Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror

Humanism, or anti-humanism, would hold that violence, inasmuch as it can be ascribed a moral quotient, belongs to Man: it is essential to his quest for meaningful existence in a symbolic world that is his own creation. The natural world, governed as it is by laws and forces, knows of no violence. The marked violence of the animal world, similarly, denotes nothing but the quest for food. For the spectacle of ritual slaughter, then, we must turn our attention to the meaning-creating acts of the Homo sapiens, the wise animal at the top of the food-chain! Little wonder that when a very erudite and diligent scholar of medieval history, manifestly disenchanted with the moralising rhetoric of our bellicose age, eschews the specialist’s narrow vision for a longue durée civilisational perspective in order to discern some semblance of a persistent moral argument in the defence of killing, from ‘ca 70 C.E. to the Iraq War’, he turns to Christianity – the heart and soul of the symbolic universe of the West.