FoB-Chapter Notes-S05

Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

Karen Armstrong

Ch 9 The Arrival of "Religion"

"On January 2, 1492, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile celebrated their victory over the Muslim kingdom of Granada in southern Spain"

"The Ottoman Empire was the strongest and most powerful state in the world, ruling Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Arabia. But the Safavids in Iran and the Moghuls in India had also established absolute monarchies in which almost every facet of public life was run with systematic and bureaucratic precision. Each had a strong Islamic ideology that permeated every aspect of their rule"

"the last magnificent expression of the “conservative spirit” that was the hallmark of premodern society"

"Premodern education could not encourage originality, because it lacked the resources to implement many new ideas"

"In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression"

"warfare—to conquer, expand, or maintain the tax base—was essential to these states"

"But for centuries now, Europeans had been devising a commercial economy that would result in the creation of a very different kind of state. The modern world is often said to have begun in 1492; in fact, it would take Europeans some four hundred years to create the modern state. Its economy would no longer be based on the agrarian surplus, it would interfere far more in the personal lives of its subjects, it would be run on the expectation of constant innovation, and it would separate religion from its politics"

"For some, Western modernity would be empowering, liberating, and enthralling; others would experience it as coercive, invasive, and destructive"

"The early colonialists stormed violently into the New World as if they were conducting a giant acquisition raid, greed melding seamlessly with pious intent"

"between three and five million Africans were torn from their homes and enslaved there"

"a purely trading empire: the Portuguese made no attempt to conquer territory inland. Meanwhile, the Spanish had invaded the Americas, slaughtering the indigenous peoples and seizing land, booty, and slaves"

"For Europeans, colonialism brought unimaginable wealth; for the native peoples, it brought death on an unprecedented scale"

"Their conquests were achieved with martial savagery and maintained by systematic exploitation"

"By the end of the sixteenth century, they were shipping on average 300 million grams of silver and 1.9 million grams of gold every year. With these unprecedented resources, Spain established the first global empire"

"peoples—they regarded the “savage” as scarcely human"

"Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)"

"the Utopians felt no qualms about fighting those who resisted them"

"There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought. The so-called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. From the outset, however, the philosophy of human rights, still crucial to our modern political discourse, did not apply to all human beings "

"“what is possessed by none belongs to everyone.”"

"Spanish Inquisition"

"The Spanish Inquisition did not target Christian heretics but focused on Jews who had converted"

"Spanish Inquisition has become a byword for excessive “religious” intolerance, but its violence was caused less by theological than by political considerations"

"lapsed “secret Jews,”"

"the emphasis always on practice and social custom rather than “belief.”"

"Seeking out dissidents in this way would not infrequently become a feature of modern states, secular as well as religious, in times of national crisis"

"on March 31, 1492, the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion, which gave Jews the choice of baptism or deportation"

"about eighty thousand crossed the border into Portugal, and fifty thousand took refuge in the Ottoman Empire"

"In 1499 Muslims were required to convert"

"But the Muslim converts (Moriscos) were given no instruction in their new faith, and everybody knew that they continued to live, pray, and fast according to the laws of Islam"

"A practical convivencia had been restored"

"between 1,500 and 2,000 people were actually executed"

"proved lamentably counterproductive"

"Spain was, therefore, feared and resented"

"By the sixteenth century a different kind of civilization was slowly emerging in Europe, based on new technologies and the constant reinvestment of capital"

"By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch had created the building blocks of Western capitalism: the joint-stock company, bank, stock exchange ... the church had no control"

"Successful merchants, artisans, and manufacturers would become powerful enough to participate in the politics that had formerly been the preserve of the aristocracy"

"With the emergence of the absolute monarchy and the sovereign state in England and France, the commercial classes, or bourgeoisie, became increasingly influential as market forces gradually made the state independent of the restrictions imposed upon it by a wholly agrarian economy. But would it be less structurally or militarily violent than the agrarian state? "

"In Germany there were no strong, centralizing monarchies, only a welter of forty-one small principalities that the Holy Roman emperor was unable to control "

"the towns of central and southern Germany had become the most vital commercial centers in northern Europe"

"In 1517 Martin Luther (1483–1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the Reformation "

"The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements"

"In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity"

"The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit"

"Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the separation of church and state"

"In Luther’s political writings we see the arrival of “religion” as a discrete activity, separate from the world as a whole"

"Luther understood that without a strong state, “the world would be reduced to chaos,” and that no government could realistically rule according to the gospel principles of love, forgiveness, and tolerance"

"While it could have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state must have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs"

"Protestants believed that the Roman Church had failed in its true mission because it had dallied with the sinful Kingdom of the World"

"Luther’s Christian was supposed to retreat into his own interior world of righteousness and let society, quite literally, go to hell"

"the Peasants’ War"

"The rebels, he concluded, were in thrall to the devil, and killing them was an act of mercy, because it would rescue them from this satanic bondage. Because this rebellion threatened the entire social structure, the state suppressed it savagely: as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have died"

"the Bible could be a dangerous weapon if it got into the wrong hands"

"The Reformation, however, had introduced an entirely new emphasis on “belief.”"

"Catholics would do likewise in their own reformation"

"increasingly confessional allegiance would become the criterion of political loyalty "

"Although the Reformation produced fruitful forms of Christianity, it was in many ways a tragedy. It has been estimated that as many as eight thousand men and women were judicially executed as heretics in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."

"We cannot expect these early modern states to have shared the outlook of the Enlightenment. Civilization had always depended upon coercion, so state violence was regarded as essential to public order. Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50 Executions were usually carried out in public as a ritualized deterrent that expressed and enforced state and local authority. Without a professional police force and modern methods of surveillance, public order was dependent on such spectacles. Utterly repugnant as it is to us today, killing dissenters was seen as essential to the exercise of power, especially when the state was still fragile"

"Yet heresy was different from other capital crimes, because if the accused recanted, she was pardoned and her life spared"

"there was no headlong rush to martyrdom. The vast majority were content to keep their convictions to themselves and conform outwardly to state decrees"

"The one thing on which Catholics and Protestants could agree was their hatred of the Spanish Inquisition. But despite its gruesome reputation, the crimes of the Inquisition were exaggerated"

"not all it was cracked up to be. The auto-da-fé had no deep roots in Spanish culture"

"about a hundred people died, whereas three hundred Protestants were put to death under Mary Tudor; twice that number were executed under Henry II of France (r. 1547–59), and ten times as many were killed in the Netherlands."

"1580s, when Spain was at war with other European states, the crown once again turned on the “enemy within,” this time the Moriscos, who, like the Jews before them, were resented less for their beliefs than for their cultural difference and financial success"

"in 1609, the Moriscos were expelled from Spain, eliminating the last substantial Muslim community from Europe"

"the Wars of Religion that culminated in the horror of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). These conflicts gave rise to what has been called the “creation myth” of the modern West, because it explains how our distinctively secular mode of governance came into being.61 The theological quarrels of the Reformation, it is said, so inflamed Catholics and Protestants that they slaughtered one another in senseless wars, until the violence was finally contained by the creation of the liberal state that separated religion from politics"

"But nothing is ever quite that simple"

"European rulers had other concerns"

"In the minds of the participants, however, these wars were certainly experienced as a life-and-death struggle between Protestants and Catholics. Religious sentiments helped soldiers and generals to distance themselves from the enemy, blot out all sense of a shared humanity, and infuse the cruel struggle with a moral fervor that made it not only palatable but noble: they gave participants an uplifting sense of righteousness. But secular ideologies can do all this too. These wars were not simply and quintessentially “religious” in the modern sense"

"Charles, a Catholic, paid little attention to the Lutherans in Germany and instead concentrated on fighting the pope and the Catholic kings of France in Italy"

"yet another episode in the long struggle of European monarchs to control the church in their own realms"

"The Catholic kings of France were so alarmed by the Habsburgs that they were even prepared to make alliances with the Ottoman Turks"

"during the First Schmalkaldic War, other prominent Lutheran princes fought on Charles’s side, while the Catholic king Henry II of France joined the Lutheran League in an attack"

"many of Charles’s soldiers in the imperial army were mercenaries"

"henceforth in Europe the religious allegiance of the local ruler determined the faith of his subjects—a principle later enshrined in the maxim cuius regio, eius religio"

"The Catholic and Lutheran princes of Germany had ganged up on Charles"

"The peasantry and the lower classes showed little theological conviction but switched from Catholicism to Lutheranism and back again as their lords and masters required."

"A similar complexity can be observed in the French Wars of Religion (1562–98) "

"a political contest among competing aristocratic factions"

"But in a landmark 1973 article, Natalie Zemon Davis examined the popular rituals in which both Catholics and Protestants drew on the Bible, the liturgy, and folk traditions to dehumanize their enemies and concluded that the French civil wars were “essentially religious.” Since then, scholars have reemphasized the role of religion, pointing out, however, that it is still anachronistic to separate the “political” from the “religious” at this date"

"The French pamphleteer Antoine Marcourt listed four arguments against the Eucharist, “by which the whole world … will be completely ruined, cast down, lost and desolated”"

"The polemic was so extreme that even Theodore Beza, Calvin’s future deputy in Geneva, condemned it in his history of the French Protestant Church. Yet it was this disreputable attack that sparked the French Wars of Religion "

"King Francis was not a theological bigot; he was open to new ideas and had entertained Erasmus and other humanists at his court. But he rightly saw the placards not simply as a theological denunciation but also as an assault on the entire political system"

"a rite that bound the community together"

"understood by both Catholics and Protestants as an implicit critique of the monarchy"

"during the ensuing wars, it was impossible to divide the French population into neat communities of Protestants and Catholics"

"In their struggle against the aristocracy, the lower classes also transcended sectarian allegiance"

"Europe drifted inexorably toward the horror of the Thirty Years’ War, which would kill about 35 percent of the population of central Europe"

"Here again, though religious solidarities were certainly a factor in this series of conflicts, it was never their sole motivation"

"there was rarely a wholly solid “Catholic” or “Protestant” response"

"The mass casualties of the Thirty Years’ War can partly be attributed to the use of mercenary armies who had to provision themselves and could only do so by brutally sacking civilian populations, abusing women and children, and slaughtering their prisoners"

"the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which left the Austrian Habsburgs in control of their hereditary lands and the Swedes in possession of Pomerania, Bremen, and the Baltic region. Prussia emerged as the leading German Protestant state, and France gained much of the Alsace. Finally Calvinism became a licit religion in the Holy Roman Empire.98 By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europeans had fought off the danger of imperial rule. There would never be a large unified empire on the Persian, Roman, or Ottoman model; instead, Europe would be divided into smaller states"

"“there simply was no coherent way yet to divide religious causes from social causes; the divide is a modern invention.”99 People were fighting for different visions of society, but they had as yet no way to separate religious from temporal factors"

"As William Cavanaugh explains in The Myth of Religious Violence, these wars were neither “all about religion” nor “all about politics.” Yet it is true that these wars helped create the idea of “religion” as a private and personal activity, separate from mundane affairS"

"The modern state had come into being by militarily defeating rival political institutions: the empire, the city-state, and the feudal lordship"

"These political and social developments required a new understanding of the word religion"

"“religion” was becoming a private, internalized commitment separate from such “external” activities as politics"

"Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) argued that Christianity was neither an institution nor a way of life but a set of five truths that were innate in the human mind: (1) a supreme deity existed, (2) which should be worshipped (3) and served by ethical living and natural piety; (4) human beings were thus required to reject sin and (5) would be rewarded or punished by God after death"

"These “truths” would, however, seem strange indeed to Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, or Daoists, and many Jews, Christians, and Muslims would also find them bleakly unrepresentative of their faith"

"Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also saw state control of the church as essential to peace and wanted a strong monarch to take over the church and enforce religious unity "

"Hobbes’s solution was to create an absolute state that would crush the tendency of human beings to cling obstinately to their own beliefs, which doomed them to perpetual warfare. Instead, they must learn to recognize the frailty of our grasp on truth, enter into a contractual relationship with one another, elect an absolute monarch, and accept his ideas as their own"

"John Locke’s solution was religious freedom, since, in his view, the Wars of Religion had been caused by a fatal inability to entertain other points of view"

"Locke insisted that the segregation of “religion” from government was “above all things necessary” for the creation of a peaceful society "

"In Locke we see the birth of the “myth of religious violence” that would become ingrained in the Western ethos"

"It is true that Western Christianity had become more internalized during the early modern period"

"But modern “religion” would try to subvert this natural dynamic by turning the seeker in upon himself, and inevitably, many would rebel against this unnatural privatization of their faith"

"Unable to extend the natural human rights they were establishing to the indigenous peoples of the New World, the Renaissance humanists had already revealed the insidious underside of early modern ideas that still inform our political life"

"On the issue of colonization, most early modern thinkers agreed with Locke"

"The colonists would take this belief with them to North America—but unlike these early modern thinkers, they had absolutely no intention of separating church and state"