Yesterday I presented – more or less – the same paper that I published a few months ago in the Helsinki Yearbook of Intellectual History (“Political Violence: Historical, Philosophical and Theological Perspectives“). It’s about the strange transformation of the complex philosophical reflections on war in Augustine to an ever simplified list of criteria in medieval and modern just war thinking, up to the point when Pope Francies tried to reduce the number of criteria to zero (at least until the realities of the war in Ukraine forced him to change his mind).
I didn’t expect it to be a popular speech, but it was truly astonishing how – although the conference was supposed to be about just war and just peace – most participants carefully avoided any hard questions of just war to repeat vague sentimentalities about the beauties of peace and justice.