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Good morning St Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, would have been very interested in the debate about Syria's chemical weapons. All those newspaper editorials and political speeches, discussing such things as proportionality, would be instantly familiar to him as applications of his theory of just war. Just war theory is the basis of modern international law, including his requirement that, even if all other conditions are satisfied, armed force can only be sanctioned by legitimate authority. Many - including in the case of Syria, the Russian Government - would insist that today that can only mean the UN Security Council. Aquinas was developing ideas he inherited from St Augustine of Hippo many centuries earlier. Both these theologians were wrestling with the central dilemma - how do soldiers love their enemies on the battlefield, as Jesus Christ instructed them to do? Augustine went so far as to say it would be sinful not to take up arms to protect the innocent, if that was the only way you could do so. He was no pacifist. But for him and for Aquinas, as well as under modern international law, force is only justified when all other means have failed. There are two branches to just war theory as developed by Aquinas, and the use of gas against your enemies would come under the second, known as jus in bello. That's jus* with a J by the way as we're talking Latin. These are essentially rules about how you fight, not whether you should be fighting in the first place: that comes under the first branch of just war theory, called jus ad bellum. These rules are not exclusively Christian - Islamic law, for instances, prohibits the poisoning of wells by occupying armies, on the grounds that civilian populations must have fresh water. It strikes me that poisoning the water and poisoning the air are pretty similar...