Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

314 BRIAN V. JOHNSTONEdevelopment of the tradition 13 even as late as the work of Grotius(d. 1645). 14 Subsequently, however, it was lost sight of, even instandard “Catholic” accounts of the doctrine, and the narrowconcept of justice between nations became the guiding criterionfor the interpretation of the just war doctrine.In introducing once more the consideration of love(expressed in forgiveness) the Pope is therefore, returning to ahallowed tradition. Read in the light of the tradition, moreover,the Pope’s conception of love and forgiveness refers not merelyto subjective sentiments, but to a coherent political vision.Hannah Arendt, the esteemed Jewish political philosopher, wholike Pope John Paul II, framed her theory against the backgroundof Nazism, the second world war and its aftermath, alsosaw the necessity of forgiveness for a viable politics of peace. Inher work, The Human Condition, she wrote:The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm ofhuman affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made thisdiscovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious languageis no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secularsense. 15For the Pope, forgiveness derives from the Gospel and istranslated through ethical discourse into political policy. For thepolitical philosopher, it is a religious discovery which both historicalexperience and reason show to be necessary even in a secularview of politics. In practice, they agree: politics mustinclude forgiveness.Thus far in the argument, I have proposed that the Pope’stheological and moral reflection does contain certain new features,which are, in some respects, a return to older Christian13Francisco SUAREZ, S.J. Omnia Opera, t.12, (Paris: Vivès, 1858) tr. III DeCharitate, Disputatio XIII, Sect. I, disp. XIII, p. 737.14Timothy M. RENICK, “Charity Lost: The Secularization of the Principleof Double Effect in the Just-War Tradition,” The Thomist 58 (1994) 458.15Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, 238. Cf. D. W. Shriver,Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995) 239.