Early Christian Historiography

Narratives of Retribution

G. W. Trompf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134964208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

First Published in 2014. This book describes the developing application of retributive principles in historical narratives before Christ. It assesses degrees of concern in the first history-writers of the world's most widespread monotheistic tradition to discern divine justice in human affairs.

PART 1
Bases and beginnings

1 Backdrop: retributive principles in traditional societies and ancient historiography

History is philosophy teaching by examples.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romae

The logic of retribution is quite perceivable as a configuration of human action and reflection. It becomes a discoverable object of investigation when we ask of others why they 'pay back' their fellow human beings by acting antipathetically, and why, conversely, they may instead behave with concession, generosity and forbearance.

The questions we put to others might just as well be used for our own introspection. Almost invariably, it soon becomes obvious that humans can give reasons why expressions of animosity or friendliness have been uttered or enacted. Perhaps we will wonder whether these reasons are ill-founded, or 'properly'-stated, or plainly ex post facto rationalizations; perhaps we will doubt whether the reasons would be brought to someone's consciousness if we had not pressed them with the question 'Why did you do it?' That reasons are given at all, though, and so ubiquitously, is the rationale itself for analysing a logic or logics of paying back other people, whether negatively or positively. The discourse of requital or retribution itself is almost inevitably ostensive in character - we can usually only listen to communicated reasons for acting (or to the thoughts arising in our own consciousness when we account for our own behaviour). The real reasons for our deeds one way or the other may not be known to us, lying embedded in the unconscious. But the remarkable phenomenology of retributive logic - the constant attempts to explain, justify and rationalize requital - take up a sizeable part of human language and communication. We wage war and make peace, destroy and build, avenge and play host, punish and reward, condemn and commend, vilify and edify, take and give, accuse or apologize, prohibit or permit, all the while telling or being able to tell why. A vast field of mental constructions encloses us, awaiting the careful traversing of scholars.

The realm of relevant notions looms vaster when realizing that our own or others' personal reasons for requiting are not the only ones that apply to it. A host of day-by-day events draw social responses from us in terms of praise and blame. How prevalent is the human recognition that, after an ill-chosen, unwelcome course of action, some people 'get what they deserve'! The whole world, it seems - extraordinarily enough - holds that significant outcomes in human affairs imply a 'because'. How characteristic is it of human societies that there are reasons why a certain group runs into trouble, or an individual falls ill and dies, or per contra some great 'blessing' is felt. Collective and consensus bodies of retributive explanation thus openly invite consideration.

Now people do not ascribe all outcomes of events to human intention; in some effects they might perceive the finger of the divine, or the workings of luck, or the forces of nature. A relatively more reflective and distanced assessment of what is going on may result, yet still the logic of retribution pertains, and more so, because a wider-than-usual selection of causal possibilities is now brought to bear on the 'appearances' of events. Any group repertoire and the assumptions behind it could be criticized as inadequate - a David Hume objecting that non-empirical causes have been invoked, or a neo-Positivist lamenting the shelving of verification principles. Such charges can never wish away the realities of that great arena of culture-affected ideas in which logics of retribution are pandemic, and although philosophies have been framed to address them, the aetiologies are mediated more through shared tradition than independent reasoning.

Retributive logic as product of culture and religion: from traditional societies to large polities

Reasons behind acts of requital are cultural products, and it behoves anthropologists engaged in cross-cultural and comparative research to differentiate one profile or eidos of retributive logic from another. In most traditional small-scale or tribal societies, for instance, revenge raiding and warfare is highly typical, and with group pitted against group praise falls on those who (sometimes even indiscriminately) kill any of the enemy on opportune occasions - as it will on those who show hospitality and give lavishly to friends and allies. The logic involved is most often connected with prestige, which accrues to those who give their all both in bravery and productivity. The pursuit of revenge wells up from the tribal need to assuage the loss of blood, while reciprocity is grounded in a complex of obligations that a 'security circle' is committed to uphold.¹

Typically, such a band, or tribal or village society, possessed a range of prohibitions instilled for the sake of group security. Young initiates were warned to uphold them on pain of dire consequences, and breaking such taboos often brought into play a regimen of severe physical punishments. This is the subject-matter of legal anthropology and comparative morality. The phenomena of shaming and guilt, demands for honour, the avoidance of bad feeling, caution between genders, and the pressure to fulfil obligations with kin and trading partners, are all consciously-perceived conditions gauged for oneself and others in traditional societies and impelling behavioural adjustments.²

Accompanying the calculated logic behind acts of requital, and legal and moral sanctions, is also that surprisingly universal if neglected manifestation of reflective thought in the so-called 'primitive world' - a body of consensus explanations or explanatory principles by which significant events (especially trouble, sickness and death, and the blessings which are their opposites) are placed in the spirit -influenced scheme of things. A death through disease which a secular-minded Westerner might otherwise put down to germs may instead be ascribed to the contrivances and dark mysteries of sorcery, to the potency of a father's (or perhaps a mother-in-law's) curse, to some local god onto whose domain the victim has unwittingly trespassed, to ghosts or gods in punishment for some evil deed that human arbitrators have not been able to uncover, or to pollution through coming into contact with a woman's menstrual blood or with a corpse; and so on. In the operational modes of this folk logic, the disasters and triumphs of the whole community, and sharp environmental shifts - involving the devastations of droughts and earthquakes or the surprising bounty of the Earth's most fruitful yields - can be attributed to appropriate agencies and spiritual forces in the web of cosmic give-and-take. Honouring the traditions is seen to bring benison, while errors, weakness or carelessness in the performance or timing of ritual make for disaster - and the wise and the good are those who see the difference and comprehend what goes on in the changing circumstances of life.³

In tribal and small-scale societies, it will now be obvious, retributive logic is an expression of religion, insofar as the term 'religion' denotes lifestyles that are also in effect expressions of a 'culture'.⁴ Put more precisely, the logic of retribution, as a structuring principle of action and thought, reinforces activities and Weltanschauungen that assume the constant involvement of cosmically-significant agencies in the give-and-take of life. What most people in the West might deem mundane - the economic and the military - are indices in some societies of ongoing relationships that include spirit-beings. The tribal language of war, barter and belief run together to indicate both why one should act and what are the factors behind change.⁵ When rituals are enacted, they epitomize this broader ethos in outward forms which moderns readily perceive as particularly religious. These rituals entail reciprocity between humans and non-humans, cult sacrifice actualizing the logic of retribution most explicitly because something is given to the spirit-powers in order that something - security, health, prosperity, blessing - be received by the sacrificers. Dant ut dent.

These patterns apply to ancient small-scale societies insofar as they are reconstructable both from surviving records of larger polities and from cultures more recently studied by anthropologists and other observers. But we find that with the development of larger unities - amphictyonies, kingdoms, sovereign states and empires - the circles of security are greatly extended. In these both military loyalty and sense of reciprocal obligation are now expected to apply beyond the limits of one tribe. Enthusiasm for manslaughter and raiding against neighbouring groups must needs be curtailed, although a new consciousness about some 'common enemy' almost invariably arises. As Bryce's apt if old-fashioned maxim about the orientation of 'civilized countries' has it:

Although every individual man is now under law and not in a State of Nature, every political community, whatever its form, be it republican or monarchical, is in a State of Nature towards every other community.⁶

Empires conquer by defeating outsiders, usually on the pretext that bordering groups merit punishment for being troublesome or pursuing an unworthy way of life. 'Legitimate reasons' for conquest or inter-imperial conflict apply that 'geometric rigour' of requital which, according to all extant epics composed at the interface between the tribal and the civilized, 'operates automatically to penalize the [perceived] abuse of force' by enemies.⁷ The perennially resurgent heroic mentality reappropriates the otherwise potentially barbaric principle of payback as a national virtue, a principle now acted out by members and recruits of armies rather than by most able-bodied men of a tribe.

Within larger unities (from city-states to empires), however, the primal stereotypes of the enemy as 'outsider' are seriously undermined. Life holds less certainty when, in the complex relations of urban life, one's neighbours behave inimically, or when - as the ancient Greek Theognis lamented - it now becomes too easy for one to deceive a friend while still remaining hard to trick an enemy (ἐχθρός, as outsider) (Eleg., 1219-20). The processes of transition from the tribus to the unitas so affect consciousness that words for 'enemy' and 'the objects of revenge' will now have to be carefully read in context to see whether they apply to distant or close relations or both. Inside a newly-emergent political society, naturally enough, pressures will be at work to do away with 'wild justice', such that previously disparate groups are held together with more detailed legal codifications of penalties and fines. Enemies inevitably fall into two sorts, however, and along with joy over defeating external foes by the country's army, allowance has now to be made for gloating over 'sweet revenge' on enemies within the community, when rivals suffer misfortunes or an adversary loses out at court (e.g. Aristotle, Rhet., 1370b; Aeschines, Orat., ii, 182-3). Some incidents occur, also, such as adultery, for which 'no compensation but only revenge seem sufficient' (Prov 6:34-35), while new fears of all-too-close sorcery and sexual dangers arise.⁸

The widened horizons of poleis, kingdoms and empires, however, do indeed enhance the possibility of 'more universal' principles of law, and the wider acceptance of them. As in the paradigmatic case of Rome, immediate, direct, severe, even brutal impositions of punishment did indeed slowly recede before the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Part 1 Bases and beginnings
• Part 2 Centrepiece: the Eusebian achievement
• Part 3 The Byzantine East
• Part 4 The Latin West
• Aftermath
• Select bibliography
• Index