Is there a form of violence that is particularly Western in conceptualization and justification? Is it rooted in the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage of the West? These are the questions that medieval historian Philippe Buc sets out to answer in his examination of holy war, martyrdom, and terror. Over the course of seven chapters, bracketed by a lengthy introduction and brief conclusion, Buc offers a tour of the horizon of Western history from the first century A.D. to the present, considering events in Europe, the Near East, and the United States. He concludes that violence in the West has been characterized by “a series of paradoxical pairings (and the tensions they generated): Old and New, letter and spirit, war and peace, election and universalism, coercion and liberty” (p. 288). Buc traces these binary poles for the organization of society, and particularly the use of violence in this ordering, back to a thoroughly Christian vision, developed on the basis of Jewish models. He argues it still provides an intellectual framework for Western elites and masses.
Buc's introduction addresses the methodological challenge of making sweeping claims about lengthy periods, based on selected episodes somehow illuminating and representative of Western traditions of violence. He then presents his exemplars of Western patterns of religious violence. These are Augustine's arguments regarding coercion of heretics to accept freedom from error; European crusades to the Holy Land 1095–1291; the Hussite movement in Bohemia during the fifteenth century; the sixteenth-century French wars of religion; the French Revolution; and the wars of colonial America and the postcolonial United States.
Chapter 1 offers a detailed treatment of what Buc identifies as a specifically Western way of war, with a focus on the wars carried out by the governments of colonial America and then the United States. He argues that such wars are guided by the belief that fighting morally cleanses both the enemy and one's own side. American leaders and people understand their wars as merciful. They see war as driving History forward and fight to produce freedom (intentionally for the world as a whole), and the American soldiers who die in them are martyrs. The chapter concludes by connecting these characteristics central to the conduct of American wars to a lengthy Judeo-Christian, Western tradition of war-theorizing from late antiquity onward.
In chapter 2, Buc details the contradiction of Christianity as an ostensibly pacifist religion that nonetheless sanctions holy war. He rejects traditional explanations that a war-accepting development occurred in Christian theology during the fourth century, in favor of a view held by a small minority of specialists that earliest Christianity sanctioned violence, reflecting the violent messianism of Jewish thought in the first century A.D. In this context, Buc focuses on the idea that violence was permitted and indeed was incumbent upon those who believed that they lived at the end of days.
Buc turns in chapter 3 to the question of why the perpetrators of religious violence tend to be thought mad. Already in the Enlightenment Voltaire saw religious frenzy and violence as madness. Buc observes parallels between how the first-century A.D. Jewish writer Josephus interpreted his co-religionists' great revolt against Roman authority and modern depictions of terrorists, like the Red Army Faction, as mad. Buc then challenges this entire tradition, arguing that we need not consider the perpetrators of religious violence mad—they are more properly understood as participants in a society infused with Judaeo-Christian acceptance of violence at the End.
Chapter 4 again proposes that “deep structures of Christianity” led Western political cultures to link the ideas of external war to internal purification. Buc argues that Western societies share a view of History in which vengeance and retribution play a pivotal role. He explores these ideas in the actions of martyrs, whom he depicts as seeking to accelerate the end of times, and in the punishment of their enemies. He draws connections between the Christian martyrs of late antiquity and more modern figures, including John Brown, who presented himself as martyr for the anti-slavery cause following his assault on Harper's Ferry.
Buc argues in chapter 5 that the responsibility for purifying the world by self-sacrifice moved steadily downward from the princes to the ordinary individual over the course of the Middle Ages. In making this case, he focuses on several major historical episodes, including King Louis IX of France's crusade, Jean D'Arc's participation in the Hundred Year's War, and the Hussite religious movement in fifteenth-century Bohemia. Throughout the chapter, Buc returns to the argument that participants justified their religious violence because the End was approaching.
Buc addresses the seeming dichotomy between liberty and coercion in chapter 6: governments and religious movements sought, and seek, to compel their opponents to give up particular practices and beliefs, while at the same time proclaiming that their struggle is for liberty. Here he stresses the Christian idea that true liberty entails freedom from sin, which requires subjugation to God. This understanding of liberty permitted and even required Christians to accept martyrdom and undertake holy wars.
Buc’ final chapter challenges the idea that there is a peculiarly modern form of violence. In this most satisfying section of the book, Buc explains how ignorance of premodern times alone makes modern memorialization of war dead, systematic doubt about friends and enemies, and views of the individual's role in driving forward History seem novel. Individuals in the premodern West understood clearly their role in bringing about a desired end time. The brief conclusion reiterates Buc's main arguments, and then looks to the future. He suggests that for religious violence, past is prologue.
This challenging book is written in a highly technical style and often veers into jargon that will be unfamiliar to non-medievalists. Its argumentation is problematic; as with all wide-ranging arguments based on selected examples and analogies, one wonders if the material presented is representative or just chosen to fit the model. And Buc's overall argument that “deep structures” of Christianity played and continue to play important roles in all facets of contemporary violence will not convince everyone. At numerous points in his text the support Buc presents for his claims is inadequate. For instance, in the first chapter the Jewish Qumran texts and military imagery in fourth-century Christian writing are weak foundations for Buc's idea that earliest Christianity was not irenic but tolerated violence. In any case, if it can be shown that Christian theology did develop militancy as an acceptable means of ending time, then early Christian militancy becomes less important.
With few exceptions, Buc connects elite thought and popular action too tenuously to bolster his conclusion that Christian teaching propelled violence on the ground. This gap appears when Buc suggests George W. Bush operated within an eschatological framework, but does not show the mechanisms by which the U.S. president might have gained this understanding of the world. The same gap is most striking in Buc's discussion of the First Crusade. For him, the image of the crusaders practicing cannibalism presented in a small number of contemporary sources proves that all crusaders believed they were participating in an apocalyptic event. Perhaps Raymond of Aguilers, who actually mentioned cannibalism, was attempting to make this connection, but the chasm between this clerical writer and the soldiers on this campaign is simply too great to leap.
That said, Buc has opened a conversation about an important topic of great relevance in the contemporary world. Scholars of non-Christian societies should join the conversation to help understand religious violence. As Islam developed in synergy with Judaism and Christianity, a comparable study of religious violence in the historical Islamic world would be welcome.
