Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West by Philippe Buc (review)

No topic from medieval historiography sparks as much controversy in today’s world as Western Christianity’s historical attitudes towards holy war, martyrdom, and terror. Unquestionably, developments since the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 have highlighted the importance of understanding the origins of religiously sanctified warfare, martyrdom, and terror. Into this divisive environment arrives the timely new monograph by the medieval historian Philippe Buc.

In a rich and sophisticated study, Buc explores what he describes as the long roots of ‘Western violence’ through a dizzying array of texts, time-periods, and historical cultures as diverse as the late Roman Empire, crusader Catholic Europe, Revolutionary France, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and George Bush’s post-9/11 United States of America. Confessing that he will be focusing primarily on the ‘dark side of Western Christianity’, Buc relies on what he sees as the commonalities and not the diversities among these premodern and modern societies’ attitudes towards violence, maintaining that the ‘degree of regularity’ in their views makes his macro-approach credible and, indeed, necessary.

Countering current thinking, which postulates that a more militant and more violent Christianity was a particular feature of the post-Constantine Church, Buc argues forcefully that Christianity had always paired irenic and militant ideologies. While this thesis is less revolutionary than his bibliography suggests, it is this yin and yang of pacifism and bloody militarism that forms the monograph’s core.

His disparate chapters illustrate that despite outwardly irenic tendencies, the smouldering embers of intolerance could be, and often were, stoked by Christian intellectuals into conflagrations of brutal intolerance. As Buc rightly cautions, in early Christian rhetoric, ‘peace, pax, did not mean the absence of conflict but victorious conflict leading to right order and justice, iustitia’. So, while many Christian rulers and intellectuals preached pacifism and religious tolerance, they spent much of their time engaging in spiritual and material warfare.

Certainly, a deft intermingling of spiritual and physical warfare had always played a role in Christian ideology. The Church Fathers were fully aware of the paradoxical pairing of militarism and pacifism in scripture. Devout fifth-century Christian intellectuals like Augustine had famously come to accept (though perhaps not as enthusiastically as Buc suggests) that ‘good’ Christians could serve in the military and destroy Rome’s enemies without committing sin.

This position was not limited to a Christian society’s foreign enemies. Buc argues that from its origins, ‘Christendom struggles simultaneously against physical enemies outside, against vices inside the human being and against vicious men inside Christendom – for instance, resident Jews, false brethren (falsi fratres, see Galatians 2. 4), bad clergy, perverts, heretics – and against demons’.

Buc posits that it is only by understanding these ancient Christian attitudes that we can begin to appreciate the lingering vitality of such views in both the Christian and post-Christian West. Chapter 1 reveals how American war ideologies echo these early Christian militant themes. This helps to explain why America has frequently fought ‘moral wars’ against internal and external enemies. I would agree with Buc that the Christian Roman Emperors, Constantine and Justinian, would have understood the notions of exceptionalism and the easy mingling of ‘mildness and strength’ preached by American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush.

While recognising the innovative aspects of medieval crusade, Chapter 2 rightly points out the dangers of underestimating the extent to which these earlier militant Christian ideologies motivated eleventh-century Western crusaders. According to Buc, ‘late antique holy war slowly morphed into high medieval crusade’. So, rather than considering the indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim men, women, and children in the First Crusade of 1096–1100 as an aberration of a violent age, Buc believes we should seek its origins in the late Roman and early medieval Christian worlds. Moreover, we should not underestimate the extent to which Western crusaders were motivated by...