“Maimed and Naked Monks in the Bloodslaked Dust”: Augustine, Aquinas, and Cormac McCarthy on Just War

Abstract

Perhaps no modern novel describes warfare better than Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (1985), the “bloodiest book since The Iliad,” according to Richard B. Woodward. The novel’s depiction of warfare is a remarkable achievement of prose. William Dalrymple, a British historian, claims that he studied McCarthy’s literary technique in order to write his history of the Anglo-Afghan wars; Blood Meridian’s descriptions of atrocity and warfare, he says, are the handiwork of “a master.” McCarthy scholar Steven Frye argues that it is precisely the aesthetic qualities of the novel that encode its moral vision, a vision “that might seem otherwise absent” (“Blood Meridian” 109). War is rendered in exquisite, even sublime, beauty, transforming the historic record on which the narrative is based into technicolor, panoramic grotesquery. Those stylistic choices are subjective choices, demanding evaluative interpretation. Building on Frye’s assertion that the novel’s aesthetics encode its moral vision, we contend that Blood Meridian’s aesthetically rendered violence offers critical insight into its arguments about the ethics of war. Specifically, we read Blood Meridian’s aesthetic treatment of war through the lens of the tradition of just war theory. Just war theory (JWT) is predicated on the notion of proportionality, authority, and intent, all of which create conditions which must be met in order for war to be just. Read through this lens, Blood Meridian’s bombastic descriptions of the orgiastic mindlessness of