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  • Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam
  • David Frankfurter
Thomas Sizgorich Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008 Pp. viii + 384.

In this revised dissertation under Hal Drake, Thomas Sizgorich proposes that violent expressions of piety, whether in legend or actual practice, served to clarify religious boundaries in times and places that were otherwise religiously fluid. Those violent expressions, moreover, drew on a "primordialist discourse"—a mythology—of atrocious and unavenged martyrdoms in the religion's origin times, martyrdoms that often took place in "our" locale. Finally, he argues, the culture of early Muslim jihād itself developed in dialectic with narratives of violent Christian ascetics and followed many of the same patterns. [End Page 148]

These are sensible theses and, if it were not for the dismal editing by the University of Pennsylvania Press for sentence length and clarity, a quite valuable contribution to the growing literature on violence and Christianization (Drake, Gaddis, Hahn). Despite the murky prose, Sizgorich does offer a vivid and theoretically informed picture of the challenges that local religious fluidity posed to bishops in late antiquity as well as the sheer power that martyrological narrative held to mobilize violent action against Jews, heretics, or heathens, whether really or in legend. He does not, however, contribute much to that more pressing issue—especially since From Temple to Church (ed. Hahn, Emmel, and Götter [Leiden 2008])—of distinguishing historical violence from violence written into legendary or political accounts of religious change. We are still left with the question, certainly relevant to early Christianity's martyrological propaganda, of how such foundation myths of martyrdom and atrocity lead to real pogroms, or when, conversely, they remain simply latent narratives in an atmosphere of relative tolerance?

The book proceeds through a series of related points. Chapter One uses Chrysostom's frustrations with his Antioch churchgoers to illustrate the fundamental fluidity of religious identity and ritual observance at the local level. Chapter Two argues that people define and locate themselves according to narratives of origin, heroic conflict, and the miraculous that, following Christianization, drew on a larger Christian tradition of martyrology to place "our" martyr and ultimately "our" holy men as axes between local and ecclesiastical traditions. Thus by the late fourth century local legends often involved some central narrative of "our" martyr's violent suffering at the hands of heathen or Jewish authorities.

Chapter Three then takes us to the reign of Theodosius and its growing intolerance, both in rhetoric and in action. Hal Drake has attributed this new stage in sanctioned Christian violence to a revitalization of martyrological rhetoric following Julian's reign. Bishops represented all conceivable opponents of Christian hegemony as persecutors and thus cosmic dangers to be obliterated. Sizgorich elaborates on this thesis with examples of iconoclasm imagined as resistance to sacrifice and a discussion of Ambrose's rhetorical celebration of Theodosius as scourge of heretics, Jews, and heathens. (Unfortunately, Libanius's Oration 30, a key witness to real intolerant piety under Theodosius, is analyzed simply as an appeal to imperial ideology.) Chapter Four turns to holy men, whose hagiographies depict both the fluidity of local religious culture and the violent, even homicidal means by which certain local saints forced boundaries and orthopraxy. In their wild prophetic zeal the holy men become, as Andrew Merrills has argued (JECS 12 [2004]: 217–44, not cited), veritable monsters of the periphery. Yet weren't they also part of their environments? Sizgorich leaves aside the multifarious ways that holy men like Simeon Stylites, John of Lycopolis, and even Shenoute also interacted with local religious traditions, at least in legend.

Chapters Five through Eight then demonstrate the legacy of "militant devotion" in early Islam and the ideology and literature of jihād (a discussion not for beginners to Islamic history, who might like some background to terms and principal characters). He proceeds first through Muslim narratives that extol the truth of the new revelation through stories of warfare and through admiring legends of [End Page 149] Christian monks' militancy (Chapter Five), then through shared modes of ascetic expression, which some Muslim...

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