Modernity, the Environment, and the Christian Just War Tradition

"The conventional telling of the Christian just war tradition goes something like this: People everywhere have always struggled to relate morality to warfare, but the incipient phase of the just war tradition really begins with the Romans (excepting a few unorganized antecedents in the Hebrew Scripture and from Aristotle, who coined the term "just war"iv). Yet while thinkers like Cicero and Seneca pushed forward a particular way of integrating morality and warfare, attention to questions about when to fight and how to fight turned almost exclusively on prudential concerns revealed by natural law, which reveal obligations toward self-defense and maintaining honor. The tradition picked up its greatest moral traction when St. Ambrose (340-397 CE) and, especially, St. Augustine (454-430), sought to reconcile the moral concerns of the Christian faith to Greco-Roman thought during the first few generations after the Edict of Milan made Christianity a legal religion"--