Recall that Freud and René Girard argued that it is not religion that leads to violence. It is violence that leads to religion. We saw in the last chapter how that led to Girard’s theory of the scapegoat as the primal religious rite. However, he went on to ask how violence begins in the first place. Freud consistently claimed that the initiating violence, in both individual and group psychology, arises from the tension between fathers and sons, the Oedipus complex. Girard cast his net wider. Violence is born in what he called mimetic desire (from mimesis, meaning ‘imitation’).
Mimetic desire is wanting what someone else has because they have it. This is behaviour we often see in children. When one child is given a new toy, the others suddenly discover that they want it. They may never have wanted it before, but they do now because someone else has it. Mimetic desire is not just wanting to have what someone else has. Ultimately it is wanting to be what someone else is. Desiring ‘this man’s art, and that man’s scope’, we wish we were them. This is mimetic desire. Often it leads to violence, because if I want what you have, sooner or later we will fight. Girard then suggested that one of the prime sources of strife is not between father and son but between brothers: sibling rivalry.
Myth and religious narrative bear this out. Genesis is full of such relationships: Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. The first murder is a fratricide: Cain killing Abel. In Egyptian myth there are Set and Osiris. The Greek equivalents are Atreus and Thyestes. The story of Hamlet begins with a fratricide: Claudius kills his brother, Hamlet’s father, and takes his throne.
The founding myth of Rome is a story of two brothers, Romulus and Remus, who argue over where the city should be built. Romulus kills Remus and in a famous poem, Horace says that a curse has lain over the city ever since:
A bitter destiny dogs the Romans
The guilt of a brother’s murder
Since Remus’ innocent blood poured on the ground,
A curse on Rome’s posterity.1
The irony is that Freud himself knew the significance of sibling rivalry and felt it deeply, but seems to have been so obsessed with the Oedipus complex that he failed to give it its due weight. It was his colleague Alfred Adler who focused on sibling rivalry. Yet whenever Freud spoke about it, he did so with blazing intensity. In The Interpretation of Dreams he writes, ‘The elder child ill-treats the younger, maligns him and robs him of his toys; while the younger is consumed with impotent rage against the elder, envies and fears him, or meets his oppressor with the first stirrings of a love of liberty and a sense of justice.’2
In a letter to the novelist Thomas Mann, he says about Napoleon’s relationship with his older brother Joseph, ‘The elder brother is the natural rival; the younger one feels for him an elemental, unfathomably deep hostility for which in later life the expressions “death wish” and “murderous intent” may be found appropriate. To eliminate Joseph, to take his place, to become Joseph himself, must have been Napoleon’s strongest emotion as a small child.’3
In a lecture on ‘Femininity’ he said, ‘But what the child grudges the unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother…we rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development.’4
We know that Freud felt intensely hostile towards his younger brother Julius, born in 1857 when Freud was seventeen months old. Julius died before his first birthday. Freud admitted to a lifelong feeling of guilt for wishing to be rid of him.5 Did he displace these feelings by focusing instead on fathers and sons?
What Freud would not have known, since it is a relatively recent biological finding, is that sibling rivalry is not confined to humans. Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in More than Kin and Less than Kind.6 In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes.
In many species the urge for dominance is part of the instinct for survival. Food supplies are scarce, and the competition to be first in the queue may spell the difference between life and death. Egrets, for example, give birth to multiple young who hatch out at different stages. The first two, born earlier and with an advantage of size and strength over their younger siblings, peck at them aggressively until a mere gesture – stretching the neck – is sufficient to induce submission.
Among birds, chicks quickly establish a hierarchy of their own – the origin of the phrase ‘pecking order’. The older use their strength to get the first bite of food. Some animals, like spade-foot tadpoles, eat their own siblings if starved of other nutrition. Others like the black stork have been seen throwing the youngest of a brood out of the nest, the better to ensure the survival of those that remain.
This is the first point. The primal act of violence is fratricide not parricide. Sibling rivalry plays a central role in human conflict, and it begins with mimetic desire, the desire to have what your brother has, or even be what your brother is.
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The second stage of the journey takes us to the post-Holocaust years when a French historian, Jules Isaac, who survived the war but lost his wife and daughter at Auschwitz, began to assemble the evidence of the long history of Christian anti-Jewish teachings that he called ‘the teachings of contempt’. His work came to the attention of Pope John XXIII, and the two met in 1961. This may have been one of the factors that led the pope and his successor Paul VI to institute the process that culminated in Vatican II in 1965, and the document Nostra Aetate that transformed the relationship between the Catholic Church and other faiths, especially the Jews.7
Beginning around this time, a group of courageous Christian theologians began themselves to explore the roots of Christian anti-Judaism. They included figures like Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gregory Baum, Edward Flannery, Paul Van Buren, R. Kendall Soulen, Mary Boys and the novelist James Carroll.8 The question hovering in the background of their work was: how was the Holocaust possible in the heart of Christian Europe?
The Holocaust was not the result of Christianity; it is important to state this categorically at the outset. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi pointed out, Christianity had an interest in the preservation of Jews, not their destruction.9 The history of Christian–Jewish relations is not one of unrelieved darkness.10 There were bishops who defended Jews at times of persecution, and popes who rejected anti-Jewish myths like the Blood Libel. And though there were massacres, there were also times when Jews flourished under Christian rulers.
While the Holocaust was taking place, there were Christians who saved Jews, among them the members of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who, under the inspiration of Lutheran pastor André Trocmé, gave shelter to five thousand Jews. Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses helped Jews to safety. There were Christian opponents of Hitler like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. There were the more than twenty-five thousand individual heroes, memorialised in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, who saved lives. There were collective acts of heroism like the members of the Danish Resistance who saved most of Danish Jewry from death. And it is important to note also that many Jews were saved by Muslims during these years, a story told by Robert Satloff in his book Among the Righteous.11
More than a century before the Holocaust, the poet Heinrich Heine made a remarkable prophecy:
Christianity – and that is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame…Then…a play will be performed in Germany which will make the Frenc
h Revolution look like an innocent idyll.
It was Christianity that prevented tragedy, thought Heine, by standing between Germany and its pagan roots. Lose it and the dark gods of blood and brutality would return.
What the post-Holocaust theologians searched for were the roots of the Church’s hostility to Jews. That is not my concern here: in any case, it is an internal conversation within Christianity. My argument in this chapter will be simple. It has to do with narrative and identity: the stories we tell ourselves to explain who we are. It turns out that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all define themselves by a set of narratives about the factor identified by Girard and felt by Freud to lie at the root of violence, namely, sibling rivalry. This is where we need to focus our attention if we are to understand and heal the hate that leads to violence in the name of God.
Sibling rivalry is, as we noted, a central motif of the book of Genesis: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, and Joseph and his brothers. It is a key theme of Judaism. However, during the early years of Christianity it became a theme there as well, most notably in the writings of Paul. Something similar happened later with the birth of Islam.
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Paul is one of the most complex figures in the history of religion. Thousands of books have been written about him, and there are major differences of opinion about his personality, his theology, and especially his relationship with Jews and Judaism. It is not my intention here to advance any view about these issues, but simply to reflect on his use of the Genesis sibling rivalry narratives.
Paul was a Jew, originally named Saul, who was at first strongly opposed to the first Christians and had been one of their persecutors. He was on one such mission to Damascus when he experienced a conversion experience that changed his life, turning him into Christianity’s first and greatest theologian. Paul never met Jesus: his conversion took place some years after Jesus’ death. Yet his writings, mainly in the form of letters to Christian communities, form the first Christian texts, preceding the Gospels.
Paul took a controversial stand on the nature of the new faith. Many of the early Christians, like Paul himself, were Jews. Initially they differed from their co-religionists only in their belief that the Messiah had come. Most believed that Jesus’ mission was primarily to the Jews. Accordingly, they kept Jewish law, including circumcision, the prohibition of work on the Sabbath and Judaism’s strict dietary restrictions. Led by Jesus’ brother James, they are known as the Jerusalem church.
Paul thought otherwise. To understand why, we have to set him in context. Israel at the time was under Roman rule. We know from several sources of the period that many Gentiles in the wider Roman Empire were attracted to various aspects of Judaism. To some they were known as the ‘God-fearers’. Josephus speaks about them. So does the New Testament. So do Roman writers, among them Tacitus, Juvenal and Celsus. Seneca saw the irony in non-Jews adopting Jewish ways: ‘The vanquished have given their laws to the victors’, he said. The God-fearers were not full converts. They were drawn to some elements of Judaism, not all. Then as now, the concept of Jewish identity had fuzzy edges. There were people who were not fully Jewish according to Jewish law, but who identified with the people and its faith.
It was among this group that Paul’s teachings resonated, especially when he showed that to be a Christian it was not necessary either to be circumcised or to keep the full Mosaic code with its multiple (613) commands. In fact, he argued, the new dispensation changed the very terms of the covenant. It was no longer a matter of law but of faith. In essence, Paul had founded the Gentile, or de-ethnicised, church. As a result he was faced with an immense problem. How could Christianity be at one and the same time a continuation of Judaism and yet a radically transformed faith – in the people it addressed, the life it espoused and the story it told? This tension haunted Paul and everything he set in motion.
Often he reminded his listeners that he was a Jew. What then was his attitude to his fellow Jews? On this he is notoriously ambiguous. On the one hand, understandably, he was often critical of them. He believed he had seen the light, they had not. He was convinced that something decisive had occurred to change the relationship between God and the world, but they did not. On the other hand, he was clearly attached to his people and said so. They had been the first to hear the call of God and to enter into a covenant with him. In Romans 9–11, he says that to the Jews belong ‘the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises’ (KJV, 9:4). Theirs is the tree onto which a new olive branch had been grafted (11:16–24). A measure of ambivalence was inevitable, given the path he had taken. In any case, Paul himself said that he spoke differently to different audiences (1 Cor. 9:20–21), as if to remind his listeners and those who read his writings that context mattered in understanding what he was saying.
It is hard to read Paul without being distracted by the immense burden of history, of all that has happened to Christianity and Judaism and their followers in the intervening centuries. He lived a tempestuous life in tempestuous times. During his lifetime, there was no such thing as ‘Christianity’ as we now understand it. The decisive break with Judaism had not yet taken place. There was an intense argument within the Church itself as to what the new faith required, and even if it was a new faith at all. The Gospels had not yet been written. There was as yet no ‘New Testament’. Doctrine had not yet been formulated. The Jewish world was in ferment, chafing under sometimes harsh and arbitrary Roman rule. Jewry was itself divided into Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. We know from rabbinic sources that there was intense internecine rivalry. Trying to reconstruct those times, we see as through a glass darkly.
One detail only of the Pauline letters will concern us in this chapter, namely sibling rivalry itself, for it was Paul who introduced the theme into Christianity. Here is how he puts the argument in Galatians, a document most historians agree to be among the earlier of his writings in the New Testament:
Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise.
These things may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: this is Hagar. Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother…
Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. At that time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does the Scripture say? ‘Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.’ Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman. (Gal. 4:21–31)
Recall the story to which Paul is referring. God had promised Abraham and Sarah a child. Yet the years pass, and there is no child. We sense Abraham’s torment in his first recorded words to God: ‘Lord God, what will you give me, since I continue to be childless?’ (Gen. 15:2). Eventually Sarah proposed that Abraham should have a child by her servant Hagar. She would become, as it were, a surrogate mother. Hagar conceives and has a child named Ishmael. Eventually Sarah does indeed have a son, Isaac, and she then insists that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. It is a difficult story, and we will examine it in greater depth in a later chapter.
What Paul is doing in his letter to the Galatians is to reverse Jewish self-understanding. Jews are, we say in our prayers several times daily, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is constitutive of Jewish memory, history and identity. Paul argues otherwise. For him, Sarah represents Christianity while Hagar is Judaism. Christians are free, Jews are slaves.
Christians are Isaac, Jews are Ishmael. Christians belong, while Jews are to be driven away.
It may be hard for a Christian to understand how a Jew feels when he or she reads these texts. It feels like being disinherited, violated, robbed of an identity. This is my past, my ancestry, my story, and here is Paul saying it is not mine at all, it is his and all who travel with him.
Context matters if we are to understand Paul. He was addressing a community that had come under the influence of those who believed that Christians entering the Abrahamic covenant had to keep the Mosaic law with all its strenuous demands. This, for Paul, was completely to misunderstand what Christianity was. The new dispensation bound people to God through faith, not law. Paul had somehow to convince his listeners that they, not the people who kept the law of Moses, were the true children of Abraham. That is what he is doing in this speech. Paul is talking not to Jews but to Christian Judaisers. It was one of the main struggles of his life and he had not yet won. He was fighting, as he saw it, for the soul of the Church.
Paul continued the argument in his letter to the Romans. By now, though, older and more reflective, he testified to his fondness for the Jewish people into which he had been born and whose refusal to accept the new dispensation caused him such distress. But he insisted nonetheless that it is the followers of Jesus, not those of Moses, who are the true children of Abraham:
[N]ot all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, ‘It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.’ In other words, it is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring. For this was how the promise was stated: At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.’ (NIV, Rom. 9:6–9)
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