[lit-ideas] Re: For Mike Geary -- from a discussion of martyrdom on Anthro-L
- From: Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:13:20 -0500
Thanks for posting that, John. It's very interesting -- things, I had not
known or thought of before. I still wonder how one can believe in any idea
to the point of suicide. Surely there is some severe kind of psychological
suffering going on at the time.
Mike Geary
Memphis
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:39 AM, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> On Mon Aug 9 2010 at 9:23 AM Beverly Fogelson wrote:
>>
>>
>> What about Jesus?-Martyr
>>
>>
>> ...but did not write "Is Dan Foss reading this? I'd very much appreciate
>> his take on this," at the very bottom. [Note: Yes, but not all the way down.
>> - daf] That was Scott Holmes, on Tue Aug 3, 2010, at 2:33 PM.
>>
>> But, to start with Beverly's question: Jesus was not a religious
>> martyr. Religious martyrdom had not yet been invented/developed/evolved.
>> There cannot have been any, such thing as religious martyrdom without
>> [strictly] religious persecution; that is to say, on the basis of "beliefs"
>> proper to a "disembedded" religion (i.e., to which one can convert by
>> adopting its theological doctrines whatever one's natal or ancestral
>> ethnicity or culture). Such a religion came inly to self-conscious existence
>> with Christianity. Neither Romans nor Jews (from "Judaeans"; or,
>> self-styled, "Israel") had any experience with it.
>>
>> The Romans, at times, persecuted Jews quite severely, even
>> genocidally; but they never persecuted them for practicing the "Jewish
>> religion." Until the Byzantine Period (under the emperor Heraclius, 610-641,
>> when it was outlawed) the religion of the Jews was, under the Roman Empire,
>> a* religio licita*. The Roman Empire was ruled by a conservative
>> landowning aristocracy which loudly trumpeted its adherence to the* mos
>> maiorum*, Way of the Ancestors. The Jewish ethnic religion was
>> traditional, conservative, and every bit as patriarchal (the Fifth
>> Commandment &c). Christianity, as it evolved out of and away from its Jewish
>> ethnoreligious matrix, was glaringly different: for one thing, over the 300
>> years of Christian development prior to becoming the State Religion, at any
>> given time at least 40% of Christians were new converts [Keith Hopkins, "The
>> Importance of Christian Numbers,"* Journal of Early Christian Studies,
>> 6.2 (1998), 185-226).* In Roman law, Christianity was categorised as a*
>> superstitio*, and the State punished all who affirmed adherence as
>> radical innovators, disloyal subjects, and threats to social and political
>> order. This policy and legal weapons of religious persecution had developed
>> by the late second century.
>>
>> Earlier in the second century, under Hadrian (117-138),
>>
>> "...the Jews were forbidden to circumcise, not as an attack on Judaism but
>> as part of the general Roman law against genital mutilation, the* lex
>> Corneliathe de sicariis* [Note:* sicarii* were terrorists - daf]. This
>> led to Jewish revolt, which led, in turn, to harsh Roman response, but there
>> was never, according to [Saul Lieberman], a concerted attack on the Jewish
>> religion by the Roman government...." [From Daniel Boarin, "Martyrdom and
>> the Making of Christianity and Judaism,"*Journal of Early Christian
>> Studies, 6.4 (1998), 577-627;* citing Saul Lieberman.]
>>
>>
>> For both Christianity and Judaism, the concept of "martyrdom," in the
>> late fourth and early fifth centuries, acquired an eroticised content,
>> centring around the martyrs' "love of God" and the metaphorical language
>> used to express or articulat it. See D. Boyarin,* Dying for God:
>> Martyrdom and the Making of Judaism and Christianity,* Stanford, 1999;
>> David Frankfurter, "Martyrdom and the Prurient Gaze,"* Journal of Ear*ly*
>> Christian
>> Studies*, 17.2 (2009), 215-245.
>>
>> Since it appears that I will not be able to finish what I'd planned to
>> write, I'll skip over to the issue Dale has raised more than once: not only
>> is martyrdom very much a social act, it is likewise, everywhere it appears
>> or is manifested, an act which is construced, then perhaps re-constructed
>> more than once after the martyr is long dead; or even, if the martyr had
>> never existed in the first place. The late fourth century was marked by,
>> among other things, a vogue for virginity. Every large city in the Roman
>> East acquired a Virgin Martyr Saint. St Catherine of Alexandria was the
>> first, and still the best-loved. You recall that she "re-programmed," as we
>> might say, an "infernal machine" designed to kill Christians into killing
>> pagans instead: they liked science in Alexandria. But, under "paganism,"
>> decent Christians were supposed to shun the arena; they'd hardly have their
>> own reserved section of the stands. [One might imagine the flash-card
>> section....] St Catherine was said to have been 18. St Margaret was 15,
>> less-well-educated but with better looks; it seems that some lustful pagan
>> male wanted her body, which she disdained to sully, etc etc; and she,
>> likewise, diverted disaster (by flood) from the Christian side of the arena
>> to the pagan seats. St Barbara was 13; St Agnes was 12.
>>
>> Islam had a different trajectory: After Muhammad and his* muhajirun*
>> Companions
>> departed Mecca, they quickly got into power in Yathrib/Medina; the first
>> Muslims to die by violence did so in combat against the Makkans (or Meccans)
>> in the period 622-30. Muslims were never a small civilian minority,
>> powerless in confronting a State controlled by unbelievers. Until much
>> later. Whatever the post-mortem rewards alleged to be vouchsafted those who
>> fall in battle (which is controversial), the major fact of relevance to
>> contemporary martyrdoms is: Suicide bombers are a recent invention.
>> In evaluating Dale's position, the following should be kept in mind:
>> In all warfare, especially that involving the levying of mass armies of
>> infantry soldiers, the Meaning and Significance of their violent deaths
>> (never clearly distinguished from deaths from disease, accidents, "friendly
>> fire," murder, suicide &c) are always under the jealously-kept control of
>> their hierarchical superiors, both civilian and military.
>> What were the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg in 1863 thinking
>> about when they died? Sex? Fear of The Enemy? Desertion? The defining was
>> left to Abraham Lincoln: "these honoured Dead....who gave the last full
>> measure of their devotion....One Nation, Indivisible......" With those final
>> words, Lincoln showed he knew how Civil Wars were won: by tough, mean
>> bastards wielding State Power with utmost brutality and ruthlessness.
>> Recalling, no doubt, Maximilien Robespierre, "The Republic, One and
>> Indivisible." [Recall that on July 1-3, 1863, New York City was in the hands
>> of rioting working class men, whose passions were focussed on hanging black
>> men from lampposts: the so-called Draft Riots, which the Gettysburg and
>> Vicksburg victories consigned to historical oblivion.
>>
>> Now, clearly, there are parts of the Middle East today, where being a
>> suicide bomber is to accord with public decency. It is also* instrumentally
>> rational*: Where the footsoldier faces a high-technology army, with the
>> firepower and gadgets to destroy many hundreds of massed infantrymen before
>> they can get within hand-to-hand combat range of the objective, whether
>> human or material, being attacked, the suicide bomber is far likelier to
>> inflict damage on something besides himself than the traditional
>> infantry-person: The latter is defined as someone suffering from the
>> delusion of attempting to kill someone else, as opposed to being fed to the
>> slaughter like sheep.
>> It's also Very Disturbing to soldiers and civilians on the other side.
>> Religon helps. That's all. There's nothing Traditional about it,
>> remember.
>>
>> Good night,
>>
>> Daniel A. Foss
>>
>
>
> Enjoy.
>
> John
> --
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
>
Other related posts:
