Freedom to resist coercion

...Then it was in a different context, namely, the imperial expansion of the Spanish power into the newly discovered territories of "the Indies...

...What almost everyone hailed as progress, Vitoria viewed as problematic...

...The ominous portents appear most immediately in the form of maps of Kurdistan, not found in Rand-McNally, but which greet us daily on the front pages of the newspaper...

...As Augustine thought through the consequences of the end of the Roman empire, Thomas gave intellectual fuel to the fire of nationalism sweeping across the European landscape and reducing the Holy Roman Empire to a tiny fraction of its earlier reach...

...When will the menace jump out...

...From tribal chieftain to tribal chieftain in three generations...

...Skeptical as he had shown himself to be of the virtues of Rome, its destruction by the Gothic hordes made Augustine intensly aware of the fragility of life...

...It's happened...

...What will the new order mean for the Kurds...

...But it's only Nikita playing a little joke on her lover...

...But this time our nervousness isn't completely dispelled...

...Just war (international or domestic) is nothing other than the force of freedom's resistance to coercion...

...Among other continuities in their work, we should note their common insistence that the novelty of the order they experienced was precisely that it was an international--rather than a world-----order...

...He awakened anew to the call of patriotism, the moral imperative of shared vigilance against the rising tide of disorder...

...n another such crisis, perhaps the most sweeping revolution of European politics since the fall of the Roman Empire in Augustine's time, it was not a bishop, but a friar, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), laboring under the suspicion of the local bishop, who turned to Augustine's writing to analyze the troubles of his day...

...He here chartered the course of social dualism, the systematic competition between church and state for leadership in society, which continues to differentiate Western society from other cultures...

...It was these canonists who had added to Augustine's spirited theological defense of the right of defense the common-sense notion that even defense must be limited...

...The shock that drove Augustine at the age of fifty-six to undertake his most difficult intellectual and literary challenge, writing the City of God, was the sack of Rome by the Vandals in 410...

...On balance, the theory failed the test of providing wise judgment...

...Thomas, on theological grounds, encouraged the king to defy the authority of the (German) emperor...

...He based his judgment on the common-sense perception that these nations (France and German) were by reasons of language, geography, and culture, different from one another...

...His aim in this polemic section was to lay the blame for Rome's destruction by the Visigoths squarely on the Romans themselves, rather than on the "impiety" of the Christians...

...In the second book of the City of God, Augustine contrasts the decadent state of Rome at the time of its collapse (A.D...

...This homely truth is, as Jefferson wrote of his own declaration of revolution, "the common sense of the matter...

...ot until 1492 did a variant on the question of Christian empire arise again...

...When Marco is caressed by Nikita, we may feel as if we were watching a man being embraced by an affectionate python...

...Thus he balanced the right of revolution against the newly fashioned fight of sovereignty...

...Shortly after his death (430), the walls of Hippo came tumbling down...

...FRANCIS X. WINTERS he invitation to assess the future prospects for the just-war theory is at the same time a summons to review its past: to read at least a selection of the classic texts in their historical contexts: Augustine, Aquinas, and Vitoria establish a standard by which to measure the utility of just-war thinking in the future...

...But he took this theological risk to encourage the church to demand equality with the state in the direction of society...

...Paris, where he taught, was then, in the person of the king (St...

...Thomas, who appears to have had little intellectual curiosity about war itself, perfunctorily recites (Summa theologiae, Q. 40) the conventional wisdom of the just-war theory of his day, which had advanced well beyond the elementary formula of Augustine for the defense of the city walls...

...Ten years later, after he had been promoted to the chair of theology at Salamanca, Vitoria began to lecture on the new 370: Commonweal moral questions of the fight of Spaniards to fight wars of colonial expansion...

...His revolutionary political theology was thus the ingenious response to unprecedented questions, the emergence of a postimperial order within Christendom...

...In this context, conscience, finally, is a sentinel who stands guard to warn against the approach of coercion...

...After awakening his hearers to the church's equality with the state, he now exhorts them to fulfill their duties to their common civil order...

...His prophetic contribution to the tradition stemmed rather from his preoccupation with the underlying political movement of his age, namely, the deliberate dismantling of the Holy Roman Empire from below...

...Some have therefore concluded that just-war theory is at fault...

...Besides defying King (and Holy Roman Emperor) Charles, Vitoria also challenged the claim that the pope had authorized the Spanish conquest, pointing out that, in doing this, the pope was exceeding his spiritual authority...

...who brought Israel in one generation to the forefront of regional politics, financed his achievement with Pharaonic cruelty, including the effort to eradicate the tribal identities of his people...

...Indeed, the first outcrop of the era appears threatening to any semblance of order: the Balkans are once again a powder keg...

...A drug-polluted near-zombie who can only mutter "gotta have it" (a fix), she allows herself to be dragged by her equally abysmal cohorts into their burglary of a pharmacy...

...The fault appears to me, however, to lie with many of the theorists on both sides who seemed unable to see the war for the weapons, the cause for the casualties...

...His views were unvarnished: There is no fight to conquer by force the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs...

...FRANCIS X. WINTERS is associate professor of moral theology and of international affairs, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University...

...The image was a paradoxical one, which Augustine introduced--apparently with some diffidence, even embarrassment...

...My own counsel at present would be for American Catholics (and kindred souls) to reread their Vitoria, who sought to warn his fellow Spaniards, as they embarked for America, to guard against the temptation to convert by coercion...

...This bit of imaginative banditry seemed to surprise even Augustine himself...

...He served in 1982-83 as a consultant to the bishops' committee drafting the pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace...

...Augustine's hesitancy was appropriate...

...Which of these warnings in the past might now serve to alert us to the peril of the new world order...

...Armed resistance by the Indians, moreover, does qualify as a just war...

...He was likewise apparently part of the Dominican network of missionary correspondents, which kept the friars better informed about the conditions of the Indians in the new world than the king was himself...

...The only auspicious chapter in this story is the d6nouement, the revolt inspired by the prophet Ahijah, who fanned the tribal fires of resentment and snatched ten of the tribes from rule by Solomon's son, Reheboam, leaving only Judah as his inheritance...

...To speak then of war as the way of wisdom is to state somewhat paradoxically the inner core of both the natural law and biblical traditions of ethics: that a doctrine of rights is the articulation of outrage against aggression (even our own...

...But what has the city of God got to do with war, or war with the city of God...

...This slowly developed legal and theological tradition had worked out the moral logic of war, namely, the insistence that the right to wage war, like all other rights, is bounded by the existence of other competing rights...

...The state, he had contended, was "banditry writ large...

...It has thus been a fair test of just-war theory...

...And, attracted as she is to her chief spymaster, "Bob," she has discovered or rediscovered sexual love...

...Thomas balanced his defense of the king's fight to independence from the emperor with an equally spirited defense of the king's subjects' fight to rebel if the king acted tyrannically...

...Aquinas included in his uninspired repetition of the tradition the results of later centuries of reflection by canon lawyers on the methods of war...

...It is the rider from Boston to Lexington, awakening the city to its imminent peril...

...They raised anew the venerable question of the just war in the new setting of the age of discovery...

...This time, the president will be unable to play the role ofarbitermundi...

...Augustine's tentative expression of this claim employed his new image: "In fact, true justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ, if at least any choose to call this [the church] a republic...

...Jacques) to teach at the University of Valladolid, which was the seat of the Council of the Indies, the newly founded Colonial Office...

...Certain classes of people were to be spared direct attack in the event of war...

...The invading forces burned the cathedral in which he had taught daily for thirty-nine years, leveled the lovely town (second largest of Roman Africa), and burned most of the libraries...

...The law of nature, therefore, clearly required separate legal systems and independent sovereigns...

...Patriotism, he taught, was preeminently a Christian virtue...

...is called), spotting a potentially ace assassin in the girl, spirits her out of prison and starts training her in various lethal skills...

...empire, Vitoria argued, was not among these causes...

...Throughout the City of God, Augustine had been belaboring the heritage of the Roman state by comparing it to the behavior of criminals...

...Whether it was because he was Basque, and therefore sensitive to the injustice of Spanish conquest, or because he was a theologian familiar with the Thomistic principle of the right to sovereignty, or merely because he was thoughtful, Vitoria proved impervious to the carrots of ambition (the archbishopric of Toledo) and the sticks of intimidation (the imperial inquisition) proffered to.persuade him to "get on the team...

...he contribution of Augustine (354-430) to this tradition is deceptively modest...

...Further on in the text, Augustine reminds his fellow believers that they live inextricably intermingled with nonbelievers, whose historical destiny they share...

...The novelty the phrase evokes is undeniable, even though the old order that it dismisses was fleeting indeed by historical standards, a mere forty-five years...

...For the historical Solomon provides in the biblical tradition the same paradigm of tyranny more familiar to many from the tomes of political history and philosophy...

...The first instinct, perhaps, is to resort to the clich6: "it would take the wisdom of Solomon" to solve this fiddle...

...To undertake this assessment at the present moment, in the still turbulent wake of the inaugural war of the "new world order," is especially apposite because each of these earlier teachers on the justice of war himself wrestled with the moral meaning of "the new world order" in which he lived...

...He calls her name and receives no answer...

...Solomon, trying to dazzle his people into forgetting their ancient tribal identities (by the splendor of his new temple) reaped a whirlwind of rebellion...

...After four years of training, Nildta's head is clear, her body fit, her exterior chic, her senses alive...

...Isn't there ever--there...

...For Solomon, one of the towering political leaders of his day (961-922 B.c...

...Indeed, these two must be brothers if the city of God was to be spared for its earthly pilgrimage...

...Only a moment's browsing in the Book of Kings, however, confirms one's suspicions: Solomon's reign was a precursor of our problem rather than a promise of its solution...

...6 he new world order" is a phrase with an unsavory past, adopted hastily by President George Bush to celebrate the end of the cold war--a phrase that has now come back to haunt him...

...But, precisely in order to continue living, she must be willing to kill again for the masters who have resuscitated her life...

...One of the officers was killed by Nikita, and her unquenchably violent behavior under interrogation and during her trial is the very thing that gets her off the judicial hook...

...In the new moment, the old international principle of sovereignty may be the warning America needs to recall from the just-war tradition...

...With Thomas's theological brief on the side of national sovereignty, the definition of just cause in war was revised: From then on, any king had the fight to wage war to defend the security of his national borders from encroachment by the empire...

...Having, with his image of the church, defied the absolutism of the political order, he now effectively preempted the possibility of Christian absolutism...

...If the crisis of his century (and of the early years of the fourteenth century as well) had been merely a routine resort to force among warring princes, Aquinas's articulation of the newly refined just-war tradition would be largely irrelevant to modern thought and thus to our present crisis...

...Augustine's articulation of the doctrine of the just war is nothing more, nor less, than that...

...The new-order maps picture Kurdistan, which exists only in memory and hope, superimposed on five rival nations, Iraq, Turkey, the Soviet Union, Syria, and Iran...

...It can't be because the lovely Nikita herself is the most industrious killer in the movie...

...These rival communities are sheltered by the same city walls from the threat of annihilation or coercion...

...From that moment, the theological and canonical question of the status of sovereign kingdoms was settled for the European theater...

...A morally insensate murderess has become a lucid, life-cherishing assassin...

...With this theological judgment, a tradition of sovereignty was articulated which persuaded the pope to revise the code of canon law in 1312, terminating the authority of the emperor over neighboring kings...

...But the implied expectation of the phrase, that the newly inaugurated order will be worldwide and orderly, is illusory...

...It was surely, however, a triumph of persuasion that he alerted the church to its temporal responsibilities for manning the city walls against the invader...

...She playfully jumps Marco and covers him with hugs and kisses...

...410) with the pristine virtue of Rome's founders...

...The commentaries on the war seemed as ambiguous and unconvincing as the judgments of priests in ancient Rome assigned to scan the entrails of sacrificial animals to predict the chances for military victory...

...Self-defense is a moral fight and duty, even for Christians...

...What befalls the city of man shapes the destiny of the city of God...

...La Femme Nikita is the perfect title because it indicates the film's theme...

...In Africa, shock waves struck even the secluded cathedral of Hippo, where Augustine presided as bishop...

...He concluded that faith could not dispense with force...

...According to convention, this is the moment when we relax after giving the usual embarrassed laugh that acknowledges that, yes, the same damn cheap trick has worked again and we are nothing but Pavlovian pups...

...It was perhaps no intellectual triumph that Augustine redis1 June 1991:369 covered the virtue of patriotism...

...For the present moment, unlike 1919 and 1945, is not the American moment...

...Today, the same imperative of self-denial might counsel an uncommon American modesty about its role in the world...

...As he walks from one room to the next, the obligatory faint noises in the background work on our nerves along with our knowledge that half the characters in this film are killers and one of them is bound to leap out and eat this poor kid...

...Each student of this tradition will have her or his preferred author 1June 1991:371 and marked passages...

...With this balanced structure of competing political rights, Thomas refined the tradition about the legitimate causes of war...

...The Spanish Empire in America was only thirty years old when a Basque, Dominican theologian, Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546) arrived from Paris (where he had lived in Thomas Aquinas's former convent on the Rue St...

...With something as insubstantial as an image, Augustine laid the foundation of the rivalry between church and state that inspired much of the drama of medieval history, such as the defiance of King John by the bishops and barons gathered at Runnymede (1215...

...All the scholastic refinements of this cry of protest are nothing but the syntax of resistance...

...Perhaps the permanent crisis into which the world seems to be passing will yet call forth great theological judges, as preceding political crises did in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and Vitoria...

...Solomon's contribution to our present impasse, then, is not what the conventional image might suggest, namely, a pithy formula that will unlock the riddle of the post-' 'Operation Desert Storm" order...

...He did so by patient analysis and comparison of all the Scriptures (old and new) concerning war and warriors...

...Sophisticated representations compound this surrealism by adding an overlay indicating the erstwhile boundaries of the Ottoman Empire...

...What was wanting in our recent political debate was sound political judgment...

...Here was a political problem (the moral status of a kingdom vis-h-vis the empire) novel enough to engage Thomas's mind...

...Augustine here proposes that Christians begin now to think of themselves in the same terms as the pagan society that had been their persecutor: the "commonwealth," or "city...

...His exhortations unfortunately were ineffectual...

...empire) had been one of cyclical persecution: the church's memory was one of martyrdom at the hands of Roman rulers...

...Femme, with its manifold connotations of elegance, grace, seductiveness, and/or wifely dignity, seems to have no application whatever to the Nikita we meet at the beginning of the movie...

...Accompanying the explorers and conquistadores were Dominican missionaries who set about baptizing the Indians and mastering their many languages for the sake of instruction...

...They also established among themselves, and their convents in Spain, "committees of correspondence" about the novelties of life in the new world and their perplexities about the rights of Indians against the Spanish colonial rulers and soldiers...

...Aquinas would easily have recognized his theological heir...

...Ominous...

...Augustine's ethic of the (defense of) the city walls was now balanced by the inviolability of the hearth, that is, by the societal priority to go on living even in the midst of a justifiable resort to force...

...When Pope Clement V in 1312 sided with the claims of sovereign autonomy from the emperor, the pope was adopting the theological defense of sovereignty sketched by Aquinas...

...Police arrive and the ensuing violence leaves several cops and all the criminals except Nikita dead...

...She is a killer who has learned to love life...

...This story thus confirms for Christians (as well as Jews and Muslims) that the natural law rights of revolution and secession do not represent some alien, Aristotelian and therefore pagan, wisdom within Christian theology, but rather echo the commonsense corollaries of an historical pattern...

...Wars can be justified only after establishing a just cause for the resort to force...

...repression begets resistance...

...We can learn, however, from the folly of Solomon...

...Taken by "Bob" to an elegant restaurant, she basks in its luxuriousness and serenely contemplates the gift-wrapped birthday present that "Bob" has placed on the table...

...The right to sovereignty is the common principle that animated these theological systems...

...But since an assassin must present a civilized front in order to escape detection and must use intelligence and discipline to carry out missions, Nikita's new masters also detoxify her, teach her computer science, and, through the Pygmalion offices of Jeanne Moreau, give her an education in what can still only be termed "the feminine graces...

...At last, she is an elegant woman and not a 372: Commonweal...

...In this apologia for Christianity, Augustine suggests that the only community which can be called just is the church itself...

...Vitoria here displayed the ethical instinct which characterizes seminal contributions to j ust-war thought: the rare gift to grasp the novelty of a political moment and to weigh the merits of conventional wisdom at that juncture...

...The orchestration of Operation Desert Shield/Storm has been a test of American society, politically, militarily, and morally...

...One school of political ethics, that called the just-war tradition, has in its (sadly infrequent) best moments, warned the people in due time of dire perils...

...It was merely a matter of an image, an image apt enough to support an entire cultural structure...

...That is, each insisted that the only war that is just is the war that defends the borders between nations, not the imperial campaign that eclipses ancient realms...

...It is being wielded daily like a truncheon, at dawn by op-ed writers and at dusk by MacNeit-Lehrer debaters, to second-guess the president...

...JUST-WAR TEACI-IING & THE GULF WAR: AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS FREEDOM TO RESIST COERCION AUGUSTINE, AQUINAS, VITORIA...

...Louis), asserting its independence from the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire...

...the Baltics no less...

...The French secret service (or whatever the Gallic equivalent of the C.I.A...

...She is, in fact, the major source of the film's terror as well as the chief object of its pity...

...Tyranny's fathering of revolt is all we need to remember of the genealogy of morals...

...He was thus at the center of the "new world order" of colonialism...

...For the experience of Christians living in the Roman republic (and its sequel, the REV...

...SCREEN WORKING GIRL 'LA FEMME NIKITA' n old suspense-horror movie trick is used once again midway throughout the French thriller, La Femme Nikita, and once again it works, but this time with a significant difference...

...How will the international community adjudicate these competing historical and moral claims...

...In this context of vilification of the Roman political system, Augustine paradoxically claimed the same name, that of the commonwealth or republic, for the church...

...Many of the same essays merited the criticism that Thomas More directed to the scholastic theology of his day: "Like milking a he-goat into a sieve...

...Facing this reality, the haunting eyes of Kurdish children search for their place on the map...

...Aquinas, like Augustine, did his thinking in the midst of revolutionary political developments...

...A young man, Marco, the boyfriend of the eponymous heroine, enters his girl's seemingly empty apartment...