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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
This
defeat of
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
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
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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
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[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
[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