The Doctrine of Justified War in Orthodox Christianity and Its Distinction from the Catholic Tradition

This paper attempts to critically examine the system of attitudes toward the justification of war and violence within the Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Orthodoxy, along with Catholicism and Protestantism, is one of the three fundamental branches of Christianity, the second largest Christian denomination, and historically closely associated with Byzantium and its areas of greatest influence. And while in the West a comprehensive systemic approach to justify the war was formed within Christianity, Orthodoxy par excellence remained faithful to the pacifistic and peaceful character of early Christian thought. Nevertheless, at the level of practice the Orthodox Church was often involved in the warfare, and secular strategies, which were used for the justification of war, often included purely religious elements and related rhetoric. Therefore, consideration of the Orthodox tradition of war justification on the ground of a more holistic and systematic approach of Western Christianity contributes to a deeper and fuller understanding of the specificity of Orthodoxy itself and its attitudes toward war. Respectively, the work is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of philosophical and religious foundations common for Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism and examines the Western way of solving the problem of justification of war. The second chapter is directly focused on Orthodoxy, separately analysing the intra-church approaches to warfare, and the extra-church practices of justification of war. Chapter three presents a comparative analysis of the approaches of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, and accordingly it is divided into two parts: comparative and critical. The comparative part is aimed to find similarities and differences in the previously outlined strategies and approaches. The critical part is an effort to expose additional reasons for the disagreements between Orthodoxy and Catholicism in their doctrinal orientations regarding their view of human nature and the source of evil in the world.