Christian Political Pragmatism and Ethical Universalism — Aurelius Augustine and Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

This chapter will be on the international political thought of probably the two most important and influential Christian philosophers: Aurelius Augustine (354-430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225[?]-1274). Discussing both as theorists of international politics is obviously not part of the historic canon constructed by the discipline of IR; nevertheless, both contribute importantly to the history of international political theory. The knowledge and interpretation of their writings enhance our understanding of traditions and legacies in international political thought and how they fed into perceptions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century inter-national politics. Both authors are part of a stream which is nowadays called ‘idealistic’ and their normative ethical tenets have, whether positively shared or not, solidified as commonsense knowledge (at least in Christian cultures, Protestant or Catholic), such as the dogmas of the Sermon on the Mount to international politics, ‘pacifist’ attitude towards international politics, and thoughts on ‘just war’. The latter perceptions, however, have to be put into question: a Christian pacifism cannot be coherently and convincingly derived either from Augustine or Aquinas and has been criticized, for example, by Reinhold Niebuhr as a-political (more on this later); and a Christian just war theory remains quite vague, at least as an original contribution to international political thought while, in a retrospective view, Cicero elaborated a much more coherent concept of ‘just wars’ long before the Christian Fathers (see Chapter I.1).