Religion and Violence in the Song of Roland

To Ursula Peters

I. Introduction: Violence and Monotheism

Pope Benedict set off an on-going debate concerning the links between religion and violence in his controversial speech at the University of Regensburg (Bavaria) in September 2006.¹ In his talk, the Pope explicitly rejected any substantial or natural link between violence and faith. Appealing to a well-established tradition of Western theology and philosophy, Benedict argued that God's metaphysical essence being Reason, religion must therefore have no place for violence. So strongly does violence controvert religious tenets, the Pope argued, that any religious claim for the compatibility of the two unavoidably calls into doubt the very substance of religion. Although Benedict did not make the case for the interdependence of monotheism and rationality, this connection obviously underlies his argument.

This thesis is in evident opposition to a position formulated recently by the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann² who postulated a logical link between violence and monotheism based on an intellectual tradition going back to Sigmund Freud. To Assmann only the birth of monotheism generates a difference between true and false faith, between truth and error in religion, a distinction, which naturally leads to violence in the name of God. Because truth, the truth of the one and only God, has to be established, defended and has finally to be diffused around the world and to be adopted by every human being, the unavoidability of violence seems to be inherent in monotheistic religion.

In this paper, I won't discuss these controversial concepts systematically,³ even though, from an historical perspective, it seems doubtful that there would have been no religious violence before the emergence of monotheism. While still a cardinal of the Roman Church, Joseph Ratzinger questioned the plausibility of Assman's thesis by pointing to noted cases of violence in polytheistic contexts.⁴ Yet from an historical perspective, it can hardly be denied that Judeo-Christian religious concepts have legitimized the use of violence. The crusades and their justification obviously constitute one of the most striking examples of religious violence in the name of Christianity.

The appeal to the faithful to drive the pagans from the Holy Land by attacking them in the name of Christ offers a classic example of the use of religious arguments to justify war. One of the medieval literary texts that has long been considered a radical illustration of the crusader ethos is the Old French Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland).⁵ In this chanson de geste, Charlemagne's fight against the Moslems appears to be a prototype of every crusade, to the extent that, despite all the odds, Christians—the French in this case—will win a decisive victory. The argument seems to hold that their unshakable belief in Christ will make the French strong enough to defeat the pagan enemy. That belief was succinctly expressed in the famous apothegm: "Paien unt tort et crestïens unt dreit" ["Pagans are in the wrong: Christians are in the right"] (1015).⁶

Yet, on closer examination, it's misleading to claim that the use and justification of violence in the Chanson de Roland is based entirely on the notion that physical power alone suffices in the struggle for religious truth. On the contrary, as I will try to demonstrate, the Christian justification of violence as a means of combat against the pagans is only one mode for legitimizing violence in this text. There are others, and, more importantly, the reader cannot help but observe the disharmony, not to say chaos, among them even to the point of manifestly contradicting each other. Clearly these conflicting strands represent competing ideologies of power and violence in the Song of Roland.⁷ It is precisely these competing modes that I will describe and analyze in the following pages. Among other things, I want to show how an unresolved conflict between two fundamentally opposed views of violence characterizes the narrative of the Roland: on the one hand, violence instrumentalized to realize the goals of French crusaders, on the other hand, violence problematized in the name of Christian doctrine.⁸ [End Page...