Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright © 2014 by Karen Armstrong

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London.

www.aaknopf.com www.randomhouse.ca

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Schocken Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Five Books of Moses, Deluxe Edition with Illustrations: The Schocken Bible, Volume I by Dr. Everett Fox, copyright © 1983, 1986, 1990, 1995 by Schocken Books. Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Armstrong, Karen, [date]

Fields of blood : religion and the history of violence / Karen Armstrong.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-307-95704-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-35310-6 (eBook)

I. Violence—Religious aspects. I. Title.

BL65.v55a76 2014

201′.72—dc23         2014011057

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Armstrong, Karen, [date], author

Fields of blood : religion and the history of violence / Karen Armstrong.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-307-40196-0

eBook ISBN 978-0-307-40198-4

1. Violence—Religious aspects—History. 2. Religion—Social aspects—

History.   I. Title.

BL65.V55A76 2014   201′.76332   C2014-902471-1

Jacket design by Oliver Munday

First Edition

rh_3.1_148359407_c0_r4

For Jane Garrett

Now Hevel became a shepherd of flocks, and Kayin became a worker of the soil

…

But then it was, when they were out in the field

that Kayin rose up against Hevel his brother

and he killed him.

YHWH said to Kayin:

Where is Hevel your brother?

He said:

I do not know. Am I the watcher of my brother?

Now he said:

What have you done!

Hark—your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil!

—GENESIS 4:2, 8–10, translated by Everett Fox

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Part One ♦ BEGINNINGS

  1. Farmers and Herdsmen

  2. India: The Noble Path

  3. China: Warriors and Gentlemen

  4. The Hebrew Dilemma

Part Two ♦ KEEPING THE PEACE

  5. Jesus: Not of This World?

  6. Byzantium: The Tragedy of Empire

  7. The Muslim Dilemma

  8. Crusade and Jihad

Part Three ♦ MODERNITY

  9. The Arrival of Religion

10. The Triumph of the Secular

11. Religion Fights Back

12. Holy Terror

13. Global Jihad

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A Note about the Author

Other Books by This Author

Introduction

Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In this way, Moses explained, the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place. ¹ In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community. ² In a similar way, I believe, modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.

In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history. I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material, and ideological factors are involved, one of the chief being competition for scarce resources. Experts on political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons.³ Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century onto the back of religion and drive it out into the political wilderness.

Even those who admit that religion has not been responsible for all the violence and warfare of the human race still take its essential belligerence for granted. They claim that monotheism is especially intolerant and that once people believe that God is on their side, compromise becomes impossible. They cite the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They also point to the recent spate of terrorism committed in the name of religion to prove that Islam is particularly aggressive. If I mention Buddhist nonviolence, they retort that Buddhism is a secular philosophy, not a religion. Here we come to the heart of the problem. Buddhism is certainly not a religion as this word has been understood in the West since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But our modern Western conception of religion is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians would have found it reductive and alien. In fact, it complicates any attempt to pronounce on religion’s propensity to violence.

To complicate things still further, for about fifty years now it has been clear in the academy that there is no universal way to define religion.⁴ In the West we see religion as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions, and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all secular activities. But words in other languages that we translate as religion almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing. The Arabic din signifies an entire way of life. The Sanskrit dharma is also a ‘total’ concept, untranslatable, which covers law, justice, morals, and social life.⁵ The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious.’ ⁶ The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.⁷ Nor does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.⁸

The origins of the Latin religio are obscure. It was not a great objective something but had imprecise connotations of obligation and taboo; to say that a cultic observance, a family propriety, or keeping an oath was religio for you meant that it was incumbent on you to do it. The word acquired an important new meaning among early Christian theologians: an attitude of reverence toward God and the universe as a whole. For Saint Augustine (c. 354–430 CE), religio was neither a system of rituals and doctrines nor a historical institutionalized tradition but a personal encounter with the transcendence that we call God as well as the bond that unites us to the divine and to one another. In medieval Europe, religio came to refer to the monastic life and distinguished the monk from the secular priest, someone who lived and worked in the world (saeculum).⁹

The only faith tradition that does fit the modern Western notion of religion as something codified and private is Protestant Christianity, which, like religion in this sense of the word, is also a product of the early modern period. At this time Europeans and Americans had begun to separate religion and politics, because they assumed, not altogether accurately, that the theological squabbles of the Reformation had been entirely responsible for the Thirty Years’ War. The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.¹⁰ The philosophers and statesmen who pioneered this dogma believed that they were returning to a more satisfactory state of affairs that had existed before ambitious Catholic clerics had confused two utterly distinct realms. But in fact their secular ideology was as radical an innovation as the modern market economy that the West was concurrently devising. To non-Westerners, who had not been through this particular modernizing process, both these innovations would seem unnatural and even incomprehensible. The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never simply a question of the state using religion; the two were indivisible. Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail.

In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life. We shall see that a host of activities now considered mundane were experienced as deeply sacred: forest clearing, hunting, football matches, dice games, astronomy, farming, state building, tugs-of-war, town planning, commerce, imbibing strong drink, and, most particularly, warfare. Ancient peoples would have found it impossible to see where religion ended and politics began. This was not because they were too stupid to understand the distinction but because they wanted to invest everything they did with ultimate value. We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our physical and psychological frailty. We find it astonishing that we are here at all and want to know why. We also have a great capacity for wonder. Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence.

They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.¹¹ Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos—whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes—premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being. We humans are profoundly artificial and tend naturally toward archetypes and paradigms.¹² We constantly strive to improve on nature or approximate to an ideal that transcends the day-to-day. Even our contemporary cult of celebrity can be understood as an expression of our reverence for and yearning to emulate models of superhumanity. Feeling ourselves connected to such extraordinary realities satisfies an essential craving. It touches us within, lifts us momentarily beyond ourselves, so that we seem to inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel in touch with the deeper currents of life. If we no longer find this experience in a church or temple, we seek it in art, a musical concert, sex, drugs—or warfare. What this last may have to do with these other moments of transport may not be so obvious, but it is one of the oldest triggers of ecstatic experience. To understand why, it will be helpful to consider the development of our neuroanatomy.

Each of us has not one but three brains that coexist uneasily. In the deepest recess of our gray matter we have an old brain that we inherited from the reptiles that struggled out of the primal slime 500 million years ago. Intent on their own survival, with absolutely no altruistic impulses, these creatures were solely motivated by mechanisms urging them to feed, fight, flee (when necessary), and reproduce. Those best equipped to compete mercilessly for food, ward off any threat, dominate territory, and seek safety naturally passed along their genes, so these self-centered impulses could only intensify.¹³ But sometime after mammals appeared, they evolved what neuroscientists call the limbic system, perhaps about 120 million years ago.¹⁴ Formed over the core brain derived from the reptiles, the limbic system motivated all sorts of new behaviors, including the protection and nurture of young as well as the formation of alliances with other individuals that were invaluable in the struggle to survive. And so, for the first time, sentient beings possessed the capacity to cherish and care for creatures other than themselves.¹⁵

Although these limbic emotions would never be as strong as the me first drives still issuing from our reptilian core, we humans have evolved a substantial hard-wiring for empathy for other creatures, and especially for our fellow humans. Eventually, the Chinese philosopher Mencius (c. 371–288 BCE) would insist that nobody was wholly without such sympathy. If a man sees a child teetering on the brink of a well, about to fall in, he would feel her predicament in his own body and would reflexively, without thought for himself, lunge forward to save her. There would be something radically wrong with anyone who could walk past such a scene without a flicker of disquiet. For most, these sentiments were essential, though, Mencius thought, somewhat subject to individual will. You could stamp on these shoots of benevolence just as you could cripple or deform yourself physically. On the other hand, if you cultivated them, they would acquire a strength and dynamism of their own.¹⁶

We cannot entirely understand Mencius’s argument without considering the third part of our brain. About twenty thousand years ago, during the Paleolithic Age, human beings evolved a new brain, the neocortex, home of the reasoning powers and self-awareness that enable us to stand back from the instinctive, primitive passions. Humans thus became roughly as they are today, subject to the conflicting impulses of their three distinct brains. Paleolithic men were proficient killers. Before the invention of agriculture, they were dependent on the slaughter of animals and used their big brains to develop a technology that enabled them to kill creatures much larger and more powerful than themselves. But their empathy may have made them uneasy. Or so we might conclude from modern hunting societies. Anthropologists observe that tribesmen feel acute anxiety about having to slay the beasts they consider their friends and patrons and try to assuage this distress by ritual purification. In the Kalahari Desert, where wood is scarce, bushmen are forced to rely on light weapons that can only graze the skin. So they anoint their arrows with a poison that kills the animal—only very slowly. Out of ineffable solidarity, the hunter stays with his dying victim, crying when it cries, and participating symbolically in its death throes. Other tribes don animal costumes or smear the kill’s blood and excrement on cavern walls, ceremonially returning the creature to the underworld from which it came.¹⁷

Paleolithic hunters may have had a similar understanding.¹⁸ The cave paintings in northern Spain and southwestern France are among the earliest extant documents of our species. These decorated caves almost certainly had a liturgical function, so from the very beginning art and ritual were inseparable. Our neocortex makes us intensely aware of the tragedy and perplexity of our existence, and in art, as in some forms of religious expression, we find a means of letting go and encouraging the softer, limbic emotions to predominate. The frescoes and engravings in the labyrinth of Lascaux in the Dordogne, the earliest of which are seventeen thousand years old, still evoke awe in visitors. In their numinous depiction of the animals, the artists have captured the hunters’ essential ambivalence. Intent as they were to acquire food, their ferocity was tempered by respectful sympathy for the beasts they were obliged to kill, whose blood and fat they mixed with their paints. Ritual and art helped hunters express their empathy with and reverence (religio) for their fellow creatures—just as Mencius would describe some seventeen millennia later—and helped them live with their need to kill them.

In Lascaux there are no pictures of the reindeer that featured so largely in the diet of these hunters.¹⁹ But not far away, in Montastruc, a small sculpture has been found, carved from a mammoth tusk in about 11,000 BCE, at about the same time as the later Lascaux paintings. Now lodged in the British Museum, it depicts two swimming reindeer.²⁰ The artist must have watched his prey intently as they swam across lakes and rivers in search of new pastures, making themselves particularly vulnerable to the hunters. He also felt a tenderness toward his victims, conveying the unmistakable poignancy of their facial expressions without a hint of sentimentality. As Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has noted, the anatomical accuracy of this sculpture shows that it was clearly made not just with the knowledge of a hunter but also with the insight of a butcher, someone who had not only looked at his animals but had cut them up. Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has also reflected insightfully on the huge and imaginative generosity of these Paleolithic artists: In the art of this period, you see human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that’s going on all around them … and this is actually a very religious impulse.²¹ From the first, then, one of the major preoccupations of both religion and art (the two being inseparable) was to cultivate a sense of community—with nature, the animal world, and our fellow humans.

We would never wholly forget our hunter-gatherer past, which was the longest period in human history. Everything that we think of as most human—our brains, bodies, faces, speech, emotions, and thoughts—bears the stamp of this heritage.²² Some of the rituals and myths devised by our prehistoric ancestors appear to have survived in the practices of later, literate cultures. In this way, animal sacrifice, the central rite of nearly every ancient society, preserved prehistoric hunting ceremonies and the honor accorded the beast that gave its life for the community.²³ Much of what we now call religion was originally rooted in an acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life depended on the destruction of other creatures; rituals were addressed to helping human beings face up to this insoluble dilemma. Despite their real respect, reverence, and even affection for their prey, however, ancient huntsmen remained dedicated killers. Millennia of fighting large aggressive animals meant that these hunting parties became tightly bonded teams that were the seeds of our modern armies, ready to risk everything for the common good and to protect their fellows in moments of danger.²⁴ And there was one more conflicting emotion to be reconciled: they probably loved the excitement and intensity of the hunt.

Here again the limbic system comes into play. The prospect of killing may stir our empathy, but in the very acts of hunting, raiding, and battling, this same seat of emotions is awash in serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for the sensation of ecstasy that we associate with some forms of spiritual experience. So it happened that these violent pursuits came to be perceived as sacred activities, however bizarre that may seem to our understanding of religion. People, especially men, experienced a strong bond with their fellow warriors, a heady feeling of altruism at putting their lives at risk for others and of being more fully alive. This response to violence persists in our nature. The New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges has aptly described war as a force that gives us meaning:

War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.²⁵

It may be too that as they give free rein to the aggressive impulses from the deepest region of their brains, warriors feel in tune with the most elemental and inexorable dynamics of existence, those of life and death. Put another way, war is a means of surrender to reptilian ruthlessness, one of the strongest of human drives, without being troubled by the self-critical nudges of the neocortex.

The warrior, therefore, experiences in battle the transcendence that others find in ritual, sometimes to pathological effect. Psychiatrists who treat war veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have noted that in the destruction of other people, soldiers can experience a self-affirmation that is almost erotic. Yet afterward, as they struggle to disentangle their emotions of pity and ruthlessness, PTSD sufferers may find themselves unable to function as coherent human beings. One Vietnam veteran described a photograph of himself holding two severed heads by the hair; the war, he said, was hell, a place where crazy was natural and everything out of control, but, he concluded:

The worst thing I can say about myself is that while I was there I was so alive. I loved it the way you can like an adrenaline high, the way you can love your friends, your tight buddies. So unreal and the realest thing that ever happened.… And maybe the worst thing for me now is living in peacetime without a possibility of that high again. I hate what that high was about but I loved that high.²⁶

Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent, Hedges explains. Trivia dominates our conversation and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us a resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.²⁷ One of the many, intertwined motives driving men to the battlefield has been the tedium and pointlessness of ordinary domestic existence. The same hunger for intensity would compel others to become monks and ascetics.

The warrior in battle may feel connected with the cosmos, but afterward he cannot always resolve these inner contradictions. It is fairly well established that there is a strong taboo against killing our own kind—an evolutionary stratagem that helped our species to survive.²⁸ Still, we fight. But to bring ourselves to do so, we envelop the effort in a mythology—often a religious mythology—that puts distance between us and the enemy. We exaggerate his differences, be they racial, religious, or ideological. We develop narratives to convince ourselves that he is not really human but monstrous, the antithesis of order and goodness. Today we may tell ourselves that we are fighting for God and country or that a particular war is just or legal. But this encouragement doesn’t always take hold. During the Second World War, for instance, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall of the U.S. Army and a team of historians interviewed thousands of soldiers from more than four hundred infantry companies that had seen close combat in Europe and the Pacific. Their findings were startling: only 15 to 20 percent of infantrymen had been able to fire at the enemy directly; the rest tried to avoid it and had developed complex methods of misfiring or reloading their weapons so as to escape detection.²⁹

It is hard to overcome one’s nature. To become efficient soldiers, recruits must go through a grueling initiation, not unlike what monks or yogins undergo, to subdue their emotions. As the cultural historian Joanna Bourke explains the process:

Individuals had to be broken down to be rebuilt into efficient fighting men. The basic tenets included depersonalization, uniforms, lack of privacy, forced social relationships, tight schedules, lack of sleep, disorientation followed by rites of reorganization according to military codes, arbitrary rules, and strict punishment. The methods of brutalization were similar to those carried out by regimes where men were taught to torture prisoners.³⁰

So, we might say, the soldier has to become as inhuman as the enemy he has created in his mind. Indeed, we shall find that in some cultures, even (or perhaps especially) those that glorify warfare, the warrior is somehow tainted, polluted, and an object of fear—both an heroic figure and a necessary evil, to be dreaded, set apart.

Our relationship to warfare is therefore complex, possibly because it is a relatively recent human development. Hunter-gatherers could not afford the organized violence that we call war, because warfare requires large armies, sustained leadership, and economic resources that were far beyond their reach.³¹ Archaeologists have found mass graves from this period that suggest some kind of massacre,³² yet there is little evidence that early humans regularly fought one another.³³ But human life changed forever in about 9000 BCE, when pioneering farmers in the Levant learned to grow and store wild grain. They produced harvests that were able to support larger populations than ever before and eventually they grew more food than they needed.³⁴ As a result, the human population increased so dramatically that in some regions a return to hunter-gatherer life became impossible. Between about 8500 BCE and the first century of the Common Era—a remarkably short period given the four million years of our history—all around the world, quite independently, the great majority of humans made the transition to agrarian life. And with agriculture came civilization; and with civilization, warfare.

In our industrialized societies, we often look back to the agrarian age with nostalgia, imagining that people lived more wholesomely then, close to the land and in harmony with nature. Initially, however, agriculture was experienced as traumatic. These early settlements were vulnerable to wild swings in productivity that could wipe out the entire population, and their mythology describes the first farmers fighting a desperate battle against sterility, drought, and famine.³⁵ For the first time, backbreaking drudgery became a fact of human life. Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.³⁶ The earth was revered as the Mother Goddess and her fecundity experienced as an epiphany; she was called Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Demeter in Greece, Isis in Egypt, and Anat in Syria. Yet she was not a comforting presence but extremely violent. The Earth Mother regularly dismembered consorts and enemies alike—just as corn was ground to powder and grapes crushed to unrecognizable pulp. Farming implements were depicted as weapons that wounded the earth, so farming plots became fields of blood. When Anat slew Mot, god of sterility, she cut him in two with a ritual sickle, winnowed him in a sieve, ground him in a mill, and scattered his scraps of bleeding flesh over the fields. After she slaughtered the enemies of Baal, god of life-giving rain, she adorned herself with rouge and henna, made a necklace of the hands and heads of her victims, and waded knee-deep in blood to attend the triumphal banquet.³⁷

These violent myths reflected the political realities of agrarian life. By the beginning of the ninth millennium BCE, the settlement in the oasis of Jericho in the Jordan valley had a population of three thousand people, which would have been impossible before the advent of agriculture. Jericho was a fortified stronghold protected by a massive wall that must have consumed tens of thousands of hours of manpower to construct.³⁸ In this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agriculture, therefore, created conditions that could endanger everyone in this wealthy colony and transform its arable land into fields of blood. Jericho was unusual, however—a portent of the future. Warfare would not become endemic in the region for another five thousand years, but it was already a possibility, and from the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft.³⁹

Agriculture had also introduced another type of aggression: an institutional or structural violence in which a society compels people to live in such wretchedness and subjection that they are unable to better their lot. This systemic oppression has been described as possibly the most subtle form of violence,⁴⁰ and, according to the World Council of Churches, it is present whenever resources and powers are unequally distributed, concentrated in the hands of the few, who do not use them to achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use parts of them for self-satisfaction or for purposes of dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the underprivileged in the same society.⁴¹ Agrarian civilization made this systemic violence a reality for the first time in human history.

Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gatherers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt.⁴² Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter-gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is a sort of communism, and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole.⁴³ But in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly of violence, and dominate the rest of the population.

As we shall see in Part One, this systemic violence would prevail in all agrarian civilizations. In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which were economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, with the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have advanced beyond subsistence level, because it created a nobility with the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible. All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive system; there seemed to be no alternative. This inevitably had implications for religion, which permeated all human activities, including state building and government. Indeed, we shall see that premodern politics was inseparable from religion. And if a ruling elite adopted an ethical tradition, such as Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, the aristocratic clergy usually adapted their ideology so that it could support the structural violence of the state.⁴⁴

In Parts One and Two we shall explore this dilemma. Established by force and maintained by military aggression, warfare was essential to the agrarian state. When land and the peasants who farmed it were the chief sources of wealth, territorial conquest was the only way such a kingdom could increase its revenues. Warfare was, therefore, indispensable to any premodern economy. The ruling class had to maintain its control of the peasant villages, defend its arable land against aggressors, conquer more land, and ruthlessly suppress any hint of insubordination. A key figure in this story will be the Indian emperor Ashoka (c. 268–232 BCE). Appalled by the suffering his army had inflicted on a rebellious city, he tirelessly promoted an ethic of compassion and tolerance but could not in the end disband his army. No state can survive without its soldiers. And once states grew and warfare had become a fact of human life, an even greater force—the military might of empire—often seemed the only way to keep the peace.

So necessary to the rise of states and ultimately empires is military force that historians regard militarism as a mark of civilization. Without disciplined, obedient, and law-abiding armies, human society, it is claimed, would probably have remained at a primitive level or have degenerated into ceaselessly warring hordes.⁴⁵ But like our inner conflict between violent and compassionate impulses, the incoherence between peaceful ends and violent means would remain unresolved. Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. And into this tug-of-war religion would enter too. Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element. Indeed, every major faith tradition has tracked that political entity in which it arose; none has become a world religion without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire, and, therefore, each would have to develop an imperial ideology.⁴⁶ But to what degree did religion contribute to the violence of the states with which it was inextricably linked? How much blame for the history of human violence can we ascribe to religion itself? The answer is not as simple as much of our popular discourse would suggest.

Our world is dangerously polarized at a time when humanity is more closely interconnected—politically, economically, and electronically—than ever before. If we are to meet the challenge of our time and create a global society where all peoples can live together in peace and mutual respect, we need to assess our situation accurately. We cannot afford oversimplified assumptions about the nature of religion or its role in the world. What the American scholar William T. Cavanaugh calls the myth of religious violence⁴⁷ served Western people well at an early stage of their modernization, but in our global village we need a more nuanced view in order to understand our predicament fully.

This book focuses mainly on the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam because they are the ones most in the spotlight at the moment. Yet because there is such a widespread conviction that monotheism, the belief in a single God, is especially prone to violence and intolerance, the first section of the book will examine it in comparative perspective. In traditions preceding the Abrahamic faiths, we will see not only how military force and an ideology imbued with the sacred were both essential to the state but also how from earliest times there were those who agonized about the dilemma of necessary violence and proposed religious ways to counter aggressive urges and channel them toward more compassionate ends.

Time would fail me were I to attempt to cover all instances of religiously articulated violence, but we will explore some of the most prominent in the long history of the three Abrahamic religions, such as Joshua’s holy wars, the call to jihad, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the European Wars of Religion. It will become clear that when premodern people engaged in politics, they thought in religious terms and that faith permeated their struggle to make sense of the world in a way that seems strange to us today. But that is not the whole story. To paraphrase a British commercial: The weather does lots of different things—and so does religion. In religious history, the struggle for peace has been just as important as the holy war. Religious people have found all kinds of ingenious methods of dealing with the assertive machismo of the reptilian brain, curbing violence, and building respectful, life-enhancing communities. But as with Ashoka, who came up against the systemic militancy of the state, they could not radically change their societies; the most they could do was propose a different path to demonstrate kinder and more empathic ways for people to live together.

When we come to the modern period, in Part Three, we will, of course, explore the wave of violence claiming religious justification that erupted during the 1980s and culminated in the atrocity of September 11, 2001. But we will also examine the nature of secularism, which, despite its manifold benefits, has not always offered a wholly irenic alternative to a religious state ideology. The early modern philosophies that tried to pacify Europe after the Thirty Years’ War in fact had a ruthless streak of their own, particularly when dealing with casualties of secular modernity who found it alienating rather than empowering and liberating. This is because secularism did not so much displace religion as create new religious enthusiasms. So ingrained is our desire for ultimate meaning that our secular institutions, most especially the nation-state, almost immediately acquired a religious aura, though they have been less adept than the ancient mythologies at helping people face up to the grimmer realities of human existence for which there are no easy answers. Yet secularism has by no means been the end of the story. In some societies attempting to find their way to modernity, it has succeeded only in damaging religion and wounding psyches of people unprepared to be wrenched from ways of living and understanding that had always supported them. Licking its wounds in the desert, the scapegoat, with its festering resentment, has rebounded on the city that drove it out.

Part One

BEGINNINGS

1

Farmers and Herdsmen

Gilgamesh, named in the ancient king lists as the fifth ruler of Uruk, was remembered as the strongest of men—huge, handsome, radiant, perfect. ¹ He may well have existed but soon acquired a legendary aura. It was said that he had seen everything, traveled to the ends of the earth, visited the underworld, and achieved great wisdom. By the early third millennium BCE, Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, was the largest city-state in the federation of Sumer, the world’s first civilization. The poet Sin-leqi-unninni, who wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s remarkable life in about 1200 BCE, was still bursting with pride in its temples, palaces, gardens, and shops. He began and ended his epic with an exuberant description of the magnificent city wall, six miles long, that Gilgamesh had restored for his people. Walk on the wall of Uruk! he urged his readers excitedly. Follow its course around the city, inspect its mighty foundations, examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built! ² This splendid fortification showed that warfare had become a fact of human life. Yet this had not been an inevitable development. For hundreds of years, Sumer had felt no need to protect its cities from outside attack. Gilgamesh, however, who probably ruled around 2750 BCE, was a new kind of Sumerian king, "a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader, hero on the front lines, beloved by his soldiers—fortress they called him, protector of the people, raging flood that destroys all defenses." ³

Despite his passion for Uruk, Sin-leqi had to admit that civilization had its discontents. Poets had begun to tell Gilgamesh’s story soon after his death because it is an archetypal tale, one of the first literate accounts of the hero’s journey.⁴ But it also wrestles with the inescapable structural violence of civilized life. Oppressed, impoverished, and miserable, the people of Uruk begged the gods to grant them some relief from Gilgamesh’s tyranny:

The city is his possession, he struts

Through it, arrogant, his head raised high,

Trampling its citizens like a wild bull.

He is king, he does whatever he wants

The young men of Uruk he harries without a warrant,

Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father.⁵

These young men may have been conscripted into the labor bands that rebuilt the city wall.⁶ Urban living would not have been possible without the unscrupulous exploitation of the vast majority of the population. Gilgamesh and the Sumerian aristocracy lived in unprecedented splendor, but for the peasant masses civilization brought only misery and subjugation.

The Sumerians seem to have been the first people to commandeer the agricultural surplus grown by the community and create a privileged ruling class. This could only have been achieved by force. Enterprising settlers had first been drawn to the fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates in about 5000 BCE.⁷ It was too dry for farming, so they designed an irrigation system to control and distribute the snowmelt from the mountains that flooded the plain each year. This was an extraordinary achievement. Canals and ditches had to be planned, designed, and maintained in a cooperative effort and the water allocated fairly between competing communities. The new system probably began on a small scale, but would have soon led to a dramatic increase in agricultural yield and thus to a population explosion.⁸ By 3500, Sumer numbered a hitherto unachievable half-million souls. Strong leadership would have been essential, but what actually transformed these simple farmers into city dwellers is a topic of endless debate. Probably a number of interlocking and mutually reinforcing factors were involved: population growth, unprecedented agricultural fecundity, and the intensive labor required by irrigation—not to mention sheer human ambition—all contributed to a new kind of society.⁹

All that we know for certain is that by 3000 BCE there were twelve cities in the Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. Theirs was subsistence-level living. Each village had to bring its entire crop to the city it served; officials allocated a portion to feed the local peasants, and the rest was stored for the aristocracy in the city temples. In this way, a few great families with the help of a class of retainers—bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and household servants—appropriated between half and two-thirds of the revenue.¹⁰ They used this surplus to live a different sort of life altogether, freed for various pursuits that depend on leisure and wealth. In return, they maintained the irrigation system and preserved a degree of law and order. All premodern states feared anarchy: a single crop failure caused by drought or social unrest could lead to thousands of deaths, so the elite could tell themselves that this system benefited the population as a whole. But robbed of the fruits of their labors, the peasants were little better than slaves: plowing, harvesting, digging irrigation canals, being forced into degradation and penury, their hard labor in the fields draining their lifeblood. If they failed to satisfy their overseers, their oxen were kneecapped and their olive trees chopped down.¹¹ They left fragmentary records of their distress. The poor man is better dead than alive, one peasant lamented. I am a thoroughbred steed, complained another, but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a cart and carry weeds and stubble.¹²

Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.¹³ Its rigid hierarchy was symbolized by the ziggurats, the giant stepped temple-towers that were the hallmark of Mesopotamian civilization: Sumerian society too was stacked in narrowing layers culminating in an exalted aristocratic pinnacle, each individual locked inexorably into place.¹⁴ Yet, historians argue, without this cruel arrangement that did violence to the vast majority of the population, humans would not have developed the arts and sciences that made progress possible. Civilization itself required a leisured class to cultivate it, and so our finest achievements were for thousands of years built on the backs of an exploited peasantry. By no coincidence, when the Sumerians invented writing, it was for the purpose of social control.

What role did religion play in this damaging oppression? All political communities develop ideologies that ground their institutions in the natural order as they perceive it.¹⁵ The Sumerians knew how fragile their groundbreaking urban experiment was. Their mud-brick buildings needed constant maintenance; the Tigris and Euphrates frequently broke their banks and ruined the crops; torrential rains turned the soil into a sea of mud; and terrifying storms damaged property and killed livestock. But the aristocrats had begun to study astronomy and discovered regular patterns in the movements of the heavenly bodies. They marveled at the way the different elements of the natural world worked together to create a stable universe, and they concluded that the cosmos itself must be a kind of state in which everything had its allotted function. They decided that if they modeled their cities on this celestial order, their experimental society would be in tune with the way the world worked and would therefore thrive and endure.¹⁶

The cosmic state, they believed, was managed by gods who were inseparable from the natural forces and nothing like the God worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims today. These deities could not control events but were bound by the same laws as humans, animals, and plants. There was also no vast ontological gap between human and divine; Gilgamesh, for example, was one-third human, two-thirds divine.¹⁷ The Anunnaki, the higher gods, were the aristocrats’ celestial alter egos, their most complete and effective selves, differing from humans only in that they were immortal. The Sumerians imagined these gods as preoccupied with town planning, irrigation, and government, just as they were. Anu, the Sky, ruled this archetypal state from his palace in the heavens, but his presence was also felt in all earthly authority. Enlil, Lord Storm, was revealed not only in the cataclysmic thunderstorms of Mesopotamia but also in any kind of human force and violence. He was Anu’s chief counselor in the Divine Council (on which the Sumerian Assembly was modeled), and Enki, who had imparted the arts of civilization to human beings, was its minister of agriculture.

Every polity—even our secular nation-state—relies on a mythology that defines its special character and mission. The word myth has lost its force in modern times and tends to mean something that is not true, that never happened. But in the premodern world, mythology expressed a timeless rather than a historical reality and provided a blueprint for action in the present.¹⁸ At this very early point in history, when the archaeological and historical record is so scanty, the mythology that the Sumerians preserved in writing is the only way we can enter their minds. For these pioneers of civilization, the myth of the cosmic state was an exercise in political science. The Sumerians knew that their stratified society was a shocking departure from the egalitarian norm that had prevailed from time immemorial, but they were convinced that it was somehow enshrined in the very nature of things and that even the gods were bound by it. Long before humans existed, it was said, the gods had lived in the Mesopotamian cities, growing their own food and managing the irrigation system.¹⁹ After the Great Flood, they had withdrawn from earth to heaven and appointed the Sumerian aristocracy to govern the cities in their stead. Answerable to their divine masters, the ruling class had had no choice in the matter.

Following the logic of the perennial philosophy, the Sumerians’ political arrangements imitated those of their gods; this, they believed, enabled their fragile cities to participate in the strength of the divine realm. Each city had its own patronal deity and was run as this god’s personal estate.²⁰ Represented by a life-sized statue, the ruling god lived in the chief temple with his family and household of divine retainers and servants, each one of whom was also depicted in effigy and dwelled in a suite of rooms. The gods were fed, clothed, and entertained in elaborate rituals, and each temple owned huge holdings of farmland and herds of livestock in their name. Everybody in the city-state, no matter how menial his or her task, was engaged in divine service—officiating at the deities’ rites; working in their breweries, factories, and workshops; sweeping their shrines; pasturing and butchering their animals; baking their bread; and clothing their statues. There was nothing secular about the Mesopotamian state and nothing personal about their religion. This was a theocracy in which everybody—from the highest aristocrat to the lowliest artisan—performed a sacred activity.

Mesopotamian religion was essentially communal; men and women did not seek to encounter the divine only in the privacy of their hearts but primarily in a godly community. Premodern religion had no separate institutional existence; it was embedded in the political, social, and domestic arrangements of a society, providing it with an overarching system of meaning. Its goals, language, and rituals were conditioned by these mundane considerations. Providing the template for society, Mesopotamian religious practice seems to have been the direct opposite of our modern notion of religion as a private spiritual experience: it was essentially a political pursuit, and we have no record of any personal devotions.²¹ The gods’ temples were not simply places of worship but were central to the economy, because the agricultural surplus was stored there. The Sumerians had no word for priest: aristocrats who were also the city’s bureaucrats, poets, and astronomers officiated at the city cult. This was only fitting, since for them all activity—and especially politics—was holy.

This elaborate system was not simply a disingenuous justification of the structural violence of the state but was primarily an attempt to invest this audacious and problematic human experiment with meaning. The city was humanity’s greatest artifact: artificial, vulnerable, and dependent on institutionalized coercion. Civilization demands sacrifice, and the Sumerians had to convince themselves that the price they were exacting from the peasantry was necessary and ultimately worth it. In claiming that their inequitable system was in tune with the fundamental laws of the cosmos, the Sumerians were therefore expressing an inexorable political reality in mythical terms.

It seemed like an iron law because no society ever found an alternative. By the end of the fifteenth century CE, agrarian civilizations would be established in the Middle East, South and East Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and in every one—whether in India, Russia, Turkey, Mongolia, the Levant, China, Greece, or Scandinavia—aristocrats would exploit their peasants as the Sumerians did. Without the coercion of the ruling class, it would have been impossible to force peasants to produce an economic surplus, because population growth would have kept pace with advances in productivity. Unpalatable as this may seem, by forcing the masses to live at subsistence level, the aristocracy kept population growth in check and made human progress feasible. Had their surplus not been taken from the peasants, there would have been no economic resource to support the technicians, scientists, inventors, artists, and philosophers who eventually brought our modern civilization into being.²² As the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton pointed out, all of us who have benefited from this systemic violence are implicated in the suffering inflicted for over five thousand years on the vast majority of men and women.²³ Or as the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.²⁴

Agrarian rulers saw the state as their private property and felt free to exploit it for their own enrichment. There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that they felt any responsibility for their peasants.²⁵ As Gilgamesh’s people complain in the Epic: The city is his possession.… He is king, he does whatever he wants. Yet Sumerian religion did not entirely endorse this inequity. When the gods hear these anguished complaints, they exclaim to Anu: Gilgamesh, noble as he is, splendid as he is, has exceeded all bounds. The people suffer from his tyranny.… Is this how you want your king to rule? Should a shepherd savage his own flock?²⁶ Anu shakes his head but cannot change the system.

The narrative poem Atrahasis (c. 1700 BCE) is set in the mythical period when the deities were still living in Mesopotamia and gods instead of man did the work on which civilization depends. The poet explains that the Anunnaki, the divine aristocracy, have forced the Igigi, the lower gods, to carry too great a load: for three thousand years they have plowed and harvested the fields and dug the irrigation canals—they even had to excavate the riverbeds of the Tigris and Euphrates. Night and day, they groaned and blamed each other, but the Anunnaki take no heed.²⁷ Finally an angry mob gathers outside Enlil’s palace. Every single one of us gods has declared war. We have put a stop to the digging! they cry. The load is excessive. It is killing us!²⁸ Enki, minister of agriculture, agrees. The system is cruel and unsustainable, and the Anunnaki are wrong to ignore the Igigis’ plight: Their work was too hard, their trouble too much! Every day the earth resounded. The warning signal was loud enough!²⁹ But if nobody does any productive work, civilization will collapse, so Enki orders the Mother Goddess to create human beings to take the Igigis’ place. For the plight of their human laborers too, the gods feel no responsibility. The toiling masses are not allowed to impinge on their privileged existence, so when humans become so numerous that their noise keeps their divine masters awake, the gods simply decide to cull the population with a plague. The poet graphically depicts their suffering:

Their faces covered in scabs, like malt,

Their faces looked sallow,

They went out in public hunched,

Their well-set shoulders slouched,

Their upstanding bearing slouched.³⁰

Yet again aristocratic cruelty does not go uncriticized. Enki, whom the poet calls far sighted, bravely defies his fellow gods, reminding them that their lives depend on their human slaves.³¹ The Anunnaki grudgingly agree to spare them and withdraw to the peace and quiet of heaven. This was a mythical expression of a harsh social reality: the gulf separating the nobility from the peasants had become so great that they effectively occupied different worlds.

The Atrahasis may have been intended for public recitation, and the story seems also to have been preserved orally.³² Fragments of the text have been found spanning a thousand years, so it seems that this tale was widely known.³³ Thus writing, originally invented to serve the structural violence of Sumer, began to record the disquiet of the more thoughtful members of the ruling class, who could find no solution to civilization’s dilemma but tried at least to look squarely at the problem. We shall see that others—prophets, sages, and mystics—would also raise their voices in protest and try to devise a more equitable way for human beings to live together.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, set toward the mid-third millennium, when Sumer was militarizing, presents martial violence as the hallmark of civilization.³⁴ When the people beg the gods for help, Anu attempts to alleviate their suffering by giving Gilgamesh someone of his own size to fight with and siphon off some of his excessive aggression. So the Mother Goddess creates Enkidu, primeval man. He is huge, hairy, and has prodigious strength but is a gentle, kindly soul, wandering happily with the herbivores and protecting them from predators. But to fulfill Anu’s plan, Enkidu has to make the transition from peaceable barbarian to aggressive civilized man. The priestess Shamhat is given the task of educating him, and under her tutelage, Enkidu learns to reason, understand speech, and eat human food; his hair is cut, sweet oil is rubbed into his skin, and finally he turned into a man. He put on a garment, became like a warrior.³⁵ Civilized man was essentially a man of war, full of testosterone. When Shamhat mentions Gilgamesh’s military prowess, Enkidu becomes pale with anger. Take me to Gilgamesh! he cries, pounding his chest. I will shout in his face: I am the mightiest! I am the man who can make the world tremble! I am supreme!³⁶ No sooner do these two alpha males set eyes on each other than they begin wrestling, careening through the streets of Uruk, thrashing limbs entwined in a near-erotic embrace, until finally, satiated, they kissed each other and formed a friendship.³⁷

By this period, the Mesopotamian aristocracy had begun to supplement its income with warfare, so in the very next episode Gilgamesh announces that he is about to lead a military expedition of fifty men to the Cedar Forest, guarded by the fearsome dragon Humbaba, to bring this precious wood back to Sumer. It was probably by such acquisition raids that the Mesopotamian cities came to dominate the northern highlands, which were rich in the luxury goods favored by the aristocracy.³⁸ Merchants had long been dispatched to Afghanistan, the Indus Valley, and Turkey to bring back timber, rare and base metals, and precious and semiprecious stones.³⁹ But for an aristocrat like Gilgamesh, the only noble way to acquire these scarce resources was by force. In all future agrarian states, aristocrats would be distinguished from the rest of the population by their ability to live without working.⁴⁰ The cultural historian Thorstein Veblen has explained that in such societies, labor comes to be associated … with weakness and subjection. Work, even trade, was not only "disreputable … but morally impossible to the noble freeborn man. Because an aristocrat owed his privilege to the forcible expropriation of the peasants’ surplus, the obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy."⁴¹

For Gilgamesh, therefore, the organized theft of warfare is not only noble but moral, undertaken not just for his personal enrichment but for the benefit of humanity. Now we must travel to the Cedar Forest, where the fierce monster Humbaba lives, he announces self-importantly: We must kill him and drive out evil from the world.⁴² For the warrior, the enemy is always monstrous, the antithesis of everything good. But significantly, the poet refuses to give this military expedition any religious or ethical sanction. The gods are solidly against it. Enlil has specifically appointed Humbaba to guard the forest against any such predatory attack; Gilgamesh’s mother, the goddess Ninsun, is horrified by the plan and at first blames Shamash, the sun god and Gilgamesh’s patron, for planting this appalling idea in her son’s mind. When questioned, however, Shamash seems to know nothing about it.

Even Enkidu initially opposes the war. Humbaba, he argues, is not evil; he is doing an ecologically sound task for Enlil and being frightening is part of his job description. But Gilgamesh is blinded by the aristocratic code of honor.⁴³ Why, dear friend, do you speak like a coward? he taunts Enkidu: If I die in the forest on this great adventure, won’t you be ashamed when people say, ‘Gilgamesh met a hero’s death battling the monster Humbaba. And where was Enkidu? He was safe at home!’ ⁴⁴ It is not the gods nor even simply greed but pride, an obsession with martial glory and the desire for a posthumous reputation for courage and daring, that drives Gilgamesh to battle. We are mortal men, he reminds Enkidu:

Only the gods live forever. Our days

are few in number, and whatever we achieve

is a puff of wind. Why be afraid then,

since sooner or later death must come?…

But whether you come along or not,

I will cut down the tree, I will kill Humbaba,

I will make a lasting name for myself,

I will stamp my fame on men’s minds forever.⁴⁵

Gilgamesh’s mother blames his restless heart for this harebrained project.⁴⁶ A leisured class has a lot of time on its hands; collecting rents and supervising the irrigation system is tame work for a species bred to be intrepid hunters. The poem indicates that already young men were chafing against the triviality of civilian life that, as Chris Hedges explained, would lead so many of them to seek meaning on the battlefield.⁴⁷

The outcome was tragic. There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour. Humbaba turns out to be a very reasonable monster, who pleads for his life and offers Gilgamesh and Enkidu all the wood they want, but still they hack him brutally to pieces. Afterward a gentle rain falls from heaven, as though nature