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

Abstract

Philippe Buc’s ambitious new study concerns the relationship of what is described as religion to certain forms of violence over the last two thousand years in ‘the cultural areas located in what was, circa 1500, Roman Catholic Europe (plus, an offshoot of the Protestant branch, what became the United States of America)’. He expressly omits Eastern Orthodox Christianity, claiming that Byzantium ‘did not know holy war’ (Heraclius?), and Islam, although he includes the Jewish war of 66–73 CE, primarily as an archetype for subsequent Christian violence. Categories analysed are restricted to holy war, the use of terror and terrorism, and martyrdom, seen as an exchange of violence between oppressor and victim. The wider contexts of social or judicial violence, for example the blood feud or legal punishment, are not considered. The case-studies range from Josephus’ account of the Jewish wars to the crusades (especially the First), the sixteenth-century French wars of religion, the English Civil War, colonial America, the French Revolution, the modern United States, Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s, and the Baader-Meinhof gang in 1970s Germany. A central unifying theme is the ubiquity of utopian models of assumptions and action precisely derived from Christian apocalyptic writing, especially the Book of Revelation. This strenuous display of comparative erudition is deployed to support two related arguments. One is specific, that so-called Modernity in the ‘West’ betrays close inheritance and continuity from its pre-Modern, Christian past, primarily in public and political attitudes and performance. In part, this tackles current questions of how religion informs theories and practices of justified violence as an intrinsic element or specious excuse. More generally, Buc insists that such mimetic behaviour operates at a level beyond superficial or familiar rituals. Utopian movements—crusades, religious war, secular revolutionary radicalism, Christian fundamentalism—do not simply assume the guise of religion or pseudo-religious ideology as a cover for ‘actual, concrete problems and crises’. Their utopian vision, derived from Christian eschatology, ‘orients and constrains action’. This conclusion reconfigures discussion of whether religions necessarily are nurseries of violence by concentrating not on their general transcendent theological claims but in detail on Christian ideas of the End of Time, and hence on the nature of historical processes and of the individual’s or society’s place in them.