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PRELIMINARY DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION OR CIRCULATION
Sanctified Violence in Ancient Mediterranean Religions:
A Typological Overview[*]
Bruce Lincoln
University of Chicago
I
I trust there is no shame in admitting at the start that I cannot provide a magisterial overview of this enormous topic. The scope is too vast, the data too varied, the intricacies too intricate for any mere mortal to master. Even did one possess the requisite omniscience concerning the near millennium (150 B.C.E. - 750 C.E.), three continents, and numerous religious traditions (Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Mithraic, Manichaean, Islamic, and others, each with its own internal divisions), not to speak of the countless texts, incidents, persons, and categories relevant to our topic, generalizations are sure to impoverish and distort as much as they clarify or enlighten. With this obligatory -- but sincere -- disclaimer in place, I should also observe that the impossibility of the task is liberating in ways, since it permits me to offer some provisional observations by way of provocation, confident that others will challenge and correct them.
In that general spirit, let me then make three approaches to our topic. First, I want to consider the nature of violence and its relation to domination. Second, I will sketch four relatively common ways that acts, campaigns, and systems of violence were "sanctified" -- i.e., invested with religious significance -- in late antiquity, sometimes by their authors and sometimes by their victims, but usually in some relation to the context of empire. Third, I will provide a somewhat more thorough (but still too brief) analysis of one phenomenon that holds particular theoretic interest, historic importance, and contemporary relevance.
II
Taking my lead from Simone Weil's meditation on the Iliad as "le poème de la force,"[1] Alexandre Kojève's elaboration of Hegel's master-slave dialectic,[2] and Orlando Patterson's treatment of slavery as a form of social death,[3] let me start by suggesting we can best theorize violence as the deployment of physical force in a manner that tends to convert subjects -- individual or collective, but in either case fully human actors -- into depersonalized objects. Murder, for instance, transforms a previously living subject into a corpse, i.e. an inanimate thing. Equally instructive examples include rape, where force is used to make some other person an instrument of the aggressor's sexual pleasure; enslavement, where it reduces human subjects to their labor power, stripped of rights and dignity; conquest and punitive discipline, where overlords of whatever sort (rulers, jailers, bosses, etc.) attempt to render their charges submissive and compliant.[4]
At the analytic core of violence, then, are not just rough acts, but the way such acts mediate relations between an actor (individual or collective) whose power, status, pride, sense of well-being, control over situations and over others are all enhanced in the process and one for whom these same qualities are diminished, deformed, or extinguished. Such negative effects exist on a cline of increasing intensity, as does violence itself, and one should observe that only the most extreme type of violence -- i.e. lethal force -- physically accomplishes that toward which all other forms gesture, but from which they ultimately retreat: the irreversible transformation of living subject into inert object.[5] Non-lethal force and the credible threat of force may approach this same end, but they stop short of it, and do so by design. For whatever damage these lesser forms of violence may inflict (both physical and psychic), they leave their victims alive, and thus with some measure of personhood, agency, and interiority. Victors, moreover, are ideal-typically concerned that the vanquished retain vital energy in the form of labor-power after they have been forced to surrender the bulk of their autonomy. The image is that of the zombie, a less than human creature situated between life and death, stripped of most, but not quite all subjectivity.
The situation of those who have survived violence is also complex and often contradictory. Thus, to the extent that survivors remain intimidated by the (implicit, explicit, or imagined) threat that violence against them may be renewed, they are likely to participate in their own partial and superficial objectification by performing a radically diminished subjectivity. Not zombies, but cautious (and skilled) actors who restrict themselves to a zombified public existence, suppressing most signs of autonomous will or desire, for fear that these signs of life might be read as a threat, provocation, or excuse for their enemies to turn violent again.
Having provisionally defined violence as the use of force to objectify the other, we are thus led to theorize domination in corollary terms as the cultivation of fear through the threat of violence, thereby producing -- and perpetuating -- a docile, compliant, and semi-objectified state among the community of the fearful. One can describe that community as having been intimidated: not just bullied, but literally made timid. Alternatively, one may speak of them as "cowed," a metaphor that signals the loss (or surrender) of certain human qualities and properties -- autonomy, spontaneity, confidence, legal rights and safeguards, territory, patrimony, the products of one's labor, etc. -- as the result of fear and a cultivated belief that resistance is futile.
Domination also produces contradictory attitudes in the dominated as regards their own inclination and capacity for violence. Surely, fear and memories of past suffering work together to inhibit the defeated from taking arms against their oppressor. But the same memories also stimulate lasting resentment, fantasies of revenge, and hopes for liberation, all of which can inspire bloody acts, should such people overcome their fear.[6]
III
The preceding discussion helps us understand why violence is regularly condemned on aesthetic and ethical grounds as something both ugly and inhumane. One can also imagine good religious reasons for its condemnation, since it is possible to describe the objectifying effects of violence (in a vocabulary that differs only slightly from that we have adopted) as something akin to the sacrilegious degradation of human subjects, whereby beings who are properly recognized as compounds of matter and spirit are reduced to matter alone.
Commentators of many sorts (politicians, clergy, journalists, e.g.) often voice the opinion that religion stands categorically opposed to violence and necessarily condemns it, but several problems undermine this bromide. First, the straightforward empirical question -- How often do religions actually condemn violence, and how often do they adopt other stances? -- proves surprisingly difficult to answer, since no representative body of data has been assembled or analyzed, and it is hard to imagine just how this might be done. (Ought one distinguish, for instance, between statements of general principle ["Thou shalt not kill" {Genesis 20:13}] and casuistic injunctions or judgments ["And the Lord said to him, 'I will be with you, and you shall smite the Midianites'" {Judges 6:16}]? Statements of the latter sort seem to be more numerous in most religious traditions, while the former are decidedly more weighty and emphatic).
Beyond the strictly empirical issues, one also has to ask what is meant by the term "religion." The problem is particularly acute in any sentence where this abstract noun appears to govern a transitive verb, since properly speaking it is only human subjects who possess agency. Thus, to pursue the example, in order to make sense of the claim that "religion" "opposes" or "condemns" something, one must replace the vague and global abstraction with specific animate actors, e.g. the official representatives of religious institutions, the authors of canonical texts, or persons who represent and experience their views not as idiosyncratic opinions, but as founded on sacred truths and transcendent principles to which they have either direct or mediated access. Once this is done, counterexamples are all too readily available, for -- as everyone knows -- religious authorities, texts, and communities have frequently reacted to incidents, campaigns, and systems of violence not just with condemnation, but also by ignoring, condoning, mitigating, even encouraging and rewarding them, according to circumstances.
Of course, it is possible to dismiss such episodes as embarrassing aberrations: moments when flawed people misinterpreted what "true religion" really had to say. As a historian and a realist, I am inclined to dismiss such a view as naïve, for history contains only flawed human actors and no true religion. But those considerably more pious than I also reject attempts to constitute the religious as categorically opposed to the violent, as witness, for example, St. Augustine's theory of Just War,[7] or Kierkegaard's characterization of the most profound faith (typified by Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac), as requiring a "religious suspension of the ethical."[8]
In the face of these difficulties, let me advance three propositions that, I hope, all but the most doctrinaire can accept. First, the relation between "religion" and violence takes many forms, being contingent and variable, rather than categorical, fixed and absolute. Second, it is the norm for "religion" to condemn acts of violence, so much so that this is often taken for granted and need not be rendered explicit.[9] Third, there are countless cases in which interested actors seek -- and find -- reasons for investing specific violent episodes with religious value, adopting attitudes that can range from sorrowful, world-weary acceptance to eager incitement and celebration. The question then arises: Under what kinds of circumstances might acts of violence, which by definition dehumanize and objectify their victims, be positively valorized on religious grounds? I can think of five general patterns that recur with some frequency in late antiquity, but the list is by no means exhaustive.[10] Let me treat four of them briefly, holding the fifth for somewhat fuller discussion when other pieces of the argument are in place.
1. Conquest as divinely sanctioned. Here, a group that enjoys certain material and sociopolitical advantages (superior numbers, wealth, weaponry, organization, etc.) sheds whatever moral inhibitions previously kept it from using force against neighbors and rivals by defining itself as more righteous, pure, or divinely favored than those who, in that moment, begin to become its prey. Insofar as incipient aggressors persuade themselves that their victims are morally and spiritually defective, the use of violence against them becomes more acceptable, since it only dehumanizes that which was already somewhat less than fully human. Such a perspective also permits victors to narrate their campaigns of conquest as a form of religious generosity and noblesse-oblige, through which they bear priceless gifts -- non-material goods like law, order, morality, enlightenment, even salvation -- to the conquered: gifts that promise to raise the benighted closer to the conqueror's higher, more blessed level. (Material goods flow in the opposite direction, of course, bringing wealth, glory, and compensation that can be construed as confirmation of divine favor). Recently, I have studied the way ideas of this sort animated the Achaemenian kings, who represented themselves as God's chosen instruments to establish paradisal perfection throughout the world,[11] but similar themes also attend Roman imperialism (as theorized in pagan terms under Augustus,[12] and in Christian terms under Constantine[13]), Zoroastrian imperialism in Sassanian Iran,[14] and that of the Islamic caliphate.[15]
2. Defeat as humiliation. If conquerors can justify aggression by demeaning their enemies and arguing, in effect, "They deserved what they got and in the long run they were better for it," the same logic permits victims to make sense of the violence they suffer by a simple substitution of "We" for "They." Such a construction avoids dwelling on the superiority of the enemy's armies and steadfastly refuses to entertain the superiority -- or existence -- of their gods. Instead, it locates responsibility for historic trauma in one's own (real or imagined) cultic and moral failings or, more often perhaps, on the failings of one's wayward countrymen, whom earlier polemics and cleavages had identified as somehow inadequate in their observances, devotion, loyalty or commitment.[16] In a theodicy of great daring and originality, these offenses are construed as having prompted chastisement by one's own god, who is thus permitted to retain all his power and benevolence as the sole causal agent of importance. From this perspective, conquest and domination are represented, also experienced, as salutary humiliations: harsh reminders that prompt a wayward people to restore their proper relation to a god from whom they had previously estranged themselves. Such an analysis posits five distinct stages to a process simultaneously historic and religious: a) an initial ideal; b) a state of gradual fall, during which the people in question lost their proper piety and humanity, while becoming rich, lazy, deluded, and decadent; c) the dis-illusioning experience of defeat and foreign domination, which forced them to realize their failings; d) a process of repentance, through which they gradually recover their moral and religious bearing; e) escape from bondage, restoration of political independence, moral righteousness, and proper relation to god: a step normally set in the future. The scenario I have sketched most closely follows the interpretation Israel's exilic prophets gave to military defeat by Assyria and Babylon,[17] but similar (if less elaborate) strains of self-chastising discourse are attested in Babylonian responses to defeat by Persians,[18] Persian responses to defeat by Greeks and Arabs,[19] and certain Roman responses to sufferings of the Civil Wars.[20]
3. Millennarian revolt. When defeat is construed as divine humiliation, what happens when the cathartic process of repentance has been completed? Or, to put the problem in its most acute form, when a conquered people feels it has recovered its proper moral and religious status, its full measure of humanity, subjectivity, and agency, also its ideal relation with the divine, but still remains oppressed and exploited, what then is to be done? Foreign conquerors are not easily persuaded to depart, nor is it easy to drive them out. Straightforward calculations of a military and political sort would lead one to judge most attempts at insurrection against more powerful overlords ill advised, even suicidal. And yet, such insurrections do occur, and sometimes even succeed, fueled by a conviction that supernatural assistance is available, either by virtue of the completion of some cosmic cycle (typically, a period of 1000 years), or through the miraculous appearance of a charismatic hero (in both theological and Weberian senses). Such salvific figures take many forms: angelic beings, sons of a god, inspired prophets or their descendants, revivified mythic heroes, and pretenders in royal lines dethroned by imperial conquest. In all cases, however, messianic figures of this sort embody the conviction that there are forms of power superior to those of brute force, through which the Evil Empire can be defeated. Whether such heroes exist only in popular fantasy or are instantiated in the human actors who claim such roles, they can inspire a dominated people to rise up, believing that divine favor and superior moral/religious status (as embodied in such figures) will ensure victory over oppressors and a salvation simultaneously this- and other-worldly. Further, perception of their overlords as more corrupt, more debased, more impious -- indeed, less fully human -- than themselves also helps rebels justify their own violent means. Such situations are well attested in Roman Israel[21] and Zoroastrian Iran,[22] but one can also perceive similar dynamics in the rebellions of Spartacus, Vercingetorix, Civilis, and others,[23] also -- with important modifications -- in the emergence of Shi’a Islam.[24]