From Dialectics to Theo-Logic: The Ethics of War from Paul Ramsey to Oliver O’Donovan

Introduction

Neither Oliver O’Donovan nor Paul Ramsey will need much of an introduction. Ramsey, a pacifist in his early years, during the 1950s rediscovered just war theory and developed it into a Christian realism vis-à-vis the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. O’Donovan’s political theology, for example in The Desire of the Nations (1996), found a practical condensation in The Just War Revisited (2003), where he explicated the Christian just war ‘theory’ with regard to the incipient Iraq invasion.

However, what is not studied is how these two authors actually relate to each other. And here O’Donovan’s appreciation of Ramsey obscures a major shift that occurred between himself and his former teacher. This transition, I shall argue here, is of crucial systematic and practical importance. It becomes especially noticeable if we look at how mediation shapes both authors’ systematics as well as ethics. Here, a (modern) sceptical oscillation between the divine and the human governs Ramsey’s work (and that of other Niebuhrians and neo-Augustinians). However, Ramsey also discovered the need for, and logic of, mediation. It was then O’Donovan who shifted Ramsey’s architecture onto an evangelical plane. Mediation governs and is now governed by the kingship of Christ. This finds expression in both authors’ ethics of war: Ramsey’s oscillation between national(ist)-sovereign realism and sceptical agapism (later: liberal idealism) gives way to O’Donovan’s evangelical notion of continuous political discernment. This has implications beyond intellectual genealogy.

Investigating the different logics of mediation, as I do here, means investigating the relationship between human and the divine, between Is and Ought, finite and infinite. This relationship holds together any ethical account of war, explicitly or implicitly. Whether conceived as Being, Event or Process, the predicates of mediation illuminate the relationship between these dimensions. Does the relationship consist in a separation or continuity/identity of the divine and the human? Are the dimensions to be conceived analogously, separate to the point of dualism, or do they collapse into each other, resulting in an imposed continuity, even violence? And, secondarily, how do these logical constellations relate to each other?

What sounds like a trip to ‘the icy seas of abstraction’ (Adorno) is in fact a Christological quest, because mediation on its grandest scale is that between humans and the divine. Already a problem for Plato, for Christianity the single and unique mediator between God and humankind becomes Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5). Nicolaus of Cues calls Christ the coincidentia oppositorum, the medium absolutum. And Vladimir Solovyev writes: ‘The mystery of God’s humanity revealed in Christ—the personal unification of the perfect divinity with the perfect humanity—is not only the greatest theological and philosophical truth; it is the nodal point of world history.’ ¹ Hence, ‘mediation’ as a question of Christology is a pivotal point through which ethico-political form and action (in extremis: war) becomes intelligible. Conversely, wars and war machines contain a theo-logic that requires Christological unpacking. ²

The term theo-logic brings us to the shift between Ramsey and O’Donovan suggested here. In modernity, the notion of ‘mediation’ is inextricably linked to G. W. F. Hegel. Recently Graham Ward revisited Hegel’s early works and there also found a connection between the logic of mediation and Christology. Hegel, Ward writes,

is interested in Jesus Christ as an historical event in which the divine is made human. He is interested in the theo-logic that such an event manifests and inaugurates—the logic of incarnation whereby god and human beings both share a nature and yet remain fundamentally distinct. ³

Moreover, the ‘Incarnation of the Logos itself’ becomes ‘the model for the logic of all mediation’. ⁴ Ward underlines that in his mature Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel continues to describe Jesus Christ as the ‘“axis on which the History of the World turns”’. ⁵ Ward highlights a shift or transition in Hegel’s thought: ‘the philosophical project of modernity, the advance of human reasoning, was only possible if the sacred—if Jesus as the revealed Logos of God—established the position from which to speak philosophically’. ⁶ Pace George Lukács and Hegel’s atheist interpreters, Ward argues: ‘Hegel’s [early] Christological investigations are investigations into that which makes dialectic possible at all’; and ‘the later dialectic is a working out of a Christological and philosophical principle’. ⁷

The significance of mediation and the transition of Hegel’s thought is an apt hermeneutic lens for the relationship Ramsey–O’Donovan. If investigating the theo-logic of the Incarnation was Hegel’s quest for a position from which he could speak philosophically, then Ramsey’s and O’Donovan’s interpretation and embrace or rejection of Hegel’s logic illuminates where they locate the point from which modern Christian ethics of war can speak. This was their own sense too: Ramsey knew Hegel via the British idealists, having written a dissertation on Bernard Bosanquet and Josiah Royce that drew heavily on T. H. Green; Basic Christian Ethics is an attempt to both appreciate and reject idealism. ⁸ O’Donovan for his part always sharply distinguishes evangelical ethics from Hegelian idealism. Instead of merely articulating ‘middle grounds’, Christian ethics had to take ‘a different path altogether’. ⁹

So in the following I will discuss Ramsey’s and O’Donovan’s ethics of war through the lens of the Hegelian movement and permeance between logic and Christology. I will proceed in three steps. First, looking at Ramsey, I show how his sceptical oscillation between human-divine separation (or duality) on the one hand, and continuity (or identity) on the other, leads to a ‘crusade for the neighbour’s sake’ based on radical agape. Significantly, in the Phenomenology Hegel diagnosed and rejected such an oscillation as ‘unhappy consciousness’. ¹⁰ Second, I look at Ramsey’s ‘transformism’, which attempts a mediate position between (divine) love and (secular) nature. His just war thinking developed during this phase provided a significant stepping stone for O’Donovan, specifically the ‘political act as judgment’. I will then sketch out how O’Donovan performs the shift from Ramsey’s Hegelian dialectic to Christological mediation, thus turning Hegel (and Ramsey) back on their heads. In short, I argue that Hegel’s movement from Christology to dialectics is reversed by the development from Ramsey to O’Donovan’s Christological mediation. I will close with some critical remarks on O’Donovan’s use of Hegel and the latter’s continued relevance.

Paul Ramsey: From Scepticism to Dialectics

In recent years Ramsey’s first book, Basic Christian Ethics (1949), has been neglected—quite unjustifiably so, because it remains a key work to understand contemporary ethics of war. ¹¹ On the Christological and practical level the book is a primary example of a sceptical oscillation between divine-human duality and identity.

The ‘central ethical notion or “category”’ of ethics’, Ramsey begins, was ‘“obedient love”—the sort of love the gospels describe as “love fulfilling the law” and St. Paul designates as “faith that works through love”’ (BCE, xi). For Ramsey, the believer’s im-mediate relationship to God engenders a self-sacrificial, unconditional neighbour love. This is constructed via historical Jesuology: for Jesus, Ramsey explains, the Kingdom of God was already here. It gave him a unique ethical position, and a horizon or ‘source’ of love. And beyond pacifism and the sovereign politics of empire (or nation) Ramsey discerns in Jesus’ vision a truly unsettling possibility. With Nietzsche, one ‘must have the courage to look squarely into the mystery of how ideals were manufactured in this Christian world’. From the Christian mystery, ‘“the late-Jewish Messianic world-view”’ springs the totaliter aliter way of agape, a love beyond good and evil, meek but equally dealing with ‘the not-so-meek’ (BCE, 26). ¹² It was a love that comprised everything, and was still ‘primitive’. Indeed, here ‘we can, after a fashion, watch revelation taking place’ (BCE, 40). Ramsey emphasises:

In the face of the in breaking kingdom, moral decision was stripped of all prudential considerations … All that mattered was perfect obedience to God. All that mattered was complete readiness for the kingdom to come. All that mattered was the single individual a man happened to confront. All that mattered was unhesitating, total love (BCE, 39).

Ramsey appreciates Jesus’ apocalypticism as an eschatological paradox, an ‘inbreaking’ divine horizon that frees up obedient, kenotic neighbour love. This is agape’s distinctive ‘perspective’ (BCE, 21; 101). Far from a mere compromise, unhesitating love is a distinct third way between (equally voluntarist) non-violence and sovereign self-justification.

Nevertheless, Ramsey cannot replicate Jesus’ unique vision. Negotiating less the terms of Incarnation, Jesuology remains after all a matter of history: ‘This has to be said, so let it be said forthrightly: few contemporary Christians accept the kind of kingdom-expectation Jesus considered of central importance, and rightly they do not’ (BCE, 35–36). As a result the im-mediacy of faithful agape stands eye to eye with Ramsey’s dichotomous eschatology. ¹³ For Ramsey, the present world of responsibilities ‘must be viewed largely in non-apocalyptic terms’ (BCE, 42). It remains separated from God’s kingdom by an ‘eschatological gulf’. There is a ‘rift’ between the present age and the hereafter; and nobody should try to ‘overleap the abyss between the ages’ (BCE, 133).

Because divine-human immediacy and separation are spliced together rather than mediated, Ramsey’s early ethics oscillate. On the one hand, the Reformation’s de-secularising notion of vocation replaces the Catholic ‘counsels of perfection’. Now ‘[e]very Christian everywhere, no matter what his function in society, is obliged … to measure his life by non-resisting love, and not only his inner disposition but his outward action as well’ (BCE, 189). This was a complete Christ-ianisation: agape would operate everywhere without gaps. Shaun O. Casey sees here a genuine drive for ‘progressivism’. ¹⁴

At the same time, agape was ‘incommensurate’ with ethics and ‘the world of systems’ (BCE, 17). ¹⁵ The chapter ‘Christian Liberty: An Ethic Without Rules’ suggests a stark love–law dichotomy. Jesus’ words, ‘not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’ (Matt. 5:18), for Ramsey ‘are either not the original words of Jesus or else they are sorely in need of a loose interpretation’. He thinks Jesus ‘fulfils the law’ means he ‘completes in such fashion as entirely to annul’ it (BCE, 54). With it he nullifies ‘any ethic of conventional respectability, any customary code of conduct into which at least every man is born, any more or less philosophic definition of good and evil’. ¹⁶ Robert W. Tuttle summarises: ‘Unmediated love demands freedom from the law.’ ¹⁷ And because Ramsey’s anti-legalism fully spiritualises and disembodies Christ, Tuttle levels the charge of Marcionism against him—and quite correctly so. ¹⁸ Whilst the historical Jesus has very limited ethical authority, the Christ is both alien and everywhere already. The divine mediator as the fulfilment of law poses a problem for Ramsey.

This becomes crucial once antinomian love is regarded as alien to just war theory. ¹⁹ With Augustine Ramsey thinks: ‘Generally self-defense is the worst of all possible excuses for war or for any other form of resistance or any sort of preference among other people’ (BCE, 173). Then he criticises Augustine and Ambrose for their ‘unqualified acceptance of public protection’, because it amounts to private self-defence and a lack of impartiality: ‘Even in his vocation, where multilateral neighbor-relationships intersect, an individual finds himself drawn not by neighbor-love alone or by considerations of justice alone but by selfish preference or personal affinity for these persons rather than those’ (BCE, 175).

Ramsey does not say that war is murder. But he concludes with confident scepticism that it always could be. The mediate, indeed practical-deliberative space between unrestrained neighbour love and public duty turned selfish gets lost. One can never discern which war is murder. As a result, using force out of neighbour love collapses into pragmatism. This can ultimately be harnessed to any political interest: whatever serves the neighbour needs to be done. ²⁰ Christians may change their ‘action to resistance by the most effective possible means, judicial or military, violent or non-violent, when the needs of more than one neighbor come into view’ (BCE, 165). D. Stephen Long points out that Ramsey completely omits discussing non-combatant immunity. Effectively he permits a ‘crusade for the neighbour’s sake’. ²¹

But this result is hardly a weakness of Ramsey’s systematic-theological choices, as if undesirable implications could be fixed by merely shifting one’s ‘emphasis’. Ramsey’s grappling with immediate agape and an alien Kingdom are theo-logically very consistent, the effect of (Christian) scepticism as such. Precisely in so far as Hegel’s own notion of love overcomes the oscillating ‘unhappy consciousness’, Ramsey rejects it (BCE, 303–304); and with it the (theo-)logical possibility of mediation, or rather: love as the mediator. Love, as Hegel suggests, ‘implies a distinguishing between two’ who are actually, ‘not distinguished from one another’. ²² A person’s self-consciousness is not in herself, but in another; ‘but this Other in whom alone I find satisfaction and am at peace with myself’, ‘just because it is outside of me, has its self-consciousness only in me’. Love is the medium between humans, and—most relevant here—between the dual choice of logical separation or identity. To love means to know and feel this duality-unity: ‘“Thus the two are represented simply by this consciousness of their being outside of themselves and of their identity, and of this perception, this feeling, this knowledge of the unity of love”’(BCE, 303). ²³ But instead of seeing love as a mediator—loving as knowing the logic of not-self—Ramsey misunderstands Hegel’s ‘unity’ to mean ‘identity’ between self and neighbour. In that case, of course, love is the brainchild of ‘idolatrous spirit’; if I identify the neighbour’s needs with my own, I only serve myself. So Ramsey settles again for the fundamental duality of self and neighbour: both God and neighbour ‘stand over against us’ (BCE, 303).

Practically, Ramsey and Hegel then also diverge. As Hegel wrote with regard to the French Revolution: the ‘merely negative freedom of the understanding’, once it turns to reality, ‘becomes the fanaticism of the destruction of all existing social order’, and what is ‘in itself an abstract imagination’ in its realisation is ‘the fury of destruction’. ²⁴ In BCE Ramsey’s agape retains this revolutionary posture and yields no positive political theory. Covenant obedience, ‘the conviction that man’s ultimate loyalty transcends every earthly system or center of human power’ only ‘gives man whereon to stand in opposing the present shape of the world’ (BCE, 387). Certainly such a sceptical ‘No’ recognises and ‘actively performs … the infinity and freedom of thinking itself.’ ²⁵ Understandably Ramsey never wanted to significantly revise BCE. ²⁶ But how to ‘fulfil’ this agapeic scepticism, risking the ‘embarrassment of involvement’ remained an open question. ²⁷ It collapses right into (pragmatically) doing what one was supposed to do in any case. (BCE, 162) This brings us to Ramsey’s endorsement both of idealism and democracy.

Ramsey’s Transformism: Christology or Dialectics?

Ramsey remained aware of the problematic implications of agape lurking in Basic Christian Ethics. To safeguard the integrity of his ethics he had to pick up the loose ends of that book. The altogether biblically grounded, non-naturalistic agape had to be reconciled with natural moral reason. This could prevent a Kierkegaardian teleological suspension of the ethical, which could ‘countermand human conscience’ (BCE, 338). So in 1953 he wrote: ‘Of late my thought has been much concerned with the various types which H. R. Niebuhr delineates, and so I would phrase my present point of view as “love transforming justice”.’ ³⁸ In Nine Modern Moralists he wrote that Christ ‘transforms, renews, reshapes, and redirects the natural law’. And: ‘where Christ reigns, agape enters into a fresh determination of what it is right to do; yet Christ does not reign over a structureless world or over men who are bereft of any sense of natural injustice’. ³⁹ This transformism, a way of thinking Christo-logical mediation, addressed the oscillation, the fundamental dualism and simultaneous ‘identity’, between the spiritual and the political, between formless agape and sovereign legality. But was it a success?

Working it out practically in War and the Christian Conscience (1961), Ramsey located himself now between the agape of the Calvinist ‘radical reformation’ of Geneva on the one hand, and the legal limitations and ‘restraints’ of such violence provided by Catholic canon law on the other. It is immediately striking that Ramsey uses the juridical paradigm of liberal democracy as a matrix for this historical dichotomy between ‘making [revolutionary] chaos of the Kingdom of God’ and the law of an institutional church. ⁴⁰ Since the French Revolution, the spectre of chaotic ‘disordered’ revolution has been brought to a final close by a legal, constitutional apparatus. Effectively, Ramsey stays on familiar territory: ‘What then is democracy but bellum iustum?’ ⁴¹ The democratic paradigm and Christian bellum iustum become congruent: when ‘democracy as “regularized struggle” breaks down, then people may need to be “directly coerced”’. ⁴²

Ramsey’s transformist turn from alien, biblical agape to democracy-as-mediation (and bellum iustum) actually remains predicated on the Christological dualism described above. In War and the Christian Conscience D. Stephen Long acutely observes instead an unacknowledged ‘epistemological rupture’. It pulls Ramsey away from ‘confessional ethics’ to ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rights’. ⁴³ The taboo to target the children ‘to get at their fathers’ is now an insight of natural reason. It was towards the end of his career when Ramsey himself conceded that this switch from love to ‘non-confessional’ natural law ⁴⁴ could not perform the transformist task he had envisioned. He described it as ‘thinking in one direction only between altogether separate sources of ethics (a possible reading of my “love transforming natural justice”)’. ⁴⁵

Nevertheless, the transformist period yielded two fruitful starting points for a political theo-logic of mediation. First, Ramsey argued that ‘just war thinking’ itself, whether democracy or not, is the historical result of a transformative Christian agape. Even if now a matter of natural insight, the absolute prohibition of indiscriminate killing is the essence of all Christian ‘just war’: ‘We only have to know that there are non-combatants, not exactly who or where they are, in order to know that warfare should be forces and counter-forces warfare, and attack be limited to legitimate military targets.’ ⁴⁶ Secondly, he developed the dynamics of the political act in his seminal essay ‘The Uses of Power’ (1964). ⁴⁷ Again, the discussion remains framed by his eschatological dualism. ⁴⁸ The Cross’s dark shadow falls into the Babylonic polis, which remains forever untouched by the salvific events. Yet, despite the gloomy eschatological ‘abyss’, Ramsey’s ‘political act’ relies on the categories of continuous mediation between opposites, on ‘coincidence’, ‘but not entire congruency’, an ongoing attempt to reconcile what could fall into duality and violent opposition. ⁴⁹

In this vein the state’s responsibility is ‘defined by the national … and international common good’, national interest and humanitarian duty. ⁵⁰ Although there is ‘to say the least, a dialectic, a tension, a polarity, if there is not an actual or irremediable conflict’ between the two goods, Ramsey insists that the responsibility of the politician ‘is defined by the area of incidence, or overlap, between them.’ The politician should try to ‘envision and if possible establish a larger area of incidence between his nation’s good and the international common good’. ⁵¹ Put differently, ‘every responsible political decision involves some precarious determination of how the circles of the national and the international common good are to be drawn’. ⁵² Ramsey also identifies what he calls the ‘terminal political values’ for ‘government’ or ‘political agency’. The ends of political action are ordo, the order (of power), iustitia or justice as ‘the regulative ideal of “humanitarianism”’, and lex, positive law. ⁵³ Again, ‘the magistrate’ will continuously weigh these goods or ‘values’ against another and should increase their overlap: ‘Whether justice warrants a disordering action or order warrants the permission of some injustice, nobody can say in advance of statesmanship which rules by what it decrees’. ⁵⁴

Ramsey’s seemingly ‘abstract’ conceptual analysis here remains curiously formal here: ‘Lex and ordo and iustitia stand in a dialectical relationship in all responsible agency’. ⁵⁵ For all the emphasis on continued responsibility, even the politician’s (aesthetic) duty to ‘envision’ a larger area of coincidence, the geometry of overlapping circles hardly matches his powerful biblical images of Fall, darkness and the Cross’s shadow. These themes underline his (and Christ’s) decisive, irreversible ‘Not Yet’ to what he calls the ‘post-evil’ and ‘post-political’ humankind. Ramsey’s critics mainly targeted the realist tendencies in ‘The Uses of Power’. But no doubt it remains an intriguingly fresh piece of writing. Most importantly, the notion of the continuously mediating political act in that essay became central for O’Donovan. In Desire of the Nations (1996), concerned with showing how ‘divine rule confers authority on [political] acts’, he acknowledges Ramsey:

[the] political act was not bounded by institutions. At home in the city, it could extend itself into open spaces across the boundaries erected by civilized institution-building. It was impossible for Ramsey to conceive politics as an island-kingdom, washed on all sides by the trackless ocean of a state of nature. The Lockean liberalism that conceived it that way had placed the abstract political institution at the core of political theory, in the place where political action belonged. ⁵⁶

In Ways of Judgment (2005) O’Donovan restated his by then well-known theorem that political authority ‘arises where power, the execution of right, and the perpetuation of tradition are assured together in one coordinated agency’. He added: ‘The source of this triad [power, right, tradition], as I now realize, was Paul Ramsey’s analysis of authority as lex, iustitia, and ordo.’ ⁵⁷ However, O’Donovan was very critical of Christian realism. And throughout he rejects philosophical idealism, especially its historicist conclusions. So how does he transform Ramsey’s transformism?

Oliver O’Donovan: From Dialectics to Theo-logic

If, as Ward suggests with a view to the early Hegel, ‘dialectic is a working out of a Christological and philosophical principle’, then O’Donovan’s Christology re-sublates the philosophical dialectics of mediation into biblical specificity. He relocates Hegel’s question of mediation (and the sceptical oscillation he sought to overcome) within exegesis. ⁵⁸ But precisely in that way, he walks through the door to a totaliter aliter opened by Ramsey. Mediation for O’Donovan means the final closure of duality. This theo-logic is now crystallised in the tension-filled narrative of Israel’s politics before and after the Christ-event. Precisely the turn to Israel gives extensive theological content to Ramsey’s political act: ‘Failure to attend to Israel is what left Christian political thought oscillating between idealist and realist poles’ (DN, 27). Moreover, Israel—because the church is Israel too—links contemporary life to the universal divine narrative.

This is O’Donovan’s position from which to investigate the biblical theo-logic. The appearance of Christ’s authority in Jerusalem, and especially when he ascends to the Temple, is then the key moment of the ‘eschatological fusion’ (O’Donovan’s word for human-divine mediation) between the old and new age, between the world of systems and an alien agape. Instead of Ramsey’s ‘eschatological abyss’, the authority of Christ according to O’Donovan

meant the unity of political and religious spheres under the rule of God. Obedience and worship were to be one and the same. But that is to say: the Kingdom was the Lord’s! The Two Kingdoms period, in which Temple without power and praetorium without worship coexisted in some kind of parallel, was declared closed (DN, 117).

Earlier O’Donovan had already located the biblical content of lex, ordo and iustitia in Israel’s triadic covenant with God. Yhwh’s authority is, first, established ‘by the fact that he delivers his people from peril in conflict with their enemies’, which brings the need for power (Ramsey’s ordo) into focus (DN, 36). The presence of judicial discrimination in Israel sets the doing of justice, the settling of right, as a ground for authority (Ramsey’s iustitia) (DN, 39). And a possession to be handed down (law/lex and land) through the generations provides clarity about God’s judgments. It gives order and structure to the community ‘and sustains it in being’ (DN, 41). ⁵⁹ On these grounds God’s rule before Christ was mediated ‘through the judicial tasks of angels and kings in all the nations’ (DN, 124). Politically, the Old Testament’s theo-logic culminates in Moses’ theocracy.

However, with the Christ event, O’Donovan explains, divine authority ‘is irreplaceably immediate in the dying, rising and future disclosing of Jesus’ (DN, 124). Christ is the immediate mediator of God. It is forbidden for ‘human rule to pretend to sovereignty, the consummation of the community’s identity in the power of its ruler’ (WJ, 4). With ‘Christ’s triumph’ Israel’s military victory is no longer sacred; neither is the possession of land and law. Christ marks victory and salvation; he is now the possession of Israel. Hence, ‘no government has a right to exist, no nation has a right to defend itself. Such claims are overwhelmed by the immediate claim of the Kingdom’ (DN, 151). The Christ-event itself is the mediating event between God and his people, between God and ‘the world of systems’. This transforms, from the bottom up, the grounds of Israel’s theocratic nationalism. Now governments mediate judgment only, discriminating between innocent and guilty. In this way, inseparable from its biblical foundation, the task of judgment persists during the saeculum.

With this O’Donovan shifts from Ramsey’s abstract ‘overlapping circles’ of national interest and international common good to the ‘evangelical counter-praxis’ of reconciliation ‘staged missiologically against a backdrop of unbelief and disobedience’. ⁶⁰ On the grounds of the reigning mediator, who ‘put an end to all unmediated antagonism’, The Just War Revisited begins with the ‘all-determining truth’ of God’s will, which is peace. ⁶¹ Neither a mere ideal nor the ‘stability’ of the (democratic) political system, this peace is an ontological truth. As ‘the interim provision of God’s common grace, promising the dawning of God’s final peace’, reconciliation ‘assumes the secular form of judgment’ (JWR, 6).

The mediate and mediating logic runs throughout O’Donovan’s ethics of war. It transforms both Ramsey’s agapeic crusade and his bellum iustum-as-democracy. When it comes to authority—who can use violent force in the first place, and on what grounds—mere national defence is impermissible (although a defensive motive persists). O’Donovan here first repeats Ramsey’s concern about private, defensive violence. ‘Privacy’ is merely a form of interest based on factual existence, whether a state’s or an individual’s. Authority as public representation, however, is the sine qua non for violent force to be political at all:

Only public acts may legitimately call upon the use of force. Only governments may make war, for the same reason that only police and magistrates may arrest and only judges sentence, namely, that they require representative persons, acting for the community, to perform them (JWR, 22).

But neither the early Ramsey’s antinomian, pragmatist idea that the neighbour’s need alone guides the means of action, nor its matching idea of ‘legalism’—that only international legal bodies like the UN are authorities—correspond to political mediation. O’Donovan instead condenses it to charitable ‘authorised arbitration’ (JWR, 22). His judicial proposal requires all belligerents to ‘act … as though one is not merely defending one’s own interests but deciding an issue between claimants’. The belligerent takes the role of a third party: ‘Acts of war carry with them the responsibility to care for the right of both parties equally. A belligerent has to act for “the” right, not “our” right’ (JWR, 25). Such a public act of war then corresponds to international right-as-order, itself an objective, existing moral order; ‘the just belligerent is supposed to venture, informally and with extraordinary means, the judgment that would be made by a formal court, if there were a competent one’ (JWR, 23; original emphasis).

Here one must read O’Donovan with Hegel: the ordering performance of justice reconciles subjective claims and objective Recht. ⁶² The political act is effective in between the ‘clamouring’ of ubiquitous judgment and mere opinion on the one hand, and an unquestionable ‘objective’ international legal(ist) system on the other. Fully dependent on the recognition of the Christ event, O’Donovan’s evangelical proposal thus consists in the paradoxical recognition of both formal and informal authorities, be they individual, national or international. ⁶³

But whilst ‘fixing’ Ramsey’s sceptical dualism on the theological-systematic and practical levels, O’Donovan decisively rejected Hegel and idealism’s notion of mediation. Already in Resurrection and Moral Order he voiced Tuttle’s critique of Ramsey. Idealist incarnation ‘(without the definite article)’ means that ‘the meaning of the whole has been focused in a representative one’; so eventually ‘any concrete being may … be an “incarnation” of universal meaning in this sense’. However, ‘Christ’s particularity belongs to his divine nature, his universality to his human nature. As the one whom God has sent he is irreplaceable; as the new man he is the pattern to which we may conform ourselves…’ (RMO, 143). Via this distinct theo-logic, O’Donovan averts the Niebuhrian/realist immanent incarnation of the Kingdom of Heaven in a concrete state (or conglomerate of states). ⁶⁴ Bellum iustum and ‘democracy’ are no longer synonyms by default. ‘What is remarkable’, O’Donovan says,

and what only the incarnation can tell us of, is not the representation of universal order in any one being, but the coming within universal order of that which belongs outside it, the one divine Word which gave it its origin and which pronounces its judgment (RMO, 144).

This critique of idealism runs through O’Donovan’s work. But is it fully warranted? Not if we look at his and Hegel’s central concern: reconciling dualities, overcoming the sceptical oscillation, the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of irreconcilable opposites spliced together. Unification, writes O’Donovan quite reminiscent of Hegel, is not a tertium quid, but ‘a union of the two, a both-and’ as ‘affective knowledge’. ⁶⁵ ‘We know only as we love’, he quotes Augustine. ⁶⁶ Whereas O’Donovan lifts reconciliation onto a biblical-exegetical plane, Hegel is concerned with its logical unfolding in thought and history—hardly mutually exclusive projects.

Moreover, once O’Donovan enters the nitty-gritty of jurisprudence, he incorporates a Hegelian mediating logic like a fetus in fetu. ⁶⁷ For example in Ways of Judgment he explains that when passing judgment, society pronounces the truth about the crime to an offender and ‘affords the occasion to acknowledge the social conditions of his own existence’. Hegel called it ‘the satisfaction of the offender’s “explicit will”’ (WJ, 118). The good of society is equally at stake—judgment itself, the basic condition of a common life. Like in Just War Revisited, punishment here means to integrate subjective claims into an objective order of right. O’Donovan appreciates that ‘Hegel’s masterly discussion … describes a convergence of the interests of offender and society upon the common need for a vindication of infringed right that will effectively express the moral and social “nullity” of the crime’ (WJ, 117). Nevertheless, he rejects Hegel, echoing the latter’s secular(ist) interpreters. Although ‘Hegel’s account of punishment brings to theoretical completion the scattered insights of patristic Christianity’, it ‘remains abstractly suspended in the psychological context that is the matrix of so much of his thought, and so appears to be merely ingenious’. ⁶⁸ For O’Donovan, Hegel lacks ‘a way of relating penal practice to the wider range of practices that constitute political and social life’. Always with an eye on Marxism-Leninism, O’Donovan largely reads him as postulating an identity of the spiritual and the political—effectively Christ as rather than in political history.

O’Donovan for his part frequently begins with an initial declaration of accomplished faith—whether as a friendly parting from non-believers, the Te Deum, or interpreting the duties of the faithful. ⁶⁹ In his most recent book, he undertakes the ‘architectural enterprise’ of Christian ethics from within a house already built: ‘those who will practice this discipline with me and after me … must enter into the lived experience of practical deliberation for themselves, and inhabit it as residents, not as those visiting on occasional research trips’. ⁷⁰ In short: via Ramsey, and incorporating Hegel’s jurisprudential logic, O’Donovan has consistently repatriated Christian ethics into its ‘proper’ theo-logical home: the Christian narrative of divine mediation culminating in the unified rule of Christ.

But once he has partly absorbed and rejected historicism and idealism, does O’Donovan not merely preach to the converted? Certainly Timothy Gorringe and Andrew Shanks have shared the suspicion that instead of doing political theology, O’Donovan does theology in lieu of politics. Liturgy and biblical narrative seem to replace political history; today’s protests and projects of civil society impinge on the perfection of the biblical narrative rather than echo it. ⁷¹ The Just War Revisited explains the Christian tradition, but practically remains at best inconclusive. In effect, just like the symmetrical beauty of classical art eventually becomes an ossified classicism, so the declaration that ‘God reigns’ without an acrimonious unfolding in history risks being the mere sound of words. Hence, in order to allow for (O’Donovan’s) Christian ethics of war to be practical, even partisan, the transition of the political act from Ramsey’s dualist–dialectical context into the theo-logic of the biblical narrative needs to be continuously revisited and reversed.

Conclusion

In short, it is by retracing again Ramsey’s influence on O’Donovan that the latter’s theological ethics of war can be taught to ‘risk the embarrassment of engagement’ without losing integrity. As we saw, O’Donovan’s central ‘act of judgment’ was shaped by Ramsey’s ‘political act’. The latter’s mediating praxis, developed in ‘The Uses of Power’, always seeks lex, ordo and iustitia. The ‘magistrate’ has to constantly increase the overlap between these three, as much as between the international and national common good. This emerged from Ramsey’s recovery of the Christian just war tradition in a modern context imbued with the idealist heritage. As I showed, O’Donovan transformed Ramsey’s ‘political act’. For him it emerges from the theo-logic of mediation in the biblical narrative of Israel. Yet what O’Donovan gains in exegetical coherence and comprehensiveness he loses in political advocacy. One reason was that he feared the confusion of Christ the divine mediator in history with Christ as history mediating itself. Certainly Ramsey, if judged by his unsavoury political commitments, could not steer clear of such implications.

Nonetheless, in returning to the earlier Ramsey, O’Donovan’s Christ triumphant gains political concreteness. For all the dangers that come with throwing oneself into politics like Ramsey did, there is the horizon of the accomplished divine-human mediation. Perhaps quite consistently with his unchanging commitment to the ‘freedom of thinking as such’, Ramsey eventually came around to question the Vietnam War and to conclude that Christology was ‘the real issue’. ⁷² In reverse movement to Hegel, it seems, the dialectics of realism–idealism governing his intellectual life in the end inaugurated the theo-logic of the Incarnation, his position from which to speak theologically.

The analytical framework of Hegel’s development not only emerges from both authors’ grappling with idealism. It also marks the field for doing Christian ethics and politics. The shift or transition highlighted in Hegel expresses the very borderline between faith and non-faith, the premise of ‘doing’ theology vis-à-vis lost faith. If one is open to the permeance between Hegel’s ‘abstract psychology’ and Christo-logical fulfilment, any political theo-logic lost to dialectics, including negative dialectics, can be therapeutically regained (and even benefit psychology). ⁷³ Hegel himself in this way allows for what may be tentatively called the apostolicity of history. From here, analysing the theo-logic of war in Ramsey–O’Donovan is a preparation to engage with contemporary wars and war machines (drone warfare, mass surveillance, deterrence etc.) beyond selectively tapping into ‘biblical resources’. The self-posited, possibly Pharaonic, sacrality of the Western war machine at least since World War I is a comprehensive metaphysical proposal. Through Hegel, Ramsey and O’Donovan one can challenge its entire logic.