Élie Barnavi, Les religions meurtières; William T. Cavanaugh, in Le Mythe de la violence religieuse
Last update: 2025-01-21 16:04:52
It is today commonplace that war is the child of religions. They are suspected of worsening conflicts if not of provoking them altogether. One exponent of this thesis in
Whom should we believe? It is clear, at least in Christianity, that the Gospel in the most evident terms condemns all violence (cf. in particular Mt 5:38-47 and 26:51-53). Nevertheless the Church has not prohibited legitimate defence and drawn up a doctrine of the ‘just war’ and down the centuries, faith, and not only Christian faith, has been used to justify resort to arms and even military conquest. The accusation of Élie Barnavi theorises a condemnation that was already launched by the Enlightenment thinkers in the name of ‘reason’ against all forms of obscurantist fanaticism but also (and perhaps in a more incisive way because it was less abstract) through a certain perception of the past.
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published between the years 1776 and 1788, i.e. exactly between the American revolution and the French revolution – a work whose influence is perhaps today underestimated), Edmund Gibbon (1737-1794) affirmed that Christian theology had worsened conflicts by introducing into every field the belief that one had to fight for the Truth and the duty to struggle against error and mere ignorance. The question lies here – understanding what Biblical Revelation changed as regards previous religiosities.
Traditionally, every nation had its gods and, in general, those of the countries it occupied. In a certain sense they conferred an identity ‘from on high’, assuring the nation its rights and giving it the force necessary to establish itself in a stable way in front of its neighbours and rivals. What first Abraham and later Moses learnt and handed down did not call into question the principle of these ‘supernatural’ interferences in the ‘natural’. On the contrary: they radicalised it. The God who chose the Jews as His people and gave them a land was the One God, the Lord of all the nations, the Creator of heaven and earth. From a relative and localised superiority, conferred by the gods who let themselves be tamed and even bought, one thus passed to legitimation by the Absolute Himself. The guarantee of rooting in transcendence could suddenly serve to motivate ambitions and the monopolistic intransigence of ‘holy war’ without limits.
The problem, therefore, is to know whether zeal without piety or compromise inspired by a God who is at one and the same time almighty and jealous, is faithful to Him or betrays Him through blind attachment. At this point one should be attentive to the difference that the overcoming of paganism within Biblical religions added to ‘natural’ religiosity, that is to say the fact that God cannot be used. If
We thus see that a singular ‘on high’ who is near but not bound by anything does not justify any particular plan for domination. Monotheism does not push for the establishment of a world theocratic empire but, rather, it is a foundation for the plurality and existence of ‘secular’ nations. Violence thus appears as a weakness inherent to immanence. In the end it turns out to be fatal for its authors, just as it is immediately so for its victims. It does not construct anything lasting because it misunderstands the Eternal God by seeking to use Him rather than obey Him. The radicalisation of the divine thus contains the antidote to the conquering absolutisation of human claims.
However, the attempts to tame the Almighty have been numerous and remain in our time as well. These attempts, which sooner or later are doomed to fail, must be seen as temptations and it is in this sense that the religions that honour the transcendent God experience corruptions in the form of the exaggeration of appetites. Here the key notion is gift. One is always, and only, tempted by the gifts he has received. The God whom neither heaven nor earth can contain places Himself within reach of man, only He knows how to do this, but nobody can become His master, even though His proximity can generate a hungry dizziness, an aggressiveness or a rapacity well beyond the ‘natural’ impulses of the ‘struggle for life’ (or for survival), like those described, for example, by Darwin.
To gauge the gifts received from God by taking possession of them, gifts that in essential terms are nothing else but His own Life, is properly called sin. This appears as such, as
This overview allows us to surmise that spirituality – in opposition to a generally received idea – is not just a personal question: it is also a collective question. Indeed, individual conversion is not sufficient to prevent religious regression with its threats of methodical and organised violence. War is never engaged in alone. Hence the importance of putting to work and sharing in the field of culture – independently of all apologetics and the duty to bear witness – the insight that every war is fratricidal because the one God is the Father of everyone and because all reconciliation is a gift that comes ‘from on high’ in a movement whose breadth suggest the greatness of God and outlines the horizon of hope in the watermark of the paradoxical beauty and the supreme tragic character of love which is mocked but not defeated.