Holy war vs. just war

Crusade is a Christian term. If we were to speak in more general terms we should use holy war. This was present as well in early Israel, in Islam, and in other religious cultures. For contemporary purposes we might expand it even further to recognize post-Enlightenment "ideological wars" as having the same moral structure.

The holy war differs from the "just war" (I shall henceforth use the latter term in its narrower, later, "properly political" sense) in five ways:

1. Its cause has a transcendent validation. What is at stake is not a finite political value needing to be weighed over against other political values, so that proportionality and the clash of rights and interests of various parties in the social mechanism need to be calculated carefully. The warriors are freed from such properly political calculations by the overarching value of the holy cause.

2. This transcendent quality is known by revelation: the measurement does not arise simply and empirically out of a sober measurement of a situation. It must be brought to us from beyond the picture we ourselves have of the predicament.

This information from beyond the system normally will need to be communicated by a special kind of person or institution that can bring such information: by a prophet or an oracle. In churches with a strong institutional frame, the validation will need to be pronounced by a pope, a bishop, or a council. In other religions or in modern ideologies this same function is discharged by an ideological oracle like an Ayatollah, a Chairman Mao, or a Central Committee.

3. The adversary has no rights, or at least no vested rights that demand calculation in firm, proportional ways. Sometimes, as in the Iberian invasion of South America, this logic was visible in the debates about whether the natives had souls. Usually it is associated with racist or ethnic deprecation or depreciation of the enemy: the only good enemy is a dead enemy. Restraint is no virtue. Excess may be a sign of devotion.

4. The criterion of last resort does not apply. Other ways of achieving the same goal-- accepting half a loaf as better than nothing, mediation, and compromise-- are dishonorable in the face of transcendent duty.

5. It need not be winnable. To fail in a holy cause is a moral victory. In the medieval period, for both Muslim and Christian, to die in a holy war was the surest and quickest path to heaven. Even in the modern analogs there is a kind of immortality assigned to martyrs, which, as Latin Americans can testify, is seen in the special status of Che Guevara or Sandino.

Once the concept of holy war has been defined with some clarity, it drops out of our study. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has proclaimed no crusade since the late Middle Ages. The questions raised by thinking that there can be such a war are quite different from the ones we shall be pursuing here. Yet historically speaking, it should be noted that when appeal is made to transcendent ideological causes not subject to political measurement, like the defense of "the free world" or the liberation of "the working class," it is in fact the holy-war concept that is still at work.