Just War

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of a just war. There were theories about a justified or noble war before the birth of Christ, but it was his reported teachings and a powerful influence, particularly on the Emperor Constantine, which set the standard which had to be kept or bluntly modified. “I say unto you, love your own image,” Matthew writes, “bless them that curse you, be good to them that hate you and persecute you”. In the fifth century, the mighty St Augustus prised the Christian church away from Christ’s reported teachings and the idea of a Just War took root to be formalised and given power by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and by other Christian commentators even up to this day. But after a century, our century, of almost unimaginably violent conflict, does the term a Just War have any meaning at all? The historian AJP Taylor wrote that “the medieval pursuit of the just war is a pursuit as elusive as the Holy Grail. For it is almost universally true that in war each side thinks itself in the right, and there is no arbiter except victory to decide between them”. So is the Christian idea of the Just War simply a way of justifying aggression or is it a moral position to take?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Professor John Keane 6 episodes
  University of Westminster
• Dr Niall Ferguson 3 episodes
  Jesus College, Oxford

Related episodes

• The Art of War
  
  12 Jun, 2003 350 Public administration and military science
• New Wars
  
  13 Apr, 2000 350 Public administration and military science
• Toleration
  
  20 May, 2004 270 History of Christianity
• St Thomas Aquinas
  
  17 Sep, 2009 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• War in the 20th Century
  
  15 Oct, 1998 320 Political science
• Clausewitz and On War
  
  17 May, 2012 350 Public administration and military science
• The Thirty Years War
  
  6 Dec, 2018 940 History of Europe
• Marsilius of Padua
  
  30 May, 2024 320 Political science
• Catharism
  
  17 Jan, 2002 270 History of Christianity
• Chivalry
  
  13 Feb, 2014 940 History of Europe

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p00545jx

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545jx

Auto-category: 172 (Ethics and moral philosophy)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, I'm joined today by historian Niall Ferguson and political scientist John Keane to examine the question of the just war.