Reconceiving Religious Conflict

New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity

Wendy Mayer, Chris L. de Wet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315387642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Reconceiving Religious Conflict deconstructs instances of religious conflict within the formative centuries of Christianity, the first six centuries CE. It explores the theoretical foundations of religious conflict; the dynamics of religious conflict within the context of persecution and martyrdom; the social and moral intersections that undergird the phenomenon of religious conflict; and the relationship between religious conflict and religious identity. It is unique in that it does not solely focus on religious violence as it is physically manifested, but on religious conflict (and tolerance), looking too at dynamics of religious discourse and practice that often precede and accompany overt religious violence.

Part I

FOUNDATIONS

1

RE-THEORIZING RELIGIOUS CONFLICT

Early Christianity to late antiquity and beyond

Wendy Mayer¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315387666-2

Religion, religious conflict, and the neuroscientific turn

In their introductory essay to a volume analyzing contemporary religious conflict from three social science perspectives, Powell and Clarke both catalogue and unwittingly reinforce an assumption that has long underwritten and continues to inform theories about the intersection between religion, (in)tolerance, and conflict, namely that pre-Enlightenment societies were typically intolerant.² At the other end of the historical spectrum and until recently the beginning point for this hostility towards religious unorthodoxy has been set at the moment of Christianity’s official adoption (313 CE) on the premise that polytheism is, by contrast, inherently tolerant.³ By polytheism is meant – with the exception of ancient and early post-Second Temple Judaism – the religions of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. While the starting point for this so-called rise in intolerance has in recent years been pushed back into the third century,⁴ the overwhelmingly dominant view persists that once Christianity became a religio licita and gained political power it became coercive, intolerant, and not infrequently violent.⁵ The nostalgic view that the classical polytheist world is one of religious tolerance and coexistence, whereas monotheism, which is exclusivist, is responsible for much of the religious violence perpetrated between the rise of Christianity and the end of pre-modern history,⁶ is, as Jan Bremmer and other theorists of religion have recently argued, itself an artefact of post-Enlightenment liberalism. This is an ideology which, in response to the protracted post-Reformation religious wars in Europe, conceived of religion as antithetical to the new age of science and reason and so sought to write religion permanently out of society. Henceforth it was restricted to the private domain.⁷ This view of religion as in its death throes and as having no future impact on society is a hallmark of secularization theory.⁸ Contemporary religious conflicts that engage the state are, in this view, to be attributed to a traditional or pre-modern, irrational society. This is an important point to which we will return, but for the moment let us simply point out that, with some recent significant exceptions, it continues to predicate twenty-first-century Western governmental responses to religious conflicts, as well as inform the ways in which Western scholars attempt to understand the phenomenon.⁹

As Fox and Sandler point out, scholars have been scrambling since the events of 9/11 both to explain the role of religion in an upsurge in national and transnational violence¹⁰ and to reintroduce religion as a significant social variable into social, political, and international relations theory.¹¹ Research on this perceived new rise in religious intolerance is in some areas starting to align with insights from neuroscientific research that began to emerge in the 1980s and that have steadily been gaining acceptance, to the effect that the mind is embodied, and that affect or emotion has primacy to reasoned thought, particularly in regard to moral judgement.¹² If we accept that cognitive and moral systems lie behind the evolution within human society of religion,¹³ then these findings have profound implications for the viability of secularization theory and a liberal view of the (negligible) social impact of religion. In fact one of the pioneers of such studies has long argued that the age of reason is a chimera that we need to move beyond, if we are to understand and accommodate morality (and thus religion) as a significant factor in human behaviour and society.¹⁴ Ironically it is precisely what the age of Enlightenment rejected (the embodied mind) in favour of a body-mind dualism that promoted the priority of reason on the basis of science that science is now asking us to re-accept.

By now, the reader will be wondering what any of this has to do with religious conflict in general and the pursuit of the topic in relation to early Christianity and late antiquity in particular, but again the implications are profound. Firstly, religious tolerance is not an absolute, but in fact itself a moral virtue embraced by secularist liberal ideology.¹⁵ It is a social construct of Enlightenment thought. If the foundations of that ideology are now in question, then we must ask whether that virtue’s entailment – that religious intolerance is an evil, in that it damages the health of society – is valid. After all, as Powell and Clarke point out, liberalism itself would argue for a limit to tolerance when the tolerance of another religion is harmful to society.¹⁶ Indeed, it is precisely this argument that we see informing recent conclusions concerning the limits of the tolerance of other religions under Roman rule in the period before Constantine.¹⁷ The implication of this is that, even when we think that as scholars we are deconstructing dominant assumptions (in this case the inherent intolerance of monotheist and tolerance of polytheist religion), we need to ask ourselves whether, instead of succeeding, we are in fact simply adopting another element of the same paradigm.

Secondly, if a pre-Enlightenment view of the world is how we as human beings in fact behave and act in the world from a moral-religious perspective, then this is something we should intentionally move to embrace rather than back away from. The findings of the neurosciences do not condemn us to a world of superstition and prejudice from which we thought we had escaped,¹⁸ but rather help us to accept the affective agency of religion in human society as a biological fact,¹⁹ while providing us with tools that help us to explain and understand it. Further, if religion is to be inserted back into and perhaps even foregrounded in contemporary social-scientific and political theories, then it makes sense that it is to a world that conceived of religion in a way that is aligned with embodied cognition that we should look for answers. This is particularly the case, if, as current neuroscientific studies suggest, consciously suppressing in our own minds a rationalist view of the world that has been cognitively strengthened since birth is likely to prove extremely difficult.²⁰ While some answers may lie in taking a fresh look at traditional and/or non-Western societies and cultures,²¹ including those of Africa, a fresh investigation of the role of religion in the pre-Enlightenment world and in the historical period which is thought to have witnessed the (old) “rise of intolerance,” in particular – that is, the centuries immediately before and after the “rise of Christianity” – is likely to prove equally fruitful. This is particularly the case when we consider that in the ancient and late ancient Mediterranean world from the fifth century BCE up to at least the fifth century CE in elite circles a model of individual and societal health that was intimately linked to both morality and the embodied soul/mind held sway,²² while across society the excluded middle – that is, the world of the supernatural – and religion were both enmeshed and embedded.²³ In these respects, whether one examines a philosophic sect, a monotheist, syncretist, hybrid, poly- or heno-theist religion in this period makes little difference. This point is important since, as we will see shortly, theorization of religious conflict in this period has been criticized for its Christianity-centred focus. Further, since social health is a desideratum not just of modern liberal ideology, but lies behind the moral foundational systems that have evolved across societies up to the present day,²⁴ we could just as well flip the subtitle of a recent book on the embeddedness of morality in twenty-first-century American politics²⁵ and ask: how can we understand twenty-first-century religious conflict without a first- (or second-, third-, or fourth-) century brain? Curiously this is precisely what has been proposed in a 2013 doctoral dissertation in the discipline of critical rhetoric. Appealing to Gorgias and the classical Greek theory of the sophist as social physician, the author, Brett Ingram, argues for the integration of the neurosciences into critical rhetorical theory in order to understand and address issues like the impact of rhetorical violence – a significant component in religious conflict – on the principle that current neuroscience confirms a surprising number of theories held by ancient Graeco-Roman philosophers on the embodied mind.²⁶

Towards a new theorizing of religious conflict

Having established that study of religious conflict in an historical period at first sight so distant from the twenty-first century – but, as we can now see, not so distant at all – is not just an academic exercise, but may in fact prove essential to helping us understand and negotiate religious conflict in the contemporary world, the next step is to engage in laying a fresh set of theoretical foundations that incorporate and internalize what, for lack of a better term, we will call the neuroscientific turn.²⁷ This is important, if we are to move towards a self-conscious re-examination of religion and religious conflict in these critical(?) centuries.²⁸ In order to do this, however, we must first step back and take stock of some of the theories and presuppositions that dominate current readings of the phenomenon in early Christianity and late antiquity. We then need to address the plethora of definitions that attach to some of the terms used and the lack of clear definition in the case of others.²⁹ Lastly, we also need to ask ourselves what assumptions lie behind these approaches and to what subconscious ideological or moral systems they are attributable. That is, the more we lay out in the open, the better our chance of assessing what continues to be valid and what does not in a worldview that incorporates the embodied mind, as well as of improving our capacity to be self-conscious and self-critical about how and even why we study religious conflict. The latter is critical, since, as the neurosciences now point out, we ourselves rationalize the world and perform actions on the basis of what Burke would call a particular piety, that is, an individualized, internally coherent, largely subconscious moral system.³⁰ This is a substantial undertaking and not all of these steps can be completed in one chapter. Even engaging in just the first step – a critique of dominant and current approaches – is suffic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Part I Foundations
• Part II Rhetorical and literary trajectories
• Part III Christianization
• Part IV Threats of violence
• Part V Ancient and modern intersections
• Index