To comprehend the impact of the Protestant Reformation upon just war doctrine, we need to first understand exactly what ‘just war doctrine’ refers to. This doctrine is not one singular manifesto, but several that have been splitting, amalgamating, and evolving for many centuries. For the purposes of this essay, however, an understanding of just war doctrine(s) just prior to the Protestant Reformation, what theorists today refer to as ‘classic’ just war doctrine, is essential.
Since the era of the World Wars, the conception of ‘just war’ has tended to be discussed by historians stripped of its ideological meaning. In the context of the German Reformation, “ideology” refers to religion. However, this was not always the case. Social scientists, politicians, and historians refer to a “classic” just war doctrine found in the work of St. Augustine and more fully developed by later medieval thinkers. The classic form as it is known today, did not exist prior to the end of the Middle Ages. This “classic” just war doctrine was understood by sixteenth century contemporaries to have two main components:
- jus ad bellum, which is the statement on the right to make war, and
- jus in bello, the statement on what conduct is allowed in war.
These two components were originally two different doctrines. Jus ad bellum stems from religious roots (theological and canonical), and focuses on right to go to war. Jus in bello is from secular ideas of proper behavior during war. These two doctrines fused at approximately the year 1500 to create what is now considered the “classic” just war doctrine. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, discussion of this classic just war doctrine disappeared, making way for more particularistic ideas.
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Prior to the confessional division caused by the Protestant Reformation, Christendom had been characterized by the limiting factors of Europe as a geographical border, and Christianity as a culture and lifestyle. Following the loss of a normative religion directly led to the loss of a normative ideological basis for classic just war doctrine. Consequently, jus ad bellum diverged into two different ideas; jus in bello after the Reformation cannot be categorized into neat slots of any particular number, but is ascribed different factors and rules and addressed in different degrees by different theologians and politicians.
Following the Reformation, jus ad bellum gradually split into these views: the first is an idea of ‘holy war’ in which war for religion is the holiest, purest, most justifiable cause. The second view altogether rules out war for religion and endorses instead, political reasons for war which can be identified within “natural law”. “Natural law” refers to secular, civil, or temporal law that is “natural” to presumably all human beings regardless of differences. Confessional faith, after the Reformation, was no longer ‘natural’ within Christendom, thereby religion was no longer considered a just cause for war.
In sum, classic just war doctrine manifested as an “expression of an ideology in which all Christendom partook …” That ideology of Christendom being the religious values that were part of a singular all-inclusive system of belief and behavior, which disintegrated in the early modern period because the necessary medieval unity of religion and culture fell apart as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Holy war doctrine was born from separation of religion and culture, and religious confessions became basis for partisan ideologies.
By the seventeenth century, it was not conventionally accepted for rulers to justify going to war for religion. James Turner Johnson, scholar of religious traditions, and Pärtel Piirimäe, early modern Baltic historian, both point to this fact in their just war scholarship. Theologians and secular theorists both of the naturalist school condemned holy war (that is, war for religious cause) because holy war did not conform to natural reason; natural reason is something all people should have, and the idea of natural religion among all people does not exist. The naturalist school of thought was directly influenced by the confessional disagreements in Europe, and progressed toward a non-ideological (non-religiously based) just war doctrine, and after the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, toward today’s modern just war theory.
The Thirty Years War seems to have been highly influential in shaping the direction from classic to modern just war doctrine. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello changed drastically in response to the wars of Reformation, and by the Thirty Years War, jus in bello was extremely in want of a normative definition.
In the late medieval period, classic just war theory’s strength lay in its relevance for personal and political morality—in other words, religious and temporal decisions. This just war theory was composed of two fundamental points. The first evinced that fault should be answered with vindicative justice, or in other words, self defense; the second paired mercy side by side in practice and importance with vindication—vindication should have its limits in what is “just” conduct because “justice, being informed by charity, expresses itself through mercy and not only through vindication.”
Without the internal constraints of the second concept of justice tempered with charity, vindicative justice becomes basis for obligatory war, which is what occurred after the Reformation. It was in reaction to holy war tendencies (going to war with purely religious justification on the reasoning that war for religion is the purest motive, this is very similar to crusader mentality of the earlier centuries), modern just war doctrine started to develop in the sixteenth century.
The branching of classic just war theory’s jus ad bellum into holy war doctrine and non-ideological modern just war doctrine led to the sundering of vindication and mercy as components of. Jus in bello in the classic doctrine, constructed from vestiges of the chivalric code and customary law accordingly fell by the wayside in developmental theory for a number of commentators. The victims of the Thirty Years War were unfortunately caught in the rut of jus in bello’s developmental stage. It is with this line of reasoning, that conceptions of, practice, and theory of just war are to be applied to the Thirty Years War.
