Jesus Wars

by John Philip Jenkins

  The Monopoly of Violence

  But even if religious believers are outraged by some deviant creed, then or now, that does not of itself mean that violence will ensue. Rather, violence occurs when the state has neither the will nor the ability to restrain highly motivated private groups. This condition might arise from extreme state weakness and the breakdown of public institutions, but state agencies might consciously decide to ally with private groups. In either case, the state loses what sociologist Max Weber famously described as its monopoly of violence, and the consequences for political stability can be dreadful. Violence breeds violence, without any external forces to bring it to an end.

  This is what happened in the fifth century, when the forces of church and empire were still unsure about the appropriate limits of each other’s power. Yes, the empire was Christian, and church leaders should be accorded all due prestige and favor. But where exactly did their power end in terms of suppressing paganism or fighting religious rivals? By 400, emperors gave very mixed signals about just how far they were prepared to let church authorities go in terms of serving as agencies of government, with the powers of coercion and enforcement that this involved. However hard dedicated civil officials tried to keep the peace at councils, they faced a losing battle when the imperial court failed to back their decisions.38

  Meanwhile, radical new religious currents transformed ideas of the basis of power, giving vast authority to charismatic religious leaders. In the new Christian vision, the rejection of sexuality and the material world led God to grant amazing supernatural power to his chosen followers, and these gifts were best manifested in visions and healing miracles. Potentially, this strength outmatched any amount of force that the secular world could deploy against it. The thousands who abandoned worldly society—the monks and hermits—became the heroes and role models for those who could not bear to make the full sacrifice. And far from challenging this alternative world of spiritual power, with its parallel hierarchies, worldly leaders sought rather to imitate it. Even the imperial family now aspired to goals of world rejection and celibacy, and they listened carefully to the pronouncements of saints and visionaries.

  By the fifth century, bishops and other Christian leaders could mobilize an impressive amount of muscle to promote their causes, making them powerful independent political actors. The church became not so much a state within a state, as a parallel state mechanism. Bishops commanded the absolute loyalty of their faithful clergy and other followers, much as secular lords and patricians could rely on their clients. Monks especially served as private militias, holy head-breakers whom charismatic bishops could turn out at will to sack pagan temples, rough up or kill opponents, and overawe rival theologians. These were not rogue monks or clergy gone bad, but faithful followers of the church, doing exactly what was expected of them over and above their disciplines of prayer, meditation, and healing. When cities or regions divided along lines of theology or faith, rival bishops and monks literally fought for domination in the hills and on the streets.39

  Driving extremism was the concept of honor. Throughout the centuries, ideas of honor have often served as an underappreciated component of religious conflict, and not just within Christianity. Looking at the conduct of some church institutions in these years, it is tempting to draw half-joking parallels to modern criminal or terrorist organizations—at times, the patriarchate of Alexandria did behave like the Sopranos. But such a comparison is more plausible than it may appear, in that both in ancient and modern times, Mediterranean societies were cemented together by certain cultural themes: clientage and patronage, honor and revenge, devotion to family and clan. Honor and family dominated social relations in different regions of the Roman Empire, and in extreme circumstances these had to be defended by force. Much of everyday life revolved around a constant series of honor challenges, ripostes, and one-upmanship. People struggled to assert the honor of their group and, hardly less important, inflict shame upon rivals. If we do not understand the ritualized forms of blood feud and vendetta, we stand no chance of comprehending Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies, whether in the fifth century or the twenty-first.

  Although monks and clergy pledged to renounce those ideas of personal honor as meaningless vanity, they easily transferred these loyalties to institutions. This might mean a new loyalty to the church as a whole, or to a particular see or monastery, and clergy fought for that church or religious house with all the zeal they might earlier have applied to defending the honor of a city or a clan. Defeated rivals had to be shamed formally, with all the ritual symbolism of degradation and submission available to church and empire. We can hardly comprehend the astonishing venom that marked the long battle between the great churches of Antioch and Alexandria unless we realize that we are dealing here with a quite literal blood feud that spanned a century or more. In later eras, the idea of satisfying aggrieved honor even became central to Western theology. Around 1100, the monk Anselm depicted Christ as the only sacrifice meritorious enough to pay the debt of honor to God, which he did through his death on the cross. This theory of the atonement became standard for both Catholic and Protestant churches.40

  Lay people, too, joined in the battles through mobs and organized gangs, as religion served as a cultural badge in struggles for political power. As a later parallel, we might compare the religious factions with the gang structures of nineteenth-century urban America, as commemorated by Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York. Constantinople—New Rome—worked in very similar ways. Street gangs mobilized the masses, but not just for mindless intertribal violence. These gangs overlapped with political factions and government, and the keenest struggles raged over official influence and patronage. Regional rivalries also featured, as ordinary people came to identify particular leaders, particular schools of thought, with their own cities and homelands.41

  Religious passions even extended to the two great sports factions in the Hippodrome, adopting the flag of the Orthodox (Blue) or Monophysite (Green). To imagine a modern parallel, we would have to suppose that current debates within the Anglican Communion were fought out at international soccer matches, between tens of thousands of football hooligans, representing the churches of (for instance) England and Nigeria. Each side would be heavily armed with knives and Molotov cocktails; each would have its distinctive colors, slogans, and banners—placards, for instance, bearing the likeness of England’s Rowan Williams on one side, of Nigerian primate Peter Akinola on the other. Nigerian mobs would yell for scriptural inerrancy, the English for interpreting the Bible in the light of reason and evolving standards of decency. At the end of the day, each side would tally its dead and maimed.

  Christianity and Islam

  Out-of-control clergy, religious demagogues with their consecrated militias, religious parties usurping the functions of the state…It all sounds like the worst stereotypes of contemporary radical Islam, in Iran and Somalia, Iraq and Lebanon. And then, as now, the problem lay not in any characteristics of the religion itself, of its doctrines or Scriptures, but in the state’s inability to control private violence. Just a century after the conversion of the Roman empire, Christian churches were acting precisely on the lines of the most extreme Islamic mullahs today. This in itself suggests that none of the violence or intolerance commonly seen in modern-day Islam is, so to speak, in the DNA of that religion but just reflects particular social and political circumstances.

  An event that occurred in Constantinople around the year 511 suggests the parallels. The church of the day had a beloved hymn, the Trisagion or Thrice Holy, which praised, “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal” (Orthodox churches sing it to this day). But the emperor, Anastasius, wanted to revise it in the Monophysite fashion, by lauding this God “Who was crucified for our sakes.” The new formula proclaimed that it was God alone who walked the soil of Palestine in the first century and suffered on the cross, a view that ignores the human reality of Jesus. So angry were the capital’s residents that they launched
a bloody riot:

  Persons of rank and station were brought into extreme danger, and many principal parts of the city were set on fire. In the house of Marinus the Syrian, the populace found a monk from the country. They cut off his head, saying that the clause had been added at his instigation; and having fixed it upon a pole, jeeringly exclaimed: “See the plotter against the Trinity!”42

  We can imagine the response if, in the twenty-first century, a Muslim mob beheaded a dissident theologian and paraded the grisly trophy around the streets. Not only would the crime be (properly) denounced, but Westerners would assume that such behavior was part of the fundamental character of that religion—a bloodthirsty, warlike intolerance that could be traced back to the sternest passages of the Quran. The beheading would be seen as a trademark of Islamic fanaticism. Surely, we would say, Christians would never act like that. But they assuredly did.

  While it is tempting to dismiss the religious politics of the fifth century as just a matter of faction and conventional partisanship, we also need to recall the special concepts of authority driving religious politics. Charismatic hierarchs claim guardianship of holy truths; prophets and visionaries seek to redirect history according to the personal instructions of the divine; religious orders bypass the secular state in order to create theocracy; and a cult of martyrdom sustains an escalating cycle of violence. Again, the better we understand the contemporary politics of the Islamic Middle East, the more intelligible becomes the Christian past; and vice versa. Constantinople or Alexandria then; Baghdad and Mogadishu today. Although the kind of weaponry involved is different, the ancient armies of obstreperous monks can easily be compared to the Shi’ite forces supporting Muqtada al-Sadr in contemporary Baghdad and Basra. The Christ Army predated the Mahdi Army by some 1,600 years.43

  Watching how church factions in the age of the councils appropriated spiritual authority so often recalls the modern Muslim world. For centuries, Muslim fatwas or religious decrees were issued only by accredited institutions of scholars and lawyers, and these texts carried real weight around the Islamic world. During the twentieth century, though, different factions and even individuals arrogated to themselves the right to issue such fatwas, generally with the goal of justifying extremist or violent actions. Today, as in the fifth century, radical clerics not only denounce more moderate enemies, but officially read them out of the faith. A fatwa might declare that however X describes himself in religious terms, he is in fact no longer a member of the Muslim community and is thus a suitable target for violence. In other words, they subject them to anathemas, just as Christians did in the fifth century. Radical Islamists even have a direct modern equivalent of the Christian anathema, in the form of takfir, the act of declaring a Muslim person or even a state to be kaffir, or infidel. The notion of takfir is fundamental to the extremist Islam that produced Osama bin Laden.

  Other analogies also unite ancient and modern extremists. As in late Roman times, a providential view of the world drives political action today. Islamist radicals believe that only by purifying the faith can the Muslim world regain God’s favor and reverse its long modern history of defeats and disasters. And ideas of honor still stir violence in societies shaped by notions of personal and family pride. Just as early Christian monks fought for the honor of their church, so modern Islamic protesters defend the honor of the Prophet, most passionately when his image is demeaned in cartoons or novels. The concept of blasphemy is meaningless except in the context of ideas of honor and shame.

  When we think of the history of Christianity, we picture certain key individuals and objects. We think of medieval cathedrals, of superb paintings and sculptures of the crucifixion or the Madonna, and generally, of some of the glories of European culture—together, of course, with some of the nightmare aspects of that story, the intolerance and fanaticism. But we think above all of a Christianity rooted in Europe and one unafraid to explore the image of the human face of Christ. We know a medieval Christian world with its spiritual and intellectual cores in Rome and Paris, not Alexandria and Antioch. At every stage, then, we are thinking of a world shaped by the outcome of those almost forgotten struggles of the fifth century, which occurred in a world of empires and states that have all faded into ruin. But these conflicts left an impact that survives into the present day. The gatherings at Ephesus and Chalcedon remade a faith.

  Appendix to Chapter One: The Church’s General Councils

  Through the centuries, the church called many councils and gatherings at regional and local levels, but a few great events were recognized as having special authority for the whole Christian world. These were general or universal (ecumenical) in nature. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches agree on accepting the first seven of these general councils as authoritative. Although these councils dealt with many miscellaneous items of belief and practice, each focused chiefly on an issue or debate that was particularly divisive at the time. Each council proclaimed a set of views that became established orthodoxy for much of the church, although in each case, the defeated party did not simply cease to exist overnight.

  The first seven councils were:

  I. First Council of Nicea (325) The church was divided over Christ’s divinity. Followers of Arius believed that, as a created being, Christ was inferior to God the Father. Their opponents, led by Athanasius of Alexandria, taught that all three persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—were fully equal. The Council of Nicea resulted in a decisive victory for the Trinitarian party over the Arians. Athanasius went on to become bishop of Alexandria.

  II. First Council of Constantinople (381) The emperor Theodosius I called this council mainly to settle continuing debates concerning the Trinity. Arianism remained powerful long after the Council of Nicea, while some groups denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. The Council of Constantinople tried to resolve these issues, and it defined the role of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity. This council created an expanded version of the creed originally declared at Nicea, and when later generations use the so-called Nicene Creed, they are in fact using the form accepted at Constantinople in 381.

  III. Council of Ephesus (431) With Trinitarian issues largely settled, the main focus of debate now turned to Christology, that is, the proper understanding of the character of Christ and the relationship between his human and divine natures. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, was accused of dividing the two natures in a way that made the Virgin Mary the mother of Christ, but not of God. His leading opponent, the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, taught the full unity of Christ’s natures. Cyril’s views triumphed, with the support of the Roman pope, and the Nestorian party was condemned. It remains open to debate whether Nestorius did in fact hold the views attributed to him.

  [Second Council of Ephesus (449) Although later generations refused to recognize the credentials of this council, it was called in much the same way as its predecessors. The church of Constantinople was deeply split, with a strong party emphasizing Christ’s single divine nature. Constantinople’s bishop Flavian condemned these views as extreme and heretical. Under pressure from the Alexandrian patriarch Dioscuros, a council met to investigate and condemn Flavian and to support One Nature teachings. The council degenerated into a mob scene, in which Flavian suffered mortal wounds. This gathering was subsequently rejected as a “Gangster Synod” and not a true council.]

  IV. Council of Chalcedon (451) The fourth council was called to reverse the disastrous results of the recent Gangster Synod. The council condemned the actions of Dioscuros of Alexandria and his allies. After intense debate, it also formulated a definition of Christ’s being that presented him as both fully divine and fully human. This historic Chalcedonian definition owed much to the thought of the Roman pope Leo I.

  V. Second Council of Constantinople (553) In the century following Chalcedon, the church continued to be severely split over christological issues, with many regions continuing to stress Christ’s One Nature (the Monophysite movement). Partly in ord
er to reconcile these dissidents, the emperor Justinian called a council that would condemn the writings of some long-dead theologians whom the Monophysites regarded as gravely heretical. The Second Council of Constantinople did condemn the controversial writings—the so-called Three Chapters—but at the cost of creating new disagreements. Only after some years as a prisoner of the empire could the Roman pope Vigilius be bullied into accepting the council’s decisions.

  VI. Third Council of Constantinople (680–81) In a last-ditch attempt to settle the christological wars, the Byzantine emperors had tried to establish that, whatever people thought about Christ’s natures, at least they could all agree that he had a single will. Unfortunately the compromise pleased nobody, and many attacked this imperial policy as a Monothelete (One Will) heresy. The Third Council condemned Monotheletism, proclaiming instead the belief that Christ was of two wills as well as of two natures.

  VII. Second Council of Nicea (787) From the 720s, the Byzantine Empire split violently over the question of icons and images, with some activists arguing that such pictures should be prohibited as idolatrous. The Second Council of Nicea declared that such images were legitimate, provided they were venerated as opposed to being worshipped in their own right.