Convivencia in the House of War Anthony Mansueto Introduction Whatever the material conditions which have contributed to its unfolding (and there are many), this present war understands itself as a war of religion, a war about religion, and more specifically a war about the relationship between “the religious” and “the political.” Specifying the problem in this way, however, leaves something fundamental unsaid. This war is not about religion in general or its relationship to politics in general. It is not, for example, about the cult of one or another local god, or about Brahman or pattica sammupada, Tian or its Tao or about the way any of these things bear on the life of the city. It is about a very specific religious problematic, one which was political from the very beginning and which, therefore, already bears on, acts, on and transforms the material conditions under which the war is being fought. It is a war about justice. I say about justice, not for justice, though all sides, of course, imagine that their causus ad bellum to be just. And the justice it is about is not any ordinary balancing of interests or righting of specific wrongs. It is about divine justice: a terrifying, absolute demand of justice that rights all wrongs, establishes a final and definitive peace, and in so doing so reveals the very nature of God. It is about the possibility of this justice, of this God, and of their presence in the city. It is about the peace of God. Wherever it may be fought, it is always and only a war about Jerusalem. How, in such a time of war (in the time of such a war), does one engage in Convivencia? How do we live together when what is at issue between us is nothing less than divine justice, than the God who is justice, or who, at least, we know first and foremost through Her acts of justice? When what is at issue between us is absolute? The War It we are to understand present war, we must go back and first try to understand another, much older war, the war in which this absolute, this divine justice, first made itself known. I am speaking of the war which gave birth to the people of Israel. At the level of the canonical text, this war appears to be wholly and completely God’s war. It is by divine intervention, and not by its own effort that Israel is liberated from Egypt. But we know better now. Scholars (Gottwald 1979) tell us that Israel was, mostly likely, born as the result of a peasant war in late Bronze Age Canaan. Some time around 1400-1200 BCE, probably because their exploitative social structures had become an obstacle to further growth and development, the great powers in the region –Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Hittite Empire—weakened. This gave new scope to the rural unrest and social banditry (Hobsbawm 1959) which perpetually plagues such societies. These social bandits ──referred to as "`apiru" in contemporary sources── were essentially marginalized peasants who had been run off their land, or who had gotten into trouble with their lords, and had (quite literally) taken to the hills, from whence they preyed off caravans, or raided the city states, occasionally entering the service of one or another local warlord. At roughly the same time the collapse of the Hittite Empire to the north broke the monopoly on iron technology, allowing the techniques for production of primitive bloomery iron to penetrate Canaan. Up until this time metal tools had been a ruling class monopoly, protected by royal control of the tin trade ──tin being an essential component of bronze, the only metal thus far widely used in the area. This ruling class monopoly on metal tools had in turn held back the development of the hill country, which required metal tools for clearing and terracing. Bloomery iron, while inferior to the bronze used by the Canaanite aristocracy, was superior to the stone tools used by the Palestinian peasants, and could be produced with materials available in the region. The collapse of the Hittite iron monopoly thus put metal tools into the hands of the peasants, removing the obstacle to settlement in the hill country. The hills were out of the reach of the chariots of the Canaanite warlords, and thus beyond the sphere of Canaanite military hegemony. The `apiru groups thus began to terrace and cultivate the hill sides, and their banditry gradually transformed itself into a kind of guerilla, or prolonged popular war ──the record of which is preserved in the Book of Judges. They organized themselves into mishpahoth, or protective associations of extended families. These mishpahoth practiced a form of communal land tenure, holding land collectively and redistributing it periodically to individual families, according to need, for purposes of cultivation (Lev 25: 8ff), and also constituted a kind of "popular militia" which helped to defend and extend the "liberated territories" without recourse to a standing army. Israel seems to have provided for a tax of roughly 10% of the agricultural produce to support the Levitical priests. At the same time, Israelite law insured that the priests could own no land of their own and thus could not degenerate into an exploitative landowning class. This revolutionary struggle created the opening for a radically new experience of the divine. The prevailing religious form of the Canaanite social formation was the cult of ba'al. This ba'al is generally referred to in the textbooks as a "fertility god," as indeed he was. But the root from which the term ba'al is derived means “to own” and the word was used in ways which signify “lord,” “master,” “owner of land,” and ... “husband.” It was used for the local warlord, as well as for the deity. Identification of agrarian and human fertility with domination and lordship, and of both with the divine, provided the ruling classes with an especially effective system of legitimation. The Canaanite peasantry, to put the matter starkly, worshiped their landlords. Breaking with the earthly warlords meant breaking with their heavenly counterparts –the ba’alim—as well. The emergence of Israel was, in other words, simultaneously the emergence of a new experience of the divine, an experience which Israel named YHWH. The name itself probably derives from an epithet attached to the name of the god El, who was ba’al’s father and the actual high god of the Canaanites but not, for the most part, the object of an actual cult. Revolutionary Israel appealed above the head of ba’al, as it were, to his father, who they worshiped as ‘el yahwi sabaoth yisrael: God who brings into being the armies of Israel. Israel, in other words met her god on the battlefield of the revolution, in and as divine justice. Gradually Israel came to regard this God as not only her liberator, but also as the creator of heaven and of earth, the power of Being as such. Indeed, the word yhwh, which eventually came to be used as a proper name for God, is the causative form of the verb “to be,” and might best be translated as “the power of Being as such.” The absolute, the power of Being as such, in other words (and once we have realized this absolute, there can be no other) is something encountered on the field of war, of a very special kind of war, a revolutionary war, a war for justice. The War About the War We peoples of the book are accustomed to calling ourselves --and each other— the “children of Abraham,” some by blood, and others by water. But in truth it is not descent, real or fictive, from a legendary common patriarch which defines us. It is war, this war, which is also the advent Being known in and as divine justice, which marks us as different from the other peoples of the earth. And it is war, this war that we are fighting about. Why? The advent of Israel defined a very specific spirituality, one in which we know God in the just act, and more specifically in the liberating act, even the revolutionary act, the act which constitutes a new, just, social order. But the later history of Israel made this revolutionary practice difficult, even impossible to sustain. The crisis of the great powers passed. Empires were reconstituted on the basis of new, iron age technologies and a new, petty commodity system centered on the emerging global trade network of the Silk Road. Simply in order to survive, Israel had to take on many of the features of the societies around it: a king with a standing army, supported by systematic taxation of the peasantry and engagement with emerging trade networks. The prophets condemned the resulting injustice as a violation of the covenant, of Israel’s founding experience of the divine. But in the end it didn’t matter. The empires won out. This defeat of Israel is also the common heritage of the three great religions of the book. We are defined by it, and it is why we fight about divine justice rather than for it, why we fight a war about a war, rather than the war itself. Judaism Judaism, as we have known it throughout the common era, began the moment the defeat of Israel seemed final and definitive and ended, or at least entered a period of profound crisis, when that defeat turned out not to be final and definitive after all. For long centuries Israel struggled to liberate itself from imperial rule and use a restored monarchy to rebuild the just social order which it remembered from the “days of its youth.” While the prophets of the Assyrian and Babylonian periods sometimes counseled submission to the great powers in the short run, they nearly all looked forward to a future of liberation and restoration. The relatively benign rule of the Persians and the Ptolemies temporarily eased the revolutionary impulse, but when the Seleucids attempted to erect a statue of Zeus in the holy of holies as part of their project of Hellenization, Israel responded with a successful revolt, that of the Maccabees, which won them a brief period of independence. And while Rome’s relative tolerance and sensitivity to Jewish religious sensibilities led many in Israel to counsel accommodation during the early years of the Principate, by 66 CE a broad spectrum of Jewish parties had been won over to the revolutionary project. Ultimately it was only the overwhelming force of the Roman legions which crushed the Jewish uprising of 66-70 CE and the Bar Kochba revolt of the next century and which convinced Israel that liberation and restoration were not on the agenda. The result of this process was the emergence of the Pharisees, who had been merely one of many political-theological tendencies in Second Temple Judaism, as the branch out of which all later Judaism –what we now call rabbinic Judaism-- emerged. The Pharisees, while not rejecting the temple and while certainly sharing a long-term hope in liberation and restoration, had focused the bulk of their attention on adapting the legal traditions of Israel to the new realities of imperial rule, petty commodity production, and insertion into the Silk Road trade. For example, rather, than waiting for a time when the Jubilee Law could once again be strictly observed to act justly, they focused on the central moral norm embodied in Leviticus 25 –“When you buy or sell … amongst yourselves, you shall not drive a hard bargain … You must not victimize one another (Lev 25: 14:17a)”—and asked what it meant for merchants in the new global economy. As events turned against the people of Israel during the Jewish War a group of rabbis gathered a Jabneh (the Roman Jamnia) to begin to codify the oral traditions they had been developing. These they organized under six headings. The resulting collection is known as the Mishnah, which was completed by 220 CE at the latest. Further commentary on the Mishnah continued both in the land of Israel and in Babylon, where there was an important Jewish community. These further commentaries, which consist fundamentally in debates between rabbis regarding the proper interpretation and application of the Law, eventually became the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, which were completed sometime in the sixth century, shortly before the Arab invasions. In the absence of a Temple and with the prospects for political independence shattered, in other words, the Pharisees, and the Rabbinic Judaism which grew out of their movement, found a new way of living Israel’s historic commitment to divine justice. But as Jacob Neusner (Neusner 1975) has pointed out, however, there is more to this way than simply adapting Jewish law, with its historic focus on social justice, to new social circumstances. The Talmud also suggests a new model of leadership. While the Jewish communities in Palestine and Babylon, and indeed in other cities as well, often had an official leadership recognized by the political authorities, and while in some cases, as in Babylon, there was even an Exilarch claiming descent from David, real authority belonged to the rabbis. But it did not belong to the rabbis as an officially sanctioned body, the judgments of which were taken as legitimate. Rather, authority belonged to which ever rabbi was able to make the most logically convincing argument regarding the particular point of law in question. While earlier opinions might, furthermore, serve as a point of reference or departure, there was, in principle, no point which was not subject to criticism and re-evaluation. The people of Israel became, in effect, a logocracy, where neither law nor persons but rather logic alone ruled. The result of this was to transform the Jewish people, deprived though they might be of land and king and temple, into one of the leading forces –indeed perhaps the leading force-- in the development of Western society and the reason we call it Western rather than Christian or European. They became practitioners of “a ruthless criticism of everything existing, (Marx 1843/1978)” a criticism grounded in a primordial experience of divine justice. It was, above all, the deliberative practice of the rabbis which shaped that of the Islamic ulema and through them that of the Christian scholastics (Makdisi 1989). And everything authentically critical in the modern Western tradition (as opposed to what is merely messianic) bears this same rabbinic seal. What is missing here, of course, is the ability to actually secure justice, whether for Israel or for the planet as a whole. Judaism never embraced Empire, but it did, out of necessity, accept it. Christianity Christianity, on the other hand, actually embraces Empire. Whether we understand Jesus himself as essentially Pharisaic (Pawlikowski 1982) or as the leader of one of the last revolutionary messianic uprisings (Eisenman 1997, Tabor 2006), Christianity itself is defined, first and foremost, by a grafting not, as Paul claims in one of his frequent reversals, of the gentiles on the trunk of Israel, but rather of the essentially Judaic experience of the divine as justice onto the trunk of the Empire and above all onto its principal religious form: the mystery cult. The mystery cult was one of the Hellenic world’s contributions to the great Axial Age (Jaspers 1953) process of religious rationalization and democratization. It opened up to those who were not, like the great eupatrid families, descended from the gods, the possibility of immortality and thus of what, in the Greek mind, amounted to divinization. This was achieved by catechesis or instruction into the mysteries, an initiation which included a ritual rebirth, e.g. by passage through a cave symbolizing a birth canal or immersion symbolizing the breaking of the birth waters, and eventual participation in a communion meal (Detienne 1967/1996). Rootstock and graft alike determine the fruit. On the one hand, divinization can never mean for Christians what it meant for the Greeks. The Christian God is the God of Israel, the God who is justice, the Great Unnamable Bringing into Being, and not some mere immortal. On the other hand, the form of the mystery cult removes justice from the center of the religious problematic. It is means and not end. By the just act –someone’s just act-- we become God or like God. The answer is Jewish but the problem is still Greek. Indeed, in some forms of Christianity –e.g. the Orthodox tradition—the theotic or theurgic form of the mystery cult all but overwhelms the political content, so that it seems (is it only a seeming?) that as for the pre-Christian mysteries, it really is liturgical participation itself which divinizes. And it is someone’s just act. Is it ours? This, of course, is the question which divided Christendom. For Paul it was first and foremost Jesus’ just act. Augustine and the reformers have answered in the same way, so that our just act flows, if at all, from His. Only His act is really redemptive, and if our just act is effective it is somehow the earthly rule of Christ. The Catholic tradition, on the other hand, has tried to re-assert the claim that it is also our just act, at least in the sense that we can and must cultivate the capacity for justice and that our just act can be effective within the political realm as a kind of participation in God’s justice without being that justice. The just act, furthermore, puts us into situations which stretch us beyond the human, towards the divine, towards that Great Unnamable Bringing into Being. How is this an embracing of Empire? Because justice is means rather than end, conciliation with the Empire (even an unredeemed, unjust Empire) becomes possible. And Empire, once redeemed, can become the means of justice. This redemption of the Empire may be purely liturgical, as in the Orthodox East. It may be a matter of collective or individual converson: God rules when and in so far as Christians do. This is the model of political Augustinianism and of the Reformers. Or it may be more substantive: the Empire is formed by the teaching of the Church and thus (more than it would otherwise) acts justly. But in none of these cases there is any expectation that justice will be done finally and definitively. Nor is that a problem. Justice is means not end. And it is no longer clear that it is even our justice which is at issue. Islam Thus Islam. It is customary to define Islam (and indeed Islam attempts to define itself) in terms of its uncompromising monotheism. This way of approaching the problem is, however, largely a product of the dual dynamic of fundamentalist and rationalizing tendencies in modern Islam which have sought to purge from Islam the taint of religious syncretisms or to interpret it in a way which makes it more compatible with and understandable to modern Western rationality. In fact, the distinctiveness of Islam concerns the very problem we have been discussing: that of justice. Where Judaism grew up in an environment of political disenfranchisement, and thus had to find a way to struggle for justice without political power, and where Christianity gave up early on the idea of actually building the Kingdom of God on earth, and redefined messianism in an otherworldly direction, thus laying the groundwork for an alliance with the Roman Empire and its successor states, Islam actually joined, from the very beginning, a religious orientation centered on realizing the law with the political power necessary to actually do so. In this sense, the defining feature of Islam is not so much it radical monotheism but rather al-amr bi’l-ma`ruf wa`nahy `an al-munkar: commanding right and forbidding wrong (Crone 2004). Islam, in this sense, replays the early history of Israel, but on a grander stage, with a universal mission, and with a higher degree of success. A marginalized people on the edges of Empire takes advantage of another period of great power weakness (in this case localized and the result of Rome’s relative backwardness by comparison with its Silk Road partners and its more exploitative social structure) to invoke Israel’s founding experience of divine justice and make it the rallying cry first for unity and liberation among the various tribes of the Arabian peninsula and then for a global war of liberation. Or conquest. Success here is the watchword. Islam was successful not only in liberating most of the southern part of the Mediterranean basic and Western Asia from Roman and Persian rule or that of Roman successor states such as the Visogoths. It was successful in creating what must be regarded as one of humanity’s most just social formations. And this was not true just of Islam in some pristine founding moment. It was true of the Abbasids in Baghdad, the Fatimids in al-Qahiria, and the Umayyads in Qurtuba. The institution of the zakat in particular, a tax on wealth paid by all Muslims, insured both that there was surplus available to invest in activities which promoted human development and civilizational progress and that the emergence of a large, unproductive, landed elite was contained if not altogether prevented. So is this the answer? Is the Muslim claim to represent the authentic or at least final interpretation of God’s act of divine justice in Israel in fact valid? Liberationists and “secular” socialists alike are often accused of being crypto-Muslims. But it is not so simple. A just empire, even an empire of justice is still an empire. And the commitment to al-amr bi’l-ma`ruf wa`nahy `an al-munkar creates its own problems. One must have leaders who actually know what is right, and they must have the political power to actually create a just social order. Dar-al-Islam has been divided since its early years between those who have stressed the importance of wisdom and piety in their leaders, something which has historically been seen as concentrated in the house of the prophet (his direct descendants), and those who have stressed the need to build the political power necessary to be effective. The first emphasis is strongest in the Shia tradition, the latter in the Sunni, though this is by no means an exclusive division. And then there is the question of what its “right.” The same divine justice which has been invoked on behalf of land reform or a living wage or even socialism has also been invoked in defense of patriarchal gender relations and even gynocide. Hence the war about the war. Modernity, or the War to End All Wars Modernity, of course, claims to resolve all this, to clean up the mess and end the conversation –to end the war about the war and indeed to end all wars. John Milbank (Milbank 2006) is right when he says that modernity is a Christian heresy, though I am not sure he has the details of the heresy quite down yet. And actually there are three heresies which go by the name of modern, each “Christian” in its own way. Modernity is Christian because it begins from the problematic of divinization and of divinization as it was informed by the Church’s grafting of the Jewish encounter with divine justice onto the Hellenic rootstock of the mystery cults. Modernity aims not at mere immortality or superhuman power (though it would like both, thank you, as an interim measure). It aims at harnessing for itself the power of the great I AM. In one form –that of early modernity (especially Protestant but also Counter-Reformation Catholic modernity and Islamic fundamentalism of the Wahabi variety) it is quite straightforward about this. The modern, sovereign state, with all its sophisticated technologies of control becomes the instrument of divine rule. But more often modernity keeps its religion a secret. It aims at transcending the boundaries of finitude and contingency every bit as much as the great spiritual traditions of the axial age, but hopes to do so through inner worldly means: revolutionary practice or scientific and technological progress. Justice (whether understood as liberal capitalism or socialism) will unleash unlimited technological progress which will, in the end, make us God. High modernity is godbuilding, rather than godworshiping, but it is religious (and Christian) nonetheless.[1] We know where this all ends. Ending the conversation means ending Judaism, which is conversation about justice. This can be done in any of a number of ways. Progressive modernity claims to transcend Judaism (as did historical Christianity), but this time by actually realizing, through revolutionary practice and technological progress, the justice for which the Jews could only argue. Jews become, in effect, absorbed into modernity, often as its greatest advocates, and simply disappear. It is this progressive modernity which has, of course, been called so radically into question in recent years, resulting not a clash of civilizations as Samuel Huntington (Huntington 1993) claims, but rather the early stages of a civilizational crisis. We continue to live modernity (working for technological and economic progress) without believing in its redemptive power. Jews, and their conversation about justice, continue. Or, one can simply end the Jews. This has already been done once and it is the real aim of fundamentalisms (Christian and Islamic) which find their peace (which is the peace of submission) disturbed by Judaism’s “ruthless criticism of everything existing.” And then there is Israel –the modern state of Israel. On the one hand, from the standpoint of the modernist problematic of the nation state, Zionism is just another national movement and the State of Israel can make a claim to legitimacy as solid as that of any other modern nation state. All such states were forged out of many different ethnic communities, have languages and cultures constructed by state education systems, and many if not most live on land which might also be reasonably claimed by others.[2] On the other hand, from this point of view Israel is the end of Judaism, the real “final solution” to the “Jewish question,” to Judaism’s critical moral role in the life of the Christian and Modern West. Justice has been done, and Israel restored, with Ben Gurion and Labor playing the part of mosiach. But the justice done in this way is not divine justice, the justice and the God as the advent of which Israel was born … Convivencia And so, I return to the question with which I began. How, in such a time of war (in the time of such a war), does one engage in Convivencia? How do we live together when what is at issue between us is nothing less than divine justice, than the God who is justice, or who, at least, we know first and foremost through Her acts of justice? When what is at issue between us is absolute? It does not help that the absolute that stands between us is the same absolute. This absolute does not bind, but rather divides. It shows each of our ways to be at once necessary and inadequate, incompatible with all the others yet desperately in need of them. We do not know what divine justice is. We do not know how to realize it. We would like to think that deliberation and argument are better ways than force. But those who followed that road found themselves in the ovens of Dachau. We would also like to think that by acting justly we become, or at least become like, the God whose advent this justice is. And yet when we made this move we displaced justice from the center, and stopped seeking justice, and we ended by building Dachau. So why not join justice to power, commanding right and forbidding wrong? Because those who have followed this path found themselves forced to choose between the very things they most sought to join. And because we do not always know what is right, and perhaps shouldn’t. We must begin, rather, by acknowledging that justice is a problem. This may not please an audience of liberationists, for whom justice is always the solution. But it is the truth. It is the truth which we share. All we have, in fact, is the primordial experience of justice, of the war for justice, and of the war about the war for justice. We live in this war. It constitutes us. Attempts to end it have always and only made things worse. Justice and a war about justice, justice which is a problem rather than a solution: this is already Convivencia. Living in the war, in the house of war (Dar-al-Harb), we reject the peace of submission. Living in the war, in the house of war, we reject all claims that the conversation is over. We reject final solutions. We break bread with the enemy, and have intercourse with her, giving her the aid and comfort of our arguments, doing justice even when the meaning of justice is unclear. Here divine justice lives in a new way, as question without answer, as the means which is its own end, as war in another form. References Avineri, Shlomo. 1981. The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic Crone, Patricia. 2004. God’s Rule: Government and Islam. New York: Columbia Detienne, Marcel. 1967/1996. Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. London: Zone Eisenman, Robert. 1997. James the Brother of the Lord. New York: Penguin. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History,” in The National Interest, Summer 1989 Gottwald, Norman. 1979. The Tribes of Yahweh. Maryknoll: Orbis Hobsbawm, Eric. 1959. Primitive Rebels. New York: Norton Huntington, Samuel. 1993 “The Clash of Civilizations,” in Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993 Jaspers, Karl. 1953. The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven: Yale University Press Lukacs, Georg. 1922/1971. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Makdisi, George. 1989. “Scholasticism and Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West,” in Journal of the American Oriental Society 109: 2 Marx, Karl. 1843/1978. “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” in Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton Neusner, Jacob. 1975. An Invitation to Talmud. New York: Harper Pawlikowski, John. 1982. Christ in the Light of Jewish-Christian Dialogue. New York: Paulist Press. Tabor, James. 2006. The Jesus Dynasty. New York: Simon and Schuster -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It might be worth noting, however, that there are forms of Marxism, in particular, which seem to make justice an end in itself rather than a means and which eschews scientific-technological utopianism. This is true of what is often called critical or humanistic Marxism. It is interesting to note that many of the leading exponents of this Marxism (Lukacs, much of the Frankfort school) have also been Jewish. Sometimes, however, they shade into what must be called a modern- messianic rather than rabbinic Judaism. Thus Lukacs’ claim that the revolution will make the proletariat the “unique subject-object” of human history –a status which would be close to divine (Lukacs 1922/1971). [2] Though in accord with this problematic, one might also have made a case for one, two, three or more Jewish states in the Pale of Settlement, in al-Andalus, in some part of the former Ottoman Empire, or for that matter, as some followers of Chaim Zhitlovsky tried to do, in Oregon or New Jersey (Avinieri 1981).