Christianity, Violence, and the West

Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West; 2015

Reviewed by Warren Brown

“The medievalist Philippe Buc discerns Christian tropes of holy war and martyrdom in seemingly secular movements with terroristic potential. A brilliant and disturbing interpretation of the religious origins of redemptive violence in the West, this is a book for our times.” ― Dirk Moses, European University Institute

Buc takes as his point of departure the apparent contradiction between pacifism and violence in Christian culture. In pre-modern Christianity he sees no contradiction at all; late antique and medieval Christian theology both produced violence and made it legitimate (68-70)…. the old theology of sacred history did not disappear. It reappeared not only in religious contexts, but also in transformed and repurposed form in apparently secular or even anti-Christian ones. God was replaced by a quasi-personified History. Man became History’s agent, and History would render violent judgment on those who had resisted its march. To Karl Marx, for example, History was man’s work–but at the same time it was the judge, with the proletariat as its executioner (261).

This is a remarkable book. Buc takes us through two millennia of western Christian and what he calls “post-Christian” (i.e. post-Enlightenment) attitudes towards violence, in order to explore how Christianity has left its imprint on western violence in the modern period. He asks whether the West’s Christian heritage can account for the idiosyncrasies of its violence, not in terms of how it is actually carried out, but rather in terms of the motives and ideologies behind it. He argues that violence is woven into early and medieval Christianity’s conceptual frameworks and language.

He then points out direct continuities between Christian violence in the past and both Christian and “godless” violence (in the literal sense of the word, not the judgmental) in various modern presents, as well as lulls, revivals and reinventions. He vigorously disputes arguments that modern western violence has become desacralized; he argues throughout that it is easier to understand if one places it against the backdrop of the Christian longue durée from which it emerged.

The book takes no prisoners. This is Buc thinking out loud, at the highest level. He assumes that his readers have the same knowledge and intellectual ability that he has, and therefore that he need not explain every reference he makes to people, events, or ideas. He jumps widely in space and time, from point to point and from example to example as his arguments require, sometimes in the same paragraph. We find ourselves moving back and forth inter alia from St. Augustine to the Spanish Civil War, to the First Crusade and the Gregorian Reform, to the American and French Revolutions, to the Stalinist Soviet Union, to Germany’s Red Army Faction, and to the American War on Terror. The sicarii, Raymond d’Aguilers, Gratian, John Brown, Rousseau, Sartre, and George W. Bush, among others, put in appearances, as do the Christian conservatives Lt.-General William Boykin and Timothy LaHaye (author of the Left Behind and Babylon Rising book series).

Buc takes as his point of departure the apparent contradiction between pacifism and violence in Christian culture. In pre-modern Christianity he sees no contradiction at all; late antique and medieval Christian theology both produced violence and made it legitimate (68-70). Central was the contrast between the Old Testament and the New. For the Church Fathers, the division between a bellicose Old Testament and a pacifist New Testament pointed to a corresponding division in sacred history: God’s time was divided into two parts, respectively devoted to war and peace, vengeance and mercy.

At the end of sacred history violence would come once more; Christ/God would judge all people and take violent vengeance for men’s sins. In the Middle Ages, this distinction was picked up and perpetuated, among others by the twelfth-century canonist Gratian (73). It legitimated violence by medieval actors against those they perceived to be God’s enemies; the violent slaughter of Muslims by members of the First Crusade, for example, (105) prefigured God’s final, violent judgment. Though there were medieval counter-voices–e.g., Sigibert of Gembloux protesting that Pope Paschal II’s call to Holy War against the Emperor Henry IV was “an unacceptable lapse into Old Testament mores” (82)–only in the modern period, starting with Wycliffe, can one start to see a current of Christian pacifism based on the argument that the Old Testament was to be interpreted figuratively rather than literally (82-84).

However, the old theology of sacred history did not disappear. It reappeared not only in religious contexts, but also in transformed and repurposed form in apparently secular or even anti-Christian ones. God was replaced by a quasi-personified History. Man became History’s agent, and History would render violent judgment on those who had resisted its march. To Karl Marx, for example, History was man’s work–but at the same time it was the judge, with the proletariat as its executioner (261).

In the Christian tradition, Buc notes, the idea that Christianity’s worldview and values apply universally and should therefore be exported appears regularly alongside that of Christian exceptionalism (55). This pairing is clearly visible, for example, in the earliest acts of the martyrs. It is also visible in a radically different context, in the ideology of the German Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof Gang of the 1970s and 80s. The RAF claimed at one and the same time both universality and election. Buc argues that this is key to understanding it…

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/20856/26862

*******************************************************************

Neo-Zionism, political theology and the Land Traditions of the Bible (1967 to Gaza 2009)

Military might, market ideology and moral posturing: A toxic combination that has poisoned America

‘Christian nationalism’ in American politics: the Republican hotline to Jesus

Seth Anziska on Dominant Orthodoxies

Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy

The American Christian Right’s Flirtation with Political Violence and Far-Right Extremism

Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims

The Lady Vanishes

Militant capitalism, bad infinity, and the longing for total revolution

Calicut professor booked for Facebook post praising Godse. (Withdraw the case)