[lit-ideas] non-violent Christians?
- From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 21:02:10 +0200
Phil Enns refers to the "non-violence" of early Christians, and cites
Tertullian in his favor. But was it really violence *as such* that
early Christians objected to, or rather enlistment in the *pagan* army,
and fighting for the *pagan* state? As far as the pacifistic Tertullian
is concerned, Nietzsche long ago pointed to a passage from his De
Spectaculis (ch. 30) that tends to show T. was not particularly opposed
to violence *as such*, as long as it was exercized against those who
"deserved it". If T. looked forward to the Day of Judgment, it was
primarily becuase he would be able to gloat over the sufferings of the
heathen :
" But what a spectacle is that fast-approaching advent 31 of our Lord,
now owned by all, now highly exalted, now a triumphant One! What that
exultation of the angelic hosts! What the glory of the rising saints!
What the kingdom of the just thereafter! What the city New Jerusalem!
32 Yes, and there are other sights: that last day of judgment, with its
everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of
their derision, when the world hoary with age, and all its many
products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle
then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? what my
derision? Which sight gives me joy? which rouses me to exultation?-as I
see so many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was
publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove
himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation;
governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name, in
fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they
raged against the followers of Christ. What world's wise men besides,
the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had
no concern in ought that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them
that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the
bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the
poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not
before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the
unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing
the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the
play-actors, much more "dissolute" in the dissolving flame; of looking
upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding
the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery
billows....."
So Tertullian the non-violent one can't wait to witness the atrocious
torture of poets, actors, and chariot-drivers. But one didn't have to
wait for Judgement Day : such sublime pleasures can be indulged in
right now, in the imagination:
"... What quaestor or priest in his munificence will bestow on you the
favour of seeing and exulting in such things as these? And yet even now
we in a measure have them by faith in the picturings of imagination".
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76/
l'Annee Philologique
Villejuif-Paris
France
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