[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
The book under review is a collection of select papers originally presented at a conference on the topic of religious approaches to the legitimization and delegitimization of violence in antiquity held at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2019, which attracted scholars from five different continents. After disruption by the global pandemic this has now been published as the 26th volume of the Hamburger Studien zu Gesellschaften und Kulturen der Vormoderne.[1] To the benefit of the English-speaking reader, all but one of the papers originally written in German are provided in English translation.
The introduction provides an authoritative guide to the major themes of the volume. Particularly relevant is the discussion of the absence of an ancient emic term for what the modern word ‘religion’ can convey and of the resulting difficulties one encounters when approaching this field. As a cautious methodological solution, the aspect of (de)legitimization or ‘patterns of justification’ (p. 29 / p. 15 in the German) is brought to the foreground throughout the entire volume. With this step, Breuer and Walter attempt a ‘shift in another line of inquiry’, one concerned with the detection of ‘religious aspects involved in approaches to the legitimation (sic) of violence’ (p. 30 / p. 17 in the German). The emphasis on (de)legitimization restricts the corpus to literary evidence. The authors consciously avoid a precise definition of core concepts such as ‘religion’ and ‘violence’ but subscribe to generic descriptions of these terms in order to cast their nets as widely as possible, at the risk of diminishing coherence. Violence, for example, is defined so as to encompass both physical and non-physical (i.e. verbal) violence, structural as well as cultural forms of it (p. 28 / p. 15 in the German). Similarly, the term ‘religious approaches’ in the title of the volume is designed to operate as an umbrella covering as many different connotations of ‘religious’ as possible: the religion of the protagonist of a literary work or of its author, the behavior of an individual or a collective connected to religious systems, and the religion of a separate other with whom one interacts on either friendly or hostile terms (p. 27-28 / p. 14-15 in the German).
At times, the impact of the helpful methodological remarks by Breuer and Walter do not extend further than the introduction itself. Some contributions opt for other definitions; see, for example, Stratton’s use of ‘violence’ as purely physical at p. 107). The distinctions of the various forms of violence could have served as useful markers to guide the reader through individual papers, which often involve jumping into completely different terrains. In fact, the scope of the volume stretches over a millennium, from the fifth century BCE to almost the fifth century CE and, in addition to late antique Christianity, also covers pagan religion in Greek and Roman Antiquity as well as Judaism and perceived “atheism”. The following summary of select contributions shows how vast of an array of different themes come together in this ambitious and challenging study of how religion shaped patterns in the justification of violence in antiquity.
The journey begins with violence against “perceived atheists”, such as the trials of Anaxagoras, Diagoras, and Protagoras in fifth-century BCE Athens. Alexandra Eppinger assesses whether these events can count as state-sanctioned violence against atheists. After some insightful terminological remarks on ἀθεότης and ἀσέβεια (with the former term meaning ‘forsaken by the gods’ rather than ‘atheist’ in the modern sense and the latter covering a vast array of different forms of religious transgression including the denial of the gods), she deems the trials analyzed to fall short of providing evidence for state-sanctioned violence against people denying the existence of the gods. Nevertheless, Eppinger concludes that the legal offence of ἀσέβεια provided an effective institutional framework to fight non-conformists through state violence legitimized by religion.
With the next contribution, the volume takes a drastic turn towards the field of myth. For mythical heroes, too, operate within a religious framework, and their violent actions are also subject to strategies of (de)legitimization. In this vein, Iris Sulimani explores how Diodorus presents the acts of violence performed by the gods in his Mythographia as part of their dual nature, contrasting the gods’ violence towards bad humans with their rewarding of virtue. Similarly, later in the volume Kathleen Hirsch analyses Prudentius’ allegorical portrayal of the conflict between Virtues and Vices in the Psychomachia as a legitimate internal civil war.
Arnold Bärtschi offers the Roman counterpart to the structural violence encountered previously in Eppinger’s paper with focus on prodigies in the Roman Republic. His approach, however, is distinctively literary in comparison to Eppinger’s stronger historical imprint. By looking at the historiography of the self-sacrifice of Manius Curtius, human sacrifices at the cattle market, capital punishment of unchaste Vestal priestesses, and the deportation of intersex infants, Bärtschi highlights ‘specific strategies of legitimization’ in the narratives reporting about these events (p. 99). Each of these different strategies depends on the particular circumstances of the respective narrative. The difference between the voluntary sacrifice of Manius Curtius for the greater good of the community and the human sacrifice of foreigners (i.e., involuntary) in face of external invasion could not be greater. Bärtschi presents these different narrative strategies of legitimization of prodigies in each author.
The volume proceeds to explore legitimizations of violence in different religious constellations. Kimberly Stratton’s analysis of Jewish and Christian literary reactions to the Judeo-Roman conflict, for example, involves an interreligious scenario. She understands approaches to religious legitimization of Roman violence in the first and second century CE as attempts at “find[ing] meaning after a catastrophic event” (p. 106). After examining how Flavius Josephus justifies the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans and comparing it to the destruction by the Babylonians, she uses the writings of Justin the Martyr as source texts to demonstrate how conflict over restoring meaning after the Bar Kokhba revolt contributed to the creation of distinct Christian and Jewish identities Her chapter emphasizes the role religion plays in the construction of identity, a feature not frequently brought up throughout the volume. In addition, Stratton’s analysis of the balance that Josephus had to strike among all the different targeted audiences, including his Roman and Judean readers as well as his patron, Titus, is remarkable. Stratton argues that the past as well as the way in which one had made sense of it became a ‘paradigm to explain violence’ (p. 112). This mechanism which allows for legitimization to be grounded on a correlation with the past forms an underappreciated aspect of the topic.
A decisive factor which heavily shapes legitimization of violence is its direction, be it towards a person or groups, states, or even ideas. Iconoclasm, a distinct form of violence directed at objects, is showcased by Marcela Caressa who argues that Rufinus, in his History of the Church, attempts to legitimize violence against pagan statues by including the pre-Christian city of Canopus into his narrative. By alluding to this mythical Egyptian city famous for the cult of several idols from the Hellenistic period and destroyed during the fourth century CE, Rufinus draws attention to the material nature of cult statues: made by men they could also be destroyed by them. This, according to Caressa, forms Rufinus’s own contribution to the larger debate around the representability of the divine which took place during Late Antiquity.
Intrareligious constellations are brought to the foreground by the Donatist controversy which forms the topic of the papers of Maijastina Kahlos and Liliane Marti. Both authors focus on Augustine’s legitimization of state-violence directed against the Donatists. Kahlos analyzes the conflicting attempts at legitimizing and delegitimizing this state-sanctioned violence between Augustine and his Donatist correspondent, Petilianus. Augustine defends the Roman administration’s persecution of the Donatists as an ultimate mean to bring them back to what he perceived to be the true faith. Moreover, Augustine denies the Donatists the state of martyrs by reminding Petilianus that one needed to suffer for the right reasons to be considered such. This did not apply to Donatists whom Augustine compares to false prophets. The nature of the evidence, Augustine’s Contra litteras Petiliani, which depicts only one side of the discussion, makes it difficult to fathom the other side of the debate; Petilianus’ attempt at delegitimizing the state’s violence against the Donatists and therefore the potentially revealing dynamic of contradicting approaches at (de)legitimization can, only be partially reconstructed. Marti, instead, focuses, more on the internal dialogue within Augustine’s writings. Her contribution highlights the development of Augustine’s opinion on the topic of violence over the years, one which was influenced also by his duties and especially by his concerns as bishop of a flock on the brink of extinction. The Augustinian formula ‘coge intrare’ (‘force them to enter’) is characterized as a coping strategy which is both problem-oriented and meaning-based, that is concerned with bringing back the Donatists and with establishing Augustine’s orthodox position (p. 165).
The volume’s wide range of topics and the diversity of the examples covered is clearly a strong point, however, as with so many conference proceedings, it suffers from a lack of coherence, both in content as well as presentation (evidenced by different modes of referencing ancient sources and different spelling conventions across contributions). This does not, however, constitute an obstacle to the interested reader and shall not distract from the merits of the book, which provides detailed insight into several religious attempts at (de)legitimizing violence in Antiquity. The volume presents an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted perspective on this fascinating subject.
Authors and Titles
- Johannes Breuer and Jochen Walter, Introduction.
- Alexandra Eppinger, ‘Godless!’ – Legitimising Violence in Fifth-Century BCE Athens.
- Iris Sulimani, Religious Legitimization of Violence in Diodorus’ Mythography.
- Arnold Bärtschi, ‘For the Greater Good’ – Literary Elaboration and Legitimisation of Use of Violence Against Humans in Roman Expiation of Prodigies.
- Kimberly B. Stratton, Religious Legitimation of Violence and the Restoration of Social Coherence – Jewish and Christian Responses to the Judeo-Roman Wars (70-136 CE).
- Marcela Caressa, The Myth of Canopus – Religion and Conflict in Rufinus’ Church History.
- Matijastina Kahlos, Swords or Cudgels? – Augustine, Petilianus and (De)legitimizing Religious Violence.
- Liliane Marti, ‘Zwinge sie einzutreten!‘ – Augustinus’ (De-)Legitimationsansätze von Gewalt im Donatistenstreit.
- Kathleen M. Kirsch, Imagining Holiness – Legitimized Warfare in Prudentius’s Psychomachia.
Notes
[1] Recent contributions on the topic include J. Dijkstra and R. Raschle, Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and M. Gale, M. and J. H.D.Scourfield (eds) Texts and Violence in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2018).