Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Perspectives from Europe and Japan offers a window into current conversations attempting to bridge geographical contexts to better illumine the historical relationship between religion and violence. Scholars convened for a series of three workshops from 2014 to 2016 to explore, as the title suggests, medieval and early modern Christianity in Europe and Japan. The present volume presents the fruit of these gatherings, specifically taking up the issue of “religious violence.” Editors Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno helpfully frame the material with an introduction that outlines how this topic has been treated in European and Japanese historiographies, before highlighting the potential for shared insight to cultivate new ways of understanding the relationship between religion and violence.

The book takes the novel approach of centering medieval and early modern Christianity as its case studies, while attempting to decenter the assumptions of European historiography that have dominated the study of the Christian world. The editors question the givenness of state and individual violence as a demand of religion. In addition, they note how this relationship has been portrayed in the study of medieval and early modern Europe, where violence seldom existed without religion within a cultural situation controlled by Christian monotheism. The story of Christianity in early modern Japan provides a stimulating counterpoint, challenging any express link between religion and violence. The eleven essays that follow take up this topic of religious violence from various angles, making a compelling case for the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the question of religious violence while leaving the reader eager for a fuller treatment of the theme.

Part 1 opens with a pair of essays that examine instances of violence in the Hebrew Bible. Debora Tonelli offers a reading of Exodus 15 that highlights how the text resists rather than encourages religious violence in its portrayal of God’s violent actions to save Israel. Vincenzo Lavenia’s examines Milton’s Samson as an important moment in the development of the warrior-judge as a model for divinely sanctioned suicide killings. Lavenia’s study is notable for its focus on a Protestant work in a collection that is overwhelmingly weighted toward Catholicism, as well as for his meaningful engagement with the historiography of Reformation era intra-Christian violence.

The second set of essays deal with aspects of religious resistance to tyranny. Serena Ferente traces the evolution of a medieval political aphorism taken from Aristotelian physics—nullum violentum perpetuum (nothing violent can last)—a malleable concept in medieval European political theory that was primarily deployed by 14^th-century anti-tyrannical commentators to criticize governing bodies established through violence. Complementing Ferente, Takashi Jinno analyzes medieval European perspectives on tyrannicide, a debate rooted in the notion that a ruler is responsible to “the common good” (a construct, Jinno notes, that was foreign to Japanese political theory prior to the 19^th century) as well as contests between church power and emerging secular sovereignty. As the contribution of the section that comes closest to placing “perspectives from Europe and Japan” into dialogue, Jinno’s comments on the significant differences between the political and religious orderings of the two regions—and thus the illegibility of discourses on tyrannicide in the medieval Japanese context—are perhaps the most intriguing, leaving the reader wishing for further analysis.

Part 2 introduces “changing meanings” in early modern Christian moral and political theology. Fernanda Alfieri examines aspects of late medieval Catholic theological anthropology through the lens of exorcism therapies, arguing that “contradictory impulses” resided at the heart of its theological anthropology’s moral discourse on human beings and their relationship to the demonic. On the one hand, human freedom was seen as naturally resistant to violence. On the other, humans were understood as permanently mired in violence. Morihisa Ishiguro’s revisionist account of Machiavelli on religion tantalizingly suggests that the Italian statesman embraced violence as a means for achieving a purer religion, which was essential to human flourishing, rather than as a tool for political ends, though it remains unclear why Machiavelli couldn’t have held Christianity to be both. The final essay in this section, from Taku Minagawa,  considers the role of German Jesuit theorists in the war-torn decades of the 17^th century. The essay offers a nuanced account of their understanding of “peace” that vacillated between commitments to religious unity against the toleration of heretics, qualified appeals to amnesty and clemency for religious dissidents, and practical appeals to religious non-violence for the sake of reestablishing social order. Minagawa closes with brief but suggestive remarks on the continued struggle between violence and public justice as related to religious difference within the frame of modern state power.

Part 3 takes a global and interreligious turn. Yuga Kuroda offers an illuminating account of how vassalage served to restrain religious animosity during successive periods of Reconquista in medieval Iberia, including such pragmatic expressions of peaceable coexistence that facilitated the eventual conquest of Islamic communities. Though a bit fragmented and episodic, Kazuhisa Takeda traces the history of coercive conversion through missionary appeals to the compelle intrare (compel them to come in) clause from Luke 14:23, which, to varying degrees, authorized the abolition of Northern European pagan worship in the 7^th to 9^th centuries and the Jesuits’ role in the military conquest and colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples throughout present-day Central and South America. Atsuko Hirayama’s analysis of “reason of state” as a non-religious category for understanding conflict between civil authorities and Catholic missionaries in early modern Japan helpfully suggests differences with European society, while perhaps overstating the extent to which religious and political concerns can be tidily parsed in that situation. One also wonders about the uniqueness of such a secular framework vis-à-vis contexts such Elizabethan England, where treason (not heresy) was the paramount concern with respect to religious dissidents.

Taken as a whole, Alfieri and Jinno’s volume offers a wide-ranging interdisciplinary and multimodal examination of religious violence that illumines the theoretical and historical roots of contemporary debates on the topic. We can hope that their effort in cultivating conversations among scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds and viewpoints will generate more collaborative work of this kind in the areas of historical studies and political theology.

Kenneth J. Woo is associate professor of church history at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
Franklin Tanner Capps is director of the Miller Sumer Youth Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

Franklin Tanner Capps and Kenneth Woo

Date Of Review:

October 31, 2022