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63 Division Is Murder 2 “All the world, you say, lived peacefully among its Religions: each in its little corner undisturbed, following the faith of its fathers, free of debate among its member except when it came to enlarging empires and principalities! But then, with the coming of the 1500s, everything fell apart, and divided into Sects and Heresies, which overwhelmed all the nations of the earth with misery and desolation—including Asia, Africa, and Europe.”1 Estienne Pasquier, the sixteenth-century French lawyer, politician, historian, and essayist, begins a famous letter here by quoting his interlocutor, Monsieur de Raimond, a member of Bordeaux’s Parliament. Raimond had described what was and remains, after all, the standard view of the sixteenth-century European upheaval: religious violence, born somehow of Christian division, exported from the center of Catholic Europe to the ends of the world. As I have noted, whatever revisionists like Cavanaugh may believe, the protagonists of the period set the stage for the traditional interpretation of the epoch; they surveyed what had engulfed their lives and communities and said, “look what the Christian Church has wrought!” To be sure, Raimond is not blaming “religion” itself—understood here in an approximately modern sense—for the violence of the world. He is, rather, blaming the divisiveness of Christians in particular for the ills of the time. This is not, then, the view attributed (erroneously) to Pascal, that 1 Estienne Pasquier, “Les Lettres de Pasquier, Livre XX, Lettre V,” in Les œuvres d’Estienne Pasquier, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Trévoux, 1723), 605. The letter to Raimond is undated. 64 A Brutal UNity somehow “religious conviction” leads to murder.2 To be sure, strong passions and zealotry often lie behind extravagant behavior, but this is true of many “convictions” (hence the notion of “political” religions or “moral” religions that has of late exercised theorists, as we have seen). No, Raimond is concerned with division within Christianity and with the way that such division—perhaps because of its “religious” undercurrent—in itself has fostered violence. And Pasquier responds to his friend in kind, with an extended reflection upon the matter. First, Pasquier launches into a historical discussion, citing various parallels in other “religions,” especially Islam, with its divisions among Muhammad’s successors, etched eventually upon geographical lines after much conflict. Christianity is not alone in this regard! (Indeed, Pasquier points to other institutions, like universities and faculties, that follow similar trajectories of internal hostility and fragmentation.) But Christianity has a sorry tradition of division: Eastern and Western churches, fracturing over 2 The usual citation is given from the Pensées 895 (Brunschvicg numbering), as translated by W. F. Trotter and widely available: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction”; this has been retranslated back into French as Les hommes ne font jamais le mal si complètement et joyeusement que lorsqu’ils le font par conviction religieuse and also disseminated according to this reading. This reverse translation is an odd factor in the invention of a literary proverb, in that the actual text of Pascal is rather different: Jamais on ne fait le mal si pleinement et si gaiement que quand on le fait par conscience (“No one does evil so fully and happily as when done for the sake of conscience”). Whether “conscience” and “religious conviction” are the same, or even closely related, is a nicely modern question, to which we shall return in a fashion in chapter 7. It was Spinoza, in any case, who most clearly stated the negative view of religious “zeal” as a cause of violence (cf. the Tractatus religio-politicus [1670] in the English translation of R. H. M. Elwes, in Benedict de Spinoza, A Theological Politcal Treatise and A Political Treatise [New York: Dover Publications, 1961], 98–99); Cavanaugh dismisses these seventeenth-century views as early examples of the “myth” (William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 124–30), although obviously the myth has much deeper roots historically than the modern nation-state. It was Lucretius who made the connection between religion and misery in a fashion that the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury humanists grabbed hold of: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (De rerum natura I.101), i.e., religion is the cause of so much evil. The citation itself, and more importantly the context of Lucretius’ Epicurean distancing from the follies of human social...

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