Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (review)

The Christian world is a big and old place whose territorial boundaries and the ubiquity, varieties, and intensity of whose Christianity have changed considerably over the course of centuries. Few people today are likely to swear publicly by the hair or head of God (spontaneously or deliberately, drunk or sober), and fewer still are likely to call them to any sort of account for doing so. But blasphemy, as David Nash points out in this immensely informative and intelligently argued book, has meant and now means many more things than such anthropomorphizing oaths and has had more targets than Christian religious sensibility. In the very first line of the book, Nash defines blasphemy as “the attacking, wounding, and damaging of religious belief,” implying that blasphemy, like beauty, is in the eye (and ear) of the beholder. But he immediately acknowledges that it is better understood as a kind of trace-element for the entire process of modernization and secularization as understood in the West, the “Christian World” of the title. And he lays out the irony that that very “Christian world,” with its articulation of toleration and rights, multiculturalism and free expression, has gotten itself into a dilemma with which it is ableis barely able to cope. His broad approach makes Blasphemy a more useful and informative (and generally less single-minded) book than Leonard Levy’s and David Lawton’s recent studies, because he does not assume as narrow a perspective as they.¹

Nash opens the book with a chapter that puts the contemporary relevance and problematic of blasphemy as outraged religious sensibility squarely in front of the reader, from the cases of Pym Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands to the UK debates over Jerry Springer: The Opera and the riots over the Sikh drama Behzti in 2004, as well, of course, as the Rushdie affair and Muslim outrage at the Danish cartoons of 2005. His second and third chapters offer a chronological account of blasphemy definitions and prosecutions from 1500 to 1800 and from 1800 to 2000. The second chapter briefly discusses biblical and other antiquity and early medieval Christianity, but unfortunately Nash is inexperienced and quite out of his depth with Christian (and general European) history before 1500, and the scholarship he seems to have relied on has not served him well.² But he hits his stride in the early modern period when he has some first rate scholarly help, as he does in the early modern period, especially from the work of Alain Cabantous, Maureen Flynn, and Gerd Schwerhoff.³ These chapters are also impressive because of the range of territory covered by Nash, from Scandinavia and the Netherlands to Australia and North America.

Nash’s chronology serves him well in his discussion of the changing sociology of blasphemers in Ch. 4, the socio-political control of blasphemy and blasphemers in Ch. 5, and responses to blasphemy – a study of victims and communities – in Ch. 6. Nash is astute in considering theologians’ (especially Aquinas and Vives) changing discussion of the psychology of the blasphemer and the problem of momentary passion and prophylactic devotional measures of guarding against it. Chapter 7 is a fine study of the relatively new role of film and media generally, the latter, as seen in the Rushdie and Danish cartoon cases, immensely influential in creating an outraged global public which can increase the pressure applied by minority groups in the country where the offense took place.⁴ These chapters are intelligent social history and constitute a useful perspective on the process of modernization, one that, as Schwerhoff among others has pointed out, often conflicts with current master narratives, e.g., thoseat of Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias. Nash is also very good on the visual evidence, from the in-your-face savagely polemical religio-political cartoons of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which, with portraits, constitute most of his illustrations) to the power of film, [End Page...