. So ask yourself, is the choice you're making a selfless one, or a selfish one?

Even in a conflict that could be deemed just, unjust things can, and do, happen. Your team goes into a town to drive out the dictator subjugating it's people, a good and noble purpose. But are you doing the right things during that fight, limiting the combat to enemy soldiers, or are you abusing innocents? What if those innocents pull weapons on you themselves? Do you shoot first and ask later, or try to disarm them? It's a muddy area for many people.

This highlights another point, which is the importance of a well-formed conscience. Atheists and relativists will talk about how religion has somehow "hijacked" morality, but this is an absurd notion. Morality is from God, that's very true, but it is, in many way, written on our hearts. You generally don't need to be a Christian to know murder is wrong. But what religion tends to do is bring forth the concepts of absolute truths. There is a real "right", and a real "wrong". But how do we know what these absolutes are? Well, additionally, religion introduces the concept of a well-formed conscience. Our moralities, like most other things, demand to be learned, developed, and refined, but I'd argue that most people don't realize they need to or simply don't want to do this.

This is where morality moves out of the realm of concepts and into practice. In war, you often cannot take the time to study and think, but instead must rely on intrinsic reaction, and the Christian action must come to the forefront. In many ways, this is the goal of a well-formed conscience, and vital to the application of Just War doctrine specifically, as well as our actions in general.