Moral injury and original sin: The applicability of Augustinian moral psychology in light of combat trauma

Introduction

The concept of moral injury, as it has developed in psychology, trauma studies, and more recently, theology, has greatly helped to differentiate between the physiological aspects of post-traumatic stress and the axiological components of wartime violence in the experience of combatants. As a relatively new concept, its precise definition, boundaries, and proper usage are a matter of ongoing debate and exploration. ¹ The first to use the term, Jonathan Shay, argued that moral injury consisted of three essential elements, “(a) the betrayal of what’s right, (b) by a person in legitimate authority or one’s self, (c) in a high-stakes situation.” ² Shay’s conception revolves closely around the violation of an established or understood ethic that constitutes an implicit understanding of “what’s right” among a particular unit, group, or military force at large. A group of researchers led by Brett Litz later expanded upon Shay’s conception of moral injury to encompass a broader spectrum of wartime experiences, arguing that moral injury entailed “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” ³ This definition helpfully includes regrettable inaction such as a failure to stop or limit violence against civilians or even comrades alongside active commission as morally injurious.

Each of these conceptions revolves around the idea that particular actions or inactions combatants take in the combat zone constitute a transgression, betrayal, or violation of an established and understood moral value. Yet recent veteran narratives suggest that this framework is inadequate to account for the more profound ways in which those very conceptions of moral value are twisted and distorted in the axiological universe of military endeavor. Michael Yandell describes that what he felt as he served in Iraq was the “erosion” of his very “perception of good and evil.” ⁴ He describes that what happens in conflict is not the violation of moral standards, but a “flattening” of any sense of moral order—the creation of a moral world in which all that mattered was the pursuit of the enemy. ⁵ Similarly, fellow Iraq veteran Tyler Boudreau describes a more diffuse sense that participation (even indirect participation) in violence against others, notably killing, may create a guilt that “no justification, legal, political or otherwise, can heal.” ⁶ He describes the roots of moral injury in the exhibition of military power itself, suggesting that the moral fabric of the culture at large bears examination as the presence of guilt and the suffering of veterans should implicate groups beyond the battlefield—“the government and maybe even the American people” in the violence done by military members. ⁷ While some recent scholarship attends to the interrelation of civilian and military spheres of responsibility in conflict, these narratives call for a still greater attention to the formation and deformation of the moral character of combatants and a more significant accounting of relationality in human agency when attempting to articulate what it means to be “morally injured.” ⁸

With its rich conceptual history revolving around notions of guilt, sin, suffering, redemption, salvation, and our poisoned efforts to pursue God and that which is good, Christian theology holds a deep explanatory power in this regard. Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini have pioneered the theological exploration of moral injury, describing the category broadly as “souls in anguish.” They importantly center the discussion around the soul as the locus of individuality, self, and life, and focus on the axiological problems of moral injury using a theological vocabulary. ⁹ Building on their efforts, in this article I will highlight Augustine of Hippo’s conceptions of original sin and human willing in order to propose a conception of moral injury that is axiologically nuanced and attends to the forces that impact moral values. His complex understanding of moral psychology can deeply inform our understanding or moral injury in a way that provides a moral grounding for traumatized veterans as it resonates with the observations and conclusions of several psychologists studying human behavior in high-stress situations. Through the lens of Augustine’s understanding of the human will, we can view the more sweeping and systemic nature of moral injury itself as not merely the violation of an interior value, but rather as a more profound distortion of our deepest internal understanding of what is “good” and “right.” Viewed as pursuit of distorted and poisoned moral goods, moral injury can be framed as the realization that one’s moral orientation, to which one commits his or her willing, is aligned toward a “good” that is ultimately false. This conception directly highlights aspects of moral injury not fully addressed by the current conceptions and speaks more broadly to the psychological and moral pain felt by many veterans of the conflicts of the post-9/11 era.

Augustine and Pelagius

For Augustine, the entry of sin into the world occurs at the level of the will and has a catastrophic effect on the human capacity to will rightly in pursuit of that which is truly good. For Augustine, Adam’s fall in the garden is foreshadowed by the fall of a number of the angels, presumably the only other agential beings in creation. As created, the angels cleaved “to that which was the common good of them all: that is, to God Himself.” ¹⁰ Overcome with their own power, some of the angels reject the true, common good of God in order to pursue their own, “private” and tribal goods, and the unity of the good which was common to them all is shattered. ¹¹ In this way, sin enters the world at the level of the will, the locus of agency, which turned from God as its truth and ultimate good in pursuit of one’s own, lesser good as ultimate. Similarly, Adam initially enjoys a close connection to God, whom Augustine describes as the true good, “by which is bestowed upon [the human will] the light by which it can see and the fire by which it can love.” ¹² As with the angels, what precedes Adam’s act of disobedience is his turning of his will and perception of the ultimate good from God and “towards himself.” ¹³ This distortion of Adam’s perception of what is good then makes his physical act of disobedience an inevitability. Adam, having elevated his own capacity to determine what is good above clinging to that which is truly good (God), is thus alienated from that which is truly good, and his will hopelessly bound in pursuit of lesser “goods” that he perceives to be ultimate. ¹⁴ As the ancestor of all humanity, Adam bears in himself all future generations, and thus the results of Adam’s sin are congenitally passed to each human being in terms of a will that is thus bound in a sinful orientation, seeking its source of satisfaction apart from God. ¹⁵

The best way to briefly illustrate how this postlapsarian alienation impacts the process of willing in Augustine’s understanding is to describe it in contrast to his famous foil Pelagius. A British ascetic, Pelagius argued that an essential part of our humanity as rational creatures, is moral autonomy. ¹⁶ He argues that we are equally capable of doing both good and evil, and that the “very capacity to do evil is also good” because “it makes the good part better by making it voluntary and independent, not bound by necessity but free to decide for itself.” ¹⁷ The human will is thus always free to “do one of the two, being always able to do either.” ¹⁸ This capacity to so choose resides in the will itself, which is always free from any internal compulsion of nature as well as any external force, returning always to a neutral position from which both good and evil can be equally willed. ¹⁹ In more modern parlance, as Alistair McFadyen argues, this means that the human will is capable of transcending “social and psychological conditioning factors,” and we are thus always capable of willing and acting independently of them. ²⁰

Since the will enjoys and maintains this independently neutral position, for Pelagius, sin must be narrowly defined in terms of actuated choices in which we freely and individually choose to act sinfully—it is solely the transgressive act—“the doing of a wrongful deed.” ²¹ Only the free choices we make when we could have chosen otherwise can be morally evaluated since the will possesses no inherent inclination (sinful or good) but remains always neutral in its capacity to “orient oneself in action through free choice.” ²² Precisely because the possibility of acting rightly is always available, responsibility for our own actions rests exhaustively with us as individual agents who are “inherently capable of willing and doing the good and so are culpable for all failure to do so.” ²³

Augustine bristled at the totalistic moral conclusion of Pelagius’ conception, arguing that in ascribing so much power to human agency, he ignores the damage caused by sin to the human capacity to will rightly. ²⁴ Augustine’s argument centers on two key differentiations from Pelagius’ position: that the will is neither independent of internal and external influence, and that the truly good choice is unavailable to us. ²⁵ Augustine held that the will was not the force that determined human action, but rather the modality in which human agency takes place. ²⁶ For Augustine, the will follows desire—we will that which we want. ²⁷ The will is an integrated part of the agent, and its desires are inseparable in its operation from the experiences, focus, goals, and ambitions of that agent in a certain disposition. ²⁸ In its operation, the human will has a natural capacity to gravitate towards that which we understand to be good—yet absent the “fire by which it can love,” our will is bound in sinful misperceptions subject to the influence of our near-subconscious perceptions and enmeshed in our historical, cultural, and social situations.

This is the power of the larger force of sin for Augustine—that as our will follows that which we want and desire, our willing can be compelled as those desires and understandings of “good” can be subtly shaped and distorted. In his view, our own willing can be at once personally active and yet not self-contained. Sin is both a “sequestering” and “colonizing” condition that underlies all of our actions and in distorting the sense of “good” that anchors our actions, limits the horizon of our available choices. ²⁹ This results in a more complex and nuanced moral valuation. When we commit our energies, actions, and willing in pursuit of a disfigured good, we commit the act of sin and become further invested in this orientation. For Augustine, we are responsible for both our collective sinful state and our individual participation in a sinful condition—yet critically, moral responsibility for our actions is not entirely exhausted with individuals, but also rests on collective, external forces beyond our agential control. ³⁰

Milgram, Grossman, and the conditioning of “the good”

Evidence from psychological studies in the past half century, particularly regarding individual willing in hierarchical situations, can be interpreted to affirm and expand on Augustine’s contention that our situation can bind our willing and shape our sense of “good.” The experiments of Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s provide us with a conceptual vocabulary that aids in translating Augustine’s conception to the contemporary situation for our veterans. Milgram found that a distinct majority of his test subjects obeyed a white coat-clad experimenter’s commands to shock another individual, often over the agonized screams and disquieting silence of the “victim.” Milgram argued that the subjects had entered an “agentic state,” in which they ceded responsibility for their own actions to the authority directing them. ³¹ A critical requirement of the ability to shift someone into the agentic state was the presence of a significant amount of “antecedent conditions.” ³² In other words, before one could be moved into an agentic state by an authority, one had to be conditioned to accept their legitimacy—to understand their purpose as a valued “good,” whether consciously or subconsciously. This was a development of human civilization—as society became differentiated, the responsibility of individuals shifted from autonomous self-sufficiency to specialized and particular roles (artist, engineer, farmer, governor, soldier) that required communal management and hierarchical leadership. To participate in these societies was to relinquish an amount of responsibility up the hierarchy, and as they developed, their cultures were permeated with subtle and overt elements that enforced this relinquishment, reminding each member to accept the “greater good” of the benefit of society as a whole and to submit to the legitimacy of the hierarchy.

It is not difficult to envision how military members are conditioned through antecedent factors to accept the “good” of the military enterprise. The US military has long held a sacred place within American society and this sacredness permeates our cultural ethos. When we recite the Pledge of Allegiance with our hand over our hearts from a very early age, we are learning to bind ourselves to the “good” of the Republic. We understand and are taught our national history in terms of military victory, from the Revolutionary War to World War II. It is reinforced through war movies that depict the sacrifice in service to our nation as the ultimate moral triumph, at sporting events in which military members are honored with rousing displays of applause and cheers. Military recruitment has always deeply appealed to the highest cultural “goods” of selflessness, duty, and fidelity—exemplified of course, in short mottos: “Always Faithful,” “Not Self, but Country,” “That others may live.” Those who join the military accept these conditions and formally and contractually bind themselves to this “good.”

Jonathan Shay has argued that military conflict is often a battle for the will of the combatant, and that the goal of any entity engaged in conflict is to psychologically motivate its own troops while demoralizing the enemy. ³³ In my view, it is a battle for the combatant’s sense of “good” that is first influenced by antecedent conditioning, then reenforced in overt and subtle ways. Political discourse regarding military conflicts often is a direct appeal to frame the war effort as exemplary moral “good”—Winston Churchill famously portrayed the stakes of World War II as the “survival of Christian civilization,” casting the conflict simultaneously as existential political and religious struggle. ³⁴ After 9/11, George W. Bush proclaimed the “war on terror,” against the axis of evil, again tying the war effort to the very survival of democracy and peace in the world. These appeals to cultural moral standards emphasize the “goodness” of the military enterprise and act to motivate combatants in the most powerful way possible—through the development of real, sincere belief in the righteousness of the cause.

Yet Milgram’s experiments also demonstrate a “fly in the ointment” of this system that resonates deeply with military experience. Despite finding that humans were deeply obedient to authorities perceived as legitimate and good, he also notes that many subjects experienced high degrees of stress when what they were asked to do conflicted with their own personal senses of morality. Despite this evident stress and clear moral conflict, the majority continued to do as they were instructed—the power of their obligation in service to the greater “good” limited the availability of the choice to simply refuse. Yet he found that many people, while bound to continue the task, would engage in subterfuges. They would comply with the demands of authority, but would take actions to mitigate their own involvement—they would argue with the authority, would “minimally comply” with his commands, often only pressing down the shocking lever for only the briefest of moments. These actions served as a moral relief valve—a way to comply with authority yet preserve one’s own conscience. ³⁵

Studies of soldiers on the front lines of combat who refuse to fire their weapons, cited by Dave Grossman in his seminal work On Killing, represent the problem of “subterfuges” in critical and lethal situations and suggest a potential failure of the moral conditioning. According to a famous study of troops in World War II conducted by S. L. A. Marshall, as few as one in five soldiers were actively firing at the enemy. The other four were engaging in varying degrees of subterfuge, often intentionally firing over the heads of the enemy in order to simultaneously comply with their orders and to obey their own consciences. As Grossman notes, the military quickly took note of the “problem” presented by these minor acts of resistance and began to restructure training in response. ³⁶

Grossman presents the specific steps taken by the military to address the inability of the front-line soldier to actively attempt to kill the enemy as a significant change in military training strategy. Yet perhaps they simply represent a fine-tuning of the critical task of any differentiated society: to motivate its military members to embrace a role and its concomitant responsibility for action, in this case, administering violence, by conditioning their willing such that there is no gap between the needs of the military and the morality of its members. The training developments that Grossman notes in response to this problem can be seen simply as a second front in the battle for the combatant’s will and are designed to shape the willing of the trainees by instilling the “good” of killing in several ways. The enemy is dehumanized through the continuous use of slurs—in an essential conflict which is presented as the clash of civilization vs. savagery, democracy vs. barbarism, the portrayal of the enemy as inhuman “other” strengthens the moral imperative to kill them. Combatants are placed in precisely constructed training scenarios in which simulated killing is accompanied with realistic aftermath. ³⁷ As combatants repeat these scenarios over and over again, killing actions become reflexive and superior performance is rewarded, instilling the specific “good” of efficient “neutralizing” of the enemy. ³⁸ What is being carefully yet subtly altered in these techniques is the presentation of killing—it is no longer a necessary moral ill, but an exemplary and perhaps even obligatory moral good.

Trauma and distorted willing

The techniques prove effective at compelling the willing of combatants—in Vietnam, Grossman notes that the firing rate in front-line soldiers increases to around 90 percent. Combatants have difficulty stepping “outside” the moral situatedness of their condition when they are asked to perform psychologically taxing actions of killing. Yet the instances of psychiatric trauma also markedly increase. Grossman records numerous accounts of combatants who followed their training—who willingly committed their energies to the “good” of killing the enemy—only to experience an immediate sense of revulsion and guilt in the aftermath. Others recount experiences of a sudden onset of intense feelings of guilt and shame years after they left the military. Others, particularly veterans of the most recent conflict, experience a more diffused and ambiguous sense of moral ambivalence about their participation in the conflict or enterprise as a whole.

What I suggest is that if the willing of military members is conditioned in this way, then moral injury can be understood as the commitment of one’s active willing in a powerful and compelling moral orientation that is understood at some point to be false. Feelings of guilt, shame, moral anguish, or ambiguity all serve as markers of moral injury, and through these experiences, many veterans come to recognize the moral orientation that governed their willing to be pathogenic. This is a subtle reinterpretation of what Grossman called the “moral remainder”—the moment of some degree of moral disquiet that seems to pierce through the ingrained ideology and testifies to the problematic nature of the “good” to which one has become oriented.

As each conception of moral injury looks to illuminate another facet of the phenomena, there are three primary ways in which this shift in thinking about moral injury and its systemic nature offers a helpful and resonant perspective. First, the framework enables us to describe the experience of both acute and diffuse cases of moral injury as such in a unified conceptual way. It allows us to point to both particular moments when one becomes aware that the “goods” they are serving are not true representations of the “good” as well as the more diffuse situations in which one experiences a sustained feeling of moral ambiguity as instances of moral injury. Certainly, many veterans testify in interviews recorded by Grossman, Brock, and others of the immediate sense of revulsion, guilt, and shame they felt at killing or participating in direct acts of violence. Yet many others cannot point to a specific moment when their deeply held beliefs were violated or their actions transgressed a boundary or they experienced a betrayal of their values from a superior officer. These veterans may simply experience a growing sense of unease at their participation in the overall effort when it begins to become apparent to them that it is not a true representation of the “good.”

Additionally, this representation may provide an understanding of agency that is more palatable to the proud US military ethos and which could influence larger groups of veterans to seek the particular care they need. Some of the current definitions seem to imply that in critical moments, combatants could have exercised an option that the above research suggests may be inaccessible and even foreign in light of their conditioning and training. The Augustinian framework allows us to more clearly emphasize the limited moral choices (what Shay describes as the condition of psychological enslavement that modern combat produces). The problem is not a matter of them being forced to take actions against their own honor, then, but that their very sense of honor is twisted and bound in pursuit of a “good” that is problematic and results in intense feelings of shame and guilt. Shay notes that in Vietnam, many soldiers experienced extreme, “berserk” states of rage following the death of beloved comrades in which they often committed acts of significant violence, often in violation of the Rules of Engagement or established laws of war. ³⁹ Yet the root of these acts, too, is an innately honorable sense of loyalty and justice to one’s comrades, twisted and disfigured by the demands of war into something that later results in great shame and guilt. ⁴⁰ The narratives of Boudreau and Yandell also implicitly argue that the established “rules” that govern the application of violence in conflict become, at best, relativized in practice and, at worst, “flattened” amidst the demands of combat situations.

This leads into the second benefit of this conception: It allows us to be more precise in demarcating the trauma experienced by veterans from that which occurs in other avenues—even as they experience similar effects. Serene Jones describes the experience of trauma in many cases (i.e., rape or other violent assault) as an experience of helplessness and passivity in the face of a force that threatens to annihilate. This often coincides with an “unraveling of agency” in which the victim may “lose confidence that they are effective actors in the world.” ⁴¹ Veterans often experience this same loss of confidence—evidenced in severe cases as extreme hopelessness and suicide and in milder situations as risk- or thrill-seeking behavior that seems to test their ability to force the universe to respond. Yet one who is a part of a powerful military force and whose moral injury is often tied to their direct action may not resonate with this traumatic experience of near-total passivity. I suggest that the framework of co-opted willing allows us to build upon a metaphor first suggested by Jonathan Shay in Odysseus in America. Based on what he relates, the veterans’ struggles against the government are to not be “eaten alive.” ⁴²

Through the lens of willing and the conception of the compulsion of agency, I would argue that one vein of the veteran’s source of moral trauma is the understanding that his individual agency and identity are easily devoured by the overwhelming force of the government. While the circumstances of their trauma is different from those that involve a less pronounced commitment of their active agency, it is notable that despite this, many veterans end in the same place, understanding that against the power of the forces that profoundly compel their willing through shaping their own deepest senses of “good,” their agency has no meaningful effect in the world. It provides one way of differentiating this particular variety of what is coming to be known as “perpetrator trauma,” driven by the guilt and shame of actively committing an offense against another person. It also preserves the unique way that the “unraveling of agency” occurs in veterans—as reflective veterans become aware of the way their own agency and honor have been co-opted by larger forces, they may experience not only the understanding that their own agency is meaningless and ineffective, but that any agential resistance to the distorting power is meaningless and ineffective. This engenders, of course, a certain degree of cynicism and a particularly bleak form of hopelessness.

Finally, this framework of compelled willing and distorted “good” lends itself to a morality that neither excuses the behavior of the combatant nor totalizes his or her moral responsibility. It moves beyond the problematic moral binary of “victim” and “oppressor” by neither denying the base wrongness of the violence of modern combat (particularly from the perspective of the victims of primary and secondary violence) while recognizing that the willing of those applying it is constricted such that they had little power to escape its commission. The framework recognizes and respects that the combatant’s agency was active in applying (or even failing to apply) violence, regardless of that constriction—working from it, one cannot tell a veteran “none of this is your fault” or that “you are not responsible” but neither are we able to tell them “this is all your fault” or “you are entirely responsible.” ⁴³ This may allow for critical breathing room in instances where guilt and shame are key components of traumatic memories that cannot be assimilated and brought to the fore. Psychologists working with traumatized persons have described our system of memory as a shifting landscape of continually reinterpreted meaning and recategorization. Traumatic memories, however, often are “frozen” as they are and deeply resist reintegration into new frameworks of meaning. Dutch psychiatrists Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart have argued that the memories of combat veterans experiencing guilt are among the most intractable—they stubbornly resist forms of renarration and reintegration. In many cases, psychiatrists can begin to artificially shape the memory by “suggesting a less negative or even a positive scenario” rather than the traumatic one. ⁴⁴

For veterans whose trauma involves their own actions of violence against others, this alteration of their memories to a more positive scenario becomes morally problematic. Is it morally proper to alter the memory of a violent act in order that its perpetrator’s guilt can be lessened and his moral culpability eased? This seems to ameliorate the guilt of the perpetrator at the expense of the victim as well as the truth. However, perhaps the more complex notion of morality found in the Augustinian conception of willing is able to provide a different solution. It is certainly less problematic to think that the “guilty” memory of a combat veteran could be ameliorated in a way that focused on the factors and forces which limit his agency and share the responsibility for his actions. This neither changes the truth of the event, nor makes a claim that the actor has not committed his energies toward violent action, nor glosses over the suffering of the victim, but simply conveys to the veteran that the totality of guilt does rest solely upon his or her shoulders.