RELIGION, POWER, AND POLITICS

Francis of Assisi

If history, as defined earlier, is our attempt to explain the catastrophes that befall mankind, that pile of debris mounting sky high in front of the angel of history, and to try to make sense of these disasters, then, in many respects, escaping from history is also a form or resistance to history and to established lines of authority. Similarly, the act of historicizing the past and, in this particular case historicizing religion, is yet another form of escape. It functions as a way to bind history and religion within temporal frameworks. One cannot also proceed in this discussion without some reference to the relationship between religion and power, between religion and the most obvious manifestation of political power: war. Clearly, religious beliefs and observances are part of the normal unfolding of history. We have long known, for example, how religion underpins political authority, and vice versa. From the first written historical records of mankind to the religious symbols displayed in modern democracies today — think for example of the oath taken on the Bible by politicians and those sworn to serve on juries, the religious invocations in Congress, references to god in school pledges, and the like — religion and politics have long blended almost seamlessly into coherent structures of power.

In Rome not a negligible part of imperial authority derived from the emperor’s role as pontifex maximus, the highest official of the formal state religion throughout the land. So did the “Mandate of Heaven” serve as a way to legitimate political power in second-millennium-bce China. In medieval Western Europe most kings ruled by the “grace of god;” their power vested via elaborate ceremonies of anointment or crowning, or through even more extreme claims of royal thaumaturgical power (e.g., the claims that the kings of France and England could cure scrofula by the touch of their hands). There was no political power in the Western premodern world without god. Th ere was no exercise of authority without the underpinning of religious structures, serving as intermediaries between the sacred and the world. But of course such links are still present in our contemporary world. Think of Franco’s link to the Church in post–Civil War Spain or the ties of Bush and many other recently elected politicians — most of them born - again Christians — to the Christian undamentalist Right. But even long before written records, archeological evidence, pictorial representations, and folklore tell us of the intertwining of religious symbolism, magical motifs, and daily life.

In the Western world, such a historical activity as warfare has been always closely related to religion. Reiterating Norman Housley’s arguments, one could simply say that religion has been one of the main catalysts for warfare. One may modify this argument by stating that conflicts between religions or within one specific religion have led to fierce carnage. One only needs to think of the horrific religious wars that devastated most of Christian Europe in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, of the enduring conflicts between Shia and Sunni, between Muslims and Hindus, Muslims and Jews, or the still smoldering embers of Protestant-Catholic conflicts in Ireland (though a resolution seemed almost to have been at hand, thanks mostly to Ireland’s new found — and soon lost — prosperity). Granted, many of these religious conflicts were, and are, also linked to issues of ethnicity, race, culture, and a multitude of other historical factors, but it is peculiar that most people’s often preferred way of selfidentification on our planet is religion. Far worse, the preferred way of identifying the enemy is also centered on religion, though, oddly enough, the most violent deeds are directed not at those who are quite diff erent but at those who are close by or differ from our beliefs in only small ways. Russell Jacobi’s forthcoming brilliant book on fraternal violence shows that wars are always harsher against a known enemy than an unknown one.

Spaniards in the Caribbean and in Mexico at the dawn of the early modern period always described themselves as Christians, while the natives whom they intended to subjugate, were identified as either infidel pagans or even Muslims. Their great temples were accordingly described as “mosques.” In today’s troubled world, politicians imprudently speak of the “clash of civilizations.” This is a not-so-veiled code for religious diff erences and the fallacious argument that such differences cannot be easily accepted in a Christian world. Think of the ongoing debate about Europe’s Christian identity or the enduring debate about Christmas in the US. Both of these debates brand a nation as being linked to a specific religious tradition, while implicitly creating a hierarchy that places other religions below. Th is essentializing of belief or of “otherness” often leads to political results. Think, for example, of the attempts of the political Right in this country to turn Obama into a Muslim. Are they saying that a Muslim should not be president regardless of his or her qualifications? Or think of the attempts of the French government — for even enlightened France can descend into this type of behavior — to expel the Roma from Paris.

Indeed, for better or worse, we cannot think of that which we call history, culture, the lives of nations, or the lives of individuals without some reference to religion. Even those like me, who have grown to have a rather vehement dislike for what I perceive as religion’s nefarious influence on the course of history, cannot do without frequently engaging religion, or, as mentioned earlier, being touched by its spell. As Clifford Geertz argued long ago (borrowing from Max Weber) in a rightly famous essay, we live, and are caught, in unavoidable “webs of significance.”1 These cultural webs bind us to specific religious forms. Although we may understand other religions and cultures, our diverse visions of the world and of ourselves are deeply imbedded in the religious culture into which we were born and in the things we were taught and learned as children and as adults. In a rather Buñuelesque fashion — Luis Buñuel was extremely anti-clerical but could not stop directing films about religion — I, and many others like me, while professing a total absence of religion, think, act, and are trapped as well in webs of significance that are spun by religion.

Of course, one ought to state the obvious before proceeding to other themes: absence of religion or a belief in god does not mean an absence of what is called morality, spirituality, or ethics. One of the most annoying things about discussing these matters is the rather shortsighted view that religion is necessary to be a “moral” person or to behave ethically, a position that often prompts a running argument with my students. It is true that most religions provide a readymade code of conduct — not that I approve of those codes or of their systems of rewards and punishments. They also provide, certainly the religions of the Book do, heavens or hells to encourage compliance. On this point there is little I could add to what has already been articulated by Plato. In the Republic, he argued persuasively for a life in which men and women would behave ethically and seek the good not because of any rewards or punishments in the afterlife, but because to do evil to others is to harm oneself first and foremost. I admit that “good” and “evil,” “ethical” and “unethical” are highly contested concepts. And Plato, at the end of the Republic let us down badly by introducing the myth of Er as yet another mysterious incentive — transmigration of souls, rewards in heaven, and a whole array of Pythagorean mysteries — to right behavior.

Escaping the Terror of History

By now, you will be ready to ask: what does all of this have to do with the terror of history and the uses of religion as a means of denying history’s burdens? Simply put, I do not wish to deny religion’s historical reality, nor its central role in human history. While I wish to re-emphasize that this is a discussion about religion and not about god or the gods, I also wish to make a further point. Th ere are crises along the long road of human existence that provoke either overwhelming stress or almost unbearable disruptions. Individuals and groups, unable to cope with what seem terrible forces gathering against them or suff ering from a deep sense of alienation and despair, seek to escape these conditions or to deny their historicity. Th ink, for example, of the Holocaust.

Many have argued (though few scholars do so anymore) that it was a unique event, not comparable to other excesses against humanity and, thus, outside history. Although I do not agree with the idea that there are events outside history (but feel rather that events such as the Holocaust should be historicized as a lesson to posterity), the important thing here is that there are some who would deny the historicity of the event — a cruelty after all perpetrated by men and women against other men and women—and argue that the Shoah was an incomprehensible divine act, not to be fully grasped by the human intellect. The history of the Shoah is so utterly horrendous that there is always the temptation to exclude it from human actions and to think that such deeds are not inherent in human agency. I fear that they are.2

Several questions need to be answered. What mechanisms or events trigger an escape from history? How do certain forms of religious experiences, both individual and communal, permit us to deny historical reality? Or how, in a certain sense, can one construct an alternate plane of existence that may appear at first glance to be better than the life one leads and that, most of all, may allow a person or a group to escape from the terrifying occurrences and patterns of human history? Large catastrophes could trigger these reactions, either partially or fully. Yet, not all plagues, natural disasters, or man made crises lead to such responses. Outcomes and responses depend, to a large extent, on historical contexts, on the presence or absence of charismatic leadership, on the level of understanding or misunderstanding of specific populations as to the nature of the crisis.

Catastrophes are of course not the only cause for a turning away from history. Gradual, abrupt, and above all drastic social and economic changes can have either a cumulative or immediate impact on large segments of the population. The dramatic social, economic, and religious transformations that marked the transition from late medieval times to the early modern unleashed millenarian agitations such as that of the German peasant uprising of 1525 and a whole host of local and regional apocalyptic movements that announced to their respective followers the end of history and time. A different form of response was the witch craze that swept Western Europe between the very late fifteenth century and the mid-seventeenth centuries. It resulted in the systematic execution of thousands of people, mostly old women. Although the witch craze was a historical phenomenon with a clearly defined trajectory, causes, and outcomes, the ideological depiction of witch beliefs by those on top as a reason for persecution provided an alternative to the other well-known great early modern Western narratives: science, discovery, centralized monarchical authority, and the emergence of the state. In a very real sense, all these elements (the harbingers of modernity) which should have, in theory, moved Western societies towards a more rational and enlightened view of the world (as they did in the eighteenth century), paradoxically fanned the fires of persecution, misogyny, and scapegoating. Below, we will revisit these topics, but it is important to note how the conflation of new technologies of knowledge and repartially or fully. Yet, not all plagues, natural disasters, or man made crises lead to such responses. Outcomes and responses depend, to a large extent, on historical contexts, on the presence or absence of charismatic leadership, on the level of understanding or misunderstanding of specific populations as to the nature of the crisis.

Catastrophes are of course not the only cause for a turning away from history. Gradual, abrupt, and above all drastic social and economic changes can have either a cumulative or immediate impact on large segments of the population. The dramatic social, economic, and religious transformations that marked the transition from late medieval times to the early modern unleashed millenarian agitations such as that of the German peasant uprising of 1525 and a whole host of local and regional apocalyptic movements that announced to their respective followers the end of history and time. A different form of response was the witch craze that swept Western Europe between the very late fifteenth century and the mid-seventeenth centuries. It resulted in the systematic execution of thousands of people, mostly old women. Although the witch craze was a historical phenomenon with a clearly defined trajectory, causes, and outcomes, the ideological depiction of witch beliefs by those on top as a reason for persecution provided an alternative to the other well-known great early modern Western narratives: science, discovery, centralized monarchical authority, and the emergence of the state. In a very real sense, all these elements (the harbingers of modernity) which should have, in theory, moved Western societies towards a more rational and enlightened view of the world (as they did in the eighteenth century), paradoxically fanned the fires of persecution, misogyny, and scapegoating. Below, we will revisit these topics, but it is important to note how the conflation of new technologies of knowledge and religion led to untold horror and desperate attempts to escape history.

Before proceeding to the examples, I do not wish to leave the reader with the impression, an impression prompted per- haps by my comments in the previous pages, that history moves from irrational to rational and back again in some form of linear progression. I do not know whether the Enlightenment was the highest point of Western history; nor that progress, if by that we mean material progress and tech- nological change, is the criteria by which we should measure human achievements. To paraphrase Nietzsche, it is about values. It is not by calculating the increase in material wealth or technology that we should measure progress, but by what our values are, and by our constant readiness to reevaluate those values. Clearly, in terms of our desire to respect the lives of others, their freedom, and culture, we have failed miserably.

The Greeks, who were perhaps the first humans to gaze unflinchingly into the heart of darkness and who understood, or at least some of them did, the meaninglessness and emptiness of the universe, pulled back from irrationality, as tempting as it was, by building an elaborate edifice of rationality and restraint. “Know thyself ” and “nothing in excess” became the ideal ruling principles of their lives. As worthy as these maxims are, they only reveal their opposites: that human life is often about excesses, and that very seldom do we know ourselves. Having written this, allow me to make a small point and complicate things further: the ideals of the Enlightenment and the belief of Enlightenment philosophers in progress only obscured and veiled the underlying irrationality and chaos of most European lives.

But enough of this, we should turn to actual responses or attempts, usually failed, to confront the excesses of history, the swift passing of time, and the permanent and edgy irrationality of our individual and collective lives. Responses are not always necessarily those of groups. Often people confront the specific Scylla and Charybdis of their individual lives through religion and other practices. We seek to make rational or, at least, somewhat understandable, overwhelming historical events as well as the less obvious but nonetheless always menacing disruptions of historical change. Some mystical or meditative states represent a clear turning away from historical reality and lead to the embracing of alternative forms of existence and awareness of time. In the most emphatic fashion, most great mystics and religious figures have argued for their direct and intimate relationship with god (or the gods), a way of thinking about the world that flies in the face of history or reality, as understood by many. Think, for example, of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He was certainly one of the most, if not the most, influential late medieval mystic. His life inspired many; his teachings led to millennial agitation and radical social and theological (one may describe some of the views held by some of Francis’ followers as heterodox) forms of religious practices. Such was his influence that almost eight hundred years later, I was, as an adolescent, taken by Francis’ example, and most of my students, who are assigned The Little Flowers of St. Francis as one of the texts they must read in my course on mysticism, are always quite moved by what seems to them his genuine renunciation of material wealth and embracing of poverty.

Francis of Assisi

Francis (c. 1182–1226) was born into a world in which social and economic structures were changing rapidly. Trade and a money economy were transforming social relations, fueling a wave of urbanization in Western Europe in general and in Italy in particular. The bourgeoisie accumulated wealth while eagerly yearning for salvation. This inherent contradiction created a conundrum for most enterprising middling sorts. Under the impetus of new economic realities, new forms of spirituality and novel attitudes towards property and wealth swept the West. Francis’ eventual message emerged from these contexts, but his preaching, shortly after the beginning of his mission, was not new. Before Francis, Peter Waldo (or Valdes) and his followers had articulated a powerful critique of these new economic forms and of the Church’s wealth. Branded as heterodox, the Waldensians faced mounting resistance and persecution, as did the Cathars, whose heresy was widespread in late-twelfth-century southern France.

The son of a merchant and born in Assisi (Umbria) around 1182, Francis grew up not very diff erently from his youthful companions. He was, as were many of his generation and station in life, deeply influenced by courtly romances, dreams of courageous martial deeds, and other such fantasies. Having read an idealized life of Francis early in my adolescence, I, almost fifty years afterwards, acknowledge honestly (and once again) to what an extent my own life and political views were shaped by Francis’ seemingly radical message. As has become a trope in the lives of saints, poets, and other sensitive people — think of Ignatius of Loyola or the young men of the Lost Generation — the experience of war (against nearby Perugia) and of being wounded deeply transformed Francis into a reflective and introspective young man. From this awakening, a radical transformation indeed, he rejected material things and embraced voluntary poverty and a life of preaching. His life, both as the subject of learned studies and hagiographical accounts, is well known.3 His preaching to the animals, his special sensitivity to nature, the centrality of apostolic poverty in his preaching, and his emphasis on Christ’s humanity signaled new possibilities for Christianity. His reception of the stigmata at Mount La Verne shortly before his death in 1226 marked a significant moment in Western history and spirituality. If Jesus was, according to Christian theology, both within history and outside it, Francis, by physically reliving Jesus’ passion, also stood within and outside history and time. Never mind that his own order, the Franciscans, rejected the core of Francis’ message and emphasized the importance of monastic establishments (thus property), education, and teaching against Francis’ firm rejection of any compromise with the world of property and owning things. Although Francis failed to convince some of his closest followers, others heard his ringing message. Never mind that he never challenged the authority of the Church or deviated from orthodoxy. Never mind that his emphasis on voluntary poverty led to, unintentionally for sure, a sharp distinction between those who had wealth and gave it up for the love of Christ and those who had the misfortune to be born and live in poverty not out of choice, robbing the latter finally of their standing in Christian society. But what did Francis’ life and preaching mean to his contemporaries, and how does his life play into our story?

The question here is not whether his heroic deeds, frequent mystical raptures, and his final reception of the stigmata — described in rhapsodic details by the mildly subversive Little Flowers of St. Francis (written many years after Francis’ death) — were “real” or not. For most of Francis’ contemporaries and for those living even centuries afterwards, the stories told and retold about him had an unimpeachable reality. In early thirteenth-century Europe, a world in which social, economic, and cultural transformations and changes in Church doctrine (most notably at the Fourth Lateran Council [1215]) created growing anxieties, St. Francis’ deeds and example offered solace and important lessons as well about living a true apostolic life. Historians, such as R. I. Moore and others, have focused on the early decades of the thirteenth century as marking the genesis of what has been described as “persecuting societies.”4 Although there is considerable historiographical discussion about whether the period truly marked the beginning of harsher attitudes towards heretics, Jews, Muslims, and others, it is fairly clear that wholesale changes were in the making. These changes, at the same time, deeply aff ected the spiritual life of Christians throughout the medieval West.

Beyond embellishing what I have already stated in previous paragraphs, one should note that Francis’ actions generated two different types of alternatives. First, at a personal level, Francis’ conversion or awakening, ascetic practices, and life of preaching brought him out of his own milieu and freed him from daily concerns, that is, took him out, as it were, from a set of social historical constraints. In many respects, some of the most charming passages detailing Francis’ adventures are those that reflect an element of random choice, of “playing the game” by none of the acceptable rules, or doing so by completely new rules. In reaching a bifurcation on the road and not knowing which direction to choose, - Francis asked one of his followers to swirl wildly and whatever road he faced at the end of his dance, that unknown road they would follow. I write this with a bit of envy, as I, and I am sure many others, presently lead lives in which we strain hopelessly to leave nothing to chance. This is even more ironic since we know that plans are easily overthrown by fate, chance, luck, illness, howsoever we wish to describe those fateful instances that overturn our best-laid plans for a well-ordered and predictable life.

Francis’ story recalls some of the 1960s attitudes towards life: the absence of planning, the lack of concern about the near or far future, the exquisite enjoyment of the moment, the rejection of the material world, and with it and only in a limited sense, a rejection of history and time. Francis had an immense impact on his contemporaries, as communes and the so-called hippies did on the culture of the 1960s. When faced with rapid change and uncertain times, Francis, like young people in the sixties (of whom I was one), escaped the burdens and terror of history through mystical visions, the embracing of poverty, and an apostolic life. As was the case in the 1960s, many in our society, often coming from a social background not unlike that of Francis, joined communes, moved to the sound of new and intoxicating music, rejected material gains, joined the peace movement (which was deeply historical), and, when finally everything failed, took to mind-bending, drug-induced escape, a kind of chemical substitute for religious mysticism.

Confronted with the angst of everyday life, with the boredom of the quotidian, with the absurdities and cruelties of history (endless warfare and communal strife in Italy during Francis’ life, the Vietnam war in the 1960s and the newly gained awareness of the burdens of racial discrimination), individuals and small groups turned their backs on their so cieties’ expectations and chose diff erent paths that set them sometimes at odds with their parents and peers and placed them outside normative historical processes. Some, such as Francis, we canonize, even as we are very careful to reject or neglect his example and message. Others, such as the young women and men who gave life to the sixties, we idealize or vilify according to our political bent; yet, we borrow their music, their fashions, and their poetry, while consciously following other paths that lead to careers, families, and compromise.

How very enticing and powerful these examples remain. How moving it must have been for those who met Francis or heard stories about him. Similarly, many lived vicariously through the deeds of others in the 1960s. It is said that if all those who claim to have attended the great concert at Woodstock had really been there, the attendance would have numbered in the millions. For Woodstock was that unique combination of music, peace, and non-violence (or at least was idealized as such) that even for those who were not fortunate enough to be there — and I was not there — represented an alternative to war and the corporate world, and a slim possibility to dehistoricize our lives. Rereading this now, past the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, I am amazed at how those glorious days of music and mud still resonate even in our apathetic age.

Individuals and communities do not require a plague like the one that vanquished many in 1348–50 or a September 11th to loosen our ties to history. We are always, somewhat unconsciously, attempting to escape history, the burdens of fleeting time, and their inexorable terrors and ever changing landscapes. Francis did, as did numerous other medieval mystics (whether orthodox or heterodox), first by entering into a rich interior spiritual life and then by articulating his visions to a wider world. So did many young people in the sixties who, while not sharing any particular or formal religion, had, at least for a short while, as much spirituality and as great a sense of citizenship in a benign universe as did any medieval mystic.

Second, Francis’ life and example had other consequences that propelled many of his later followers against history. He was widely seen as the second coming of Christ, and consequently his life and message served as a rallying point and inspiration for a groundswell of millenarian expectations that swept parts of Western Europe in the 1260s and, in a more diminished form, in the early fourteenth century. The end of the world, by which was meant the end of time and history, was anxiously expected in 1266, with Francis as the harbinger of the Second Coming and the final wars. These apocalyptic ideas, which had long been part and parcel of Western history and which, according to Norman Cohn had their origins in ancient Mesopotamian and Zoroastrian beliefs, have had a remarkable vitality in Western culture.5  Their blossoming in times of change, uncertainty, and  catastrophes is a telling sign of our enduring discomfort with historical processes. These millenarian outbursts punctuate our history. In the 1260s, bands of flagellants took to the road; their self-inflicted punishment was a form of purgation of their own perceived excesses and of the evilness of the world. It was a powerful attempt to return humanity and the world to god. The Church, which was of course an institution deeply grounded in history, did not look with pleasure on these activities, condemning the flagellants as heretical and uncanonical. It would do so again in 1348 when, in the wake of the Black Death, flagellants reappeared throughout the West.

Francis’ impact was not just limited to widespread expectations for the end of the world and time or to the flagellants’ peculiar religiosity. Francis’ radical followers remained for decades after his death in what can be described as an almost permanent state of subversion and resistance in expectation of the end of time. They did so into the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, that is, for almost a century after Francis’ death. These Fraticelli or little brothers, as they were known, became radical proponents of poverty and of an evangelical Christianity that was, in the eyes of the Church, deeply intertwined with heresy, prophesy, and enduring expectations of dramatic changes within the Church. We meet some of these characters, vividly drawn, in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, but they had far more real counterparts. The idea of an Angelical Pope who would usher in the Last Days and the end of history was fanned by Celestine V’s election to, and shortly thereafter by his famous resignation from, the papal throne in 1294, as well as by the coming of a new century. These ideas, circulating widely throughout the West, were part of complex set of traditional and, at the same time, revolutionary ideas that lingered in parts of Italy, mostly Calabria, into the early modern period. We find echoes of these beliefs in the life, deeds, and writings of someone like Tommaso Campanella, fairly well known for his defense of Galileo, but less known for his long prison term in Spanish custody for plotting and writings about a universal monarchy (first Spain and later France) that would bring final peace to earth. He also authored the enchanting utopian work, The City of the Sun, a work in which Christianity and property played no role.6

NOTES

1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretations of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973) chapter 1.
2. See the series published by Princeton University Press, “Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity” (four volumes have been published so far), which explores some of the most horrific violence against humans by other humans.
3. On the life of Francis, see Jacques Le Goff , Saint François d’Assise (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) and The Little Flowers of St. Francis, ed. Raphael Brown (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 1991).
4. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); and Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
5. On these topics, see the two very important books by Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and his The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)
6. On Campanella, see Tommaso Campanella, La città del sole: dialogo poetico / The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. and introduction by Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981).

By Teofilo F. Ruiz in "The Terror of History", Princeton University Press, USA, 2011, excerpts pp. 40-56. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.  

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