An Inventory of Differences: Reply to Reviewers

On listening to a discussion by the director Quentin Tarantino about the making of his film Django Unchained, I learned about different facets of the presentation of acts of violence to cinematic audiences. Among other matters, Mr. Tarantino was sure that most spectators could tell the difference between experiencing actual physical violence as opposed to watching the caricatured violence, say, of TV westerns of the 50s and 60s of the last century, or the repeated physical indignities suffered by Wile E. Coyote.¹ The interviewer demurred, but I think that the director was right. Tarantino suggested points on a spectrum in the artifices of violence as witnessed, cautioning that his threshold for viewing such representations was rather higher than the average spectator. In his view, there are at least two fundamentally different aesthetics of violence that are always at work: one implicated in the actuality of harm being done (about which he disavowed interest) and one of its representation. His work is with the latter.

My African bishops of late antiquity were somewhat more serious and glum versions of Mr. Tarantino. And that is a big part of the problem. Like him, they were, well, so wholly themselves, whereas most Christians, I accept, were parttimers. These latter Christians were more or less intensely Christian as the situation demanded.² The wonderful retort by the imperial official, Macedonius, to Augustine is sufficient to demonstrate the distinction. Macedonius, who was not just a Christian but also a Catholic one, reproved the bishop. Measured against the end of all things, the bishop’s moral strictures had real force, but, Macedonius says, I was born into this imperfect world and in it I have a job to get done.³ He could be and was Christian, but to this extent. This personal problem of what roles were going to be played, how intensely, and on what occasion was important to the commission of actual violent acts—including, in this case, the execution by beheading of Marcellinus and Apringius, two high-ranking Roman officials, who were both, like Macedonius and Augustine, Catholic Christians. It was part of Macedonius’s job description, along with a few other imperial hit men, all of them Christians, to see that the work was done.

Unlike the forms of sacred violence with which I was concerned, this other world of violence fell between two types of representation and so it was not easily finessed. The state was a rather different kind of unity that could maintain high levels of large-scale violence more constantly. The significance of its physical size and consistency for sectarian struggles is not easily resolved. On the other hand, neither is the question, raised by David Frankfurter, of the place of monotheism in the exciting of violence, if only because it is rarely as ‘mono’ as pretended. At the level of the general impact of mass ideologies, it is difficult to see how it could not have a larger impact. The actualities, however, are not easily explained or described. But there surely is something here, as Ramsay MacMullen has forcefully reminded me in a personal communication. At least this species of religious violence was new, larger, and more coherent, but to what degree any of the societies of the empire were “more violent” because of it is still difficult for me (at least) to confirm. Did the diversion of a (small?) part of the normal drunken rages, street fighting, and self-interested labor violence of the so-called circumcellions into sectarian enforcement lead to less of the former violence or did it create a surplus of violence that did not exist before? I do not know.

I agree with Frankfurter that there is more, perhaps much more, to be done on martyrdom, and this despite a flurry of recent research and breakthroughs in understanding both the behavior involved and the creative contexts. The ways in which such an apparently nihilistic force can be manipulated and institutionalized never fails to surprise. The quotidian occurrence of sectarian self-killings (not a day has gone by in the past two weeks without some current instances being...