Martyrdom and Identity: The Self on Trial

Martyrdom and Identity

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Martyrdom and Identity The Self on Trial

Michael P. Jensen

Published by T&T Clark International A Continuum Imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © Michael P. Jensen, 2010 Michael P. Jensen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. ISBN 978-0-567-52628-1 (hardback) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

For Catherine

Ouvk evpi. to.n qa,naton avll’ evpi, th.n zwh,nÅ Pionius, presbyter and martyr

Contents

1

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

A ‘I wish to be what I am’

1

B Martyrdom and Christian identity – the basis of the link

3

C ‘Identity’ and ‘The self’

2

3

7

D The work in outline

11

‘What kind of idea are you?’ Martyrdom and identity in Charles Taylor and in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

17

A Introduction

17

B Charles Taylor and authenticity i. Introduction: authenticity as a theme ii. The three malaises iii. Retrieving authenticity iv. A culture in tension v. What remains of authenticity? vi. Evaluation

18 18 19 20 22 23 24

C Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses i. ‘Identity politics’ and religion: what kind of idea are you? ii. The unstable self and the unstable deity iii. Victimhood as identity iv. The ‘open’ identity v. The problem of martyrdom and identity vi. The knowledge of good and evil vii. An authentic way to die? viii. Evaluation: Rushdie and martyrdom

26 27 29 30 32 33 34 35 36

D Conclusion

39

The first temptation: the temptation to security and the risk of martyrdom

41

A Introduction

41

4

5

B Scripture and the martyrs

42

C The first temptation i. The pleasing past ii. The promise of return iii. The security of ease

46 46 47 48

D Martha C. Nussbaum, the Greeks and luck

49

E The martyr and the ‘good’ life i. Preliminaries ii. ‘Forgetting what lies behind’ a. Life on the way b. Augustine, memory and desire iii. Ease and pleasure iv. Security and safety

52 52 53 53 59 63 65

F The martyr looking forward

72

The second temptation: the temptation to collaborate and the mission of the martyrs

75

A Introduction

75

B The second temptation i. The return to glory? ii. A ‘certain submission’ iii. The assertion of the keys

76 76 77 78

C Richard Rorty and pragmatism

79

D The martyr, power and authority i. Addressing the question ii. Responding to the peace iii. The power of the keys

82 82 83 90

E Suffering and hoping witness: the mission and the martyr

95

The third temptation: the temptation to idealism and martyrdom as passive action

99

A Introduction

99

B The third temptation i. Defiance of the crown ii. Friendship iii. Time iv. England v. Action

99 99 101 101 102 102

C Roger Scruton, T. S. Eliot and patriotic tradition

103

D The martyr, patriotism and action i. Preliminaries ii. Loyal resistance iii. Time

107 107 107 112

iv. v. vi.

Friendship England and Englishness Passive action?

E The responsibility of martyrdom 6

7

8

115 120 123 128

The fourth temptation: the temptation of honour and reward, and martyrdom as renunciation

131

A Introduction

131

B The fourth temptation i. The power to bind ii. The martyr’s earthly glory iii. No enduring crown?

132 132 133 134

C The ethics of honour and the theology of heavenly rewards i. Honour ii. Heavenly rewards a. EXCURSUS: Martyrdom in Islam and heavenly rewards

135 135 140 140

D Honour, glory and martyrdom i. Honour and fame and the verdict of history ii. The self-proclaimed martyr: forcing God’s hand

143 143 152

E The renunciation of honour

156

‘Who killed the Archbishop?’ Martyrdom, temptation and providence

159

A Introduction

159

B Who killed the Archbishop?

161

C Trials and temptations a. EXCURSUS: Irenaeus of Lyon and the temptations of Christ

165

D Temptation and providentia dei

173

E Martyrdom, temptation and providence

179

172

Martyrdom and the self in review

183

A Introduction

183

B A review of Murder in the Cathedral in production

183

C In review

190

D Conclusion

196

Bibliography

197

Name Index

206

Scripture Index

209

Subject Index

213

Preface

My interest in the topic of human identity – and the thought that Christian martyrdom might have some bearing on it – was provoked in the first instance by my daily encounters with the teenage sceptics who inhabited the classrooms of St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney, Australia, where I was School Chaplain from 2000 to 2003. They were adamant that they were not going to accept a thin gruel of moralism from me as an alternative to the freedom to choose who to be on their own terms. Clearly, different ways of being a self were at issue. Thanks are due to them for not allowing their resident theologian to be happy with the glib answers that came immediately to mind. I have been richly blessed by having, in Professor Oliver O’Donovan and Dr Bernd Wannenwetsch and, more latterly, Professor Nigel Biggar, teachers of the finest calibre in the field of moral theology. As markers, Professor Biggar and Dr Alistair McFadyen provided perceptive and searching comment. I am grateful in particular for the direction and stimulus given by my supervisor, Dr Wannenwetsch, throughout the writing of the project; and for his scholarly and personal example. I would not have been able to consider coming to Oxford at all if it had not been for the remarkable generosity of Mr Vanda Gould. In addition, he has been a source of prayerful encouragement and pastoral care to the whole family in his regular visits, emails and phone calls. I would like also to thank the Trustees of the Joan Augusta Mackenzie Travelling Scholarship, and the Principal, Bursar and Council of Moore Theological College, Sydney, for the Roberts Prize and other discretionary funds that were made available to us during our time in the UK. We have been truly blessed in this regard. Friends new and old have been an integral part of the mostly solitary experience of writing a thesis. In particular, Kosta Milkov, Christopher Barnett and Guido de Graaff have been magnificent fellow travellers, along with Russ Dawn, Jonathan Brant, Matheson Russell and Charles Byrd. Laurence Emmett read a full draft. Reading new theological texts with the members of OXCAT on Friday afternoons has kept me going; and it was a joy to rediscover Calvin and more with Sam Allberry. We will never forget the welcome and support of the staff and members of St Ebbe’s Church of England. Justin Moffatt and David Höhne kept chivvying me along; Alan Lukabyo and Stephen Jacobs kept writing real letters, on actual paper. Bec Watson and Karen Beilharz sent Campos coffee beans. My sister, Anna Cox, and her husband, Matthew, brought me a new computer when the old one died. There were people I hardly

x

PREFACE

know who stopped by my blog to give me helpful advice or pointed me to an overlooked reference. My parents-in-law, Richard and Jackie Wallder, did not live to see the end of this project, though they were instrumental in it coming to pass. We miss them. To my own parents I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude. My mother, Christine Jensen, made more than one trip from Australia to keep us all going. My father, Peter Jensen, has read and reread my work, often telling me what it was that I was trying to say when it had become unclear even to me. I don’t know what I would have done without him. These years, though not without trials, have been happy ones for a young family. The joy of my life continues to be that I share it with my four intriguing and wonderful children – Simon, Sacha, Matilda and (our very own English rose) – Freya – and with Catherine, who bore the load more than anyone, and to whom this present work is dedicated, with love. Thanks are due to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to quote extensively from Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. MPJ

1

Introduction

A

‘I wish to be what I am’

On 17 July AD 180, a small group of Christians, named in the extant record as Speratus, Nartzalus, Cittinus, Donatus, Secunda and Vestia, were brought to the council-chamber at Carthage to stand trial before the proconsul, Saturninus. They were to become known as the Scillitan martyrs. The dialogue that has been recorded for posterity is not much more than an official court report.1 Saturninus comes across as a reluctant persecutor bewildered by the obstinacy of the Christians. He begins the interrogation by suggesting to the group that – ‘if you return to a right mind’ – the imperial favour is still available. For the Roman official, the defiance of this little group, when given a clear choice for freedom, is evidence not so much of sedition as of unsound mind. The Christians in their turn insist on their innocence of any crime and even cite their exemplary citizenship; however, Speratus shows that a higher loyalty was at issue for the Christians: ‘I do not recognize the empire of this world; but rather I serve that God, whom no man has seen, nor can see with these eyes.’2 They will not swear by the genius of the Emperor. They claim for themselves a different allegiance – in fact, a different identity: Vestia said: ‘I am a Christian.’ Secunda said: ‘I wish to be what I am.’3

1 As per Owen’s description. (E. C. E. Owen, Some Authentic Acts of the Early Martyrs (London: SPCK, 1933), p. 71.) 2 ‘The acts of the Scillitan martyrs’, VI, in Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford Early Christian Texts; Oxford: Clarendon, spec. edn, 2000), p. 87. 3 Ibid., IX, p. 89. 1

2

MARTYRDOM AND IDENTITY

They reject even an offer of 30 days’ reprieve to ‘think it over’. They repeat ‘I am a Christian’ – this statement is apparently enough to explain their willingness to face execution rather than sacrifice to Caesar. Finally, the whole group is condemned to die at the point of the sword. At the reading out of the verdict they all shout ‘[T]hanks be to God!’ In this sparse account we see the great disparity between the two views of the world that have here collided. The Roman governor is by no means demonised in the report: he acts, if anything, with the utmost restraint and civility. Neither is he an object of derision from the anonymous martyrologist. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Christians see themselves as subjects of another Lord and so as inhabitants of another realm, a realm that encompasses the one in which Saturninus operates. It is Secunda’s testimony that draws attention: ‘I wish to be what I am.’ It is not merely her allegiance to God, but her very self-understanding that draws her to this point. She can do no other than accept the verdict of Saturninus because she construes her own self in this way – as a Christian; that is, as a follower and imitator of Christ. Two different and at this point rival understandings of what it is to be a self are here in evidence. Though both have notions of transcendence, allegiance to authority and membership of community, it is possible neither for the Roman to acquit the Christian nor for the Christian to say she is other than what she is. This dissonance is not merely an ancient one. The association of martyrdom with fanaticism, religious violence and the spectacle of suffering complicates discussion about the meaning of martyrdom as a narration of the self. It is a problematic and contested discourse – perhaps supremely so. Part of this dissonance lies in the inevitable association of martyrdom with the spectacles of horrendous religious violence that are the signs of our times. As the suicide bomber shows, the line between killing and dying for a cause is all too thin. As it seemed to the Romans, so today: martyrdom is the domain of the unreasoning fanatic.4 How, then, might a discourse characterized by the notion of the ‘authentic’ self (for example) accommodate the possibility of self-abnegation to the kind and degree that the martyr demonstrates? It seems that it is difficult: a life in which the possibility of martyrdom has been accepted is not a life that appears to be lived to its greatest potential. It is perhaps freely determined (though only as a form of suicide), but it is given away too cheaply; it has too little regard for the ties of family and friends; it is too committed to a notion of ‘truth’ which has fallen into disrepair. It is held to be too passive and too tragic. What kind of self is the Christian, as it is to be discovered in Christian martyrdom? Confessing ‘I am a Christian’, as the martyrs have done, is also a refusal to accept alternative ways of finding and describing one’s self by means of (for example) security, pleasure, power, action, nationhood, ethnicity or

4 For example: in his article on contemporary religious violence, David Brooks simply equates martyrdom with suicide bombing. But then, to be fair, he is only reflecting the rhetoric of martyrdom which has been deployed by the perpetrators of such acts. (David Brooks, ‘The culture of martyrdom’, Atlantic Monthly, 289(6), pp. 18–20). For a sophisticated analysis of this rhetoric, see Talal Asad (On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

INTRODUCTION

3

honour. Instead, Christian discipleship means giving one’s self over to a divine designation, even if that means suffering and death. In the face of the trials and temptations that are an inevitable part of human experience, it is an offering of one’s self up to the providence of God as it is evidenced in the life, death, resurrection and promised return of Jesus Christ. For the Christian, therefore, human purpose and identity are fulfilled – and vindication received – in discipleship, even if discipleship results in martyrdom. This then stands as a question mark against other forms of self-identifying.

B

Martyrdom and Christian identity – the basis of the link

Christian martyrdom is merely the working out, in a particular circumstance, of the identity in which individual Christians participate. It is not that every Christian is a martyr, in the literal sense; nor is martyrdom the only way to attain salvation. That some Christians are martyred reveals that life and identity are at issue in all Christian discipleship.5 Christianity has at its heart a saviour who was unjustly tried and executed by the ruling religious and legal powers. The prominence of martyrs in the early years of the church’s life, following the impact of the death of Christ, is not then at all surprising. While the case could be made that Christianity inherited pagan6 or Jewish7 (or both) patterns of honourable dying – and the Fathers definitely made use of pagan and Jewish exemplars in connection with Christian martyrdoms – it is also the case that in Christianity the status and significance of martyrdom was sui generis. Daniel Boyarin, noting the differences between Jewish and Christian martyrs of antiquity, writes: ‘[F]or Christians, it [martyrdom] is the declaration of the essence of self: I am a Christian.’8 Martyrdom in Christianity was something obviously very close to the self-identification of Christians in a way that was without precedent or parallel – because of the nature of the death of the saviour.9 The New Testament (NT) documents are texts in part generated by the experience of persecution. In the NT, the word ma,rturion, meaning ‘witness’

5 This thought is strongly asserted by Chris K. Huebner (A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge and Identity (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2006)). Also see Craig Hovey, To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church (Michigan: Brazos, 2008). 6 G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7 W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Oxford: Blackwell,1965). See also John S. Pobee, Persecution and Martyrdom in the Theology of Paul (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985). 8 Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 9 This point will become crucial in the light of the attacks against religious martyrdom (exemplified, in this book, by Salman Rushdie) which tend not to make a distinction between the meanings such martyrdoms have for different faiths.

4

MARTYRDOM AND IDENTITY

or ‘testimony’ in the legal sense, had not yet acquired ‘martyrdom’ as its primary meaning. Trites offers a five-stage analysis of the lexical development of the ma,rtur- word group from its simple courtroom usage through to ‘martyrdom’ in the literature of the second century, concluding that the process of semantic change was certainly well under way within the texts of the NT.10 In other words, already in the apostolic era and just after, death and suffering were in the process of becoming bound together with the concept of witness. In addition, as Dragas explains, this lexicographical development was only a recognition of a significance already there.11 The juridical context of the term suggests some truth to which the martyr testifies – in the case of the NT, the evangelical truth concerning Jesus the Messiah. In Luke 24.48 and in Acts 1.8 for example, Jesus designates as ma,rturej those of his disciples who will bear witness to his death and resurrection. This is the story of the Christ; and here are the witnesses to that series of events. In the recollection of Jesus’s words in Acts 1.8, the early Christian community showed that they understood the context of witness to extend far beyond the courtroom. Ma,rturion was linked not merely to the task of defending the honour and innocence of Christ in court, but also to the missionary task of proclaiming the gospel. Both contexts (courtroom and missionary) are concerned with speech in public and require the response by hearers of evaluation and judgement. It is with Paul that the notion of witness becomes linked not only to the facts as such but also to the personal transformation wrought by an encounter with the risen Jesus himself. The story of Paul’s conversion, as he is depicted narrating it in Acts 22, results in him being commissioned as a ma,rtuj to the Gentiles. Not only does the revelation of the divine truth to Paul transform him; it also results in his impulsion to witness to others as a matter of sheer conviction.12 What now comes into view is confession of the truth – the truth about reality as it has been revealed in Christ, but also the truth about the confessor and his or her very identity with regards to that truth. There is nothing neutral or unbiased about witness in this sense. As Craig A. Slane writes: ‘[I]f confession discloses the identity of self, we might consider Christian confession to be the disclosure of one’s self in proximity to Christ.’13 In the light of that which it confesses, witness becomes the confession of one’s own commitments and identity. 10 Allison A. Trites, ‘Ma,rtuj and martyrdom in the apocalypse: A semantic study’, Novum Testamentum, 15(1) (1973), pp. 72–80. 11 George Dragas, ‘Martyrdom and orthodoxy in the New Testament era – the theme of Ma,rturia as witness to the truth’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 30(3) (1985), p. 293. 12 The significance of Paul’s conversion is a major debate in Pauline studies. Kim in particular links Paul’s mission to his Damascus road experience. (Seyoon Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Tübingen: Mohr, 2nd edn, 1984).) More latterly, see the essays in Richard N. Longenecker, The Road from Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on His Life, Thought, and Ministry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997). 13 Craig A. Slane, Bonhoeffer as Martyr: Social Responsibility and Modern Christian Commitment (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2004), p. 41.

INTRODUCTION

5

From the NT point of view there is no doubt of the potential for conflict with the world, the flesh and the Devil implicit in this confession. This is always and already inbuilt into the narrative of Christ himself – a priori the confession prophesies its own rejection. If believers in Christ are to imitate him, then that implies following him to the extent of dying the death he died – or, at least, that one’s suffering and potential death are to be understood as echoing Christ’s. Paul continually reads his own sufferings as an apostle in this way (e.g. 2 Cor. 4.8-10). Suffering for Christ is inextricably bound to witnessing for Christ – and vice versa – as far as Paul is concerned. The death of Stephen is a heuristic moment for the Christian understanding of martyrdom. He is, as Slane points out, a martyr because he is a witness to Christ as he preaches his tendentious and courageous rendition of Israel’s history, rather than because he dies per se.14 Which to say, violent death is the consequence of his witness rather than the content of it. He testifies to the providential power of God at work in history – and particularly to that work as it is consummated in the death and resurrection of Christ. Luke clearly wants his readers to observe the parallels between Jesus and Stephen in their deaths: he prays, as Jesus prays, ‘receive my spirit’, and asks for forgiveness for his enemies (Acts 7.58-60).15 Stephen consciously echoes the manner of death of the figure whom he considers central to Israel’s history. For its part, John’s gospel makes much of the sham trial at which Jesus was convicted as a kind of ironic antitype of the real eschatological trial at which he was mightily vindicated.16 As such, the author of the gospel uses the category of witness to describe himself and his writing, with the purpose of bringing the putative readers to faith in Jesus as Christ (Jn 19.35). The gospel is offered as a counter-testimony to the false witness against Jesus. In the Book of Revelation, likewise, ‘witnessing’ refers to a verbal witness to the truth of God and a living obedience to the command of God. The two are not separated: a true speech is conjoined with a true life. Jesus himself is the primary ma,rtuj (Rev. 1.5): his followers do not offer their own witness, but continue his work of witness. This witness is of course contested, and gives rise to opposition – a false and beastly counter-testimony, rooted in the primal lie of the serpent in Eden. The examples of Jesus, Paul and Stephen shape Christian discipleship as a life in which suffering rejection is the likely norm. Christian discipleship is described as a death to self and a taking on of new life, in union with Jesus Christ.17 Union with Jesus Christ by faith creates a supreme bond of loyalty which is tested daily in the struggle against sin, the world, the Devil; and even when put to the test of martyrdom transcends all other loyalties. Not surprisingly, Christian baptism is a symbol of the offering of the old self over to death, which is what every Christian does as an identification with Jesus Christ. It is a

14 Ibid. 15 Jaroslav Pelikan, Acts (London: SCM Press, 2006), pp. 106–8. 16 Lincoln persuasively reads John in terms of the trial/witness motif. (Andrew T. Lincoln, Truth on Trial: The Lawsuit Motif in the Fourth Gospel (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000).) 17 See Rom. 6.1-10.

6

MARTYRDOM AND IDENTITY

kind of proto-martyrdom, with its act of testimony to Christ and renunciation of the world, the flesh and the Devil.18 The plunging into the water symbolizes dying and then rising to new life. First Timothy 6.12ff explicitly compares th.n kalh.n o`mologi,an (the ‘good confession’) of Jesus under Pilate with the confession of Timothy made (presumably) at his baptism.19 That is to say, the rite of entry into the Christian community symbolically unites a confession and a death. The trajectory from this moment to instances of martyrdom is not at all surprising, given that this was how the Christians identified themselves.20 By the time of Augustine, the celebration and memorialization of the martyrs was an indication of just how deeply embedded in Christian self-perception martyrdom had become.21 The treatment given the theme by several theologians in the interim (Tertullian, Clement, Origen, Cyprian among them) serves to underscore its significance. Martyrdom is the possibility latent in the Christian identity, for all Christians are called to the ‘witness’ or ‘testimony’ (martu,rion) that might result in bloody (or ‘red’) martyrdom. Every Christian, we might say, is already a martyr; for, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, ‘[T]he cross is laid on every Christian.’22 The martyr outwardly represents the Christian way of understanding both the world and the situatedness of the self in that world.23 As Balthasar writes: . . . this does not mean that every single Christian must suffer bloody martyrdom, but he must consider the entire case as the external representation of the inner reality out of which he lives.24 18 Certainly Paul treats baptism as a symbol of death/new life in Romans 6. Origen makes the connection between the baptismal promises and the test of martyrdom explicit in his Exhortation to Martyrdom. (Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, in Rowan A. Greer (ed.), Origen (London: SPCK, 1979), III.17, p. 157.) 19 Though baptism is not explicitly mentioned here, a formal congregational ceremony is strongly implied. See I. Howard Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), p. 661. 20 Rowan Williams writes of the martyr narratives that ‘[T]he issue is who the believer is, and whether or not this is a person whose life is defined by the sovereignty of God’s free gift.’ (Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement (London: Fount, 2000a), p. 99.) 21 For Castelli, ‘[T]he memory work done by early Christians on the historical experience of persecution and martyrdom was a form of culture making, whereby Christian identity was indelibly marked by the collective memory of the religious suffering of others.’ (Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Gender, Theory, and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 4.) See also my review: Michael P. Jensen, ‘Review of Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 20(1) (2007a), pp. 125–8. 22 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (trans. R. H. Fuller; London: SCM Press, 2001), p. 44. Similarly, Australian theologian Peter F. Jensen writes: ‘Martyrdom . . . is only the ultimate form of obedience, of being a follower of Jesus. The cross is a daily form of life . . . the spirit that makes the martyr for Christ is simply an extension of that which makes the ordinary believer’ (Peter F. Jensen, The Future of Jesus (Sydney, NSW: ABC Books, 2005), pp. 61, 74). 23 See, for example, Mt. 10.18f. 24 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness (San Francisco: Ignatius,

INTRODUCTION

7

Martyrdom thus provides us with a unique opportunity to examine and reflect on the meaning of Christian identity and its reception in the world.

C

‘Identity’ and ‘The self’

Already prominent in this discussion are some concepts that need elucidation – for the purposes of working definitions – namely, ‘the self’ and ‘identity’. The purpose of this section is to orient this study to its subject matter in the terms that appear in contemporary philosophical discourse. This will give some indication of the way in which the terms will be adapted and applied in the context of this study; but as I intend here to give a theological account of the self in terms of martyrdom, these definitions or orientations should not be thought of as setting the outward limits of the discussion. I shall seek in this task the assistance of Paul Ricoeur in particular, though it will be of interest to take note of similar lines of thought appearing in the work of such thinkers as Calvin Schrag, Seyla Benhabib, Anthony Giddens and Charles Taylor. Further: the present task is not yet to give a critical evaluation of discourses of selfhood; a detailed engagement with two such accounts is to be found in Chapter 2. In his monumental work Oneself as Another, Ricoeur makes a distinction between the two major meanings of the word ‘identity’ in terms of the Latin words idem and ipse.25 Idem-identity has the sense of ‘sameness’. Under this definition, a person’s identity can be constituted from matrices or horizons that stem from comparison to others. So, I identify with those who are the same as me, and I do not identify with those who are different. On the other hand, ipse-identity invites an understanding of identity in terms of ‘selfhood’. As an identity, the self has to be reflexively understood.26 Self-identity refers at the outset to the one I am speaking about when I am able to speak self-consciously about myself. It is an indication of self-awareness, a capacity for ‘seeing’ oneself. We might describe it as a mental gaze at one’s own reflection in a mirror. 1994), p. 22. 25 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (trans. Kathleen Blamey; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2. Latter-day thought about the self and personal identity begins with a critique of the inwardness and abstractness of Enlightenment accounts. As Wilhelm Dilthey wrote: ‘No real blood runs in the veins of the knowing subject that Locke, Hume and Kant constructed’ (cited in Anthony C. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation and Promise (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 47). For his part, Ricoeur introduces his philosophy of the self as means of bypassing the stand-off between the Cartesian idea of the posited cogito and its Nietzschean (and, subsequently, postmodern) undoing. In Thiselton’s opinion, Ricoeur’s achievement is ‘to undermine equally the autonomous self which commands the centre of the stage in high modernity and the reduced, de-centred self of postmodernity’ (ibid., p. 78). Ricoeur (1994: 134–9) also gives extensive time to responding to more analytic accounts of identity, such as that of Derek Parfit. 26 I make more modest here Giddens’s claim that the self ‘has to be reflexively made’ (Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1991), p. 3; emphasis mine).

8

MARTYRDOM AND IDENTITY

This self-awareness is not self-understanding as such, or an appreciation of the meaning of oneself; but it is a prompt to self-understanding. The very notion of ‘oneself’ invites one on a quest to discover or make sense of who it is one is talking of when one refers to ‘oneself’. If I am to make sense of myself, I need a point of reference or comparison. I must be able to trace in some way a coherence, a pattern in this entity I name ‘self’. Time27 offers that to me in two ways: first, by an act of remembering I can trace my own actions and experiences across time. I can begin to see patterns of cause and effect; to make sense of motivations and intentions; to have feelings of nostalgia and regret, and so on. As a number of recent theorists have observed: I begin to see my own narrative emerging, the story of my own self.28 In turn, secondly, I can begin to exercise my other mental faculty relating to time – my imagination – and to project into the future the next stages in the ‘emplotment’ (Ricoeur’s term) of my life.29 To pursue this invitation to understand oneself, then, suggests that it is a narrative that needs to be understood. It is true to our experience of embodiment to think this way, too: that we are not selves known in abstract, as if we are static types, but rather that we are revealed, to others as well as to ourselves, as characters in a sequence of causally related events. We notice then, of course, that we are not, even in this moment of reflexivity, cut off from the phenomenal world of space and time – but, rather, thoroughly situated within it. In other words, this reflexive sense of identity invites expression in the form of a narrative. That is what our memories do for us: they narrate the self into identity, interpreting the past for us and projecting out of that past a future, the open horizon to which our personal history is moving.30 Story is, after all, a remarkable mnemonic device. Personal identity could be said to take this narrative form because of its inherently historical nature.31 What we have in narrative is a binding together of word and event: the

27 Dilthey’s insistence that accounts of selfhood must recognize the temporal context of lived experience is indispensable to later accounts of selfhood (Thiselton, Interpreting God, p. 59). 28 In addition to Ricoeur, thinkers attracted to a narrative view of identity include: Alasdair C. MacIntyre (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edn, 1984)); Marya Schechtman (The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)); Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989b)). 29 Calvin Schrag writes: ‘. . . the self that has nothing to remember and nothing for which to hope is a self whose identity stands in peril’ (Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 37). 30 George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology (London: SCM Press, 1984), p. 107. 31 In connecting identity with consciousness, John Locke long ago recognized the importance of memory for personal identity and ethics. However, he came under strong criticism from Joseph Butler and Thomas Reid because he located personal identity in the consciousness, as distinct from any substance-based identity (David Shoemaker, ‘Personal identity and ethics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/ (accessed 13 Oct. 2009)).

INTRODUCTION

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event is described and given coherence by the application of the shape and categories of narrative. Narrative applies a causal and teleological form to events as we experience them – though this is not altogether arbitrary. The sequentiality of events invites the search for causal links between them, and further invites an inquiry into the teleological aspect.32 Is there some force or personality guiding or shaping events, and if so, of what nature? Ought we speak of luck or of fortune, or of providence? We recognize our own narrativity even in our own bodies: as they change over time, collecting scars and wrinkles, we experience in ourselves the results and effects of our experiences. This is not to say that our narrating of the events of our experience is the final truth about them; or that every account that we give of events we have experienced is absolutely comprehensive. Narratives offer themselves as a means to overcome the problem of persistence in identity: namely, the problem of conceiving of the continuity of an entity who ‘acts and suffers within a framework of continuity and change through the changes and continuities of time’.33 Human actions may bring about or contribute to change – change which may alter the self drastically. However, there is also a continuity in the sense that the actions can be ascribed to the same self who acted in the first place. Narratives enable the tracing of this movement of action and change over time. Furthermore, narrative may function in both a descriptive mode (especially when oriented to the past) and a prescriptive mode (with the future in view). While Shoemaker claims this as a shortcoming or even a confusion,34 in fact there is much to be said for this flexibility. Narrative may be a means to understand what has in fact happened to me, but also a way in which to think about how I propose to act. A third advantage is that narratives claim that they account for both action and intention: they describe the things that are done, and give explanations for them in terms of motivation. They address, in other words, both the inward and the outward conditions of selves. Thus, if ipse-identity requires narration, then it also draws the self into the realm of the ethical.35 This is for two reasons. First, there is the realization that we are actors and agents, who may participate and contribute to the chain 32 Of course, inviting the inquiry into teleology might result in a non-teleological response. For example, ‘luck’ might be the only determinative ‘principle’ discerned. 33 Thiselton, Interpreting God, p. 74. 34 Shoemaker, ‘Personal identity and ethics’. 35 John Locke had already in the seventeenth century sought to connect personal identity with ethical concerns. A narrative account of selfhood, however, brings the ethical dimension to light in a powerful way that reflects our lived experience. As Ricoeur (1994: 115) writes: ‘[T]here is no ethically neutral narrative. Literature is a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity serves as a propaedeutic to ethics.’ Taylor (1989b: 89), for his part, writes: ‘the issue of how we are placed in relation to this good is of crucial and inescapable concern for us, that we cannot but strive to give our lives meaning or substance, and that this means that we understand ourselves inescapably in narrative’. Against Taylor’s rather absolute statement, it ought to be noted that Shoemaker (2008), for one, expresses reservations about the narrative approach. See also Galen Strawson, ‘Against narrativity’, Ratio, XVII (2004), pp. 428–52.

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of causality. As selves in time, we are immediately in the position of asking how it is we are going to act in a way that is consistent and coherent with our emerging conception of our self-identity – so that we are recognizable to ourselves as well as to others. What is it that I am to do? How are my actions going to make sense as coming from me, as being ‘mine’? We might question the sanity of someone whose actions do not emerge from some even partially evident sense of self – a judgement even the insane person might make as they find themselves unable to answer the question ‘why did you do that?’36 In retrospect, too, we are asked to account for our actions – to ascribe to them a sense of appropriateness or fitness. That is to say, judgement is required. The second point is not unrelated: the notion of the self is also an invitation to pursue the ‘true’, or perhaps ‘authentic’, self. The corollary of this is that the individual must have, or develop, some conception of the good by which to judge the self that might emerge.37 Yet, with the turn of the self to the good does not come an automatic description of the good. So, if the chosen measure for self-realization is ‘authenticity’, for example, then the concept must be given some relatively substantial account if the authentic self is to be recognized when it appears. Which is to say, the hermeneutics of the self orient the self to the pursuit of the good, without also giving thereby a definition of what the good is. That discovery remains to be made, or that revelation remains to be given. Already I have suggested that an examination of ipse-identity inevitably demands an account of the situatedness of the self. The self cannot be described in splendid and abstract isolation, as it was once thought the Cartesian cogito could be. The self is a self only and always among other selves with whom, in the first instance, it is possible to make comparisons of similarity and dissimilarity;38 and, secondly, with whom the self must live, and relate. ‘One is a self’, writes Charles Taylor, ‘only among other selves’.39 The discussion is opened up, therefore, to social, political and historical dimensions, and must deal with the particularity and contingency of lived experience. Once again, raising the question of other selves or relationships at this stage is not to say 36 Hence, we are drawn to speak of character, which Ricoeur (1994: 122) somewhat elliptically describes as ‘truly the “what” of the “who”’. See also MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 216–22. 37 ‘To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good and bad . . .’ See Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 28. 38 Thus Seyla Benhabib: ‘The identity of the self is constituted by a narrative unity, which integrates what “I” can do, have done and will accomplish with what you expect of “me”, interpret my acts and intentions to mean, wish for in the future . . .’ (Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 5). 39 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 35. Taylor notes that giving an articulation of the self by means of language necessarily involves participation in a language community – in other words, the self can only be described with reference to the selves surrounding it (ibid., pp. 34–6). The necessity for others in self-understanding is not a new discovery. Already in the work of Schleiermacher, himself influenced by Schelling, is to be found a stress on the inter-subjectivity of self-knowledge. The encounter with the Other is indispensable for all understanding, and especially for understanding oneself (Thiselton, 1995: 50).

INTRODUCTION

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who these others might be, or how they are or might be encountered, or what form these relationships are to take. The two forms of identity thus prove to be closely related and mutually informing. For the purpose of this study, this means that each of the terms ‘identity’ and ‘the self’ can be used and at the same time refer validly to the meaning indicated by the other term. ‘Identity’ and ‘the self’ are suggestive of an interpretational activity with the individual’s life as its object. As we have seen, this means that we are led into a consideration of the narrativity of the self, which in turn leads us into the realm of the ethical and, by extension, into a consideration of the self among other selves. In this way, the concepts themselves can function for us as invitations rather than as conclusions. If, then, we are asking about the Christian ‘self’ or ‘identity’ as it is expressed in martyrdom, we will be asking these three general questions concerning selfhood: ‘what kind of narration of the self is indicated?’, ‘what account of the good is given, and how is it to be realised?’ and ‘how are the relationships between this self and other selves to be described?’ However, while the questions, drawn from philosophical discourse, may serve as prompts, it is also the case that addressing them in theological terms will give occasion to revisit even the form of the questions so put.

D

The work in outline

This book unfolds in three parts. In the first part (Chapter 2) I shall seek to show, by means of expositions of the work of philosopher Charles Taylor and novelist Salman Rushdie, that selfhood shaped by Christian martyrdom proves difficult for these instances of secular contemporary accounts of identity and personal authenticity. Both non-theological attempts to give answers to the questions of selfhood (as I have just outlined them) struggle to accommodate the possibility of a selfhood conditioned by the possibility of martyrdom. In the instance of Charles Taylor, who might well see his own account of ‘the ethics of authenticity’ as proto-theological, I will argue that his attempt to revive authenticity is not particular enough or exclusive enough to suit the conditions under which martyrdom occurs. On the other hand, Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses gives an avowedly anti-theological version of human self-fulfilment, repudiates any self-identification that might rest on martyrdom in the name of any religion. If Christians consider martyrdom to be the ‘normal condition’ of their existence,40 then so much the worse for them – and indeed for the whole human community. Martyrdom is far too rigidly and irrationally traditional to allow the individual self the flexibility to transmogrify according to the twists and turns of fate. As an expression of an identity, it closes off the self to experiencing the new; it perverts love and denies life. It is an invalid self-narration, and a very thin account of the good. However, Rushdie’s account is not without its own difficulties: it is hard to see that he has successfully escaped from the

40 Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, p. 21.

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‘self-determination’ problem that Taylor derides in his account of authenticity. Furthermore, while his depiction of martyrdom might hold for some Christian and other religious martyrdoms, it is certainly not the case that his criticisms of martyrdom fairly describe a Christian martyrdom that is true to its own sources, not least in the example of Jesus Christ himself. I turn, then, in the second part (Chapters 3–6) to an elucidation of Christian martyrdom and its implications for selfhood. In this I am assisted by T. S. Eliot’s martyrological drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which sheds considerable light on the themes of this study.41 In the instance of Eliot’s literary creation, Archbishop Thomas Becket (or, more accurately, his interpretation of a historical figure), we are given a richly imaginative reflection on martyrdom in the Scriptures and the Christian tradition as a whole. By dramatizing a particular martyrdom, the play presents martyrdom in its true, narrative form and enables us to observe its narrative logic. The play enables us to investigate, imaginatively and theologically, the interior life and struggles of the martyr – things which are not frequently available to us. By drawing us into the three questions of narrative, the good and the self-re-other-selves, the drama offers benefits to this discussion not necessarily available from those abstract kinds of discourse more customarily part of theological analyses. Further, as we shall see, the play suggests that no account of identity can be theologically adequate that does not acknowledge the crucial significance of temptation on the one hand, and providence on the other. The play’s plot is straightforward: returning from exile in France and aware that he is an enemy of the King, Thomas must resist the four ghostly Tempters if he is to die the death of a true martyr. His murder by the King’s henchmen then forms the substance of the second part of the play. Though not a ‘professional’ theologian, Eliot (as his role in this study will demonstrate) had a remarkably sound theological instinct, and, of course, the compressed and yet fertile expression of one of the great poetic voices of the twentieth century.42 Using the drama as a heuristic device (though not uncritically so), we proceed to a scriptural and theological exposition of martyrdom and the self. Anticipating the objection that the play is a purely literary artifact subject to primarily aesthetic criteria which, therefore, has a dubious place in a theological account of martyrdom, it is pertinent to note that Murder in the Cathedral was commissioned by a Church of England Bishop (Bishop George Bell) and designed to be performed within the walls of Canterbury Cathedral. Eliot was quite aware that his initial audience was an ecclesiastical one. If anything, the play has had a rather awkward and ambivalent reception as a literary artifact, quite because of its almost liturgical quality and its theological subject

41 Patristic scholar Warren Smith has also recognized the potential of this play as a stimulus for theological thought. (J. Warren Smith, ‘Martyrdom: self-denial or self-exaltation? Motives for self-sacrifice from Homer to Polycarp: a theological reflection’, Modern Theology, 22(2) (2006), 169–96.) 42 See Donald Davie, ‘Anglican Eliot’, in A. Walton Litz (ed.), Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Waste Land (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

INTRODUCTION

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matter.43 Perhaps uniquely among twentieth-century plays, then, Murder in the Cathedral has a place at the table of theological discussion.44 The four temptations presented to Archbishop Thomas in the first act of Murder in the Cathedral are each an offer of an alternative self-identity to that which results in Christian martyrdom.45 The temptations – his ‘strife with shadows’ – do not come from some point external to him, but already subsist within him: they are already features of his character that he may choose to embrace or reject as his own truth. In the example of Thomas’s rejection of them, Eliot signals that the meaning of Christian identity is not found in capitulating to these temptations; or, to put it positively, the Christian self is the one who resists these temptations even to the end. The temptations put to this particular martyr, then, form the catalyst for my discussion of martyrdom and identity in general. The First Tempter (Chapter 3) reminds Thomas of his past life of comfort and ease under the protection of his king. The temptation is framed as a nostalgic vision of yearning for an unrepeatable past which is still yet able to capture the heart. The Second Tempter (Chapter 4) and the Third Tempter (Chapter 5) share a concern for the assertion of the self through power. For his part, the Second Tempter offers a collaboration with the King with the entirely reasonable argument that church and governor and people will benefit from the arrangement – and that Thomas will not have wasted his life. The Third Tempter likewise appeals to a view of the good, by encouraging Thomas to join with him in rebellious political action in the name of the true identity of the nation. If the King is a tyrant and his claim to represent his nation tenuous, then surely his removal is warranted in the name of patriotic duty. The Fourth Tempter (Chapter 6) is the most surprising, bringing the glory and honour of martyrdom itself as the substance of his temptation. In human terms, he offers Thomas the possibility of narrating himself into the honour of great renown. Or, if Thomas should reject this motivation, the Tempter sets before him the promise of heavenly rewards as an enticement to martyrdom, knowing of course that acceptance of the offer will corrupt the idea of martyrdom itself. That is to say: he is tempted to justify himself in the heavenly court. In each case I will explore the meanings of the temptations with reference also to philosophical works. The first temptation is intensified as we look to Martha C. Nussbaum, who argues that selves should invest in a broad portfolio of goods as a means of guarding against luck. The second temptation finds an echo in the work of American neopragmatist Richard Rorty, who advocates the ‘ironic self’, an individual capable of entering the public sphere without clinging to a metaphysical view of the self. In the case of the third 43 We will return to the difficulty that the play has as a piece of contemporary theatre in Chapter 8, as a case study for the reception of Christian martyrdom within secularized culture. 44 It almost goes without saying that poets have long formed part of the Christian tradition of theological thinking. The fissure between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘theological’ is a post-Romantic-era one. 45 Recognizing this, in productions of the play the Four Tempters are frequently portrayed as aspects of Thomas’s character. (T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (ed. Nevill Coghill; London: Faber, 1965), p. 106 – from Coghill’s explanatory notes.)

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temptation, English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton expounds the kind of idealistic patriotism offered to the Archbishop – and of which Eliot himself is somewhat of an exponent in his political writings. In the fourth temptation, in which the martyr’s motives come under scrutiny, I will trace both the ‘honour ethic’ and the ‘theology of heavenly rewards’. Each temptation thus puts a difficult question before the Christian disciple that is a real challenge to her identity. The temptations are not merely arguments to be won but possible selves one might embrace in terms of security, power, patriotic action and honour. To respond to such a challenge is to be thrown back on the Scriptures and the tradition. To that end I embark on a scriptural and theological enquiry into the significance of each temptation and its renunciation. Christian discipleship emerges from rejection of these offers, as martyrdom reveals, and itself allows a critique of some of the contemporary versions of selfhood being proposed. It is an acceptance of (rather than a management of) risk on the basis of the call of Christ and the vision of the heavenly city. Martyrdom is not a sign that the Christian self is always at odds with earthly government; but neither is the authentic Christian given to collusion with the state and its values. Martyrdom is not an assertion of the self through action, but rather a suffering act which refuses that assertion. Neither is it patriotic without reserve. Christian martyrdom is not even the result, it turns out, of pursuing martyrdom, but rather of discipleship and witness. It is not really a self-narration at all. The crowning of martyrs is, as we shall see, a divine rather than a human business. Having described what martyrdom avoids, how then may we describe, in positive terms, the understanding of self-identity that arises from Christian martyrdom? The seventh chapter, which opens the third section, proceeds as a discussion of two themes that have arisen in the preceding chapters: temptation and providence. These are basic to the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom. I shall offer here an analysis of peirasmo,j – which includes both ‘trial’ and ‘temptation’ – as a condition which human beings encounter with monotonous inevitability. The making or narrating of a ‘self’ is insufficient to defeat peirasmo,j, we shall discover. Christ – who is at once both the conqueror of peirasmo,j and the agent of divine providence – is the point at which the two themes overlap. It is precisely this ‘eternal patience’46 – the providentia dei revealed and enacted in the passion and resurrection of the divine Son – that is the mark of the martyred self. The focus in Christian martyrdom is thus on the vindication, rather than the innocence, of the martyr. The final chapter recapitulates these themes by way of a discussion of Stephen Pimlott’s 1993 production of Murder in the Cathedral. Reviewers of the play found Thomas somewhat baffling and unsatisfying. Does an 46 The phrase comes from perhaps the most curious speech in Eliot’s play. It is spoken first by Thomas: ‘Neither does the agent suffer Nor the patient act. But both are fixed In an eternal action, an eternal patience To which all must consent that it may be willed And which all must suffer that they may will it . . .’ (I.208-17)

INTRODUCTION

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identity framed in terms of Christian martyrdom in fact represent the defeat of the possibility of communication with the world, a retreat behind sectarian or tribal lines? In particular, these questions relate to the matter of the self-among-other-selves. I will take my cue from Eliot once more, and offer an analysis of the way in which martyrological narratives invite (rather than repel) attention, and are in fact true to their own nature as witness. Christian martyrdom is undertaken by a self offered in the service of the God of Jesus Christ; and, because this is so, it is also a sacrifice made on behalf of the world, a sign of the divine commitment to the world. Thus, the Christian claim is that authentic human identity is found in discipleship, and that, providentially, this identity survives even the peirasmo,j of a bloody death.

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‘What kind of idea are you?’ Martyrdom and identity in Charles Taylor and in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

A

Introduction

We have already seen that martyrdom is the external demonstration of the internal reality of the Christian person. I have also briefly indicated that the notion of martyrdom is sharply contested as an inauthentic and destructive form of identity in a number of contemporary accounts of selfhood and identity. In this chapter my aim is to expound in more depth the problem of the martyred self for these non-theological (or even anti-theological) perspectives. First, we address the work of Charles Taylor as one of the most prominent diagnosticians of the self and identity within contemporary moral philosophy.1 His description of late-modern identity in terms of ‘the ethics of authenticity’ serves to introduce some additional conceptual tools into our discussion with which to inquire as to the authenticity of the martyred self-among-other-selves. But Taylor also offers a positive account of authentic selfhood, not apparently hostile to martyrdom but, in the view of this study, problematic on its own terms. Second, we turn to one of the late twentieth century’s most noted public intellectuals, the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, and to his novel The Satanic Verses, in which he evinces both a critical suspicion of martyrdom, and also gives a particular account of the identity, the self and human authenticity. Rushdie offers a view of self-identity which resonates at some points with Taylor’s description, but says a definite ‘no’ to martyrdom as a possible

1 Taylor’s influence is illustrated by the growing number of monographs on him now available, among which are: Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Teddington: Acumen, 2000); Arto Laitinen and Nicholas H. Smith, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Charles Taylor (Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland, 2002); Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). 17

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authentic choice for right-thinking contemporary people. Here then are two powerful attempts – one philosophical, one literary – to give an account of authentic selfhood and human identity-making in the modern world in terms of narrativity, orientation to the good and the self-with-others. Though they diverge from one another in many aspects, both are in my view problematic as accounts of selfhood on their own terms, and are further problematized if selfhood is viewed through the lens of Christian martyrdom.

B

Charles Taylor and authenticity

i. Introduction: authenticity as a theme The purpose of this section is to outline and then evaluate Charles Taylor’s 1991 work The Ethics of Authenticity as a construal of selfhood which appears to allow for an affirmation of Christian martyrdom. Taylor suggests that ‘authenticity’, properly conceived, may be a potent way to answer the questions of the self. To discover the self’s authenticity has become a prominent theme within the late-modern quest for self-identity, as Taylor points out. This was recognized by the literary critic Lionel Trilling in his book Sincerity and Authenticity, where he called authenticity ‘part of the moral slang of our day’.2 Trilling also showed that authenticity is part of a discourse with its roots deep in the nineteenth century, and even in the writings of Rousseau. He traces the descent into banality of the ideal through the influence of Freud and Nietzsche, so that in the late modern era

The falsities of an alienated social reality are rejected in favour of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ – but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished.3 What may have once been an appealing ethical ideal has, for Trilling, become a way for individuals to articulate self-interested self-assertion. Building on Trilling’s analysis, Charles Taylor offers his book The Ethics of Authenticity as a restatement and readjustment of authenticity as a moral ideal. As we shall see, the way in which Taylor presents his case is suggestive of a theological discussion that he himself does not offer.4 The strong implication is that the 2 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Oxford University Press: London, 1972), p. 93. 3 Ibid., p. 171. 4 In Taylor’s most recent large work, he consciously incorporates and restates the ideas presented earlier in The Ethics of Authenticity. This present analysis can thus be read as an engagement with a part of Taylor’s ongoing philosophical project. In his recent book, granted, he begins to take up some of the more theological themes suggested by his previous work, such that his apologetic intentions are much more in evidence. See the chapters ‘The malaise of modernity’ and ‘The age of authenticity’ in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,

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ideal of authenticity ought to resonate with a theological discussion of the self and its own truth. In the terms of this study, this means that Taylor makes a space in which a martyrological self might be described as authentic – at least potentially.5 ii. The three malaises The Ethics of Authenticity opens with a diagnosis of three ‘malaises’ of the contemporary culture of the West.6 The appearance of the symptoms is relatively uncontroversial: there is a widespread experience of loss which controverts the apparent progress our civilization has made. The first malaise is held to be individualism, which appears to be causing a felt loss of meaning. Second, the ascent of instrumental reason, on which so much of modern life depends, has led to a feeling that we are pressed by the powerful mechanisms of the industrial and bureaucratic state. Taylor calls this problem an ‘eclipse of ends’.7 Third, on the political level the consequence of individualism and instrumental reason is a lack of active participation in the process of government, leading to what Tocqueville described as the ‘soft despotism’ of the democratic state over its docile citizens. Taylor offers a full discussion of only the first of these malaises. There are those, whom Taylor calls the ‘knockers’,8 who write with an apocalyptic fervour against these cultural patterns, in particular targeting self-centredness and relativism for opprobrium. Opposed to them (though few if any are named by Taylor) are the ‘boosters’, who fear that the reaction is fed by nostalgia for a more closed and ordered – in other words, ‘oppressive’ – age. Taylor offers his diagnosis as an alternative interpretation to both of these – not as a trade-off between the two somehow, but as a completely different analysis, ‘a position distinct from both boosters and knockers of contemporary culture’.9 For Taylor, there is indeed ‘a powerful moral ideal’ at work in contemporary culture, despite what the knockers are saying. There is in fact a vision of what a higher or better mode of life might be. It is just that there is a problem with ‘inarticulacy’10 in contemporary moral discussions such that the moral ideal is hard to identify even for those who are espousing it. Taylor views the criticism of modern laxity as misplaced. There is, he asserts, an ethic at the heart of modern culture, though it is evident in deformed ways. But one of the greatest difficulties of correcting the deformities lies in the inability of modern culture to admit that it even has a moral ideal in the first place.

5 6 7 8 9 10

2007), pp. 299–321, 473–504. For my own further analysis of Taylor, see Michael P. Jensen, ‘In spirit and in truth: Can Charles Taylor help the woman at the well find her authentic self?’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 21(3) (2008), pp. 325–41. Elsewhere, Taylor (1989b: 218–19) gives a brief comment on the place of martyrdom in the Christian self-understanding. The book was published as The Malaise of Modernity in its first Canadian edition. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 10. Chief among them is Allan D. Bloom. (The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).) Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 22. Ibid., p. 17.

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iii. Retrieving authenticity This moral ideal is what Taylor describes as the ethic of authenticity. It is, he claims, an idea with considerable moral appeal, if only it could be expressed in a more intelligible way. At present, it appears mostly in degenerate forms, as a travesty of itself. What Taylor proposes, then, is a work of retrieval:11 he thinks that by a fresh articulation of the ideal of authenticity, the good that is in it might be rediscovered in a way that speaks powerfully to people who are already attracted to it. Something quite important about Taylor’s intellectual strategy is revealed here too. His goal is in a sense rather modest – he does not want to give voice to some eternal moral truth, but rather to suggest ways in which better outcomes can be achieved for human persons given the common heritage we share (and struggle over). He chooses to be an advocate for authenticity because it is, at least partly, the ethic we in the West have already inherited. Pursuing it is, in a way, being true to who we are as people of this time and place. At least, he seems to be saying, talking about authenticity will be talking about some vision of the good, which is an advance on the stultifying inarticulacy of ethical discourse that he observes in contemporary culture. What is the ideal of authenticity? Taylor traces the ethic of authenticity to the end of the eighteenth century, observing that it descends both from the rationality of Descartes and the individualism of Locke. It was further suggested in the eighteenth century (particularly by Rousseau) that morality was anchored within us, in an intuitive sense of right and wrong. It ought to be added that this had been learnt from the vigorous discussions in the Christian tradition about the conscience; but there was at this time a turn to intuitive feeling rather than moral calculation as the source of moral understanding. In fact, what becomes essential to attaining true human being is to be in touch with this inner depth of the self, to have a ‘reflexive awareness of ourselves’.12 Taylor claims that this turn inwards was already present in the West through Augustine and Luther’s appropriation of Pauline thought.13 11 Taylor uses this word of his own work in Sources of the Self, where he writes (with Hegelian overtones): ‘The intention of this work was one of retrieval, an attempt to uncover buried goods through rearticulation – and thereby to make these sources again empower, to bring the air back again into the half-collapsed lungs of the spirit’ (The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 520). 12 Ibid., p. 27. 13 Here I suspect Taylor (or, at least, the Western tradition of thought he describes) has misread the Christian mode of introspection found in Luther’s reading of Paul. For Luther, the gospel was simultaneously a declaration of God’s justification of the sinner in Christ and the news that he was a sinner in need of justification in the first place (simul iustus et peccator). Inwardness was a dead end. Introspection was not the path to greater self-knowledge except in the sense that it led to greater awareness of one’s need for grace: ultimately the gospel of Christ was the basis for true understanding of the self. The Western tradition attempts to have the self-knowledge without the gospel of Christ that, on Luther’s (and, later, Calvin’s) account, reveals it. For a critique of Taylor’s reading of Augustine along these lines, see Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 125–32. In his larger works, Taylor rightly emphasizes the role the Puritans had to play in developing introspectivity. See, for example, Taylor, Sources of the Self,

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Though we can trace its multiple roots back in this way, authenticity as we know it today bursts into flower during the Romantic period. Taylor associates with Herder a further development of the inward turn: that each of us has an original way of being human that is ours to discover. In fact: There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.14 To this is subsequently added (Taylor observes) the principle of originality: the model for living my life is only found within me, by being true to my own originality. Only I can discover it; only I can articulate it. Growing alongside the development of the authenticity ethic was the sense of self-determining freedom. This theme has had a complex relationship with authenticity and has led to a focus on choice as a crucial consideration in moral discourse. Taylor traces the rise of moral relativism back to this emphasis on freedom; and hence, according to his account, the ethic of authenticity has grown in distorted ways. How does one speak about morality to a people who do not find any point of reference outside the self to be a compelling object of moral belief? Taylor is not deterred, because he is confident that while people may say they accept no moral demands, in fact they do subscribe to an authoritative moral ideal, that of authenticity. By giving expression to and interrogating this ideal it certainly ought to be possible to converse with people in the contemporary culture of authenticity. In what follows, Taylor invokes as an ‘inescapable horizon’15 the dialogical character of human life – in other words, the human self is more tightly bound in with explaining and articulating and justifying itself to others than is commonly imagined.16 In fact, the ideal of authenticity itself demands that there is some background sense of what is significant – a ‘horizon of significance’.17 This implies discrimination: a decision, a priori, about what is good and what is less so. Authenticity cannot be defended in ways that deny horizons of significance. In fact (and here Taylor is especially suggestive of the theological), even the sense that choice is the root of my personal significance is grounded on the understanding that ‘independent of my will there is something noble, courageous, and hence significant in giving shape to my own life’.18 Horizons of significance come to us from outside ourselves: they are given. There is already, anterior to the choices of the individual, a picture (or pictures) of what human beings are like, or ought to be. Even positing self-choice in itself as a moral ideal requires pp. 221–35. 14 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 29. 15 Ibid., p. 31ff. 16 Latterly, Taylor has traced this observation through to the level of collective social identities. See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 17 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 38. Seyla Benhabib (1992) has a similar idea in mind when she writes of the ‘situatedness’ of the self. 18 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 39.

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that there be choices that themselves are significant. As Taylor says, ‘I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter’;19 and if I am to bracket out from consideration history, nature, society and everything except for that which I find in myself, I am surely not choosing for myself anything other than the trivial. ‘Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.’20 Some reference to the self-transcending – whether God, nature, nation, ideology or whatever else – is necessary for authentic selfhood. Choice itself cannot be basic. If it is incoherent to argue for self-fulfilment without regard to those demands which have their source outside the self, it is equally self-defeating to overlook the demands of our ties with others. One frequent theme in knocker writings is that a self-endorsed understanding of self-fulfilment is detrimental to all kinds of social life. Taylor once again turns to his ‘retrieval’ strategy: for him there is a notion of society inherent in the ideal of authenticity as a matter of plain fact, even when it is as badly distorted as it is now. Individualism makes its strong appeal to universal right and, in its contemporary form, puts a great deal of emphasis on intimate relationships as the sphere of self-discovery and self-fulfilment.21 What is clear is that our identity requires recognition by others.22 iv. A culture in tension Taylor’s reading of contemporary culture shows that it is in tension with itself. Though it appeals to the ideal of authenticity, several factors or themes have combined to make the realization of that ideal unachievable; and the deviant forms of this ideal thus abound. The culture of narcissism is founded on an ideal that it only ever fails to reach. As Taylor explains it, this situation has come to pass because those external factors which previously constrained the pursuit of naked self-interest are now not felt to be relevant. The slide in the culture of authenticity into atomism and anthropocentricism has come about because of the conditions of urban living and mass mobility, and because of the way in which our society places more and more value on instrumental reason. The deviancy in authenticity is explained in part by the fact that authenticity has to be pursued in an ‘industrial-technological-bureaucratic society’.23 Further, the pursuit of the authentic self has been placed alongside a move towards self-centred modes of self-fulfilment in popular culture and a simultaneous move towards nihilism in ‘high’ culture. The Neo-Nietzscheans, such as Foucault and Derrida, while explicitly claiming to undo the self (one thinks

19 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. A point also made by Anthony Giddens (1991: 87–8). Taylor later returned to the theme of recognition. (Charles Taylor, ‘The politics of recognition’, in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).) I shall turn briefly to his work on recognition in my discussion of honour in Chapter 6. 23 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 59. Trilling (1972: 127) notes that, since Ruskin, the appeal to authenticity has had an anti-technological streak. ‘The machine, said Ruskin, could make only inauthentic things, dead things.’

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of the erasure of the self at the end of The Order of Things24), have, in fact, more deeply entrenched anthropocentricism. The self is supreme, even over those who would categorize it! Taylor here refers to the close analogy that exists between self-discovery and artistic creation. Artistic creation has become the paradigm of self-discovery: the artist becomes the ‘paradigm case of the human being’.25 Art itself is no longer honoured in its mimetic capacity but for its creative originality; so, discovery of the self requires poiesis, or ‘making’. Successful imitation is no longer what art is about. And so successful imitation of moral exemplars is no longer what the self is about.26 Authenticity is seen to require originality ex nihilo, as opposed to conformity to convention, or even a moulding of something new from existing materials. In this way, the search for authenticity in its Nietzschean mode is openly hostile to any form of morality that lies beyond the boundaries of the self. Rather than serving as a means to facilitate one’s moral behaviour, authenticity becomes something worth having for its own sake. However, in this embrace of self-determining freedom, the ethic of authenticity undercuts itself, for it neglects the inescapable horizons of significance. As Taylor puts it, ‘authenticity can’t, shouldn’t, go all the way with self-determining freedom’.27 v. What remains of authenticity? At this point it is worth asking whether anything is retrievable from authenticity. If authenticity has become so perverted, so distorted, is it not perhaps preferable to find another ideal altogether? Though he has made in many ways a good case against authenticity, Taylor thinks that it is worth struggling for: that if people respond to the call to raise the practice of the ethic of authenticity, its deviant forms can be overcome to the greater (and the individual) good. It is the meaning of authenticity itself that Taylor chooses as his battleground. Authenticity is worth fighting for, because it is an identification of one of the ‘important potentialities of human life’28 in that it points us to, as Taylor puts it, ‘a more self-responsible form of life’, because that life has become our own to live. The pull of ‘fulfilment’ in human experience is hard to ignore, and the ideal of authenticity at least makes sense of and articulates this powerful feeling.29

24 Foucault wrote that he could foresee a time when ‘man would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 490). 25 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 62. Trilling (1972: 99) draws the same analogy with the aesthetic: ‘As the [nineteenth] century advances the sentiment of being, of being strong, is increasingly subsumed under the conception of personal authenticity. The work of art is itself authentic by reason of its entire self-definition: it is understood to exist wholly by the laws of its own being, which include the right to embody painful, ignoble or socially inacceptable [sic] subject matters.’ 26 An interesting exception is Edith Wyschogrod, who makes a notable attempt to reposition hagiography as a source for moral thinking. (Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1990).) 27 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 68. 28 Ibid., p. 74. 29 See also Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 44–5.

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Authenticity might describe the manner of my acting, but it need not refer to the whole matter of what I do. It is clearly my orientation that is in view with authenticity – it is, at that level, self-referential. However, that doesn’t mean the content must be self-referential like this. In fact, Taylor strongly suggests that genuine fulfilment will be found in self-transcending categories, like God: I can find fulfilment in God, or a political cause, or tending the earth. Indeed . . . we will find genuine fulfilment only in something like this, which has significance independent of us or our desires.30 The mistake that modern culture has made has been to suggest that each self must create anew and from within not only the manner of authentic selfhood but its matter as well. The modern self is called upon to self-define and also to define the entire system of reference against which that self is to be understood. Rather, in Taylor’s account, to be true to oneself is to see oneself positioned on a broader, and external, horizon of significance. vi. Evaluation The strength of Taylor’s case for the ethic of authenticity (and its possible application to martyrdom) lies in its descriptive power: it appeals to a general human longing for true purpose and satisfaction.31 The success of Taylor’s retrieval depends, however, on whether he has persuasively untangled authenticity from self-determining freedom. Rightly construed (he hopes), the appeal to authentic selfhood could inspire people in the West to live remarkable lives of service to others (to recall one of the three selfhood questions) and to discover self-fulfilment in doing so. It could lead them to find again in human relationships of commitment and love that identity they so desperately pursue. To call people to be true to themselves recognizes that in some way people are not found ordinarily in alignment with themselves. The widespread phenomenon of ‘extended adolescence’ in contemporary Western culture signifies that there is perhaps a greater difficulty in the quest for the self than was experienced in the past; a greater dissatisfaction with the answers on offer, given the disappearance of traditional ‘horizons of significance’; and a greater unwillingness to ‘settle down’ and be more shaped by the expectations of a less flexible set of relationships. Therefore, the promise of a return to an uncorrupted ideal 30 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 82. 31 His identification of authenticity as a key term for contemporary thinking about the good has the support of cultural analyst David Boyle. There has been, Boyle claims, a wholesale cultural shift, even in the decade since Taylor’s book was published, towards ‘the real’, or ‘the authentic’. This is not just played out in thinking about the self, but also in consumer patterns, political concerns and leisure activities. And real/authentic, according to Boyle, has come to indicate ‘ethical’, rooted in the past, honest, natural, simple, unspun and, above all, human. Taylor is perceptive, even prescient, in seeing that this idea is a potent one for contemporary people. Perhaps the rediscovery of authenticity as an ethical discourse has begun to take place. (David Boyle, Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), p. 283.)

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of authenticity is an appealing notion. Yet this is part of the difficulty with the ideal of authenticity that Taylor never quite confronts: where exactly is the pure version of authenticity to be found in the tradition to which he appeals? Taylor’s method appeals to the history of ideas rather than (as in Kant) to abstract universal principles; but can he point to a moment in the tradition when authenticity was held apart from the other ideas that corrupt it? Neither Rousseau nor Herder is held as an example of the kind of thinker who was able to deliver an uncorrupted vision of authenticity. Taylor’s history of the roots of authenticity never quite traces a pre-lapsarian instance. There is never an ideal of authenticity not intertwined with other ideas that make it less than what he wants it to be. In which case, the suspicion arises that perhaps authenticity is inseparable from those corrupting influences that Taylor decries; and it makes Taylor’s use of the word ‘retrieval’ rather suspect. A further question arises from a passage I cited earlier: I can find fulfilment in God, or a political cause, or tending the earth. Indeed . . . we will find genuine fulfilment only in something like this, which has significance independent of us or our desires.32 The way in which Taylor lists the possibilities for orientating the self to some greater reality than the self suggests that these are interchangeable;33 that, once again, a choice (perhaps even subconsciously) may be made as to which greater reality one prefers: the result will be the same. If this is the case, don’t these inescapable horizons become merely projections of the self, however much we might feel that they are ‘given’ or ‘inescapable’? Can Christian theology – or any other religious discourse, for that matter – really accept an ideal that speaks of God as a possibility interchangeable with others? And further: in Taylor’s vision, are the horizons of significance themselves open to question? Are there any ‘inauthentic’ horizons? What criteria could be suggested for determining their legitimacy?34 The problem becomes particularly evident when we consider – as Salman Rushdie does – the question of religiously motivated terrorism (in his view, closely related to martyrdom). Clearly, suicide bombers considers themselves in view of a horizon of significance, and find what they think is self-fulfilment in their self-transcendent cause in the imagining, planning and carrying out of unspeakable horrors. Yet they could be said, in Taylor’s terms, to be acting more authentically than many self-determining secular Westerners do. Taylor does not acknowledge that horizons of significance are not merely given but received; which is to say, horizons themselves could be subject to evaluation

32 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 82. 33 Alternatively, perhaps it suggests that these horizons are all different names for the same thing, or at least overlapping terms naming the one greater reality. 34 The problem will always tend to arise if theology is treated as an addendum (in McFadyen’s term, as ‘Post-It™ label theology’) to philosophy. (Alistair I. McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 12.)

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or even modification (which in practice occurs in most religious systems). The distance between the horizon and the self is susceptible to interpretation (e.g. it is claimed that the terrorists of 11 September 2001 practised a distorted form of Islam). From another point of view we may ask whether Taylor’s conception of authenticity allows the possibility that a person who is rejected by his community – even condemned to death by its members – might be living in complete authenticity. The factor of recognition by others, which in ordinary circumstances is a consideration which prevents the subject from mere self-interestedness, may in fact exclude the figure of the prophet – which is to say, that one who calls a community to a more authentic realization of its own identity. This one of course plays a deadly game. It is certainly the case that, for their part, true Christian martyrs are not disloyal citizens (a case I shall put more strongly in Chapters 4 and 5). In fact, the opposite is true; yet they stand (like Christ) under the condemnation of their societies. Taylor’s retrieved ethics of authenticity attempt to overcome, simultaneously, both the moral problem of self-centredness and the rational difficulty in self-determining freedom. The authentic self ought to be characterized by a reflexive self-awareness and originality, but also ought to be performed against horizons of significance and in dialogue with others. In this way, Taylor hopes to counter the charge of individualism, and yet also to avoid an unreflective traditionalism or collectivism. At first glance it may seem as if the Christian martyr could find Taylor’s platform amenable: she has her own horizon of significance and, up to a point, her dialogue with others; she is aware of a self-transcendent reality. However, it is a stage of somewhat unstable construction, as we have seen. Not just any horizon of significance will do.

C

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

In Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses,35 the possibility of religious martyrdom is critiqued specifically from the point of view of the themes of identity and selfhood. Though Rushdie puts forward a large field of valid means of construing the self, a martyred self does not sit within its range. In his fiction – but also in his non-fiction – Rushdie is highly critical of the notion that an individual’s identity might be authentically conditioned by the possibility of martyrdom. Identifying with the old certainties of nationalism-blendedwith-religion in a world of constant and rapid change and shifting boundaries is a disastrous and destructive strategy. It is a-rational behaviour that puts the subject’s identity dangerously beyond challenge and so isolates him from the potential for personal growth and change. Rather, Rushdie enjoins each individual to give birth to his or her identity by means of the trial and error of experience. In terms of the three aspects of selfhood that were suggested in Chapter 1, Rushdie cannot see the coherence of a self narrated in terms of 35 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 2006). (Originally published in 1989.)

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martyrdom, is critical of the account of the good it gives, and complains that it has the potential to destroy rather than help others. As I shall show, in the contorted plot of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie describes the wrestle of his characters with their own identities. In doing so, he addresses the increasing need of groups to demarcate themselves more clearly (‘identity politics’) and the place of religion in such identifications. The fluidity of identity, in life and in death, is something individuals must come to terms with in the context of massive worldwide social change. Rushdie well recognizes the religious sources of this crisis of identity: when deity as a horizon of transcendence has become problematic, then the individual is left having to seek a new way of understanding herself and her context. Inevitably, Rushdie raises the question of what the most courageous and authentically human way to die is, given that martyrdom is evidence not of a glorious sacrifice but of a dangerous, oppressive and inherently destructive mindset. I will contend that Rushdie’s intellectual instruments are not fine-tuned enough to give a coherent account of the Christian self he so sweepingly rejects, and that his own account of selfhood and identity raises its own difficulties. i. ‘Identity politics’ and religion: what kind of idea are you? The act that begins the narrative of The Satanic Verses is a sadly familiar (even presciently described) piece of religious terrorism. A group of Sikh fanatics have hijacked an airliner and its passengers, the Boeing 747 Bostan. Tavleen, their female leader, is heard saying to her colleague as she executes a hostage:

Martyrdom is a privilege . . . We shall be like the stars; like the sun.36 Even though her fellow terrorists fight against her, in the end it is Tavleen who explodes the bomb as they fly over the English Channel, ‘and the walls come tumbling down’:37 she herself is killed and the plane destroyed; and as the two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall towards the earth, the frenetic and bizarre narrative is strangely propelled. Famously, Salman Rushdie’s fiction both represents and expresses the clash of religious and secular world-views.38 At its publication, The Satanic Verses provoked outrage from Muslims, culminating in the Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa against the author. The book – commonly considered not Rushdie’s best work – is a fascinating self-fulfilling prophecy: an attack on fanaticism and revealed religion which itself becomes the focus for fanaticism.39 The novel itself is a thinly veiled attack on the very kind of murderous religious zeal that 36 Ibid., p. 86. 37 Ibid., p. 87. A reference to the suicide of Samson in Judges 16, though curiously using the words of a spiritual song about Joshua (‘Joshua fought the battle of Jericho . . .’). 38 As Talal Asad notes, the book is itself ‘a political act’ (Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 270). 39 This vehement response to Rushdie was reaffirmed in July 2007 after he was awarded a knighthood.

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was directed towards its author after its publication.40 Though Rushdie took aim at the excesses of Sikhs and Christians in the book (and has attacked Hindu extremism in others of his works), Muslims were right to feel that they were its chief target, especially given the extended passages that threw into question the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed.41 However, it would be a mistake to characterize Rushdie as merely an anti-religious zealot. Discussion of religion naturally emanates from that consideration of what might be called ‘identity politics’, which is deeply entrenched in his work.42 Rushdie is witness to a world in which personal and communal identities are constantly shifting against a backdrop of massive and rapid historical, cultural and political change. The drawing of borders on maps has enormous – sometimes enormously destructive – consequences for individuals on the ground and how they identify themselves (the partition of India described in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children43 being but one example). It is a world of immigrants and exiles, who are no longer at home and yet deeply homesick. This fluidity of identity is experienced with delight by some Western individualists; yet is easy to see how this ‘freedom’ is also frequently experienced as anxiety.44 Those who are in situations where they are (or feel themselves to be) on the outer as a minority, or perhaps as a disempowered majority, struggle to find the capacity to assert their identities alongside those given more easy access to a satisfactory identity. In the midst of this flux, the question that Rushdie’s characters ask of one another, themselves and even of God is ‘what kind of idea are you’?45 40 The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was indeed assassinated. 41 Talal Asad (1993: 239ff) gives an intriguing account of the developing controversy: the variety of ways in which Muslim hurt was expressed, and the rhetorical strategies used by Rushdie and others of more liberal bent to invalidate this hurt. 42 ‘Identity politics is the political activity of various social movements for self-determination. It claims to represent and seek to advance the interests of particular groups in society, the members of which often share and unite around common experiences of actual or perceived social injustice, relative to the wider society of which they form part. In this way, the identity of the oppressed group gives rise to a political basis around which they then unite.’ (Cressida Heyes, ‘identity politics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/identity-politics/ (accessed 13 Oct. 2009) This definition demonstrates how important one’s perceived victimhood is for identity in the contemporary epoch. 43 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1981). 44 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 42–7. 45 In his essay, ‘Identity and religion of the status quo: The Rushdie affair in the West’, Andrew Aghapour claims that, in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie outlines three types of ‘identity formation’: the ‘religious’, the ‘secular’ and the ‘postmodern’. Aghapour defines the religious in terms of traditional assignations of identity according to some transcendent ground; the secular is an identity that is utterly rational; and the postmodern (so-called) is seen in terms of ‘individual agency’. In Aghapour’s reading, then, Rushdie clearly favours the postmodern over the other two. This a badly drafted typology, however: the secular identity scarcely appears at all in the novel (as Aghapour defines it) and whether ‘postmodern’ is the most enlightening term for the identity Rushdie favours is extremely dubious. In fact, even Aghapour has to admit that Rushdie’s strident critique – in blatantly moral terms – of the religious identity is

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ii. The unstable self and the unstable deity As the characters discover, there is no ready answer to this question – much as they would like there to be one. Having miraculously – magically – survived the air disaster, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha find themselves transformed. Gibreel begins to resemble an angel, while Saladin grows hairy legs and horns. And yet it isn’t possible to apply to them a simple moral category such as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Both Gibreel as a Bollywood movie star and Saladin as ‘the man of a thousand voices’ (a professional voice-over man) had in their former lives been in the business of taking on and performing other identities; and yet now they find the experience of continually shifting in shape and identity simultaneously liberating and alarming. Saladin and Gibreel wrestle with their new circumstances and with each other. Gibreel, increasingly prone to psychotic visions and dreams, tracks down his former lover, the mountaineer Allie Cone. For his part, feeling abandoned by Gibreel, Saladin pursues the path of revenge against him, and sabotages his relationship with Allie. Gibreel responds with forgiveness, and, in a tumultuous episode, even saves Saladin from incineration. In the novel’s final phase both return to India, where Gibreel, in a fury of deranged jealousy, kills Allie and then himself. Saladin, having been forgiven by Gibreel, finds also the sweetness of reconciliation with his estranged father. Large, rambling sections of the novel are taken up with the dream vision sequences that emanate from the disturbed mind of Gibreel Farishta – a device that enables Rushdie to treat a variety of topics. The controversial part of the book is a dreamed retelling of the life of Mohammed (called by an obscure variant name, ‘Mahound’). Its focal point is the episode of the ‘Satanic Verses’, in which Mahound first makes some polytheistic pronouncements, but later recants this revelation as Satanic. Further, one of Mahound’s companions claims that he has introduced alterations into part of the Qur’an as it was narrated to him by Mahound, to see if Mahound will notice (which he doesn’t).46 Rushdie puts these words in the mouth of Rekha Merchant in a vision Gibreel has later in the novel:

‘This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam . . . but go back a bit and you see that it’s a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eight century BC, at odds with what may be termed a postmodern critique. Rushdie’s analysis of identity and selfhood is contemporary (and in that sense perhaps postmodern) in that it is situated in the contemporary experiences of religious violence and of the massive movements of people-groups across the globe. However, it is also solidly rooted in the Enlightenment and in the liberalism of the mid-twentieth century. There are echoes, too, of existentialism in Rushdie’s celebration of the individual forging his identity in the teeth of circumstances, and especially death. Rushdie is perhaps a postmodern narrator, but he is no Foucauldian. The self in Rushdie is unsettled and unstable, but certainly not decentred. (Andrew Aghapour, ‘Identity and religion of the status quo: The Rushdie affair in the West’, Chrestomathy, 4 (2005), pp. 1–18.) 46 Rushdie did not invent this episode. It is an ancient variant tradition of which he read while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. (Salman Rushdie, Step across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 249–50.)

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asks: “Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?” Also Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century BC, that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’47 This is a rather unlikely bit of biblical scholarship (which takes on the tone of an encyclopaedia entry); but it illustrates what for Rushdie is so problematic in the religious world-view. It is impossible for the believer to be certain that the voice that she is hearing is that of the divinity and not that of some more sinister force; or that the God in whom she believes is not somehow to be found in two guises in any case. Rushdie intimates that the religious believer has to accept either that good and evil are both committed by the same God, or that this God is not truly (or even actually) God in the way that the monotheist religions have imagined. The point is to ask the believer in a divine speech, can you tell that it is the voice of an angel you are hearing and not the voice of a devil? And what is, in fact, the difference in any case, since both are servants of God? Are not the voices of both just pieces of divine ventriloquism? It is a way of proposing, by means of a rather cheeky analogia entis, that the lack of stability in the identity of the human subject is analagous to an unsettling (to say the least) variance in the divine identity.48 Revealed religion is problematic not only because the discernment of the divine voice is so subjective, but because the discernment of one’s own true voice is also inherently problematic. After all, ‘When a man is unsure of his essence, how may he know if he be good or bad?’49 In which case, how can he know it of God? iii. Victimhood as identity In the latter part of the twentieth century – which, for much of the world, has been the ‘post-colonial’ era – self-identity has frequently been established by means of the telling of an emancipatory narrative about one’s group. As Rowan Williams puts it:

in the complex political situation of our century, it [i.e. an ‘adversarial moment’] sometimes appears to be the dominant motif in the discovery or appropriation of selfhood: I discover who or what I am by the discovery of myself as victim, stripped of my ‘true’ identity by some other. My interest must be articulated by denial and revolt, by a distancing from 47 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p. 323. 48 As Gibreel asks about God at one point: ‘What kind of idea is he? What kind am I?’ (ibid., p. 110). There is a reversal of this Rushdiean dialectic in theology from Augustine through to Calvin and beyond. For example, Calvin opens the Institutes with two short chapters: ‘[W]ithout knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God’ and ‘[W]ithout knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self’ (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975), I.i.1–2, p. 35.) 49 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p. 192.

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the other’s definition of the linguistic field. Hence what we might call the ‘separatist moment’ in all twentieth-century liberationist movements, racial, gender-based and so on. I/we am/are not what you have taught us to be and to believe; to be what we truly are, we must reject your account of reality and overturn what it privileges (European rationality, pale pigmentation, masculine bias in language, heterosexual coupling).50 What Williams rightly discerns (and, with Rushdie, critiques) is the perceived need for identity to be won through some kind of struggle, an ‘adversarial moment’ or a ‘separatist moment’. Identity is won (a crucial verb) by means of a – violent, if need be – negation of another’s identification of you and your group. This push to occupy the moral high ground of victimhood is even observable among those groups usually considered to be established and in power (witness the grievances of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, for example: a white male who felt himself disenfranchised by his own government in favour of what are traditionally held to be minorities). If it is to be authentic, the kind of idea I am (or we are) is not the idea that others have of me (or us); and negotiation with this definition is scarcely possible. Rather, it must be fought against and defeated. Religion is of course a volatile ingredient in this assertion of self-identity, offering, as it tends to do, a transcendent ground (a potential ‘horizon of significance’) for the identity of the group and its ties to land; and also a view of providence which promises the historical fulfilment of the aspirations of a people – frequently in contrast to those who threaten that fulfilment.51 Religious and national identities do not neatly coincide, and religious groupings may transcend national borders or provide a division within them. However, the strength of religious identity is for Rushdie the reason why it is so dangerous.52 He has written: [I]n India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of ‘respect’. What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them!53 Rushdie here expresses frustration, not only with the ‘poison in the blood’, but with the usual late-modern liberal strategy of toleration of religious beliefs. It is no good insisting that religious beliefs are undebatable and that they exist in some untouchable private realm of faith apart from public discourse when the consequences of religious belief manifest themselves with such ‘fatal 50 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000b), p. 242. 51 We will address these themes in Chapter 5. 52 Taylor, of course, gives a much more pacific account of the relation of religious beliefs for the self’s authenticity. 53 Rushdie, Step across this Line, p. 403.

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results’. It is a failure of the secular nerve to think this way. The religions and the identities that they foster ought to be exposed to critique, even satire – for example, by (with no little comedy) casting doubt on the purity of the divine word to the Prophet. In this way Rushdie is self-consciously casting himself as iconoclast, the smasher of the totems, an anti-prophet. He is also the bringer of enlightenment to ‘our darkening world’. It is not an accidentally chosen metaphor. iv. The ‘open’ identity Rushdie’s novel offers the kind of critique of religious self-identity that he himself urges. Identifying oneself according to the traditional patterns – accepting the given designation of yourself according to the old forms – is for him a lazy and inauthentic option. It is merely an acceptance of the heteronomous agency of another, even if it is cast in an emancipatory outline: that is, accepting Islam (or any other religious faith) for your self, even though it is outwardly in defiance of the secularism of the former colonial masters of the West, is merely exchanging one form of self-slavery for another. Rather, as Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha discover in The Satanic Verses, the answer to the question ‘what kind of idea are you?’ is best left ambiguous and fluid, for from the flux something genuinely new might emerge. As Rushdie wrote himself of the novel:

Standing at the centre of the novel is a group of characters most of whom are British Muslims, or not particularly religious persons of Muslim background, struggling with just the sort of great problems that have arisen to surround the book, problems of hybridization and ghettoization, of reconciling the old and the new. Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.54 For his part, Gibreel with his revelations apparently from above becomes resistant to any personal growth or change, and descends further into his psychosis. Convinced that he is an angel, he becomes destructive even of those he loves, and ultimately of himself. On the other hand, Saladin develops his identity through a process of responding to the world as he encounters and experiences it. For Rushdie, then, the individual’s personal struggle to build his or her identity is preferable to the more straightforward reliance on traditional, 54 Salman Rushdie, ‘In good faith’, in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 393–414 (p. 394).

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religious categories. Gibreel’s receptiveness to the transcendent – his ‘faith’, we might say – isolates him from reality with catastrophic results. v. The problem of martyrdom and identity In martyrdom, victimhood and religious self-identity are combined in a potentially lethal way: it is not an accident that Rushdie opens his novel with the act of a person claiming martyrdom for herself. He has elsewhere written: ‘[O]nly fanatics go looking for martyrdom.’55 It is for him an inauthentic and dangerous way to establish one’s own identity. It is a cheap grab for victimhood which leaves only a legacy of vengeance. In the chapter entitled ‘Ayesha’, Gibreel has a vision that he, as an angel, carries ‘the Imam’ – a character strongly resembling the Ayatollah Khomeini – back to the capital city of Desh. Gibreel notices the streets swarming with people, converging in a regular pattern upon a grand avenue leading towards the palace of the Empress (who echoes the hated Shah of Iran, deposed by the Islamic revolution of 1979). The people march in their hundreds towards the gates of the palace:

Seventy at a time, they come into range; the guns babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of the dead grows higher. Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons in to the parade, go, be a martyr, do the needful, die. ‘You see how they love me,’ says the disembodied voice. ‘No tyranny on earth can withstand the power of this slow, walking love.’56 This scene of ‘slow, walking love’ is viscerally awful, especially from the point of view of a secular individualist like Rushdie: the filmic quality of the narration adds to the revulsion that the reader must feel. That the mothers approve of the death march adds to its horror – horror that people could be so possessed of an irrational desire to self-destruct. For his part, Gibreel lamely suggests to the Imam that they are in fact driven not by love of him, but rather by hatred for the Empress: a revolutionary zeal in other words, rather than a religious devotion. The Imam replies: They love me . . . because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that 55 Rushdie, Step across this Line, p. 240. In this article, entitled ‘Messages from the plague years’, Rushdie claims that he has no desire to be a martyr for his own cause; rather, he expresses a desperation to live and to continue writing. He stayed true to his convictions despite the enormous inconveniences over many years. Is it so hard to imagine that if he were asked to recant down the barrel of a gun, he would refuse? What he evidently means by ‘martyr’ in this instance is one who seeks death qua death, rather than one who seeks to speak and enact the truth and accepts the possible consequences. 56 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p. 213–14.

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has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or a tock.57 The religious emphasis on the transcendent, in other words, enables the appalling scene before us, because it holds out the promise of something even more substantial than one’s own life. It promises a substance more solid than the power of empires, which come and go with the ebb and flow of history. The cost of offering oneself to the Imam – life itself – is nothing compared with the reward that he promises.58 Rushdie acknowledges that martyrs make very effective soldiers, far more effective than those whom tyrants and dictators employ. However, for him the promise rings false. Martyrdom in Rushdie’s account is a perversion of the idea of love. It perverts love because, rather than accepting the momentary temporal instance of bonding with another human being, it has pretensions to eternity. It is a love that is not therefore free, but rather is bound by some unthinking and irrational delusion. It is a love which depends on hatred (we the readers scarcely believe the Imam’s denial of this) – there must be those who are not loved as much as those who are. The fire of this devotion consumes all in its path. vi. The knowledge of good and evil The problem, for Rushdie, apart from the savagery that he sees as the outcome of this way of thinking, is (as I have already suggested – see ‘The unstable self and the unstable deity’ above) a problem of subjectivity: how does one know that what is experienced as a revelation from God is in fact just that – from God? And, even if one is certain within oneself that one identifies such an experience, is it possible, or even desirable, to move from that subjective particularity to a universal declaration in the way the great religions do? Good and evil are perhaps not so easily distinguished as the religious traditions have thought; it is not so easily a case of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The victim mentality, which accuses the other of evil on a diabolic scale, ignores the evil within; it does not admit the possibility of its own complicity in evil. Victims are also perpetrators, though this is an unpalatable truth; and this means that causes cannot be pursued in expectation of some triumphal, final vindication. ‘Evil’ and ‘good’ form a complex web in which human beings and communities are entangled with one another, violently and fatally so. This tragic confusion of good and evil is intensified in the novel’s eighth chapter, ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’. Gibreel this time dreams of an ill-fated pilgrimage of the villagers of Titlipur, led by the mystical and mysterious girl Ayesha. The events of this part of the narrative are based on a real incident which occurred in 1983: thirty-eight Shi’ites marched into Hawke’s Bay in Karachi, Pakistan, at the instigation of their spiritual guide, who had taught them that the sea would part as in the days of the Exodus, enabling them to journey to the holy city of Kerbala, in Iraq.59 In The Satanic Verses, 57 Ibid., p. 214. 58 In Chapter 6 we will raise again the issue of heavenly rewards. 59 The tragic story is told in Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘Death in Islam: The Hawke’s Bay case’, Man, 21(1) (1986), pp. 120–34.

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Ayesha, strangely surrounded by butterflies which are interpreted as some kind of divine sign, determines to reach Mecca by marching through the Arabian Sea. Mirza Saeed tries to persuade his very ill wife, Mishal, to abandon the pilgrimage, but, like most of the devotees, she will not be swayed despite her declining physical condition. Even the deaths of several elderly pilgrims have little effect: they are now called ‘martyrs’ by Ayesha. Increasingly, Ayesha’s fanaticism makes her more and more tyrannical and brutal, condoning the stoning to death of an abandoned baby as ‘the Devil’s Child’ out of religious fervour. Mirza Saeed can only look on helplessly as his wife and her companions stride into the sea and are drowned; or, at least, that is what Mirza himself witnesses. Others present, more devout than he, claim that the sea does in fact miraculously open as prophesied by Ayesha. Rushdie, with his self-consciously postmodern narrative technique, appears to relish the ambiguity: the miracle both did and did not happen, and it ‘happened’ in a dream sequence in any case. But it is not the triumphalist, miraculous and religious version of events that we the readers are inclined to believe. The tragedy is as much the willingness of the faithful to ignore the death of the naïve and the innocent. It takes religious fanaticism – the ‘eyes of faith’ – to make a sign of divine benevolence out of such willful self-destruction; and Rushdie despairs of ever convincing those who look with such eyes on the world. Those who would be, and would have, martyrs are (as far as he is concerned) beyond the pale. vii. An authentic way to die? If martyrdom is a way of dying that is indicative of an impoverished or inauthentic conception of one’s identity, then is there an authentic way to die? In the moving Chapter IX, ‘The Wonderful Lamp’, Saladin (now renamed Salahuddin) returns to India to the deathbed of his father, Changez Chamchawala, and the two men are sweetly reconciled. As he watches his father die, Salahuddin thinks to himself

He is teaching me how to die . . . He does not avert his eyes, but looks death right in the face. At no point in his dying did Changez Chamchawala speak the name of God.60 This scene, apparently drawing on Rushdie’s own reconciliation with his father,61 stands out among all the death and mayhem in the novel as the noblest way of dying and the clearest acceptance of the reality of death as it is. There is no frightened appeal to God, but, rather, a courageous face-to-face with death. But there is more to the episode: in the very moment of his father’s death, Salahuddin notices the ‘dawning of a terror’ on his face: ‘What was it that waited for him, for all of us, that brought such fear to a brave man’s eyes?’ However, at the end, when he contemplates his father’s dead body, he finds him 60 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p. 531. 61 See Paul Brians, The Unity of the Satanic Verses – Notes on Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, www.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/satanic_verses/unity.html (accessed 5 May 2006).

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to be smiling. Rushdie admits here that death is terrible and terrifying. There is a genuine agnosticism presented here: a question rather than answer as to what lies beyond death. The courage of Changez in staring death in the face does not lesson death’s horror, but his bravery is at least an acknowledgement of the reality of death. He does not seek by some shadowy faith to elude it. Salahuddin then has a tense encounter with the mullah who has come to dress the body with holy clothes. Somehow they seem inauthentic to the death that his father has died. In the aftermath of his father’s death, he reconnects with his former lover Zeeny Vakil. As the narrator comments: Zeeny’s re-entry into his life completed the process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most surprising and paradoxical product of his father’s terminal illness. His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils, now seemed very remote, even irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. ‘About time,’ Zeeny approved when he told her of his return to Salahuddin. ‘Now you can stop acting at last.’ Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase, in which the world would be solid and real, and in which there was no longer the broad figure of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the grave. An orphaned life, like Muhammad’s; like everyone’s. A life illuminated by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind’s eye, like a sort of magic lamp.62 The death of his father proves fertile for his own growing sense of identity, a ‘strangely radiant death’. It his father’s staring determinedly in the face of death that now becomes the ground for a life authentically lived, ‘solid and real’: ‘The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.’63 Salahuddin is not determined by the various traditional (religious) matrices of meaning that might be cast upon him, nor by his alien-ness to the surrounding society; and, crucially, he has found a freedom to cease acting (in the sense of ‘role-playing’) and to become his real – or, at least, his authentic – self. viii. Evaluation: Rushdie and martyrdom For Rushdie, then, martyrdom is an insufficient and inauthentic basis for an understanding of oneself – or is evidence of such a basis. Apart from being morally simplistic, it represents a placing of oneself in the role of victim, which is then the grounds for later acts of violent vengeance. That is the logic of the suicide bomber. On the other hand, the shifting flux of identity that his characters at first find so alarming is actually to be celebrated for its emancipatory significance – not to mention its comic potential! Rushdie’s protagonists are the refugee-immigrants who do not hold slavishly to old-world mores and who are also a challenge to the xenophobia and conservatism of the host culture. They are liberated as individuals to experiment with new forms of identity instead of the identities given to them by more traditional forms: to enjoy 62 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p. 534. 63 Ibid., p. 531. The ‘somebody’ is British playwright Edward Bond, from his ‘Author’s Preface’ in Edward Bond, Lear (London: Methuen, 1994), p. xiv.

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being ‘mongrel selves’. There is not a straightforward answer to the question ‘what kind of idea are you?’ What appear to be simple bifurcations of race, religion or even gender are now blurred in the experience of the modern world. Martyrdom, which (in Rushdie’s view) stands for the stubborn determination not to dilute identity at any cost, or at least is the violent and destructive result of that obduracy, is a bloody purification rite. The martyr offers himself or herself as the sacrifice which will keep pure the identity of the community or faith he or she represents. In other words, martyrs are fundamentally conservative, demonstrating to others a kind of hyper-conformity in order to clarify and cleanse the boundaries that are under threat. By contrast, Rushdie celebrates ‘newness’: the constant crossing and recrossing of boundaries that themselves ought to be considered permeable rather than fixed. Andrew Aghapour writes: Rushdie’s existentialist morality is symptomatic of the postmodern perspective and supports a secular, constructive method of identity formation that relies primarily on individual choice.64 There is a rather slipshod application of the term ‘postmodern’ here: Rushdie’s ‘postmodernism’ is more a matter of his narrative style than anything else. However, Aghapour is right to note Rushdie’s emphasis on the individual’s struggle to self-identify against the pressure to conform to some brute, fixed notion of a group identity. Rushdie is not advocating some form of complete self-determination, granted: an integral part of Saladin/Salahuddin’s journey of self-discovery is a coming to terms with the India of his past. In this way, his reconciliation with his dying father symbolizes an acceptance of the past precisely as past that is necessary for his own self-discovery. In the terms in which Rushdie accounts for both identity and martyrdom, he makes a compelling case.65 Undoubtedly, the ideal of martyrdom has been put to destructive use in a variety of religious contexts, including the Christian – especially as attached to the identity politics of victimhood. Where martyrdom has been held as an ideal there has been a tendency to localize and tribalize it: the martyr is one who dies for us, i.e. for what we already are as a people or a nation, not for some ideal or possibility which all people everywhere may be invited to imitate. The sacrifice of the individual to the collective identity has borne its violent fruit in abundant crop. Rushdie is certainly right to question the criteria by which horizons of significance are received. He also recognizes the significance of the manner of dying for the meaning of a life. Rushdie would agree that it is not enough to make the ‘horizons of significance’ as apparently arbitrary and open as Taylor seems to allow. Not only are the martyred selves in Rushdie’s novel insufficiently original as selves and too submissive to the heteronomy of religious speech – a judgement with which Taylor might readily concur – they are also selves referenced against the backdrop of problematic horizons of significance. Rushdie is hostile towards the horizons themselves: it is no good being authentic to an inauthentic horizon. 64 Aghapour, ‘Identity and religion of the status quo’, p. 10. 65 It is very much in the tradition of Nietzsche’s polemic against Christian martyrdom.

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That is no better than being a hard-working thief: one’s diligence is only intelligible with reference to a way of life that is by its nature compromised and inauthentic. For Rushdie it is, in particular, the tribalism that religious revelation promotes that is the cause of senseless violence. Which is to say, the old religious horizons of significance are too narrow for the new world. In the contemporary world of rapid change, mass emigration and global communications, the horizon of significance must be universal or it is nothing: it is insufficient to reference only one’s tribe, or even one’s nation. So, the martyred selves are, after a fashion, insufficiently original and too deeply bound by the matrices of traditional religion; but they are also, oddly, guilty of a rampant egotism.66 They refuse to submit to the recognition of others who do not share their ethno-religious identity to the point of mutually assured destruction. There are, however, some shortcomings with Rushdie’s version of authentic selfhood, which his rejection of all forms of martyrdom exposes. I concentrate here on two of these, and show how they are (perhaps strangely) intertwined. First, though Rushdie appears as perhaps an exotic figure in the West, and however much he critiques Western imperialism and racism, he is still very much a Western writer beholden to a Kantian liberal understanding of self-determination and individualism.67 Secondly, his critique of martyrdom in general does not apply to truly Christian martyrdoms,68 which actually then in turn stand as a question against his construal of identity, because they challenge his ideal of human fulfilment. Rushdie’s synthesis calls for people everywhere to hold the religious components of their traditional identities at arm’s length.69 While laudably calling for a critical interaction with one’s ‘horizons of significance’ (in a way that Taylor seems to overlook), Rushdie would rule out a priori any religious component from these horizons. For him, rejecting the religious element (in all, perhaps, except custom or ritual) is how one’s traditional background is to be received by the individual in such a way as to allow for an authentic self-identity to emerge. That is to say, he is unable to envisage any but a baldly fideistic version of religious belief.70 By opposing faith to reason (or at least his version of 66 The charge of egotism made against martyrs is also made by Lacey Baldwin Smith, who writes with barely concealed cynicism: ‘[R]eputation stands at the heart of martyrdom’ (Lacey Baldwin Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1st edn, 1997), p. 373). 67 In his own response to the Rushdie controversy, Charles Taylor observed that The Satanic Verses was, despite its exotic trappings, ‘a profoundly Western book’. He continued: ‘Rushdie’s book is comforting to the western liberal mind, which shares one feature with that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the belief that there is nothing outside their world-view which needs deeper understanding, just a perverse reflection of the obviously right. To live in this difficult world, the western liberal mind will have to learn to reach out more.’ (Charles Taylor, ‘The Rushdie controversy’, Public Culture, 2(1) (1989a), pp. 118–22 (122).) 68 It is beyond our competence and scope to judge whether Rushdie has been fair to Islam and Sikhism. In his work all religions are treated with some hostility; it is our task here to answer his charges only in terms of Christian martyrdom. 69 As we shall see in Chapter 5, Richard Rorty makes much the same call. 70 This was, likewise, the contention of Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensberg address of 2006.

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it), he is readily able to dismiss faith as irrational to the point of insanity; but, of course, he does not account for the possibility that the two might not be opposites at all. Indeed, speaking at least for Christianity, there are many ways in which faith and reason have been construed as relating to each other. Rushdie posits a false dichotomy between the irrational tribalism of the religious groups on the one hand, and the more reasoned and global perspective he claims to offer on the other. For him, there seem to be only these alternatives available; and it is quite clear that the individual who sees himself as a citizen of the globe is preferable to the person whose individuality is consumed by the tribe, with its limited and primitive vision. As we have seen, this is inauthentic, but also inherently violent. And yet (and here we return to the first of the deficiencies) Rushdie is far too optimistic about the degree to which his Western liberal vision is free from some of the same deficiencies. The society of individuals who are learning to be themselves through agonized wrestling with the conditions of rapid global change is no less guilty of blind exclusions and violent rejections. The alliances of technological and bureaucratic societies have as much blood on their hands as the more ‘regressive’ theocratic ones. Furthermore, it is by no means evident that individuals in such societies who have proclaimed themselves free of the straitjacket of faith are living the authentic and fulfilled lives of which Rushdie dreams.71 Though Rushdie gives an account of two characters who must respond to circumstances that prove to be beyond their control – and comically so – the most authentic characters are still those who, taking everything into account, are able to self-determine. Saladin is the model self because of the way he successfully negotiates the vicissitudes of his life following the air disaster. So, when it comes to making peace with his ethnic heritage, Saladin is able to achieve this with extreme selectivity, especially with regards to its religious elements. In the end, Rushdie’s vision of self-fulfilment does not escape Taylor’s critique of ‘self-determining freedom’: though the inescapable horizons of significance are not ignored in the novel, they are strongly relativized. In Rushdie’s view, the self – at least the self with reason intact and not under the delusions of religion – still possesses the capacity to construct or narrate a meaningful identity from the materials of his or her experience, aside from a point of transcendence.

D

Conclusion

Though they operate in very different modes, both Taylor and Rushdie are significant representatives of the attempt to put human identity/selfhood on a secular (or, at least, non-theological) footing. Taylor’s version of authenticity is an attempt to alert individuals to that which transcends them. However, his conception is too vague to account for the specific conditions that may allow for a Christian martyr; and he is apparently unable to describe how it is that a particular ‘horizon of significance’ might actually be an inauthentic

71 Giddens (1991: 181–3) shares this diagnosis of a general anxiety in the West.

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or invalid one. Rushdie, who is much more polemical and specific, treats all religious considerations as irrational almost by definition. His own version of authentic selfhood, however, begins to look very much like that governed by the ‘self-determining freedom’ that Taylor decries. His selves are authors of their own narratives. Thus: both attempts to describe a paradigm for human identity are not only problematic in their own ways but also seem deeply at odds with an identity which claims that it is authentically realized in Christian martyrdom. In the chapters that follow, I shall explore the implications for human identity that are signified by Christian martyrdom in the light of various temptations to be ‘other than I am’. This exposition will begin to address Christian identity in terms of the questions of narrative, the good and other selves.

3

The first temptation: the temptation to security and the risk of martyrdom

A

Introduction

In the previous chapter I contended that Christian martyrdom seems (often sharply) at odds with a number of contemporary attempts to construe identity and/or selfhood – Taylor and Rushdie being the examples. Taken from this direction, martyrdom seems bewildering, even alarming: even a denial of what it is to be an authentic human self. There are questions as to its validity as a self-narration, and as to its account of the good. In this next sequence of chapters (Chapters 3–6) I turn to the study of Christian martyrdom in its scriptural and theological setting, asking also what light it sheds on human identity and selfhood. Using Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral as a lens through which to focus the theme, will take each of the temptations of Archbishop Thomas I as an opportunity for inquiry into the nature of Christian martyrdom. It should be noted that these are temptations and not merely alternative arguments: they are offers of alternative ways of living human life that claim to be more attractive and more virtuous as well as simply more true. They are different ways of self-narrating, of describing the good, and of relating the self to other selves. An exposition of the text of the play in the case of each Tempter helps us to sharpen the question that he puts and discover its real appeal as a temptation. In each of the first three temptations I will rearticulate the temptation in a different mode with the help of particular conversation partners: Martha C. Nussbaum, Richard Rorty and Roger Scruton. In the case of the fourth, in which the glory of martyrdom itself becomes the temptation, a number of thinkers provide assistance. This strategy goes to show that the temptation is not a dramatic device only (and therefore the concern of literary criticism only) but a matter of some existential force. The attractiveness of each alternative is tangible; its evasion is not straightforward. Christian martyrs renounce such temptations in favour of another way of seeing themselves. Their identity is to be construed otherwise. The ways in which this identity is shaped will be given consideration from the point of 41

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view of its normative theological source in the canon of Christian Scripture. Further, I shall keep in view the early ‘martyr-acts’ in which the Scriptural texts were ‘enacted’, and seek assistance in the theological works of Augustine and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others. As we shall see, the act of renunciation is performed as a witness to, and in imitation of, Christ, and thus involves the martyr in a close identification of himself with this other self, emerging from his union with Christ. This is the identity that arises from his choice of martyrdom – as he subordinates his acting and willing (and more besides) to the divine will and deed.

B

Scripture and the martyrs

A word as to the hermeneutic deployed is needed. The early martyr-acts and the patristic discussions of martyrdom are drenched in scriptural references and allusions. This was possible and meaningful because (despite the variety of methods of interpretation used) the Scriptures were held to be a unity cohering in Christ, the one whose death provided the template for Christian martyrdom. The texts of Scripture had particular import for these individuals facing a terrible death, and, as it is reported, gave them particular inspiration and solace.1 This was (and remains) a ‘performance’ of the Scriptures par excellence. This notion of ‘performing the Scriptures’ has been highlighted in an influential essay by Nicholas Lash.2 Lash begins from the rather obvious point that the reading or interpretation of a text depends largely on the kind of text being used: ‘different kinds of text call for different kinds of reading’.3 To read some texts – in particular, those texts which are ‘works of art’ – does require the assistance of experts; however, the role of experts in reading texts, while indispensable, is subordinate. Their expert ‘reading’ is not the fundamental form of interpretation. Rather, ‘there are at least some texts that only begin to deliver their meaning in so far as they are “brought into play” through interpretative performance’.4 1 Brad S. Gregory says the same about the martyrs of the Reformation era, across the denominational divides. Martyrdom meant ‘conformity to an ancient course of action, grounded in scripture and epitomized in the crucifixion of Christ himself’ (Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 119). 2 Nicholas Lash, ‘Performing the scriptures’, in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005). Brian Brock (2007) offers a similar approach in using the metaphor of singing: singing becomes for Brock a paradigm of what it means to engage with Scripture on Scripture’s own terms, as a text which is the locus of more than merely human activities. See also my review –Michael P. Jensen, Review of Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God, Anvil, 25 (1) (2008), pp. 68–9. For his part, Lash’s student Kevin Vanhoozer has made an extensive development of his suggestion. See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster: John Knox Press, 2005). See also my review: Michael P. Jensen, ‘Review of Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine’, Anvil, 24(3) (2007b), pp. 227–8. 3 Lash, ‘Performing the scriptures’, p. 38. 4 Ibid., p. 41.

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Having used King Lear and a Beethoven score as examples, Lash now applies his insight to the NT, suggesting that ‘the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of Scripture is the life, activity and organisation of the believing community’.5 Christian practice can properly be described as ‘interpretative action’ – a performance of the texts, in other words. This performance, in its turn, is an enactment of the conviction that the best (‘best’ because most appropriate to the text in question) reading of these texts is as the story of Jesus, human beings and God. The performative interpretation of Scripture can also be called ‘Christian discipleship’. Lash allows that performances may differ over history, as circumstances change; but though the story may be told differently, it cannot be a different story if it is to be a performance of this text. The original meaning of the text gives an appropriate constraint to later performances of it. This points to an important difference between Scripture and King Lear, which has to do with history. The NT self-consciously adheres to particular past events. Its original meaning was not merely that Jesus Christ was representative of certain fundamental human virtues, but that he was one man ‘in whom the mystery of divine action is seen to have been embodied and disclosed’.6 So, for Lash, to suppose that we could render an authentic performance of the NT utterly disconnected from the historical would be to tell a different story from the one the NT itself tells. Lash goes on: ‘for the practice of Christianity, the performance of the biblical text, to be true . . . must be not only “true to life”, but “true to his [i.e. Christ’s] life”; and not only “true to his life”, but “true to God”’.7 Martyrdom, as an expression of Christian discipleship in excelsis, is therefore a performance of Scripture as a witness to Jesus as the Son of God and Lord of all. Hence, Scripture ought to have particular prominence and authority in any theological account of martyrdom. More than this: a reading of the canonical Scriptures which highlights their salvation-historical – and so Christological – shape is the appropriate complement to the subject at hand, because theological reflection on martyrdom has always cast itself as imitative of, and indeed generated by, the death of Jesus Christ. This means that typological readings will have a particular (though not singular) prominence in this discussion. Hans Frei, among others, has served to rehabilitate figurative or typological reading as a necessary component of Biblical hermeneutics in recent decades.8 Building on the work of literary scholar Eric Auerbach, Frei argued that the Bible points to its own unity and inner coherence by inviting figural interpretation. In Auerbach’s terms: 5 6 7 8

Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid. The German-speaking world was ahead of developments in Anglophone scholarship in this regard. Eichrodt notes that ‘a new awakening’ of interest in hermeneutics, including typology, had begun already in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. (Walter Eichrodt, ‘Is typological exegesis an appropriate method?’, in Claus Westermann (ed.), Essays on Old Testament Interpretation (London: SCM Press, 1963), pp. 224– 45 (224).)

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Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. The are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act.9 In other words, typology shows that two events or characters are part of the one connected stream of history in a way that is not necessarily obvious from mere analysis of causality. The prefiguring of one by the other is discerned by (or, perhaps better, revealed to) the reader. In theologian Frei’s words: In figural interpretation the figure itself is real in its own place, time, and right and without any detraction from that reality it prefigures the reality that will fulfill it. This figural relation not only brings into coherent relation events in biblical narration, but allows also the fitting of each present occurrence and experience into a real, narrative framework or world. Each person, each occurrence is a figure of that providential narrative in which it is also an ingredient.10 Unlike allegorical reading, typological interpretation points to the embeddedness of the events in a common narrative framework governed by providence.11 These are ‘real’ or ‘historical’ at least in the sense that they gain their meaning from a relation to divine providence – the same providential narrative in which the reader of the text then in turn finds herself.12 Typology, therefore, develops from the theological assertion that God works by theme and variations in the patterns he establishes in history.13 Furthermore, typological interpretation gains its impetus from the NT’s appropriation of the Old Testament (OT). In fact, the very existence of the NT itself depends on a typological account that reads the story of Jesus Christ as 9 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans. Willard R. Trask; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 73. 10 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 153. 11 The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, for his part, wrote: ‘Typology points to future events that are often thought of as transcending time, so that they contain a vertical lift as well as a horizontal move forward’ (Northrop Frye, The Great Code – the Bible in Literature (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1982), p. 82). Is ‘transcending’ the right verb? Typology as it is used in the NT, and as observed by Hans Frei, reconfigures time certainly, but doesn’t overcome or dispense with it (if that is what is meant by ‘transcending’ here). 12 This is what Frei argued had been ‘eclipsed’ in all the debates about what it was the texts referred to. 13 As Reventlow writes: ‘typology is a means of discovering structural analogies between the saving events attested by both Testaments which bridge the gap produced by our loss of a direct relationship in faith to the events of the Old Testament’ (Henning Reventlow, Problems of Biblical Theology in the Twentieth Century (London: SCM Press, 1986), p. 25).

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continuous with, and indeed the fulfilment of, the salvation-history narrated in the Jewish Scriptures.14 Examples of the NT writers employing typological readings are numerous; the Passion narratives in the Synoptics, for example, emphasize the correspondence and continuity of the events to significant events in the OT. Paul makes explicit use of the word tu,poj in 1 Cor. 10.11, as he compares the church to the Israelites in the wilderness, and in Romans 5, in comparing Adam to Christ. The argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews hinges on a typological account of the Exodus and of the Tabernacle. There are, granted, significant differences in the relationship between the types. However, in each case the rhetorical power of drawing the comparison is made more impressive by the salvation-historical link between the two events. They are related thereby to the one overarching divine plan. This observation dovetails with Lash’s proposal for a ‘performative’ reading of Scripture. The reader of Scripture is invited to see not only types of the Messiah in the OT narratives, but also then to model his own life (and death) after the pattern of the life of Christ; to read his identity in terms of the narrative of Jesus (to address the first of our ‘selfhood questions’). The structure of shadow and fulfilment is not repeated in the life of the believer (the believer’s life is not the reality prefigured in some way by Christ); but the typological similarity – a mimesis – serves to bind the disciple into the same reality as the world of the text, within the frame of the same providential narrative.15 The text may generate not only a type of Christ but also, in a secondary way, a type of the follower of Christ. Once again, it is the common salvation-historical thread that makes this figurative reading quite distinctive. It is not merely that Christ is offered as an impressive model to be copied. His followers are, rather, to pattern their lives after him because they find themselves connected to him as part of the one divine movement towards the world. The disciple’s performance of Christ is not only an echo of Christ’s work; it is, as Frei (1974) puts it, ‘a figure of that providential narrative in which it is also an ingredient’. It is a very part of the divine work that it imitates. This use of Scripture is particularly evident in accounts of martyrdom, both in the early Christian era and in the early modern period. In sum, therefore I attempt to read Scripture with an eye to its unfolding disclosure of a history of redemption as well as to the theological concepts that it generates.16 The experience of the disciple is read as continuous with the 14 Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel-Centred Hermeneutics: Biblical-Theological Foundations and Principles (Nottingham: Apollos, 2006), p. 243. For von Rad: ‘One must therefore . . . really speak of a witness of the Old Testament to Christ’ (Gerhard von Rad, ‘Typological interpretation of the Old Testament’, in Claus Westermann (ed.), Essays on Old Testament Interpretation (London: SCM Press, 1963), pp. 17–39 (39)). 15 For an extensive recent account of discipleship as imitation, see Richard A. Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). 16 I take heed, therefore, of Oliver O’Donovan’s stern warning not to ‘dip into Israel’s experience at one point . . . and to take out a single disconnected image or theme from it’, which would be ‘to treat the history of God’s reign like a commonplace

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history narrated in Scripture. The salvation-historical nature of the material necessarily plunges us into the business of narrative analysis; but it is also the case that the Scriptures provide the frame, or chart the trajectory, for a theological discussion they themselves prompt but do not always directly provide. Not coincidently, in the dramatization of an ‘interpretative action’ in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot prompts his audience to just such a reading of Scripture. Moreover, this method brings us into the range of the three ‘questions of selfhood’ that were outlined in the opening chapter.

C

The first temptation

i. The pleasing past In what now follows I shall offer a close reading of the first of Thomas’s temptations – the temptation to easeful security – in order to show just how enticing it really is. I shall then show how the temptation is echoed in the work of Martha C. Nussbaum, before seeking to explain how and why the path of Christian discipleship leads away from this offer. To set the scene: the entrance of the Tempters is pre-empted by Thomas’s command to the Priests and the Chorus: ‘[W]atch’ (I.254). The audience is now in Thomas’s Gethsemane, called to observe his struggle between his own will and the call of God on his life, and called also to a self-examination.17 The first of these Tempters turns Thomas to the past self he has now apparently renounced. Thomas is invited to be ‘realistic’: to expand his moral vision of himself and to repudiate his current obdurate narrowness by recognizing the world as it truly is. He is called, in other words, to a life of safety and ease. In my response, I shall argue, with the help of Augustine’s discussion of memory, that Christian discipleship is a renunciation of the apparent security and pleasure of this so-called realism precisely because it denies that it is an adequate description of the human situation. According to Christian testimony, the human situation is instead framed by the judgement and the promises of God. The First Tempter greets the Archbishop in tones of jovial familiarity, in contrast with the foreboding in Thomas’s immediately preceding speech:

You see, my Lord, I do not wait upon ceremony: Here I have come, forgetting all acrimony, Hoping that your present gravity Will find excuse for my humble levity Remembering all the good time past. (I.255-9)

book or a dictionary of quotations’ (Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27). 17 This feature of the play – the direct appeal for self-examination – has been noted with not a little discomfort by some audiences. For example, see Elizabeth Däumer, ‘Blood and witness: The reception of Murder in the Cathedral in postwar Germany’, Comparative Literature Studies, 43(1–2) (2006), pp. 179–99.

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The pleasant-sounding patter of the rhymes emphasizes his deference and indicates his desire to remind Thomas of the camaraderie and fellowship he shared with the King and his courtiers in former times. These are soothing and conciliatory tones. He tempts Thomas with yearning for the happy past when ‘the King and you and I were all friends together’ (I.263), enjoying the relaxations and pleasures attendant on high office. Doesn’t Thomas remember the bond of their friendship? – ‘Friendship should be more than biting Time can sever’ (I.264). Time, pictured like some wild animal dismembering its prey, threatens to sever us from the past; but Friendship should be stronger than this and immune to the fractures and rents that come about through ‘biting Time’. The First Tempter finds in the seasons an apt metaphor: if Thomas has regained the King’s favour, then surely the ‘summer’ of the past can continue. Surely the pleasant memories of the music and laughter of the courtier’s life – indeed, his former identity as a courtier – need not fade. Even the winter of the past, with its cultured badinage and wine-bibbing by the fire can constitute an ongoing ‘summer’. If the King and he can still hold each other as friends, then ‘[M]irth and sportfulness need not walk warily’ (I.275). The Tempter is not depicting a life of unbridled sensuality: Eliot holds back from implicating Thomas in rakish behaviour in his more secular past. The memory is of the simple pleasures of company and delight in culture and nature rather than of some orgy of excess. This is what makes the temptation real for Thomas now – it is not an invitation to visit the back alleys of desire but rather to travel the open road of pleasure and ease in the company of familiar and comforting faces. There is nothing obviously rapacious or decadent about this vision. Rather, these pleasantries were simply – and yet could be – the fruit of managing the tricky and dangerous business of political life with consummate skill.18 ii. The promise of return The Tempter depicts time as a rotating series of seasons corresponding to one another. Thus, the wintry period of enmity between King and Archbishop must turn into a fresh period of amity. There is the promise of return in the natural cycle of the seasons which is matched by a similar promise in the affairs of men. ‘[M]irth matches melancholy’ (I.281), and so there can be optimism about a return to the former days of enjoying the untroubled sweetness of life. Thomas is happy to accept the premise that ‘history repeats’; though the future is on the whole unclear to human beings, it is evident that the generations revisit the things that have happened of old to not much advantage: 18 The character of the historical Thomas prior to his elevation to the see of Canterbury intrigues his biographer, Frank Barlow. The mediaeval accounts stress that ‘Thomas, although he detested lust, idle talk and avarice, like a wise man dissimulated his feelings so as not to offend those who went in for such things. His courtesy and generosity . . . made him an agreeable member of the fashionable world of which inwardly he disapproved.’ As Barlow notes, we ought to suspect a projection backwards of an inner holiness onto the worldly (and very wealthy) courtier. That said, there is no record of the earlier Thomas as an out-and-out debauchee either. (Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), pp. 25–6.)

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‘[M]en learn little from others’ experience’ (I.285). But this, Thomas can see, is not the experience of the individual whose personal experiences do not return. The nostalgia for the past that is so appealing is not in the end useful to him because he denies the possibility of it returning again. The ‘summer’ is long gone. After all, Only The fool, fixed in his folly, may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns. (I.288-90) The Tempter’s response – ‘a nod is as good as a wink’ (I.291) – is a colloquial way of saying that it makes no difference. He rejects Thomas’s rather high-blown talk of history and points rather to a psychological insight: ‘[A] man will often love what he spurns’ (I.292). Thomas may have rejected the past life and he may consider returning to it impossible but that is not an indication that he is not desirous of its return. Even the impossible may be a genuine temptation, because the heart may be given to it. Thomas admits that he has not forgotten his past pleasures; the Tempter suggests to him that he may still harbour longings for a return to them. Thomas’s stern rebuke to the Tempter – ‘[Y]ou were safer / Think of penitence and follow your master’ – is revealing perhaps of his own inner doubts. iii. The security of ease The Tempter responds by appealing to Thomas’s need for security. The Archbishop’s faith is too enthusiastic, too uncompromising for the Tempter: ‘Not at this gait!’ he cries. Thomas may also urge others along this destructive and unsafe path. Rather: ‘[T]he safest beast is not the one that roars most loud’ (I.300). His warning is that Thomas’s actions are likely to produce an uproar that will have dangerous consequences; in addition, ‘our master’ – by whom the Tempter ironically indicates not Christ but King Henry – is not combative like this. He too would rather a return to the safety and comfort of the quiet pleasures of the courtly life on the vast royal properties. The Tempter teases Thomas to ‘[B]e easy, man!’ (I.303). In former times the Archbishop had not been so puritanical, not so strict upon the ‘sinners’ of his acquaintance. He was a flexible and wise – and safe – gentleman of the court, when as Chancellor he had been the King’s most trusted colleague and friend. Why not return to a life of ease? After all, ‘[T]he easy man lives to eat the best dinners’ (I.304). This first temptation, then, is on the one hand an offer to Thomas of a nostalgic vision of his own self – his idyllic past life of pleasure, fellowship and ease. It asks him to recall the strong hold his former love for the King has on him, and the possibility of a much safer life in his household. If it is not possible to actually relive the past, it is surely proper to live in continuity with it. On the other hand, he is accused of a puritanical pride because of his determination not to compromise. It is implied that he is judgemental and inflexible – and that he ought to concede more to ordinary sensual ‘sinners’. He is called instead to find a way in which to manage his circumstances so as to minimize the harm that is looming, and so as to make space for the enjoyment

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of good pleasures, as is only proper for a man of his standing. This is a call to be realistic: to live within the given limits of his existence.

D

Martha C. Nussbaum, the Greeks and luck

The work of Martha C. Nussbaum in dialogue with the Greek tragedians and philosophers in her The Fragility of Goodness serves as a counterpart to Thomas’s first temptation.19 Within Thomas’s temptation lies the problem that vexed the Greeks, according to Nussbaum’s account: that many of the factors that constitute the well-lived life (eudemonia) are beyond the control of the human person.20 Nussbaum describes her book as an examination of the aspiration to rational self-sufficiency in Greek ethical thought: the aspiration to make the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason.21 Human practical rationality is not a game played on a smooth playing surface, but rather on one with surprising bumps and hollows.22 Nussbaum finds in the philosophical and literary sources of ancient Greece two ‘normative conceptions’ of how would-be moral agents can respond to this condition. On the one hand, the agent can assert control through uninterrupted, pure activity and through emphasis on the rational aspect of human being. The eudemonistic life thus envisaged is solitary and unimpaired by reference to others. Plato, for one, articulates a version of this response (though not uncritically so). On the other hand, the moral agent can be seen as sharing both active and passive components, with the recognition that there are external sources of power that inevitably limit the control one may reasonably expect to have over events. Under this conception, the eudemonistic life is lived alongside and with the co-operation of friends and loved ones.23 Nussbaum’s Aristotle gives expression to a version of this second normative conception (which Nussbaum herself clearly favours). Thomas is faced here with a choice to limit the risk of his situation by tempering his witness to Christ – in other words, to follow this second alternative. The First Tempter does not ask him to assert his control over events, but rather to withdraw from them in the name of safety, ease and friendship and to go back to being the person he was. He is not even asked to abandon 19 Martha Craven Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Nussbaum is not motivated to delve into ancient literature by merely antiquarian interest but because she believes that the concerns addressed in these texts are of contemporary – or perhaps universal – relevance in liberal democracies. 20 This problem also concerns Salman Rushdie, as we have seen (see Chapter 2). 21 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 3. 22 Nussbaum’s suspicion that the problem of luck – and so risk – is one keenly felt by contemporary people is confirmed by Anthony Giddens (1991: 109–43), who argues that the culture of late modernity can be regarded as a ‘risk’ culture. 23 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 20–21.

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Christ, it seems; only, rather, to abandon the angular way he has of living out his faith. Thomas may yet avoid the impending catastrophe by structuring his life and commitments such that he is able to steer wide of a serious conflict that threatens to destroy him. His value-commitments are too complicated for him to continue safely as he is. As Nussbaum notes, the strategy of conflict elimination as a solution to a dilemma was a prominent theme in fifth-century tragedy, but has also a modern counterpart.24 The claim is that ‘the human being’s relation to value in the world is not, or should not be, profoundly tragic . . . that it is, or should be, possible without culpable neglect or serious loss to cut off the risk of the typical tragic occurrence’.25 In Sophocles’ Antigone (as Nussbaum reads it) two attempts to simplify the structure of an agent’s commitments and loves – in order that conflict might be avoided and security promoted – are examined.26 This is one vision of eudemonia (that is, the more Aristotelian alternative) achieved by two possible routes. The plot revolves around the dispute between Antigone and King Creon over the unburied corpse of her brother (and his nephew), Polyneices, who has been killed attacking the city of Thebes. The religious obligation to bury the corpse (which Antigone desires) is in apparent conflict with the civic duty to leave it unburied as the body of an enemy – the view advocated by Creon. Creon does not appear conflicted, however, because he narrows his vision of practical reasoning to include only civic values. As the play opens, he seems to have succeeded in keeping the problem of misfortune at bay. His strategy, however, fails him as the plot unfolds, and it ends with the suicides of his son, Haemon, his wife, Eurydice, and Antigone. As he mourns at this calamity, he repents of the inadequate practical reasoning that has led him into such entanglements. Though it is generally agreed that Antigone’s vision is morally superior to Creon’s, Nussbaum argues that her moral vision is similarly limited;27 she likewise makes a simplification in her concept of the good: family attachments (and so the religious duty to care for the dead bodies of family members) for her are the trump card. Nussbaum’s Antigone is at least able to recognize the contingent factors that impinge upon her, that her conception of value is vulnerable to some sets of circumstances. Her vision is ‘the more humanly rational and the richer of the two protagonists: both active and receptive, neither exploiter nor simply victim’.28 Neither of these two responses is ultimately satisfactory, however. Antigone also eliminates conflicting obligations by means of a simplification of the world 24 Ibid., p. 51. 25 Ibid. 26 It is not my purpose here to evaluate Nussbaum’s reading of the play in terms of its strengths and weaknesses as a piece of literary criticism but rather to make use of the conceptual discussion that she generates. Paul B. Woodruff is one reviewer who, though full of admiration for Nussbaum’s work, disputes her reading of the Greek texts. (Paul B. Woodruff, ‘Review of Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50(1) (1989), p. 205–10.) 27 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 86. 28 Ibid., p. 67.

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of value. Her subservience to duty makes her cold to other values – such as the goodness of life itself – and leads to her destruction. She is an agent who is more than ‘half in love with easeful death’ and blind to the true nature of piety. As Nussbaum shows, an optimistic harmonization of the two responses is an option that the play countenances and rejects as well.29 Instead, she finds in the play a practical wisdom that bends responsively to the shape of the natural world, accommodating itself to, giving due recognition to, its complexities . . . To be flexibly responsive to the world, rather than rigid, is a way of living in the world that allows an acceptable amount of safety and stability while still permitting recognition of the richness of value that is in the world.30 So: Nussbaum would argue (and in later pieces she makes these thoughts more explicitly her own31) that, as Antigone shows, the avoidance of conflict is not only impossible, it is even undesirable for the eudemonistic life. Practical wisdom actually demands that we acknowledge our own finitude and our vulnerability to external factors – even those we might call ‘luck’. The conflict-free life would be reduced in value and beauty next to the life which is open to the possibility of conflict. For Nussbaum, managing risk is a matter of being ‘flexibly responsive’ to risk rather than eliminating it. This flexible posture towards the world involves using a specifically practical reason – a reason that does not imagine itself mastering the world and its circumstances but rather reflectively interacting with them.32 Not that this is a claim to guarantee security; but it is the safest and most realistic strategy available – and it is precisely the strategy that Christian martyrs appear to have eschewed. Nussbaum’s claim is that this strategy takes seriously what is, and, by so doing, maximizes both the security and the pleasure available to the human person. It may appear at first blush that this temptation is, in its turn, a strategy for ensuring security by means of a narrowing of the moral field. The Tempter does this by making Thomas’s former friendship with the King the value to which all other considerations are to be ordered. However, around this apparent narrowing of value, what he offers is the reverse of Creon’s self-assertion. Thomas is being invited to show more flexibility (as Nussbaum would recommend), and is accused by the Tempter of a self-destructive rigidity. The larger, singular vision of the good that Thomas feels he has been called to pursue is highly dangerous (and needlessly so). It does not recognize his human limits. He is to yield to his heart’s longing for the idyllic past and to his very human needs for security and friendship. He is called to recognize that his particular vision of the good is making him (and others) insecure, and to acknowledge his powerlessness to master time or to overcome the King. 29 Ibid., p. 75. 30 Ibid., p. 80. 31 Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 365–91. 32 This is, after all, what Salahuddin discovers in The Satanic Verses.

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This accusation stands against Christian disciples and martyrs more generally: in their inflexible preparedness to die rather than deny their witness, are they not guilty of causing instability? It is not only the consequences for the self that are catastrophic; the martyr inflames society as well, risking harm to others.33 Martyrdom seems like a choice for discontinuity with the past and all its ties, a decision to favour a rupture rather than smooth evolution from past into present. By holding on to Christ as the supreme value to the extent that they do, martyrs appear to be denying that there are other values. Are martyrs denying the goodness of the world – the creation (they claim) of their God, after all – and that which binds human beings into it?

E

The martyr and the ‘good’ life

i. Preliminaries The Nussbaumian temptation is an apparently cogent and attractive proposal: human agents ought to acknowledge their situatedness and the finitude appropriate to them as human beings if they are to secure the goods of security on the one hand and pleasurable experiences on the other.34 She here addresses the three questions of selfhood (narrative; the good; others) which were outlined in Chapter 1: humans beings self-narrate against a backdrop of luck, they pursue the good across a broad field, and by doing so protect others from the consequences of their enthusiasms. However, my claim is that Christian martyrdom exposes Nussbaum’s eudemonism as claiming at once too much and too little. Her hope for human security is too optimistic, but her description of the goods human beings ought to desire is itself too limited. In response, I shall show that the disciple of Christ is called in a special way and on a specific basis not to attempt to secure his own identity on the basis of what apparently is, but neither merely to become detached; that pleasure and rest are neither utterly repudiated, nor accepted as the ultimate reality for human beings; and that the human need for safety is renounced by the martyr on the grounds that there is a greater security offered in the heavenly city. What this means is that the martyr stands counter to, and in fact challenges, the Nussbaumian version of the human situation. First (in ‘Forgetting what lies behind’) I shall offer a description of martyrological faith as a response, in time, to the promises of God. This account will then be deepened by taking 33 The accusation levelled against the early Christians was precisely that they were impious – that their stubborn refusal to sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor was putting the security of the Empire at risk, or was the cause of its visible decline. This was, for example, the gist of Saturninus’ accusation against the Scillitan martyrs: ‘We too are a religious people, and our religion is a simple one: we swear by the genius of our lord the emperor and we offer prayers for his health – as you also ought to do’ (‘The acts of the Scillitan martyrs’, III, in Musurillo (2000: 87). See W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 180–82. 34 Hauerwas describes her argument as ‘her [Nussbaum’s] attempt to recover a sense of the unavoidability of the contingent for a life of excellence as a free-standing truth’ (Stanley Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (London: SCM Press, 2001), p. 93).

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up Augustine’s exploration of the self in its relation to time. This provides the groundwork for a further analysis of pleasure (in Ease and pleasure) and protection (in Security and safety) from a martyrological perspective. By way of a final preliminary: it might be objected that the description of martyrdom depends on a world-view determined by themes learnt from a claimed divine revelation, whereas Nussbaum’s description of luck (i.e. her ‘realism’) is merely derived from material fact and human experience. If this is so, then the two alternatives start on apparently rather unequal footings. However, Nussbaum does not acknowledge the ‘theological’ commitments embedded in her description of the context of human life in terms of ‘luck’, learnt as they are from Greek polytheists.35 To describe an event in terms of ‘luck’ or ‘chance’ means an already determined judgement about the nature of such events: that, because the individual in the midst of these events cannot account for them or order them according to some plan, and certainly cannot face the future with any guarantees, this is how the world really is. Yet, in asserting this to be the case, Nussbaum is making a claim to knowledge that is really inaccessible to the human subject – except as a faith-claim. The argument that this way of living the good life is more realistic than the alternative leads to the not-insignificant question of how this judgement about what is and isn’t ‘real’ is arrived at. It is very much an interpretation of the human situation, but it conceals its interpretative process. The discussion may then proceed on the basis that two competing ‘theologies’ are being compared. ii. ‘Forgetting what lies behind’ a. Life on the way To identify as one who is a potential Christian martyr is to make a break in some sense with the past. Like Nussbaum, the Scriptures situate the individual in a world in which human existence is vulnerable. Unlike Nussbaum, the believing individual steps forward on the basis not of the practical arrangement of values, but of hearing the divine promises. The scriptural metaphor of the journey, which maps time onto space, indicates that human life is lived not merely with a cycle of seasons or under conditions governed only by luck, but according to the divine shaping of – and judgement on – history. In order to show how the Christian self is thus situated, I will trace the emergence of this motif in the OT narratives and its typological use by the NT writers. The faith of Abraham – that normative faith for the Scriptures and the Christian tradition – was expressed in his leaving behind the comforts of Ur and heading for an unseen land of Yhwh’s choosing. It is the faith of a wealthy man, a man with a considerable amount to lose; but the promise of God puts a decisive imprint on Abraham’s relationship to his time, his resources and his security. The promise reshapes Abraham’s reality entirely, though it is a 35 Charles Taylor notes Nussbaum’s tendency to contrast Greek ‘polytheism’ favourably against Judaeo-Christian monotheism. (Charles Taylor, ‘Critical notice of Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18(4) (1988), pp. 805–15 (813).)

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lesson he learns in a somewhat ad hoc fashion, as much through his futile attempts to foreshorten the time between promise and fulfilment as through his patience and forbearance. However, the step that Thomas (and any martyr) is called to take is not the faith of first setting out, but a faith in medias res. He encounters this temptation after having already set out on his journey away from his more apparently secure past towards the kingdom of God. We do not find Abraham, despite his faults, hearkening back to Ur and whatever lifestyle he has lost. Within the Abraham cycle, there is however one figure known for succumbing to the temptation to look back: Lot’s wife. With the brimstone hailing down on her home, she looks longingly back. If the salty judgement on her seems harsh, it also serves to underscore her lack of belief that the call of God to the future really is the future. That is to say, her heart is, it would seem, still in Sodom and Gomorrah. From the spare text it is readily inferred that she still yearns for that which she knows has fallen under the judgement of God. The suggestion is that her sin is a nostalgic longing for that which God has repudiated, not a faithful longing for that which he promises to give.36 Lot’s wife serves as a precursor to the great moment of in-between-ness in Israel’s history – the wilderness journey between Egypt and the Promised Land. Moses’s wrestle with the people in the desert is often cast in terms of their longing for the pleasant Egypt of their enslavement in preference to the hardships of their journey. With their backs to the Red Sea and with Pharaoh’s army closing in on them, they complain: ‘[I]t would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness!’ (Exod. 14.12). Likewise, their hunger (Exod. 16.3; Num. 11.4-6) and their thirst (Num. 20.1-8) contrast with the plenty that they had in their former home in bondage to Pharaoh. Their looking back is not at all unreasonable from the point of view of human needs. As for Lot’s wife, the difficulties and uncertainties of the journey of faith contrast unfavourably with the simple pleasures and security of the past. The experience of being a refugee has little to commend it, especially when the basic requirements of daily living are apparently not being met. The disconnection of personal and communal identity involved is also what is at issue for the Israelites. Far better to be the slaves of the Egyptians and to know who one is than to be trapped in this condition of uncertainty – dis-located and dis-identified. Far better to be able to manage life as it is than to risk losing all. Throwing off the shackles of Pharaoh means disavowing his identification of them as a slave-people. However, Israel is not the maker of her own identity; instead, she is called to an identity that is given to her by Yhwh.37 Yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt is a yearning to be identified as one formerly was: it is a longing for the old identity as a slave-people under the rule of Yhwh’s

36 For von Rad, the story of Lot’s wife teaches that ‘before divine judgment there is only the possibility of being smitten or of escaping, but no third alternative’ (Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (Old Testament Library; London: SCM Press, rev. edn, 1972), p. 217). 37 As Walter Brueggeman writes: ‘Israel’s existence is rooted in Yahweh’s inescapable, originary commitment to Israel’ (Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), p. 414).

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opponent. This nostalgia for the past self does present a rosy vision of what once was. The speech of the Israelites about the Egypt that they have left behind seems to bear little resemblance to the real Egypt. Slave labour, racial segregation and ethnic cleansing – and their severe condemnation by Yhwh – are conveniently excised from the Egypt of their complaints to Moses. In the Exilic period, the past does become an object of yearning – but in a crucially transformed way. Rather than being called out from slavery towards a new life of freedom with Yhwh, Israel now found herself re-enslaved and outcast. The laments of Exile exhibit a powerful tone of disconnection and longing: By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land? (Ps. 137.1-4) The memory of Zion is invoked with all the pain of its bitter loss – and a song about the end of singing.38 The circumstances are very different from those of the Exodus: here is the forced removal of a people from their homeland and the attempted destruction of their identity as a people through enslavement (as certainly happened to the tribes of the North). Nostalgia for a more comfortable past existence might be forgiven a people in those conditions. Yet the Hebrew Scriptures – many of which date from this period or after – most assuredly do not present a nostalgic vision of the past.39 Rather, the past is viewed as under divine indictment. The climax of the narrative of the Former Prophets in the David–Solomon era is not presented merely as some Golden Era to which Israel should return with all haste. The prophetic call to restoration came with recognition that the old order was even at its height not yet all it could have been. Jeremiah, for example, envisaged a hv’d”x] tyrIB. (‘new covenant’) surpassing the Exodus covenant because torah would now be internalized by the people and not just mediated through the writing on stone tablets (Jer. 31.31-34). Ezekiel’s great temple (Ezek. 40–48), described in such extraordinary detail, clearly exceeds the former temple in its globally significant dimensions and in its overflow of the divine glory (Ezek. 43.1-12).40 In the book of Haggai, the rebuilt temple is compared unfavourably with the old one; but the divine promise is that ‘the latter splendour of this house shall be greater than the former’ (Hag. 2.9). The appearance of apocalypticism in the latter half of Daniel and Zechariah suggests that longing for a mere repe-

38 John Goldingay,Old Testament Theology: Israel’s Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006b), p. 214. 39 Pace Freund, who argues that the language of ‘the land flowing with milk and honey’ represents a nostalgic exilic vision. (Richard A. Freund, ‘The land which bled forth its bounty’, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 13(2) (1999), pp. 284–97.) 40 Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25–48 (New International Commentary on the Old Testament, Vol. 2; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 580.

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tition of Israel’s past is a cul-de-sac.41 On the historical horizon, no redivivus was possible. The consolation of Israel’s lament could not – would not – come in the form of a return to the past. Her previous faithlessness stood in the way of this; if the covenant were to be re-established, it would have to be on a new footing. Israel was to remember the past with tears; not those of longing, but rather those of sorrow and confession, in preparation for the coming of Yhwh’s cleansing, comfort and restoration (cf. Isa. 40.1ff). A scene which encapsulates this tension in the historical experience of Israel is found in Ezra 3.11-13. When finally the foundations of the new temple have been laid with the permission of Cyrus the Persian, there is described a scene of great celebration and joy. And yet, intermingled with this is the sound of the older generation – who have seen and now remember the first temple – weeping aloud at the sight of the foundations. The result is a sound which is ambiguous: the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted so loudly that the sound was heard far away. (Ezra 3.13) The sorrow and joy blend so as to become indistinguishable. The text does not elevate one noise as the appropriate response to the moment instead of the other here. The elders realize perhaps that the ‘Zion’ of their longings is not a matter merely of laying bricks in the ground. The new generation has, on the other hand, discovered in the ambiguity of this moment not a new identity (which they may possess), but the foundations of a new identity (in which they must hope).42 What we discover then is that the true vulnerability of the human subject does not arise because she inhabits a world governed only by chance. Human fragility is far more profound, in fact, for the past lies under the judgement of God. The hope of Israel, then, was not born out of forgetfulness of the past, nor founded on a nostalgic yearning to return to former days, but seen as continuous with the pattern already established in her covenant history. The import of the prophetic message was that the afflictions of the present were not to be the grounds for a hankering for the past; rather, this longing was to be directed to the future. The shape of this hope took the form of the Abrahamic promises and echoed the Mosaic and Davidic high points of Israel’s history; but the scope of the expectation was magnified beyond the historical plane.43 By contrast, the prophets were not at all triumphalistic about the restoration 41 Though, as Hanson argues, in apocalyptic literature the future was framed using the language and symbols of the past. See Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, (Philadelphia: Fortress, rev. edn, 1979), p. 249. 42 When Ezra reads the law aloud to the people, as recorded in Nehemiah 8, the reaction is similarly mixed. See John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology: Israel’s Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006a), p. 728. 43 Though clearly, in the Maccabaean period, this trans-historicality did not obviate the need for action from within the historical sphere in the minds of many Jewish people.

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as they experienced it in history – it would have been a nostalgic triumphalism. After all, the restoration was still enacted under foreign rule – a condition that remains in place at the opening of the NT period.44 The distinctive contribution of the NT is to focus Israel’s hope on Jesus Christ. That the life of faith is a constant pull between the new identity promised in Christ and any previous markers of identity is a theme to which the NT authors frequently return. This tension is often articulated in terms of a longing for the eschatological rule of God in the face of present troubles. Matthew’s gospel offers a retracing of the steps of the Exodus by Jesus.45 The implicit commentary on the present experience of Israel is that her deliverance has not yet been accomplished. Jesus, too, is called out of Egypt having gone there as a refugee (Mt. 2.13-18). Matthew reads the temptation narrative – deliberately set in the wilderness to echo Israel’s mid-point experience – as a recapitulation by Jesus of Israel’s temptations of the wilderness years (Mt. 4.1-10). This naturally forms a prelude to the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’s recapitulation of the Sinai event. The difference, of course, is that the temptation to succumb to his hunger is resisted by Jesus – not because bread in itself is somehow tainted but because it is here the opposite of dependence on the Word of God. The Sermon itself (Matthew 5–7) is addressed to those who are in a condition of desire – those ‘blessed’ of the beatitudes who experience in the present some significant lack: the mourning; the poor in spirit; those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and so on.46 Here, perhaps, it is the exilic theme that asserts itself: these are not the grumbling Israelites of the wilderness journey but the dispirited Jews of the Babylonian captivity in sorrow for their sins but longing for the coming of the kingdom of God. Jesus predicts that the disciples of the Christ will face trials of an eschatological nature preceding the consummation of the Kingdom. In Luke’s version, he turns to the wife of Lot as an example to be eschewed in an end-times context: Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day that Lot left Sodom, it rained fire and sulfur from heaven and destroyed all of them – it will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, anyone on the housetop who has belongings in the house must not come down to take them away; and likewise anyone in the field must not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it. (Lk. 17.28-32) 44 ‘The need for this restoration is seen in the common second-temple perception of its own period of history. Most Jews of this period, it seems, would have answered the question “where are we?” in language which, reduced to its simplest form, meant: we are still in exile. They believed that, in all the senses which mattered, Israel’s exile was still in progress’ (N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK, 1992), p. 268). 45 Ibid., pp. 386–7. 46 As Davies and Allison note, there are strong allusions in the Sermon to exilic themes in Isaiah 61 and Psalm 37. (Dale C. Allison and W. D. Davies, Matthew (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), pp. 65–6.)

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The ordinary activities of life serve as a distraction from the impending apocalypsis; and yet, at the moment of a decisive divine intervention, there is no time for clinging to these. Turning back, on the other hand, reveals an orientation of the heart towards the material, temporal and visible that is counter to the call to follow Christ.47 Rather than being the person you were, the Christian life consists in choosing to be, amidst present trials and temptations, the person you are: ‘I wish to be none other than I am.’ The NT hope, then, is expressed as a contraction of the future into the present, exceeding and intensifying the hope of Restoration-era Israel. In the letter to the Hebrews, the writer translates space into time, such that the wilderness journey of the Israelites over physical space becomes a type of the life’s journey of the Christian between the past and the future ‘rest’ (h. kata,pausij) of God. In making this translation the author is self-consciously relying on the Psalmist. The Exodus was already the pattern for Israel’s life with Yhwh, as Psalm 95 attests. The pattern of Israel’s cultic life with its feasts and sacrifices was already deeply rooted in that journey narrative. However, the author deploys the Psalmist’s ‘Today’ for his own use. He has found a Christological ‘Today’, because Christ has renarrated the history of Israel – and, indeed, the whole story of humanity, as the reference to Psalm 8 indicates – as his own story. The history and religion of ancient Israel foreshadowed the appearance of this one, the Christ. The analogical framework of the epistle revolves around the superior fullness and the decisiveness of the revelation in the Christ. Thus, the journey of the Christian is like and unlike the journey of the ancient Israelite. The temptation to fall back, to complain and to desert is no less evident in the Christian journey. The difficulties that surround them are also parallel. The difference is twofold. On the one hand, the Christian has had a more complete vision of the reality to come and the possibility of God’s bounteous rest than ever the faithful witnesses of old had, seeing as they did only po,rrwqen (‘from a distance’ (Heb. 11.13)). On the other hand, if the ancients were treated sternly for their lack of faith in the desert, how much more so can the Christian expect severity for denying what is offered in the crucifixion of the Christ? The letter climaxes with the claim that the believers have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. (Heb. 12.22-23)48 These verses seem strange next to the previous portrayal of the readers of the letter as in the middle of their pilgrimage, but they serve to contrast this group with the sojourners of old. Here, they are journeying to a place to which in a sense they have already come. They are already ‘present’ in the company of angels in the VIerousalh.m evpourani,w|.49 47 In this vein, too, we can read Paul’s disavowal of his own ‘blameless’ (a;memptoj) past in Phil. 3.3-11. 48 See Gal. 4.26 for a similar sentiment in Pauline dress. 49 For this reading, see Peter T. O’Brien, ‘The church as a heavenly and eschatological

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We can begin to see how different this is from the way in which Nussbaum situates the moral self as ‘responding flexibly’ to conditions of luck. My reading of the scriptural narrative shows that the Christian (the one who is potentially a martyr) is certainly not insensitive to ‘the fragility of goodness’. On the contrary, the self at risk of martyrdom knows how truly vulnerable human life is to events that are beyond human power to control. Even clinging to traces of one’s identity emanating from the past is not a successful strategy for managing the unforeseen. From Abraham on, we have seen that faith in the God of Israel is faith in a God whose promises – and whose pursuit of those promises – shape human history in a decisive way. The Christian martyr cannot recognize ‘realism’ in any account of the human situation which excludes the promising God and replaces him with dumb luck. Quite precisely, he witnesses to a reality that is circumscribed by the God of Abraham (i.e. the God who is Lord of history). This is not to say, however, that the Christian is immune to surprises: his testimony is not to a secret knowledge of history, but to a knowledge of the one whose plan history is. b. Augustine, memory and desire These concepts are given a particularly rich treatment in the meditations of Augustine on memory and time in the final books of the Confessions. Here we encounter the narrative of a man in desperate search of his own selfhood. As I shall show, Augustine’s exposition of the human self locates the civitatis dei as the place/time where it finds its true home. Furthermore, he teaches that faith is the means by which the individual directs his longing, within the present time, to the supreme good – namely, God himself. In desiring to attain the promises of God, the human being does not transcend his humanity, but is in fact being true to his created nature. Towards the end of the Confessions, Augustine writes:

I will ‘enter into my chamber’ and will sing you songs of love, groaning with inexpressible groanings on my wanderer’s path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up towards it – Jerusalem my home land, Jerusalem my mother.50 Here is homesickness for an unseen home. The Confessions (as I shall read them here with the help of Hans Urs von Balthasar51) themselves represent an attempt to adopt a stance to the past that avoids nostalgia for the pre-conversion self.52 Augustine tries not so much to have done with his life but to order it aright by narrating it as confessio – adopting a stance critical, entity’, in D. A. Carson (ed.), The Church in the Bible and the World: An International Study (Exeter: Paternoster, 1987), pp. 88–119 (95–8). 50 Augustine, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), XII.16, p. 257. 51 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study (London: Sheed and Ward, 1968). 52 The same inner journey is the concern of the early books of Augustine’s classic work on the Trinity. See Augustine, ‘The Trinity’, in Augustine: Later Works (ed. John Burnaby; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955).

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rather than nostalgic, of his former self. Augustine’s confession that as a youth he was ‘in love with love’53 is a description of a kind of incurvature of longing on itself. However, having retraced the narrative of his life, he now turns to consider memory itself. Memory was described by Plato in terms of the soul’s reminiscence of its own origin within the world of ideas. Augustine baptizes this conception,54 and because the origin of the soul which it remembers is now the eternal and living God, the capacity of memory is found to have a indescribable depth. Commenting on 1 Cor. 2.11 (‘no man knows the things of a man, save the spirit of a man that is in him’), he explains that it is only through God, whom man himself does not know, that man can know himself.55 God, then, lies within his memory, and yet is not contained by his memory.56 This tension is replicated in the human subject itself: the vast caves of the memory hold immensities that are not conceivable even to the soul that contains them. Augustine’s subterranean journey through the caverns of his own memory leads to an encounter with his own past self: There also [i.e. in memory] I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it.57 However, this strange meeting is partial and fleeting: I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp? Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind. How then can it fail to grasp it?58 If his identity (‘the totality of what I am’) is so elusive, how shall he then find the God for whom he searches? He equates the search for God with the search for ‘the happy life’.59 This longing for the happy life is universal, he says, even among those who cannot consciously remember being happy, strictly speaking. Yet this eudemonistic longing is evidence that in fact all human beings have known the happy life – for if it were not in their memories they would not know it to love it.60 God has never been absent from his memory, in fact; he always deigned to dwell in it:

53 Augustine, Confessions, III.i, p. 35. 54 Roland Teske, ‘Augustine’s philosophy of memory’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 148–58 (150). 55 Augustine, Confessions, X.v–vi, pp. 182–4. 56 Balthasar, Man in History, pp. 2–3. 57 Augustine, Confessions, X.viii, p. 186. 58 Ibid., X.viii, p. 187. 59 Ibid., X.xx, p. 196. 60 Balthasar, Man in History, p. 5; Teske, ‘Augustine’s philosophy of memory’, p. 154.

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Surely my memory is where you dwell, because I remember you since first I learnt of you, and I find you there when I think about you.61 Though it is not possible here to give in detail all the lineaments of his argument, what he says here about memory is the basis for Augustine’s understanding of the Christian self in time.62 Through Christ the new Jerusalem has come down into time, not so as to destroy time, but to fulfil it.63 This ‘Jerusalem’ is the church that is the bride of the Lamb, and it pilgrimages in time as if it is in a foreign land. As Balthasar puts it: The constantly self-realizing point of intersection between transient time and salvation time causes the duration of the Church to appear as an ever-present dramatic event which, precisely because of the indwelling of the eternal in it, can never be seen as a whole.64 The church stands at the crossroads between times, as it were, and the complete pattern of progress on the journey is not visible to it. And yet there is a sense in which the journey is already over and the church has come to its heavenly home. In ‘Burnt Norton’, Eliot writes (with strong allusion to the incarnation and passion): ‘Only through time time is conquered.’65 Is ‘conquered’ the best theological verb to use? The incarnation of the Logos in time offers up time to a divine experiencing of it. Time, and its sinister twin, Death, were not avoided by him but transcended – and transformed – in him. If they are ‘conquered’ by him it is not because they are denied by him but rather because they are experienced by him. Both remain, but their negative affects are attenuated.66 As Balthasar (reading Augustine) says, temporality as it stands ‘is an absence of the creature from unified eternity’67 – which means death. It is not possible to grasp eternity in time: even Augustine’s impressive inventory of his memory does not lead him unambiguously to that condition. It is only by faith (in the terms of Hebrews 11-12) and in ‘acceptance of the renunciation which is imposed upon him’68 that the journeying Christian and the pilgrim church can experience that indwelling of the eternal in the temporal.

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Augustine, Confessions, X.xxv, p. 201. Teske, ‘Augustine’s philosophy of memory’, p. 154ff. Balthasar, Man in History, p. 38. Ibid. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), p. 173. Frye (1982: 76) makes a similar point, but approaches it via a literary account of Scripture. 66 This is also an important consideration if Augustine’s reasoning is not to fall prey to Nussbaum’s critique of Platonism in general, that it illegitimately (if bravely) seeks to transcend human existence by leaving it behind in some way. She herself acknowledges the profundity of the incarnation as the Christian response to the problem of transcending humanity, but fails to develop this line of thinking. See Nussbaum’s ‘Transcending Humanity’ in Love’s Knowledge, pp. 365–91. See also Fergus Kerr’s illuminating comments (Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: SPCK, 1997), p. 14). 67 Balthasar, Man in History, p. 39. 68 Ibid., p. 40.

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Augustine’s development of the biblical tradition intensifies the typological reading of the OT found in Hebrews and also in Paul. Human longing may have false objects, including that found in the form of nostalgia for the past. However, this longing for the soul’s true home may find a true object in the city of God, revealed in the Son. But it is not enough to say that this lies completely in the future: two more observations are required. First, the Son ‘Today’ reveals the time of the Father, such that the city of God is now here already present, and the church in Christ is now already present in it. Though invisible, it is visible to the eyes of faith. Secondly, Augustine’s point is that the fact of the longing itself reveals that it is something remembered; thus, not only does the city of God lie ahead, but it is also the soul’s origin. To express it in other – more Biblical – terms, we might say that in yearning for the fulfilment of the promises of God, the human individual is being true to her created nature. It is not, then, the longing for the past itself that is denied but rather any imperfect and merely penultimate objects of this longing. Furthermore, the believing self is not seeking to transcend its humanity, as Nussbaum fears; rather, he is following the pattern of his own created nature. It is, in fact, humanizing. Like Christ – and like the protagonists of Greek tragedy, too – the martyr experiences in the most extreme form the press of time.69 Events seem to have turned against him. It was recorded that the martyr Pionius was implored by his pagan fellow citizens to recant: ‘Listen to us Pionius, we love you. There are many reasons why you deserve to live, for your character and righteousness. It is good to live and to see the light!’ Pionius replied: ‘I too agree that life is good, but the life that we long for is better; and so too of light, that one true light. All these things are indeed good, and we do not run from them as though we are eager to die or because we hate God’s works. Rather, we despise these things which ensnare us because of the superiority of those other great goods.’70 Christian martyrdom was never intended to spring from a hatred of life, or from a death wish.71 The witness that the martyr makes is to his renunciation of strategies of survival and his affirmation of homesickness for the kingdom of God. Like Nussbaum, the Christian martyr critiques the narrowing of the eudemonistic vision. However, where Nussbaum invites consideration of a balanced range of goods held with maximum flexibility, the martyr proclaims a supreme good to which other goods are ordered. 69 Rahner puts the same thought in different terms in his meditation on death. (Karl Rahner, On the Theology of Death (trans. C. H. Henkey; Quaestiones Disputatae, 2; New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).) 70 ‘The martyrdom of Pionius the presbyter and his companions’, V, in Musurillo (2000: 143). 71 Charles Taylor (1988: 308) notes: ‘the transcendent can be seen as endorsing or affirming the value of ordinary human attention and concern, as has undoubtedly been the case with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with decisive consequences for our whole moral outlook’.

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The next two points relate to this first part (i.e. point ii.) because they are what make the past (and potentially the present and future) desirable: ease and pleasure, on the one hand (point iii.), and, on the other, security and safety (point iv.). I seek in what follows to give a theological and scriptural account of these twinned themes, relating them also to questions of self-identity, and showing thereby that Christian assurance and blessing are secured in the life of the ascended Christ. iii. Ease and pleasure The emphasis so far has been on the rupture between Christian life and the old self – the move away from the past into the future. My intention here is to show how Scripture asserts rather than denies the created goodness of human life in the world and of human enjoyment of this life, while also teaching of its potential to distract from the ultimate purpose of human existence. By ‘ease and pleasure’ I am indicating the material things that human beings find delightful and the time to enjoy them. As we have seen, Thomas is not called by his Tempter to an unrestrained sensuality or to a pure hedonism which might easily be dismissed as licentiousness. Rather, the vision of life he remembers is easeful and pleasurable in an attractive and reasonable way. The urbane company and the delights of fine living could readily be seen as the best that life ‘under the sun’ has to offer. To embrace these things would be to affirm the goodness of life itself – and perhaps even to praise the maker of such delights of the heart and body. The accusation that comes to him from the Tempter – and we have heard repeated by Nussbaum – is that his renunciation is (at least implicitly) a denial of the created goodness of these things and experiences – and a denial of his own existence within this order as a finite creaturely being. Likewise, the vision of the life of Israel as the covenant people presented in the OT has its hedonistic side. It is not presented as a denial of this-worldly goodness but rather as a fulfilment of it. #r t[;Ûbuv.) that David makes with Jonathan is not overturned by the changing times; and David even extends its benefits to Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s crippled son (2 Sam. 21.7). David’s grief-song, the Song of the Bow, is a touching expression of personal and national loss (2 Sam. 1.18-27). The counterpart to the David–Jonathan story in the second half of the Samuel cycle is the tragic David–Absalom saga. Once again, David, now old and portrayed as somewhat enfeebled by an old man’s sentimentality (certainly Joab thinks so!), cannot disentangle his personal feelings from his public policy. Here, his loyalty crosses the bounds of wisdom, and perhaps indicates a wish to pre-empt the work of Yhwh by securing for himself an heir. David’s experiences of friendship and betrayal in the midst of a struggle for divinely appointed kingship presage the experiences of a later putative messianic king. The Jesus of John’s gospel speaks of the love of one ‘laying down his life for his friends’ (Jn 15.13): that is the greatest love. It is love that he exemplifies; but it is the kind of love that will also be at the heart of discipleship – self-sacrifice. His public life, as Luke reports, was a life lived among his friends over and against even his own family (Lk. 8.17-19). Friendship with him was a matter of performing his words (Jn 15.14), which elevates the status of disciple from servant to friend (‘[Y]ou are my friends . . .’). However, the

50 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic, 1981), p. 68ff.

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capriciousness of human friendship was of course something Jesus himself experienced. Not only did he count among his friends Judas, who betrayed him, but at the crucial moment of testing, his disciples fled and left him alone. He went to the cross alone, watched only from a distance. Unsurprisingly, then, part of his teaching to his friends was that they were risking the possibility of this affliction themselves. In Lk. 21, he prophesies their betrayal by family and friends (Lk. 21.16-17). ‘You will be hated by all (misou,menoi u`po. pa,ntwn) because of my name.’ The experience of martyrdom is clearly on view here. Christian discipleship is promised by Jesus to have a destabilizing effect on earthly relationships (as it does for Archbishop Thomas), which may even result in violent rejection. Perhaps laying down one’s life for one’s friend may mean dying at his hand. But the way in which Jesus connects love with friendship is the key here. The divine love of Jesus for real human beings represents a turning toward human beings in friendship despite and even through their violent enmity towards him. In death, Jesus alone stands in the place of his fellow human beings. And yet the point at which he suffers betrayal, rejection, torture and death becomes the point of greatest divine love for human beings and human love for God (see Rom. 5.1-11). In turn, this great realized and actual love of God for human beings and of one human being for God becomes the supreme example of love for the disciples of Christ (Jn 15.13-15; 1 Jn 4.1ff; see also the language of sacrifice in Rom. 12.1-2). That such a love will involve concrete, actual bodily sacrifice is unmistakable in the language of the NT. This love is shot through with pain – possibly the pain of unreciprocity. As Eliot shows, this means for the Archbishop-martyr that he cannot abandon the King altogether, though there may be violent consequences. Though Thomas has been offered the chance to shut the door on Henry by the Third Tempter, this is not ultimately for him a Christian possibility. Rather, he calls out ‘[O]pen the door!’ (II.351); and, with this, calls down on himself his own murderers, the agents of the King. In his last intimate teaching to his disciples (as reported by John), Jesus makes plain the contrariness of following him. The consequences of a life lived after the pattern of Jesus are dire: rejection by the world is inevitable. The comfort Jesus offers here is that his disciples should realize that they share together in Jesus’s rejection by the people of the world, and so also in his eschatological vindication by the Father.51 Simon Peter has already, with characteristic belligerence, proclaimed his willingness to follow Jesus: Peter said to him, ‘Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’ (Jn 13.37) At least he, in this blurting-out, has grasped the full meaning of following Jesus: that following him means following him to the limit of life, and even beyond it. But Jesus rebukes him here as he has rebuked him before:

51 See Andrew T. Lincoln, ‘Trials, plots and the narrative of the fourth gospel’, JSNT, 56 (1994), pp. 3–30 (4).

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Jesus answered, ‘Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.’ (Jn 13.38) Peter’s zeal to die for Christ is undermined by Jesus’s prophecy of his weakness under the pressure to witness to him at the vital moment. Peter’s fault seems to be his exuberant desire to do something for Jesus. He cannot accept that he is not to follow Jesus where he is going now (Jn 13.36), but only afterwards. He cannot accept the passive role. His failure to witness to Christ at the hour of the crucifixion will be a lesson to the whole church that the foundational act of witness is Christ’s alone.52 They are to remember that, no matter what heroisms may trail in the wake of Jesus Christ, no matter what tortures are suffered by those in his name, at the very moment of the church’s foundation Jesus stood alone. Before Pilate, he was accompanied by no others to argue his cause. He was left alone. It will not be so for his followers: they will share his fate, because the world will respond to them as to him. They are servants who are ‘not greater than their master’. Part of being the servant of Jesus is sharing his fate; but he promises to be with them in this moment. o` para,klhtoj, ‘the Advocate’ (NRSV), will be sent from the Father to testify on Jesus’s behalf alongside his followers. This one is also called to. pneu/ma th/j avlhqei,aj, ‘the Spirit of Truth’. The disciples will experience hatred and rejection because of their union with the Son (Jn 15.18-20; 16.1-4a).53 In Jn 15.26, Jesus explains that witness is evidence of true discipleship: ‘this union of life shows itself in the task of witnessing to him’.54 But o` para,klhtoj itself takes on the role of witnessing peri. evmou/ (‘about me’) by inhabiting the believer. After his departure, Jesus’s own testimony to himself will be performed by the Advocate, who comes (as he did) from the Father. The witness of the disciples is not of secondary significance to that which the Spirit carries out: it is the same testimony. Their witness is theirs in that they indeed do it, but they do not witness independently of the Spirit. To what ‘Truth’ do the Spirit and the disciples testify? It is peri. evmou/ – it is a testimony concerning Jesus himself. After all, o[ti avpV avrch/j metV evmou/ evste (Jn 15.27) – ‘because from the beginning you were [evste: literally, ‘are’] with me’. The Advocate will teach them to remember Jesus’s teachings (Jn 14.26), which itself does not exclude an interpretational activity and clearly presages 52 th.n yuch,n sou u`pe.r evmou/ qh,seij is construed as a question by the NRSV and punctuated thus by the UBS 4 (United Bible Societies), though it could be read as a prophecy. Such a prophecy does occur in Jn 21.19. However, the emphasis here is not on foretelling Peter’s martyrdom, but rather on posing a question as to his readiness in the present to really follow Jesus in the fullest sense (avkolouqein). For Bultmann (1971: 597, n. 1), Jesus’s answer ‘cannot be a prophecy of martyrdom, but sets out to teach that the believer’s existence depends on the u`pa,gein that precedes it’. The post-resurrection encounter between Peter and Jesus is a deliberate contrast to this one: Peter will experience the kind of death by which doxa,sei to.n qeo,n (Jn 21.19). 53 For the application of this text to the persecutors of the martyrs, see ‘The letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne’, I.15, in Musurillo (2000: 66). 54 Bultmann, The Gospel of John, p. 552.

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a passing on of this teaching by and to the community. This continuation of Jesus’s witness about himself is not thus the dry rehearsal of a past event, but speech about a lively present reality continuous with this past.55 The Spirit is a co-witness with(in) the church. These are reassuring words from Jesus in the midst of prediction of all kinds of trials and persecutions. The disciples can take comfort in knowing that they are not abandoned, and their witness to the divine reality that they have encountered in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth will be upheld in the crucible of subsequent events. There is something else, too: though Jesus promises his disciples that they will be more than somewhat wrenched from their earthly moorings, he also promises them to each other. The great organic symbol of the Vine winds through this discourse as a way of speaking to the disciples of their mutual interconnection through Jesus himself. The commands to love begin among the disciples themselves; their love for one another is the very sign of their belonging to Christ (Jn 13.34-5). The scattering of the disciples has its counterpart in a gathering. They are to wash one another’s feet. They will lay down their lives for their friends: the deaths of the persecuted witnesses will turn out to be for the church as a great sign of the presence of the Spirit of Truth among them. Once again, the enactment of these texts is evidenced in the Acta Martyrum. In ‘The Martyrs of Lyons’ we read of Vettius Epagathus, who spoke up ‘in defence of the brethren’ before the governor and his tribunal, and was killed as one who was – in strong allusion to Jn 15.13 – ‘well pleased even to lay down his own life for the defence of the brethren’.56 In this account also the martyrs are seen as expressing in their patient resistance a love for their less courageous brethren;57 and they are also seen as praying for those who persecute them. In ‘The Martyrdom of Marian and James’, the two bishops Agapius and Secundinus inspired many others to follow them in martyrdom out of their strong ‘love to the brethren’.58 At least as far as these early martyrologists were concerned, the path of martyrdom was not abnegation of love for the brethren, but in fact its pure expression.59 It might be protested that the references to friendship as such in the Scriptures are few, especially in the NT. The ecclesio-relational metaphors that are most prominent are organic or fraternal ones – the Vine, the Body, the Brotherhood. This certainly helps protect the church from becoming a community of people I like, or of people like me, in that friends are typically freely chosen for friendship, whereas ecclesial relationships are established on an entirely different basis – namely, by the election of God. On the other 55 Ibid., p. 554. 56 ‘The letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne’, I.10, in Musurillo (2000: 64). 57 ‘This on account of the sincerity of their love was the greatest of all their contests with the Devil, that the Beast being throttled might disgorge alive those whom he at first thought to have devoured’ (ibid., II.6, p. 84). 58 ‘The martyrdom of Marian and James’, III.6, in Musurillo (2000: 196). 59 Admittedly, the megayuch, (‘great-souled’) man of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics may also lay down his life for his friends (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (ed. and trans. Roger Crisp; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 176). But he does so because of self-love: it is the nobility that accrues to him that makes his sacrifice of his own life rational.

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hand, the church is not a biological entity either, in the sense that it is not composed only of people who have a particular genetic or racial identity in common. In fact, the church is composed of those who have been ‘unplugged’60 from the primacy of their organic communities. Baptism symbolizes this new form of life. The NRSV’s decision to render VAdelfoi, as ‘friends’ rather than ‘brethren’ would completely change the grammar of ecclesial relationships (if accepted). What is perhaps most overlooked is that material in the NT which is actually most relevant – the actual ecclesial experience of Paul and the others that we glimpse in the greetings and farewells of the epistles (e.g. Phil. 4.1; Romans 16). Here we see that there is apparently a genuine and heartfelt experience of ‘friendship’, touchingly and lovingly recorded in these incidentals. These are those whom Paul addresses as avgaphtoi, (2 Cor. 12.19). But this, of course, is given to us alongside the experience of a painful enmity, too, from within the ecclesial sphere. The apostle does not always count his enmity as outside the church and his experience of friendship as inside. Rather, he actually encounters both in the present reality of church. There is a reminder in this that Judas was one of the Twelve, and that opposition to and treachery against Jesus came from within the small band of apostles who were with him from the very start. Thomas’s experience of opposition with King Henry is, of course, complicated by the fact that the King, his knights and the bishops who support him are – or at least claim to be – on the inside of the church. The martyr declines the path of sedition not only because it is disloyal but also because it is unloving. This directly implies a certain orientation to the good and to others. This love springs from the priority (for the martyr) of the love of Christ himself: the loving action which founded, in the Spirit, the community bearing his name. v. England and Englishness The martyr expresses a Christian identity that is certainly political, but in a very distinct way, as the discussion of friendship has shown. In the same way, his commitment to a national/patriotic self-identity has also been relativized by his witness to Christ. Thomas the martyr does not accept the invitation to designate himself as a patriotic self. The appeal to honour true Englishness goes unheeded; he does not die for his country, but for his Lord. By contrast, the Four Knights make appeal to the audience’s sense of Englishness in their defence of their assassination of Thomas late in the play. They claim for themselves that they have acted on the nation’s behalf and for the nation’s good. The Third Knight in particular trades in this currency: ‘We are four plain Englishmen who put our country first’ (II.457-8). Though the Knight is, of course, loyal to the King and

60 The term is used by Slavoj Žižek, who in his audacious (for an atheist!) defence of Christianity makes much the same point: ‘it is love itself that enjoins us to “unplug” from the organic community into which we were born – or, as Paul puts it, for a Christian, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks’ (Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), p. 121).

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not a would-be revolutionary, his language is very much akin to that of the Third Tempter. Thomas renounces ‘Englishness’ as the narrative that is most basic to his identity (though it is not completely denied). It is a temptation to which the Christian churches are often prone in the modern era. Bonhoeffer locates the rise of modern nationalism in the era of the French Revolution: ‘[T]he nation is a revolutionary concept.’61 This is hardly a novel reading: however, he makes the provocative assertion that revolutionary nationalism, which is openly hostile to God, arose partly in reaction to the political theology of the Catholic Church (lacking the ‘two-kingdoms’ theology of Luther), which was unable to prevent the loss of ‘the unity that was created by the form of Jesus Christ’.62 In the Anglo-Saxon world – and this relates directly to the situation of Archbishop Thomas in this most Anglo-Saxon of plays – the problem has been rather ‘a collapse of the church into the world’.63 In other words, though there is in the Anglo-Saxon world the phenomenon of a democracy based on a Christian foundation, this has not prevented severe secularization, as Bonhoeffer rightly notes. It is certainly possible to read the temptation of Thomas in this way as a temptation to blur the distinction between ‘the offices and kingdoms of the state and the church’,64 a temptation to which modern Protestant Christianity has certainly (for Bonhoeffer) succumbed.65 In the Acts of the Apostles the idea of national identity is not dissolved even as the church is gathered and the Gospel spreads to the nations.66 The symbolic key is Pentecost. This miraculous sign comes not to Gentiles, granted, but to Jews dispersed among the nations and who are speakers of many languages. At this moment they are gathered in Jerusalem for the festival. The tongues of flame lead to the speaking in many tongues: the apostles are given the gift

61 ‘Heritage and decay’ in Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 120. 62 Ibid., p. 127. Bonhoeffer uses the expression ‘the form of Jesus Christ’ in contrast with the unity created by the institution(s) of the Church in western Europe – a unity intended to mimic and even advance the unity created by the Word of God in Christ, but which became instead confused with it and even a parody of it. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., pp. 103–33. In the same vein, in and after the 1914–18 War the language of martyrdom was applied to the sacrifice of the young men who died for England on the battlefield. Using this language no doubt brought great comfort to the bereaved. In particular, the text that features again and again in memorials is Jn 15.13, ‘greater love hath no man than this’. A well-known hymn from the period, ‘O Valiant Hearts’ by Sir John Arkwright, makes the connection between patriotism and religion explicit: Still stands his Cross from that dread hour to this, like some bright star above the dark abyss; still, through the veil, the Victor’s pitying eyes look down to bless our lesser Calvaries. These were his servants, in his steps they trod, following through death the martyred Son of God: Victor, he rose; victorious too shall rise they who have drunk his cup of sacrifice. 66 Of course, the Biblical idea of ‘nation’ and the modern idea of the nation-state are not exactly equivalent, though there is enough overlap to make the comparison viable.

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of speaking in the languages of those present. There is not one language that all are given to hear – the miracle is in the apostles’ mouths, not just in the hearers’ ears. Peter, for his sermon on the event, takes as his text the ancient prophecy of Joel: ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people’ (Joel 2.14).67 If there is a reversal of Babel, it is not in terms of a restoration of a primordial universal language. The Spirit, which makes possible the hearing of the gospel of the Son, is the unificatory principle in this event: the message, not the language, is what is held in common. Though dispersed Israel is addressed here, the rest of the narrative of the book shows how this invitation is extended to the Gentiles as well. Interestingly, Luke’s Paul does not renounce or deny his Roman citizenship and is in fact happy to use the fact that he was born to this status to gain a hearing (Acts 22.25-29). The inauguration of the church does not therefore mean the dissolution of the nations. This is how the promise to Abraham that ‘all nations will be blessed through you’ (Gen. 18.18; Gal. 3.18) comes to pass in the preaching of the apostles. This means an engrafting of the nations into Israel: an offering of membership in the people of God extended to the whole globe (Romans 9–11; Ephesians 2). John of Patmos seems to imply that nations maintain their identity even in the eternal vision, where they bring their glory and honour (Rev. 21.26), and receive healing from the leaves of the tree of life (Rev. 22.2). Around the great throne is gathered a multitude visible to the seer as ‘from every nation, tribe, people and language’, singing the song of the salvation of the Lamb (Rev. 7.9). However, insofar as the nations (and their kings) are ranged against the Lord and his Son, they are utterly defeated (Rev. 19.15-16; see Psalm 2). The martyr, therefore, does not witness against all national or tribal identifications per se, but to their relative significance. The early martyrologies depict the martyrs as at times stubbornly refusing any identification of themselves but as Christian. In Chapter 4 I cited the story of one named Sanctus, who resisted them with such determination that he would not even tell them his own name, his race, or the city he was from, whether he was a slave or a freedman. To all of their questions he answered in Latin ‘I am a Christian!’68 This may well have been intended by the author as a hyperbolic instance of the self-identification of the martyrs as Christian transcending all other ascriptions; certainly, other martyrs are not as radical in this as is Sanctus. However, the priority of self-identification with Christ instead of with other matrices of identification is a recurring theme in the martyr-acts. Thomas is actually given back to England as her martyr – and seen as a focus of national pride. The play itself is a demonstration of English ownership of this martyr, even in the 1930s. This is an ambivalent side of the story (of which Eliot appears to be aware): the ‘having’ of martyrs and saints by various 67 This text also features in the opening chapter of ‘The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas’, in Musurillo (2000: 107). 68 ‘The letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne’, I.20, in Musurillo (2000: 69).

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locales perhaps fosters the very kind of tribalism that the martyr dies to avoid.69 However, there is a sense in which Thomas’s rejection of Englishness as an absolute makes a godly pride in Englishness possible. In addition, the telling and retelling (or rather, re-enacting) of a martyr’s tale stands as a rebuke to a certain form of nationalism – as evidence of its self-destructive consequences.70 vi. Passive action? Ultimately, Eliot shows that it is action that is problematic for martyrs. It is not that Thomas renounces action as such, but rather that he renounces a type of action and embraces another kind – the ‘passive action’ of 1 Peter.71 He renounces the course by which a man may define himself – or even be defined – by the greatness of his deeds. He renounces the assertion of his own will over England, and against Henry, whatever good may result. He does not engage in a balancing of goods one against another. He refuses to do anything at all. What he does is merely submit himself to the will of God. Thomas knows this even early in the play, prior to his temptation, when he says of the townswomen-chorus:

They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know, that action is suffering And suffering is action. Neither does the agent suffer Nor the patient act. But both are fixed In an eternal action, an eternal patience To which all must consent that it may be willed And which all must suffer that they may will it, That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action And the suffering . . . (I.208-17)

69 Peter Brown describes the role of the saints and martyrs in the ‘localization of the holy’ in late antiquity. (Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1981), pp. 86–8.) 70 Edith Cavell, executed for aiding Allied prisoners during WWI, was reported to have said on the night before she died: ‘standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough’. 71 In his discussion of the ecclesiological locus of theology, Reinhard Hütter (2000) introduces the concept of ‘pathos’ (for Luther, passio). By this he means to indicate that surrender to God’s own voice which characterizes ‘the core of Christian existence’. This is the vita passiva of faith, which, of course, issues in a vita activa. ‘This human pathos’, he writes, ‘corresponds to God’s own poiesis, the poiesis of the Holy Spirit.’ Hütter describes how the theologian’s pathos is conditioned by ‘God’s own poiesis’; but we could speak of the martyr in exactly the same way. Indeed, he goes on to discuss Luther’s ‘Seven Marks of the Church’, of which the last is ‘discipleship in suffering’. The point is that these constitutive marks are the work of the Holy Spirit in and through the church. However, these marks, insofar as they are practices, are not to be understood as ‘generated’ by the Spirit and then ‘realized’ by the human agent. Hütter’s intriguing suggestion for resolving this tension is to see the practices as subsisting enhypostatically in the Spirit. The human being remains the recipient of all the church practices, even though it might be said that human activity is always an inherent part of them. My notion of ‘passive action’ strongly resembles Hütter’s terminology of ‘pathos’ (Hütter, 2000: 30–31, 130, 132).

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This is highly elusive speech; but it is prescient of Thomas’s own destiny unfolded in the play. He, too, ‘knows and does not know’ about the inevitable relationship between acting and suffering. Action among human beings involves the consequences and entanglements that result from that action. It means the responsibility and perhaps even culpability for that action even though the results are possible only to guess at. Conversely, suffering is a kind of action, in the sense that Thomas displays by his submitting to his martyr’s path. In fact, it is the eternal action of God (which is, of course, ‘patient’) that matters most – ‘the pattern’. Eliot comes very close to making Thomas reflect the Eastern spirituality that he explored in poems like The Waste Land: the language of the wheel and the fixing of time suggests a depersonalizing of divine providence away from an orthodox Christian theism. True, the God of Murder in the Cathedral appears at times remote and remorseless. Yet, however close Eliot sails to this wind in the play, he does not quite tack to the East. What Eliot effectively dramatizes is the apparent remoteness of God from the world of the martyr’s experience in its tragic and violent aspect. For him, God’s final verdict is as-yet concealed, though Christologically glimpsed. In what sense does martyr Thomas nonetheless act, having rejected the action offered to him by the Tempter? He has grasped that ‘action’ is not a category of pure freedom or power. He has experienced the frailty of human acting, set about as it is with complications and reactions and myriad unforeseeable consequences. He also knows the dubious way he has acted in the past and his inability to escape the results of these actions except via divine forgiveness. For the audience’s sake, the priests have noted the pride that Thomas exhibited during his political career (I.118). However, in his last sermon Thomas declares that ‘the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God . . .’ (Interlude 68-9). The temptations are a dramatization of the genuine alternatives open to Thomas; but the martyr does not assert his will such that it results in an action he may call his own. Rather, he determines to be in accord with the willing and acting of God. There are echoes here of Christ – this time under the extreme pressure of Gethsemane (Mk 14.32-52 and parallels): he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, ‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.’ Here Jesus, too, glimpses another possibility. He knows the full horror of what is to come. He wishes that there were some other way. He pleads that the will of God would not be done through the temporary triumph of evil. Here he does not set his will against God’s will, or offer any helpful suggestion of an alternative plan to God – only that God would will differently. In the end he prays ‘not my will, but yours’ – he submits his will to his Father’s will. He does not understand the will of God as some remorseless impersonal engine of fate grinding him in its cogs. The plan of God is something to which he can freely submit or else there is no submission to it at all.

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The word ‘lost’ in Thomas’s sermon jars with the Gethsemane narrative somewhat. The loss of the will suggests dissolution of the person’s will into the divine pattern – again, perhaps, a more Eastern or mystical concept than what we see Jesus doing here. Jesus does not dissolve his will into the will of the Father, neither does he reluctantly resign himself to the will of God; rather, he actively embraces it, saying, as Karl Barth wrote, ‘a radiant Yes to the actual will of God’.72 The prayer completes his obedience. This is certainly the reading of this episode given in Heb. 5.7-10, where the prayer is seen as part of Jesus’s High-Priestly ministry which prepared him for his sacerdotal and sacrificial role. In this prayer, as Jesus accepts the bitter cup of God’s wrath, his obedience comes to complete fruition. In this garden his obedience blossoms. It is what Jesus does: like the Messianic voice of the Psalms,73 he directs his voice to God and waits. In the tumultuous end of the Gethsemane scene, as he is being betrayed and arrested, Jesus castigates both his sword-wielding disciple and his captors: ‘[H]ave you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me?’ (Mk 14.48). They have misconstrued the essential nature of Jesus’s ‘action’, because they have not grasped his true identity.74 The first martyrologists report that this misconstrual was repeated in the executions of the martyrs. Directly related to this ‘act’ of the martyr is the relation of ‘faith’ to ‘works’ as expounded in the theology of Martin Luther. Luther argued that the righteous person – namely, the person declared by God to be so – is the truly human person. His critics – among them latterly Herbert Marcuse – have argued that the principle of justification by faith alone excuses a person from responsibility for their actions in the world, because it posits a schism between the inner, justified person and the outer, sinful person. For his part, Eberhard Jüngel has mounted a strong defence of Luther.75 He argues first that Luther’s critics have mistaken his distinguishing of the person and work for a separation. But, turning the tables somewhat, Jüngel argues that the modern world has rather made human actions the basic compositional unit of the human self. We moderns understand ourselves as acting subjects. The damaging consequences of this view of the acting self are numerous: from an instrumentality in human relationships, to a removal of the dignity of those who cannot act, who are limited in their ability to act (the disabled and the elderly in particular). Even Aristotle’s more moderate vision of a subject who is both responsive and active falls under this critique; for Aristotle cannot envisage a truly good human life without the expression of virtues through action.76 Against this, Luther teaches from his reading of Paul that human beings 72 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas Forsyth Torrance; London: T&T Clark International, 2nd edn, 2004), IV.i., p. 270. 73 For example, Ps. 40:1–3. 74 The emphasis on makroqumi,a| (‘patience’) and u`pomonh. (‘endurance’) in the Acta Martyrum confirms the determination of the early martyrs and their martyrologists to see themselves as imitating Christ in this virtue. 75 We note with interest that Paul Ricoeur (1994: 25) cites Jüngel’s account of faith in connection with his own philosophy of the self. 76 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 333f.

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are not constituted by their acts at all; rather, this self-realization is overthrown by the gospel. What iustitia fidei explains is that it is God who judges, declares and determines; it is he who calls human beings to themselves. It is he who even gives them to themselves. This, then, is the basis for a true human agency, and a new human work (see Eph. 2.8-10). That is the ‘freedom of a Christian’: an evangelical freedom to do all sorts of good works. Jüngel perhaps insufficiently outlines what ‘faith’ might mean. It seems crucial to Luther’s theology (and, in my view, to Paul’s) to establish that faith is not an alternative kind of action as such, although it is a thing ascribed to human agents. Faith is in this way similar to the passive action that I have been describing.77 It is, however, action. The difference from Aristotle’s view is that, whereas he sees the agent as now active, now passive, the Christian agent is called to action that is qualitatively different. It may be objected that this action is so passive that it neglects the pressing and, indeed, righteous need for a ‘proper’ action. I have already asked, with Bonhoeffer, whether the martyr, in rejecting compromise, flies headlong into the arms of Christian radicalism (that is, pietistic withdrawal). The choice for martyrdom could be seen as an appalling loss of nerve. In a world that demands us to act, martyrdom refuses action (as the world sees it) and embraces only suffering. The vita activa is always morally compromised, but it is a necessary responsibility of true humanity. The choice of inaction appears more spiritual because it is other-worldly. Certainly, it was the oft-times bitter historical experience of the early church that gave rise to the privileging of the vita contemplativa over the vita activa (and hence the charge of Platonism).78 But this choice could certainly be read as an abdication of responsibility. The martyr (it seems) leaves behind the messy business of living in the complex world of human affairs. The author of the account of Perpetua’s martyrdom clearly wants the reader to be impressed – even shocked – by the nursing mother who would rather give up her child than compromise with the authorities. The mention of her breast-feeding ensures that we do not miss the point.79 Was not her first loyalty to the child as its mother? Is not the first duty of Thomas to his flock as their pastor? Bonhoeffer explores this question in his Ethics, notably in ‘History and Good [1]’ and ‘History and Good [2]’,80 where he argues that responsible action is that which is most in accordance with reality.81 That reality is ‘the reality of the God who became human’.82 This action, however, is neither an endorsement of the status quo nor a blessing of revolution. It begins with the action of God in Christ ‘reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5.18). 77 See Eberhard Jüngel, ‘On becoming truly human’, in Theological Essays I(i), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), pp. 216–40. Reinhard Hütter (2000: 31) makes the same equation. 78 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1998), p. 318. 79 ‘The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas’, VI, in Musurillo (2000: 115). 80 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 219–45, 246–98. 81 Ibid., p. 220. 82 Ibid., p. 223.

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Responsible action is grounded and circumscribed in Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer is clear that this is not merely an ideology which carries all before it. He writes: [T]he task is not to turn the world upside down but in a given place to do what, from the perspective of reality, is necessary objectively and to really carry it out83 – that is, to do what is possible within the human domain. God becoming human means that responsible actions likewise have to occur within that domain. The ultimate evaluation of these actions is only for God. Responsible action ‘must completely surrender to God both the judgment on this action and its consequences’.84 For his part, Thomas quite openly does this in the end, unable to do otherwise. The question is whether or not he could have acted responsibly in alliance with the Third Tempter’s faction. Bonhoeffer turns to the Sermon on the Mount, where he finds a powerful picture of suffering action: The Sermon on the Mount confronts those who are compelled to act within history with the event of the reconciliation of the world with God in Jesus Christ, thus placing them into genuine Christian responsibility.85 The Sermon on the Mount is not a manifesto of withdrawal from the historical-political sphere, contrary to the way in which it has been read for much of Christian history. Historical-political action and Christian action have been seen as opposites – statehood without self-assertion or force is thought impossible. ‘Turning the other cheek’ or ‘love your enemies’ are not plans for kings to rule by, as ordinarily conceived. Bonhoeffer also points out that even the most cynical uses of power in the West ‘always need a mask of Christian concepts in order to succeed’.86 The Third Tempter has certainly grasped this! He is asking Thomas to baptize his self-assertion, which is a recognition that force is not sufficient on its own to effect rule. Again, the response is Christologically framed: the action of God in taking human flesh and inserting himself into the world of real human beings shows in its very particularity that he is concerned for real human beings in the concreteness of their existence and not merely for the idea of them. The Sermon on the Mount is the voice of the incarnate love of God calling people to love one another and to a renunciation of everything that gets in the way of that possibility. This must include action in the sphere of the political, because God’s love for the world is not partitioned. To act in accordance with Christ is to recognize that

83 84 85 86

Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 240. The editors of the Works reference a comment from Baumgarten, who observes that this is a particularly English form of hypocrisy(!).

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‘the world is loved, judged and reconciled in Jesus Christ by God’,87 which is the true reality of things. ‘Responsibility’ (Verantwortung) is a key notion for Bonhoeffer, and includes the sense of ‘answering’ not perhaps captured in the English word. Bonhoeffer expounds responsibility in terms of Stellevertretung, or ‘vicarious representative action’. Jesus was the model of this type of action in becoming human, in dying as crucified and in the resurrection; and ‘all of life through him is destined to be vicarious representative action’.88 There is the suggestion of a resemblance here with what the Tempter invites Thomas to do: to act as a representative of his people, in their stead and for their good. However, Bonhoeffer differentiates Stellevertretung from that self-appointed representation by claiming that only the selfless person is able to act responsibly – as parent, as pastor, as citizen.89 Does Thomas act ‘responsibly’? Bonhoeffer’s own case and Thomas’s are not parallel; but Bonhoeffer’s theology of responsible action makes room for both cases to be witnessed as authentic testimony to Christ’s paradigmatic Stellevertretung. Knowing the complications and the risk of perdition, Thomas offers in his sermon his own resolve to submit only to the will of God. He renounces the pragmatism and hedonism of the tempters and the consequentialism of those who ‘argue by results . . . to settle if an act be good or bad’ (II.333); in sight of the swords of his killers he gives his life ‘[T]o the Law of God above the Law of Man’, in confidence that: We have only to conquer Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory. Now is the triumph of the Cross, now Open the door! (II.348-51) He acts – ‘conquers’ – but in a suffering way: as a self the martyr makes himself available for a vicariously representative action in conformity to the cross of Christ.

E

The responsibility of martyrdom

The Third Tempter offers Eliot’s Thomas an enticing and even reasonable possibility. In alliance with the barons lies the possibility of greater freedom and power for the Archbishop and his church. Tyranny and injustice – and patriotic duty – surely warrant an active response if balance is to be restored and good government achieved. Eliot presents his audience with a particular example of a situation repeated (with variations) many times in the history of the church: in which there is opportunity to overthrow unjust rule with a 87 Ibid., p. 264. 88 Ibid., p. 259. 89 See Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘“Responsible Living” or “Responsible Self”? Bonhoefferian reflections on a vexed moral notion’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 18 (2005), pp. 125–40.

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view to substituting for it a form of rule in which the church’s interests are more evidently protected and even promoted. Roger Scruton, with Eliot’s own political writings as an inspiration, argues that cultures are religious, and that England needs its Church to help explain itself to itself. The self that Thomas is invited to consider is the one who acts in harmony with unfolding events. In this lies his potential greatness: that he is able to assert himself while recognizing his own limitations as a creature under the inscrutable hand of fate. This self accepts as fundamental the ideal of his national identity, and orders other values to this one principle and the duties that it demands. The need for action for the good of the country trumps whatever ties of amity bind his private self. On the other hand, the martyr is open to the accusation that he is neglecting the very real needs of justice and good government in his own nation and missing a chance to forward the cause of the church in the world. He is prone to sentimental attachments and to religious fanaticism – both of which lead him to a serious imbalance in his evaluation of the circumstances and how to act flexibly and sensibly in response to them. He stands charged with favouring the spiritual above the material. However, in renouncing this option, the martyr is acting responsibly for the sake of others. As we saw with Thomas and with the early martyrs, they were in fact demonstrating loyalty to ruler and nation by showing them their own relative authority and significance under the divine rule which was their source. Love, as exemplified, taught and communicated by Christ, is capable of encompassing both the lapse (and even loss) of friendship and open hostility.90 This love, by which the Christian community is turned to one another and given its identity, also breaks down the human walls of ethnic and tribal identity. The martyr does not assert himself as a master of time and attempt to seize hold of it; neither does he yield to an impersonal fate. Rather – and this is a pattern that has emerged from each of the discussions thus far – he accepts time as being under the superintendence of divine providence. The character of this divine providence is grasped by the Christian martyr in Christological terms. Thomas’s refusal of the temptation is carried out in imitation of Christ’s own refusal of his temptations, just as it was for the early martyrs. The martyr identifies himself with Christ; or perhaps, more accurately, testifies to Christ’s identification of him. His choice for martyrdom – as he subordinates his action and resolve to the purposes and actions of God – is a choice to be designated as Christ’s, above all other possible ‘natural’ designations. Eliot’s Thomas (for example) reads his own murder as an analogy of Christ’s and as the provident design of God. In this way, it is he who more truly represents and takes responsibility for the people, rather than the baronial landowners. As a self he allows himself to be narrated transcendently – in God’s time – rather than grasping at his own version of himself in immediate time. The martyr as a self opens himself to the possibility of a divine action and a divine designation – the divine narration. As John 90 This is a riposte, too, to Rushdie’s accusation that martyrdom ‘perverts love’ (see Chapter 2).

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Milton wrote, imagining the words that Patience herself might say to him as he descended into blindness: ‘God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.’91

91 ‘Sonnet XVI, in John Milton, The Complete Poems (ed. John Leonard; London: Penguin, 1998), p. 84.

6

The fourth temptation: the temptation of honour and reward, and martyrdom as renunciation

A

Introduction

Thus far it has been established that Christian martyrdom follows a path away from the ordinary human calculations of safety and security; away from mere collusion with earthly power (though not away from recognizing its legitimate authority); and away from the type of assertive action that is driven by idealism and self-definition. Now we turn to the last of the temptations facing Thomas, and indeed so many martyrs. It is the one most troubling and hardest to renounce: it is most difficult to disentangle his own will-to-glory from the rightness of the course he is about to take. He is now called to imagine the verdict of history upon himself with pride – to narrate himself into triumph. Then, even more powerfully, he is asked to consider the heavenly glory that will be his if he makes a martyr of himself. As he says: The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. (I.667-8) This turning of his motive towards his own self-interest would corrupt his martyrdom. Thomas recognizes that it can scarce be avoided. But what alternative does he have? In this last phase, martyrdom itself comes as a temptation, because it results in recognition by others. Whereas Thomas had until now been enticed away from the path of martyrdom, now he is called to embrace it – only to find himself accused of unholy motives. The temptation is to turn the prospect of a violent and ugly death into a comprehensible act – to make it somehow possible to own or control the terms of one’s death via the discourse of martyrdom. It may then become the path to an understanding of the self – a self-narration, indeed. The prospect of earthly honour and/or heavenly rewards may well 131

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make it seem worth the physical pain of a martyr’s death. This ‘temptation to honour’ is one that has confronted the Christian martyrological tradition since the earliest times; and it is fair to say it has not always been resisted. Christian martyrdom involves a transformation of the notion of honour because it is a self-narration construed as an imitation of Christ himself. However, the idea of a heavenly reward as a substitute for earthly honour threatens to undo this transformation. While it is not clear that all the early theologians of martyrdom disentangled themselves from this problem, I shall show, with the help of Augustine, that there is a way forward: the Heavenly City is a very different object of longing; the heavenly rewards are given on a very different basis from earthly rewards. Furthermore, Christian martyrdom (like discipleship) turns out not to be a self-narration at all.

B

The fourth temptation

i. The power to bind The Second Tempter taunted Thomas by suggesting that ‘Your sin soars sunward, covering kings’ falcons’ (I.384). That is, it is merely his pride rather than some holy virtue that enables him to overcome this temptation to power (so the Tempter accuses). This suggestion now returns to Thomas in the guise of the Fourth Tempter, whose appearance is a surprise: after all, Christ himself was offered only three temptations. The Tempter introduces himself by this curious stanza:

As you do not know me, I do not need a name, And, as you know me, that is why I come. You know me, but have never seen my face. To meet before was never time or place. (I. 481-4) The paradox implies that this Tempter is so close to Thomas’s own heart that, though he is strangely unrecognizable, he is yet familiar. This underscores the grave danger presented here: the temptation he presents is not a turn back to the past (as were the first two temptations) but something that is a part of Archbishop Thomas’s present, and indeed his possible future. The Tempter himself describes the previous temptations as hooks baited with ‘morsels of the past’ (I.486), and uses his first speech (I.485-500) to diminish their power. Throughout, he reminds Thomas that he is only telling him what he already knows (e.g. I.525), underscoring the impression that the temptations come to Thomas as parts of himself that are already there. As such, the Tempter is more making an accusation than offering a temptation. He is exposing what appears to be a trap within the path of martyrdom which threatens to completely unmake it. His counsel is for Thomas to look at events from the perspective of the ‘end’ (I.501). The power Thomas wields as Archbishop of Canterbury surpasses that of any king or baron. Temporal power is uncertain and changeable; even Henry will realize this when he dies without son or empire, as the Tempter accurately prophesies (I.518). On the other hand, the ‘general grasp of spiritual

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power’ (I.507) that comes from the possession of the keys ‘of heaven and hell’ is of eternal significance. This spiritual power is, of course, the power to bind and to loose: to represent Christ himself in the declaration of forgiveness or in the condemnation to hell (from Mt. 16.19).1 The Tempter calls Thomas to exercise his spiritual power, to ‘wind / The thread of eternal life and death’ (I.521): to damn his enemies. ii. The martyr’s earthly glory The Tempter next enjoins Thomas to ‘think of glory after death’ (I.528). The sequence of kings continues on into the future, with the authority of each individual king not surviving his death. Before Thomas is the enticing thought that ‘[S]aint and Martyr rule from the tomb’ (I.532). The one who dies gloriously will live on in renown. Enemies will be forced to come ‘[C]reeping in penance’ (I.534) to the tomb of the fallen saint; pilgrims will venerate the richly decorated shrine; and miracles will be performed in his name. From the audience’s perspective, this aspect of the temptation has power because of the knowledge that this is, in fact, what happened in Archbishop Thomas’s case following his martyrdom in 1170.2 Quite rapidly his tomb became a shrine, and even King Henry was forced into a humiliating act of penance before it.3 Even the making of the play itself is part of this remembrance of Thomas as a spiritual hero. Thomas ought to imagine this, and to think of his enemies in ‘another place’ – that is, hell (I.540). According to this temptation, the martyr will exercise ‘rule’ from the grave in that, even though he will be dead, his glorious memory will exude a spiritual power to shape history. Thomas is asked here to consider the verdict of history falling in his favour. Dying in this righteous way will vindicate him, and, by contrast, will expose the injustices of his enemy. His own cult will arise; he will become, indeed, a kind of spiritual celebrity. Thomas, of course, has the roll-call of the church’s many martyrs to consider as an example – most famously the way in which the Acta Martyrum portrayed the deaths of the martyrs of the early church as moments of victory over their oppressors.4 The memory of those martyrs – the retelling of their stories –

1 Recalling the Second Tempter’s words (see Chapter 4). 2 Barlow (1986: 274) records: ‘A year or two after his [Thomas’s] death, Peter of Celle, abbot of St Remi at Rheims, in a letter to John of Salisbury . . . reminded his old friend of how, during the exile, they had often joked together about Thomas and groaned over the impossibility of ever being able to obtain a shrine big enough to contain him. And now God had made of them a laughing-stock, for now everyone in England as in France was flocking to his tomb – and he himself had just returned from a pilgrimage to Canterbury.’ 3 For a full description of Henry’s penitential visit to the shrine of St Thomas, see Barlow, Thomas Becket, pp. 269–70. 4 It is worth noting that, for an English-speaking audience, the influence of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the making of martyrology is inestimable. Foxe not only recorded the martyrdoms of the Reformation, but placed them in a tradition continuous with those of the early church. (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 345–6.)

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was, by all accounts, instrumental in the rise of Christianity.5 However, the Tempter changes tack entirely in his next speech, undoing his own words (I.542-60). Rather than fame and renown, Thomas should think on the turning wheel of history: ‘that nothing lasts, but the wheel turns’ (I.547). There may indeed be a period of veneration – but there will be a time when the glory has faded and when the claims for miracles dissipate. ‘And men shall only do their best to forget you’ (I.554). Even beyond this comes a time of rather cynical disinterest, when the possibility of sanctity has been entirely disavowed. This will be a time When men shall declare that there was no mystery About this man who played a certain part in history. (I.559-60) The audience again knows more than Thomas here: the Reformation period with its attack on saints’ shrines and pilgrimages was followed by the period of modern dispassion, in which Thomas has become a figure of mere historical curiosity. Through the Fourth Tempter Eliot speaks to the audience of their own cynicism. They are likely to have heard the talk of miracles and pilgrimages as naïve and superstitious. For the modern audience, hagiography is extremely problematic because it shows too little disinterest and too little interest in the ‘historical fact’ (I.558). iii. No enduring crown? Thomas recognizes that the period of glorious sainthood, of ‘ruling from the tomb’, will be followed by a more distant period of forgetfulness and indifference. The despair of this second speech shatters the enticing prospect of the first. Thomas asks: ‘Is there no enduring crown to be won?’ (I.562). The Tempter’s response is in the end the really sharp temptation for Thomas, and trumps the other, temporal temptations. It is the temptation to pursue heavenly glory for its own sake:

Seek the way of martyrdom, make yourself the lowest On earth, to be high in heaven (I.569-70). Compared with this, as Thomas well knows, earthly glory and pride are nothing. This richness and grandeur are sublime. However, in seizing at this path Thomas is falling prey to pride – which is (in the Augustinian tradition at least) the greatest of sins. He would be his own judge: proclaiming himself saint and martyr and so passing a verdict that only falls to God himself to give. The motivation for debasing himself on earth is the exaltation he receives as a result in heaven. The Tempter also pictures Thomas having a vision of his persecutors not merely as they do penance, but in ‘timeless torment, / [P]arched passion, beyond expiation’ (I.571-2).

5 Tertullian’s famous comment was: ‘The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is the seed’ (‘Apology’, L, in Tertullian, The Writings of Tertullianus, p. 139).

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Thomas recognizes that these are his deepest longings.6 But what is the price of this temptation? The Tempter replies: I offer what you desire. I ask What you have to give. Is it too much For such a vision of eternal grandeur? (I.578-80) This is diabolical reasoning: what Thomas wants is the glory of sainthood; what Thomas has to give is himself. And yet the payment of the price undoes the possibility of receiving the reward. This is what Thomas can finally see: ‘[Y]ou only offer / Dreams to damnation’ (I.582-3). In fact, the pride of the would-be saint in desiring the status and prestige of sainthood is fatal to the soul. Grasping at the heavenly reward means only its loss. What appears to be an act of humility in earthly terms may still in fact be a self-justification. Thomas is left with a despairing question: Can I neither act nor suffer Without perdition? (I.589-90) Can the would-be martyr at the moment of decision ever be free from this sinful pride – which means in the end the undoing of the meaning of the decision itself? Thomas is caught in a dilemma – accused, rather than tempted. If he refuses the Second and Third Tempters and instead embraces martyrdom, is he not just trading the pride of earthly power for another – even more sinful – form of pride? And yet, isn’t he called by God to precisely this action? Is this exactly what God requires of him? Can he renounce the first three temptations without embracing the fourth? Under the Fourth Tempter’s reasoning, God himself turns out to be demonic because he calls on men and women to do what he then refuses to reward on the grounds of pride. There is no enduring crown to be won. As if to underline the irony of the situation, the Tempter then proceeds to speak Thomas’s own opening speech back to him (‘[Y]ou know and do not know . . .’ I.591ff).

C

The ethics of honour and the theology of heavenly rewards

i. Honour Thomas admits that he has thought of ‘ruling from the tomb’, imagining the parades of pilgrims at his shrine and the posthumous glory of his name. The Tempter exposes to him his own desire for honour and renown. If martyrdom is merely a Christianized form of the ethics of honour, then it is problematic – something that Thomas can himself see. 6 Eliot scholar Craig Raine puts it this way: ‘The Fourth Tempter voices the temptation buried so deep inside Becket that he is initially unprepared, surprised, to discover that spiritual pride is a factor in his willingness to embrace martyrdom’ (Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot, Lives and Legacies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 117).

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The ‘honour ethic’ is characterized, in the first place, by its vicariousness. It is an ethic which deems some forms of life – that of the warrior, for example – as more praiseworthy than ordinary ways of living. Nevertheless, the honoured hero serves as a representative example of the kind of virtues that a community wants to celebrate. This ‘higher’ life is associated with glory and fame because the honourable person, having taken some risk with the things ordinary people deem precious, succeeds with skill and resolve. Traditionally ‘masculine’ virtues are those that are praised: strength, endurance, mastery. Honour involves looking and being looked at as a self: reputation, in other words.7 Secondly, honour emphasizes the masculinized world of military duty and honour. It is therefore bound closely to suffering and death. The notion of ‘good death’ as a means of preserving honour has roots in the Classical tradition, the context in which Christian martyrdom first emerged. Rome revelled in her glorious defeats as much as in her triumphs. A famous example is recorded by Lucan in his epic Pharsalia: the small military band led by Volteius, finding themselves surrounded, choose to commit suicide rather than face death at the hands of the enemy. Volteius intones: No man’s life is short Who can take thought for death, nor is your fame Less than a conqueror’s, if with breast advanced Ye meet your destined doom. None know how long The life that waits them. Summon your own fate, And equal is your praise, whether the hand Quench the last flicker of departing light, Or shear the hope of years.8 Volteius and his soldiers choose noble suicide as a way of rescuing dignity from defeat. This kind of death means that they will live on in glorious memory rather than be forgotten, which is what Lucan’s poem itself achieves.9 Asserting their own fate – advancing the breast to the unsheathed sword – ensures their fame. Thirdly, then, that which is honourable is that action which is an exercise of volition. In the terms of the Classical honour code the exercise of volition was fundamental. The suicide of Volteius and his men was an act of will when none seemed available. The voluntary death preserved the soldiers’ honour because by it they demonstrated that they were not the hapless victims of their enemies. It was a conspicuous act of sacrifice of life which restored honour where it had been on the point of being lost, and even ensured ongoing renown.10 7 Julian Roberts, ‘Honour’ in The Routledge Encylopedia of Philosophy, www.rep. routledge.com/article/L036 (accessed 1 May 2006). 8 Lucan, The Pharsalia of Lucan (trans. Edward Ridley; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 2nd edn, 1905), IV.535–42, p. 108. 9 Carole Straw, ‘A very special death: Christian martyrdom in its classical context’, in Margaret Cormack (ed.), Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 39–57. 10 Carlin Barton, ‘Honor and sacredness in the Roman and Christian worlds’, in Margaret Cormack (ed.), Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion

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Critics of the honour ethic have a very ancient heritage indeed: Plato himself posited the citizen’s reason above the military value of honour as the ground for the highest kind of life.11 The Stoics, too, spoke strongly against the desire for honour because they held that it put value in mere appearance. Since the Enlightenment, honour has largely been a suppressed discourse because it does not fit well either with the romantic ethic of personal authenticity or with the rationalist/utilitarian appeal to ‘reason’.12 That is, it would be allowing others’ opinions too much influence to speak of the self in terms of what is honourable. What is more, it is viewed as being undemocratic. It is an ethic of kings in an age of parliaments. For his part, Charles Taylor argues that the modern notion of ‘dignity’ ought to replace ‘honour’ in contemporary democratic society. He argues that honour differs from dignity in that honour is what only exceptional men achieve, whereas dignity can be ascribed to all. It is the importance of the assertion of the will that the two hold in common.13 Recognition is, for Taylor, absolutely vital and inescapable as a necessary constituent of identity (as we have seen – Chapter 2); and a democratic society has no business recognizing some of its citizens more than others, which is what the honour ethic at least seems to promote. Honour does have its contemporary advocates, such as Sharon Krause and Michael Walzer. Walzer has argued that honour is not incompatible at all with a modern liberal democratic society, especially if it is viewed as a quality of character. In his account of honour, it would seem not corrosive of equal recognition at all if some (albeit fixed) concept of desert for honourable behaviour were to be held within a democratic society. In particular, these standards could relate to particular types of activity, such as voluntary organizations – vocational and professional associations, political parties, advocacy groups, religious groups and even families. These groups are vital sources of shared identity and by dint of their voluntary nature allow a domain appropriate for a code of honour. They are resources for inspiring honour: for motivating virtuous activity from which the whole community and indeed the political order benefits.14 As Krause writes:

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 23–38. 11 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 20. Aristotle for his part saw honour as the goal and completion of the virtuous life: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1115b, p. 49. 12 Rousseau, as Taylor (1994: 49) explains, campaigned against honour because of its ‘striving after preferences, hence division, hence real other-dependence, and therefore the loss of the voice of nature, and consequently corruption, the forgetting of boundaries, and [ironically!] effeminacy’. Honour compromises the natural self-sufficiency of the individual. 13 Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, pp. 46–7; Taylor, ‘The politics of recognition’, pp. 45–51. 14 Sharon Krause, ‘The politics of distinction and disobedience: Honor and the defense of liberty in Montesquieu’, Polity, 31(3) (1999), p. 469; and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Robertson, 1983). See also A. A. M. Kinneging, Aristocracy, Antiquity, & History: Classicism in Political Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997), p. 319. Kinneging argues that there is an evident continuity between the ancient and modern ideals of honour.

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The power of honour lies in the fact that it is a mixed motive. It builds on the particular attachments and private desires that make us who we are and move us to act. It channels and directs personal ambitions, rather than suppressing them in the name of a comprehensive common good or a universal standpoint. Nor does it require the state to cultivate character, or submerge diverse identities into a homogeneous collective one.15 In other words, like capitalism, honour makes a virtue out of self-interest. Its advantage is chiefly practical, in that it appeals to what human beings are actually already like rather than what it imagines that they might become. Whatever democratic ideals a society expresses, it will find it hard to do without some concept of honour because of the way in which human communities and individuals cling so powerfully to it. It is its appeal to natural self-interest and ambition that makes honour deeply problematic in Christian terms. If this ‘Walzer–Krause’ defence of honour reveals that honour is built upon the human need to be exalted and distinguished, then Christians, who are enjoined to ‘in humility consider others more highly than yourselves’ (th/| tapeinofrosu,nh| avllh,louj h`gou,menoi u`pere,contaj e`autw/n (Phil. 2.3)), can hardly endorse it as a personal aim. One might point also to the condemnation of evriqei/ai (‘selfish ambition’) in two of the most significant passages of paraenesis in the NT, Gal. 5.14 and Jas 3.14-16. Towards God, and within the new community of the Spirit, Christians are to be marked by their avoidance of the élitist and meritocratic tendencies that attend the honour ethic. If anything, it is the less honourable (avtimo,tera) parts of the body that are treated with greater honour (timh.n perissote,ran) (1 Cor. 12.23). Yet – and this is where the power of this accusation against the martyr has its force – it is certainly the case that there has been a long history of offering baptism to the ethics of honour. Does not the NT itself offer the suggestion that some individuals are worthy of particular honour? Does not Paul command ‘honour to whom honour is due’ in Rom. 13.7? Within the church itself, does not 1 Tim. 5.17 describe the elders as deserving of a diplh/j timh/j (‘double honour’)? The early Christian martyrologies conspicuously utilize the vocabulary of honour. They are full of military imagery: in the arena, the martyrs become soldiers of Christ, fighting a battle against the enemy, and so on.16 The voluntaristic aspect is also emphasized: it is important to the martyrologists to show that the martyr chooses to die for Christ. The honour of the martyr is intelligible in the pagan context as a demonstration of free volition. A fine example is the celebrated ‘Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas’, which tells of the martyrdoms of the young mother and recent convert Vibia Perpetua and her companions in Carthage. The text purports to include a record of Perpetua’s visions from her own hand. In one of these visions she sees herself ‘changed into a man’17 and prepared for gladiatorial combat with a mysterious Egyptian 15 Krause, ‘The politics of distinction and disobedience’, p. 499. 16 They have an ample store of military imagery applied in this way in the NT, especially in the book of Revelation. 17 ‘The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas’, X, in Musurillo (2000: 119).

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opponent whom she finally understands to be the Devil himself. The imagery of the vision and the language of ‘fighting’ activate the discourse of military honour. When at the gate of the arena the group are being forced to don pagan garments, Perpetua resists, saying: we came to this issue of our own free will [Latin, sponte], that our liberty might not be violated; therefore we pledged our lives, that we might do no such thing: this was our pact with you.18 Perpetua understands the necessity of the martyrs demonstrating to all the freedom of their choice to die. Finally, as she faces her male opponent in the arena, the narrator records that she herself guided to her throat the wavering hand of the young untried gladiator. Perhaps, so great a woman, who was feared by the unclean spirit, could not otherwise be slain except as she willed.19 Perpetua, like a defeated gladiator attempting to regain his honour through offering up his throat, proves herself more manful than her executioner. She has to show him – the professional killer – how to kill her. As in other martyr narratives, the death that the persecutors have planned for the martyrs goes embarrassingly awry. Just as noble suicide takes the initiative out of the hands of the enemy by an exercise of will, the martyr only dies because he or she finally wills it so.20 Like a gladiator, Perpetua’s confrontation with the ignominy of public death is transformed into a story of glory and honour by her resolute attitude. For Christian theologians of the pre-Constantinian period there was apologetic value in a favourable comparison of the Christian martyrs to similar figures of Classical legend and history. Though the point was to show the superiority of the Christian examples, the rhetoric had power on account of the similar field of discourse that could be used to describe both the honourable pagan and honourable Christian death. Tertullian, Clement, Origen and Augustine were happy to acknowledge pagan examples of ‘good death’ in their respective discussions of Christian martyrdom. Clement, who is positively disposed towards the pagan philosophers, draws on references from Heraclitus and Plato in which the noble sacrifice of pagan warriors is lauded.21 Furthermore, he lists a number of dramatic examples of pagan rectitude in the face of pain.22 For Clement, ‘self-control is common to all human beings who have made choice of it’.23 Origen acknowledges that there are many who have

18 19 20 21

Ibid., XVIII, p. 127. Ibid.,, XXI, p. 131. Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, I, p. 41. Clement of Alexandria, ‘Stromateis’, IV.7, in A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, The Fathers of the 2nd Century (ed. Arthur Cleveland; The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1887b), pp. 416–17. 22 Ibid., IV.8, p. 419. 23 Ibid., p. 420.

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fought and died for temperance, fortitude, prudence and even justice. Further, he asks, ‘[W]hat dead person could be more deserving of praise than he who of his own choice elected to die for his religion?’24 Even Tertullian, most hostile of the three to pagan thinking, could cite a long list of remarkable pagan deaths in urging Christian martyrs to the same.25 Augustine cites the self-sacrificial deeds of many noble heroes, while arguing that Christian martyrs surpassed them in virtue and number.26 The language of honour and glory, together with the insistence on the free willing of the martyr in his or her death, was definitely a part of early martyrological practice. Christian martyrdoms were construed as honourable deaths comparable to the deaths of the great military heroes of Greece and Rome. The martyrs, no less than the pagan heroes, showed themselves volitionally unhampered by their persecutors. There is, then, apparently a deep ambivalence at the heart of the Christian description of the good: on the one hand, pride and honour are condemned; on the other, they are inevitably embraced and celebrated. In fact, martyrdom itself becomes part of the problem because it is so heroic, and recorded by martyrologists in such heroic terms. At best this is a tension. On a more harsh reading, this becomes a deep moral and personal incoherence – which is Thomas’s experience at this point – encouraging in disciples the very thing that, it appears, will undermine them to the core. ii. Heavenly rewards On the other hand: if he is to leave aside notions of honour in an earthly sense, Thomas is reminded of the heavenly reward that is his to look forward to if he proceeds boldly to a martyr’s death: more than adequate compensation for the momentary afflictions he is about to undergo. The notion of a heavenly reward for the martyr would seem to be necessary part of any theology of martyrdom: it represents a promise of divine vindication, and offers a motive for such apparently counter-intuitive action. a. EXCURSUS: Martyrdom in Islam and heavenly rewards It is certainly worth noting – given the inter-religious context of contemporary discussions of martyrdom – the very strong emphasis on heavenly rewards and honour in the Islamic construal of martyrdom.27 The classic Qur’anic text associated with the martyr’s reward is surah 3.169–70: ‘And do not think of those who have been killed in the way of Allah as dead; they are rather living with their Lord, well-provided for. Rejoicing in what their Lord has given them of His bounty, and they rejoice for those who stayed behind and did not join them, knowing that they have nothing to fear and that they shall not grieve.’28 Though the blessings are not described here, the life promised

24 Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, XX, p. 56. 25 ‘To the martyrs’, IV, in Tertullian, The Writings of Tertullianus, p. 4. For Tertullian’s use of military imagery see (for example) his ‘Apology’, L, ibid., p. 139. 26 Augustine, City of God, V.18, p. 212. 27 The following comments are offered with due reserve by this author in recognition of the complexity and diversity of Islamic theology and tradition. 28 Quoted in David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam (Themes in Islamic History; Cambridge:

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to the martyr, or to the one killed in jihad, is presented not to urge further acts of martyrdom but rather to comfort the living. In the Qur’an itself, there is no sense in which the martyr is singled out for special heavenly treatment. However, in the traditional writings, the hadith, the situation is completely transformed. The figure of the martyr becomes one who is carefully described as set apart from the common mass of Muslims. The rewards are described in much greater detail. What David Cook describes as ‘probably the most frequently cited tradition listing these rewards’29 describes the food and drink of paradise reserved for the martyrs in the presence of Allah. In particular, there is a strong sexual theme associated with martyrdom. Much controversy surrounds this material of course, but the sexual imagery is undoubtedly present. Cook writes: ‘[T]he rewards for the martyr described by the Muslim jihad literature are very lurid . . . no one who reads the jihad and martyrdom literature can avoid the frequent and graphic descriptions of the sexual delights of paradise. Although it is impossible to be certain, the fact that this material is so well attested and descriptive suggests that along with the spiritual aspects of being a martyr, there was a strong sexual pull as well.’30 It becomes more the case in the traditional material that these rewards are used more to entice other Muslims to follow the example of the martyrs so rewarded in addition to offering comfort for those who remain. The promise of heavenly reward has long been used as a consolation for the faithful in the Christian tradition. For example, in the evidently popular though non-canonical Apocalypse of Peter, the sumptuousness of heaven as a place in which those who were persecuted dwell with Moses, Elias and all the company of the saints contrasts with the fate of their persecutors, who are led to the tortures of hell.31 In Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom, the author encourages young Ambrose and Protoctetus by reminding them of the promises of heavenly reward in the NT. In this beautifully crafted passage, he manages to cite nearly all the relevant texts from the Pauline epistles: if strangers to the language of the holy Scriptures should hold us in contempt or disparage us as either impious or fools, let us remember that the ‘hope upon hope’ to be given us in ‘yet a little while’ will be given ‘by the contempt of lips, through another tongue’. And who would not welcome ‘affliction upon affliction’ that he might immediately also welcome ‘hope upon hope’? He will consider with Paul ‘that the sufferings of this present time’ with which, as it were, we purchase blessedness ‘are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us’ from God (Rom. 8.18). The truth of this judgment is apparent because ‘this light momentary affliction’ (2 Cor. 4.17) both is and is said to be ‘light’ for those not burdened by present hardships, since it is quite outweighed by the greater and heavier ‘weight of glory’ it is ‘preparing for us’ (2 Cor. 4.17). Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 31. 29 Ibid., p. 37. 30 Ibid. 31 See Michael P. Jensen, ‘The genesis of hell: Eternal torment in the consciousness of early Christianity’, Reformed Theological Review, 65(3) (2006), pp. 132–48.

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It is the imbalance in favour of the promised heavenly reward that makes the present strife bearable. Further, Origen hints that the endurance of these trials in fact earns the bestowal of God’s generous gifts: This will happen if, when our persecutors wish to weigh down our souls, as it were, we turn our governing mind from our sufferings and look not at the present sufferings but at the prizes kept for athletes who by their endurance of these tests compete according the rules in Christ by the grace of God (cf. 2 Tim. 2.5). He multiplies His benefits and gives as much beyond what the toils of the contestant deserve as it is right for Him to give as the God who does not quibble about trifles and who in His munificence knows how to increase His gifts to those who have demonstrated they love Him with all their soul by despising so far as they are able their earthen vessel.32 Origen also dwells on those words of Jesus which promise heavenly rewards in exchange for earthly renunciations: Mt. 5.10-12, for example, and the promise of a hundredfold return (Mt. 19.27-9). As in the Islamic texts, the beauty of the rhetoric has a mimetic role – it is meant to be an enticement to think on the heavenly reward amidst the troubles of this life. What begins as a word of comfort to those who are under the pressure of persecution and possible death, or to those who have lost someone in the arena, becomes, under less pressured conditions, not merely an encouragement to endure but a motivation to seek out a martyr’s death in order somehow to guarantee God’s approval. If the promise of vindication and reward comes so surely to those who find themselves under trial, then it would follow that one ought to seek out trials, or even perhaps provoke them if necessary. This was, in fact, exactly what happened in the first centuries of the Christian era, and it was a problem that Augustine encountered (as we have seen – Chapter 5). Yet, to be fair, this is only the consequence of the notion of heavenly rewards gone awry. The notion of heavenly rewards – as we have seen, deeply embedded in the Christian Scriptures and the subsequent tradition – is problematic not just because of its problematic effects. In the first place, if renunciation of life and its pleasures and comforts is motivated by expectation that this very act of renunciation will bring as a certainty eternal life and heavenly bliss, is it not then the case that the act is really a form of self-interest? And further, is it not affirming the paradigm of rewards that it seems at first to reject? Secondly, we can see here that this desire for a heavenly prize can certainly mean that the martyr dies in a way which denies or diminishes the goodness of the created order – including the other people in it. This was certainly a feature of Origen’s construal of martyrdom. It is hard to see how martyrdom is a genuinely loving act in this case. A third difficulty is perhaps even more serious: the one who wills for himself to become a bloody martyr becomes his own judge; or, at least, attempts to force God’s hand, to trigger divine approval as an automatic right. The one who designates himself

32 Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, pp. 41–2.

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‘martyr’ is presumably conscious of imitating Christ in his death; and yet this martyr presumes that his own death secures the merit, at least for himself, that only Christ’s death secures for any human person. All three of these problems are, at base, evidence for the accusation levelled against martyrs of all faiths that the apparent denial of the self is really a complete fabrication. This applies to the having of martyrs too: the church that designates and then celebrates martyrs is with not much subtlety proclaiming its own blessedness, its own God-favouredness above the blessedness of others, even of other churches. It is not incidental that the cult of the martyrs sprang up in the fourth and fifth centuries, as the various sees of the empire jockeyed for position. The keeping of the relics of the martyrs and the veneration of their tombs and shrines threatened also to subvert the power of their witness to the work of Christ. Once more, we see here the temptation of supplanting the divine judgement. In sum: we can see on the one hand that honour (in an earthly sense), despite its defenders, is not for Christians an acceptable way to motivate an individual to act virtuously for the benefit of others. On the other hand, if Thomas shuns all earthly honour and pursues instead the heavenly reward – as he certainly is invited to do by a strand within the Christian tradition – he risks calling down on himself the charge of spiritual self-interest. Thomas is caught, unable to self-justify. In what follows, I shall address first the matter of earthly honour (in Honour and fame and the verdict of history) before turning to the problem of heavenly rewards (in The self-proclaimed martyr: forcing God’s hand).

D

Honour, glory and martyrdom

i. Honour and fame and the verdict of history Does anything distinguish the Christian use of the honour ethic from its pagan ancestor? Could Eliot’s Archbishop Thomas fittingly give in to this temptation-to-glory given the prominence of the honour ethic in the early theology of martyrdom? Is martyrdom not, in fact, a choice for honour and glory and an exercise of the will in the teeth of violent opposition? The Acta Martyrum and the first theologians of martyrdom in fact used the honour ethic to demonstrate that the idea of honour had been transformed. Martyrdom involves a reconstrual of the honour ethic in three important ways: volition is described in terms of the obedience of the will; the language of honour is directed to God; and the resurrection of the body replaces the memorialization of the dead. First, the will of the martyr, though free, is an obedient and dutiful will. Despite all the similarities drawn with honourable pagan death, suicide was never given as an option for the Christian martyr nor glorified by martyrologists.33 In addition, despite the fact that there were clearly many Christians willing to seek or even provoke martyrdom, this ‘voluntary’ martyrdom was condemned successively by (among others) Clement, Origen, Lactantius, 33 For example, see Augustine’s extended discussion of suicide in Augustine, City of God, I.17-27, pp. 27–39.

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Cyprian and the Council of Elvira.34 Clearly, in the Christian construal of ‘good death’, the freedom of the will was not an absolute consideration. The Christian was not given a free hand against herself.35 That is, the martyr does exercise her will in isolation, but she does so in free obedience to the will of God. Polycarp’s martyrologist wrote: Blessed and noble are all martyrdoms that happen according to the will of God. For we should act with discretion leaving the power over all events to God.36 Polycarp displays an almost paradigmatic attitude in this comment. He is neither fatalistically resigned to his violent death nor hopelessly optimistic about avoiding it. He can ‘act with discretion’ by exercising his own judgement without claiming a mastery of events that is only a divine property. The narrative describes him fleeing to avoid capture more than once, but then accepting his trial, and martyrdom when it comes. What matters to him is the ultimacy of the divine power in contrast to the powers of Caesar and the Evil One. The same attitude to willing can be seen in Perpetua’s martyrdom: the particularly emotive aspects of her story – including the touching references to her nursing her baby and her father’s pleas to her to think of her life – give emphasis to her having to overcome in her choosing for martyrdom these ‘natural’ calls on her life in the name of her new identity. She says to her pagan father: Do you see this vessel for instance lying here, waterpot or whatever it may be? . . . Can it be called by any other name that what it is? . . . So also I cannot call myself anything else than what I am, a Christian.37

34 ‘The heads of the churches, sensibly enough, forbade voluntary martyrdom again and again, and were inclined to refuse these zealots the very name martyr’ (G. E. M. de Sainte Croix, ‘Why were the early Christians persecuted?’, Past and Present, 26 (1963), pp. 21–2). De Sainte Croix is convinced that voluntary martyrdoms were an extensive phenomenon. Agreeing with the extent of voluntary martyrdom, Paul Middleton has more recently argued that this was not its deviant form. Rather, what he calls ‘radical’ martyrdom was a vigorous enactment of Christian discipleship widespread in the period up to the Decian persecution, and only suppressed by the authorities at a later date. (Paul Middleton, Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Conflict in Early Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2006).) This raises the question of whether an authoritative theological judgement could be made as to the validity of such actions by Christian leaders. Apparently, the ‘heads of the churches’ thought it was behaviour worth rebuking as inauthentically Christian. 35 Augustine took great pains to argue that there was not to be an exception for those women who were raped and subsequently took their own lives in order to prove their virtue (following the example of the pagan heroine Lucretia). He makes a strong case against this option as fundamentally unchristian: the body cannot be held responsible for giving consent without the will. Killing the innocent is always wrong, even when it is self-murder that is in view. (Augustine, City of God, I.19, 20, pp. 28–9.) 36 ‘The martyrdom of Polycarp’, II, in Musurillo (2000: 3). 37 ‘The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas’, III, in Musurillo (2000: 109).

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Her choice is made freely, but it is still inescapable because it is true to her Christian self. Her will is bound by her baptismal oath.38 For the pagan, honour came through free and active exercise of self-assertion. For the Christian, though the language of soldierly action was used, the gestures that this described were entirely of a different order. No swords were taken up, not even against the self. Suicide was not a Christian option because the nature of the action itself was an assertion of self over against the enemy. Martyrdom was different: where the noble soldier was responding to remorseless fate, the Christian was entrusting him- or herself to the benevolent providence of God himself. Straw calls this a ‘realignment of agency’:39 the martyr does not seize his own will back from fate, but rather offers his will to God’s greater purpose and power. They believe that even the blows of their persecutors did not come down on their backs outside the providence of God. The martyr’s model in this exercise of will (as we saw in Chapter 5) was the Christ of Gethsemane who aligned his will to the will of his Father.40 Not that the disciple simply repeats Christ’s laying down of his will and goes forward to her own death; the Christian is not called merely to a discrete repetition of Christ’s act, but to stand with Christ in his act. This was a scene in which the disgrace of the disciples in first falling asleep and then leaving Jesus to die alone was remembered alongside the honourable determination of Jesus to face his death. As readers of the gospels, martyrs have the opportunity now to remember Jesus’s injunction to ‘keep watch41 and pray’ (grhgorei/te kai. proseu,cesqe (Mt. 26.41)).42 In other passages, Matthew presents grhgorei/te in an eschatological context: it is the wise virgins who are vigilant, awaiting the appearance of the bridegroom, for example (Mt. 25.1ff). But here in the garden, the call to watchfulness includes not only readiness for the coming of the bridegroom, but preparedness to stand alongside Christ in his suffering.43 Watching may take the form of suffering and death. This is something that resembles what it is to, as Bonhoeffer put it, . . . throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, 38 This, too, is Origen’s logic: ‘This we must know also that we have received the so-called covenants from God in virtue of agreements we made when we accepted the Christian way of life. Amongst these agreements which we made with God was the observance of the entire pattern of living set out in the Gospel’ (Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, XII, p. 49). 39 Straw, ‘A very special death’, p. 42. 40 The same laying down of the will is noted by Brad S. Gregory, a historian of the martyrs of a different era: ‘[T]he voluntary nature of martyrdom was profoundly paradoxical: the martyr’s agency depended upon relinquishing control, their strength upon a naked admission of their utter impotence and total dependence on God’ (Gregory, 1999: 132). 41 Or perhaps ‘stay awake’. 42 Of Perpetua and her friends it was written that they rejoiced that they had won ‘some share in the sufferings of their Lord’ (‘The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas’, XVII, in Musurillo (2000: 125)). 43 Stockton makes the same observation regarding Mark’s version. See Ian Stockton, ‘Advent and Gethsemane: Mark’s call to watch’, New Blackfriars, 84(994) (2003), pp. 571–6 (574).

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not our own sufferings but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian.44 What Bonhoeffer saw is that the disciples of Jesus are not called to will a separate suffering and dying of their own. Rather, they are only to keep watch with Christ, and so perhaps to share in his death. Secondly: as a corollary of the obedient will, it becomes clear that, though the language of honour is used in speaking of martyrs, it is used in terms of honouring and glorifying God. The martyr seeks not to preserve her own honour, but to be seen as honouring the God to whom she is bound. Such honour as she does accrue is not sought for its own sake but is caught as an overspill from the glory given to God in heaven by her death.45 The honour that the martyr receives is not in an exercise of what free will remains, but in joining her will to the will of God, and so praising and honouring God himself. The reversal of the honour/shame dynamic is generated from the passion narratives and the manner in which they are read and enacted in the lives of the apostles, especially Paul. Mark’s account of the passion of Jesus, for example, emphasizes in detail the shameful aspects of the story (rather than the physical suffering, for example). So even the vile Barabbas is preferred by the crowd to Jesus (Mk 15.6-15). The soldiers are seen mocking Jesus and with heavy sarcasm proclaiming him ‘King of the Jews’ (Mk 15.16-20). They pay him mock homage and give him the pretend trappings of royalty. As Jesus hangs from the cross under the sign ~O basileu.j tw/n VIoudai,wn, he is further subject to the scoffing of the two robbers and of the religious leaders (Mk 15.25-30). Jesus dies in apparent disgrace. The point of view of the narrator, of course, is that these attempts to subject Jesus to shame result in him being honoured: the proclamation ‘[T]he King of the Jews’ is, for Mark, ironically true. This disgrace is in fact a scene of honour. Reading Jesus’s crucifixion in this way is significant especially for Paul in his Corinthian correspondence because he confronts there a Christianity tempted to a form of spiritual triumphalism. He first emphasizes the shameful aspects of the cross in contrast to the more glamorous alternatives being offered the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1-2). For him, ‘boasting’ (to. kau,chma) is only possible if it is not a self-glorification (~O kaucw,menoj evn kuri,w| kauca,sqw (1 Cor. 1.31)). His own ministry takes the same pattern, as he sees it: his theme 44 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge; London: SCM Press, 1999), p. 370. 45 Jürgen Moltmann describes the glorification of God not merely in terms of the self-glorification of a narcissistic deity, or as the result (in Hegelian terms) of his self-realization through the process of history, but more as the overspill [my term] of his divine life into the creation. The language of to. plh,rwma (‘the fullness’) of God, in Jn 1.16, Eph. 3.19 and elsewhere reflects this idea, as does the remarkable promise of God being pa,nta evn pa/sin (‘all in all’) in 1 Cor. 15.28. As Moltmann puts it, ‘The fullness of God is the rapturous fullness of the divine life; a life that communicates itself with inexhaustible creativity . . . The fullness of God is radiant light, light reflected in the thousand brilliant colours of created things’ (Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (London: SCM Press, 1996) p. 336).

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is that his own role is merely as a ‘servant of Christ’ and that he ought to be regarded as such (see 1 Cor. 4.1). That is not to say that he eschews all the authority and respect that comes with this designation; it is rather that whatever significance he does have is not self-originated or self-declared, and therefore not grounds for his own boasting. So, in 1 Cor. 4.1-21, he dramatizes the situation by casting the apostolic band as a group of prisoners condemned to die in the arena, with the whole universe looking on at the spectacle (qe,atron). They are the ‘world’s refuse’ (pa,ntwn peri,yhma e[wj a;rti (1 Cor. 4.13)) and utterly contemptible. He heaps contempt on his own head, it seems, in order to stress the honour/shame reversal that lies at the heart of his theology of the cross. Paul’s reversal depends on a reversal of the ordinary order of things rooted in the cross of Jesus. The significance of this pattern for Paul is evidenced by his return to it in 2 Cor. 6.4-10. Paul’s concern is that in pursuit of his own honour he may in fact be deflecting honour due to God alone. In fact, God’s choice of the lowly things and the despised things was precisely in order to increase his own glory, in which the lowly and despised then share. Ignatius of Antioch was pursuing just this line of thought – with a little (characteristic) overstatement – when he wrote to the Romans: ‘[I] shall be a convincing Christian only when the world sees me no more.’46 The martyr’s path is glorious only because it is an imitation of the Christ who redeemed humanity. But at least some of the early martyrologists are at pains to show that the honour does not detract from Christ’s glorification: on the contrary, it exalts him all the more. The martyrs of Vienne and Lyons were described as imitating and emulating Christ so completely that Though they had reached such a height of glory and had borne witness not once nor twice but often, and had been brought back alive from the beasts bearing about them burns and weals and wounds, they neither proclaimed themselves to be martyrs, nor suffered us to address them by that name, but, if ever any one of us by letter or by word of mouth called them martyrs, they rebuked him sharply. For they gladly yielded the title of Martyr to Christ.47 The title ‘Martyr’ itself is held only as it derives from the glorious first martyr. In this very deflection of praise to Christ the narrator beholds their ‘nobleness’.48 In a passage from De Civitate Dei, Augustine manages to interweave both a surprisingly positive appreciation of the great deeds of the Roman heroes on behalf of their earthly city and a demonstration of the superiority of Christian

46 Ignatius of Antioch, ‘Epistle to the Romans’, III.ii, in Roberts and Donaldson, The Apostolic Fathers, p. 210–11. We should also not forget Jesus’s critique of public good works in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). He was highly critical of the performance of almsgiving and religious fervour in the public eye because of the corrupting effect this had on the intentions of the performer. A great public display of virtue and religious devotion was, on the contrary, probably an indication of some level of insincerity. 47 ‘The letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne’, II.ii–iii, in Musurillo (2000: 83). 48 Ibid., IV, p. 87.

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martyrs who died for the city in heaven.49 Honour and glory are the cruces. Ancient Rome had indeed waxed great under the providential hand of God, because the moral character of the Romans of old had been kept in check by a passionate desire for glory.50 This desire had disciplined the Romans in their quest for, first, liberty and then empire, and led to all the undoubtedly great deeds of the past. Honour had to be acquired by virtuous means, but it was only a handful of great men, ‘good in their way’,51 who had grasped this and so preserved the Roman state. The decline was already underway by the time of the late Republic. Love of praise in and of itself Augustine views as a vice, though it may restrain greater wickedness; this view was also held by Cicero and expressed by Horace.52 The path of honour and praise was as good as pagans without the Holy Spirit could do. The greatness of Rome was the reward bestowed by Providence for the honourable and self-sacrificial labour of many great Romans. They worked for earthly honour and power and glory, and this is what they indeed achieved. But ultimately the lust for glory is a vice to be purged from the human soul, though it is a temptation even for the most godly.53 The apostles were the great examples of those who eschewed human recognition in their desire to preach Christ even though they were held in utter detestation by those to whom they preached. They followed Christ’s precept in Mt. 5.16: ‘[L]et your works shine in men’s sight, so that they may see your acts of goodness, and glorify your Father, who is in Heaven.’54 The Christian martyrs, for their part, carried on the honourable tradition: The martyrs followed in the steps of the apostles. They did not inflict suffering on themselves, but they endured what was inflicted on them; and in so doing they surpass the Scaevolas, the Curtii, and the Decii by their true virtue, springing from true devotion, and by the countless multitude. These Roman heroes belonged to an earthly city, and the aim set before them, in all their acts of duty for her, was the safety of their country, and a kingdom not in heaven, but in earth; not in life eternal, but in the process where the dying pass away and are succeeded by those who will die in their turn. What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them.55 The difference between the martyrs and the great heroes of Rome was not their bravery or their suffering, nor even the greatness of their virtue per se. It was the goal of their suffering, the object of their devotion and the reward for which they worked that made the difference. Indeed, Augustine presents

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Augustine, City of God, V.xii–xxi, pp. 196–216. Ibid., V.xii, p. 216. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., V.xiv, p. 203. Ibid. Ibid.

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in colourful detail the noble deeds of the Romans as an example for those whose desire is the Eternal City (i.e. Christians)56 – but part of his intention in drawing the comparison is to remind Christians that they have nothing to boast in. The Roman conquerors endured much hardship with great discipline and fortitude. The glory of the Earthly City was their just reward. But this ought to suppress Christian pride, because the Eternal City is of an entirely different nature, in which human praises have no importance. We should not seek earthly glory for what is in fact heavenly virtue. In considering what the pagans have done, the holy martyrs have no cause for boasting, as though they have done anything worthy of participation in that country where there is eternal and genuine felicity, if they have struggled in the faith of charity and the charity of faith, to the extent of shedding their blood – loving not only their brothers, for whom their blood was shed, but, in obedience to the commandment, loving even their enemies, by whom it was shed.57 The Christian martyrs are superior, not because they ought to rank alongside the heroes of old in suffering and courage (though they may indeed display these), but because their true virtue with its true devotion had the true God as its object: no one can have true virtue without true piety, that is without the true worship of the true God; and that the virtue which is employed in the service of human glory is not true virtue.58 As Augustine explains, it is not earthly honour that the Christian seeks; rather, in his pursuit of the Eternal City for its own sake, honour overflows. The martyrs are indeed to be memorialized and honoured in thanks to and for the greater glory of the God who made them his witnesses.59 Third, and this perhaps Tertullian grasped better than anybody: whereas the Romans had only statues to memorialize the honourable dead, Christians looked forward to resurrection bodies – glorious and honourable bodies, radiant with the reflected glory of God (1 Cor. 15).60 Through obedience they passed glory on to God; from God glory was reflected back to them. Like athletes they underwent physical training, but in order to win an a;fqarton ste,fanon (‘imperishable crown’ (1 Cor. 9.25)). As Tertullian wrote, addressing his pagan contemporaries with characteristic vigour: . . . you cast statues in honour of persons such as these, and you put

56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., V.xvi, p. 205. Ibid., V.xviii, p. 209. Ibid., V.xix, p. 212. Ibid., VIII.xxvii, p. 340. Origen, for example, spoke instead of the liberation of the soul and its progress through greater knowledge of the Logos. (Origen, Against Celsus (trans. Frederick Crombie; Ante-Nicene Christian Library; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1878), pp. 176–8.)

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inscriptions upon images, and cut out epitaphs on tombs, that their names may never perish. Insofar as you can by your monuments, you yourselves afford a sort of resurrection to the dead. Yet he who expects the true resurrection from God, is insane, if for God he suffers! But go zealously on, good presidents, you will stand higher with the people if you sacrifice the Christians at their wish, kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice is the proof that we are innocent.61 The statues were a kind of resurrection, but a poor copy of the true one. The Christians had a completely different understanding of death and how it might be overcome.62 The Christian who died willingly and the Roman hero who died similarly had very different ends in view. This meant that the meaning of the suffering and dying itself was different.63 Rather than fighting bravely to the end with sword in hand as the noble hero had done, the Christian’s weapon of resistance was suffering in and of itself. Further, whereas the noble warrior rescued his honour (and Rome’s) by the manner of his death, his death was still a defeat, not a victory. The martyr, on the other hand, ‘overcame the world not by resisting but by dying’, as Augustine put it using the vocabulary of the book of Revelation.64 Again, there is a Christological significance to this interpretation of dying: Christ’s sufferings were themselves the means of his victory over sin and the Evil One. His resurrection signalled the divine vindication of his struggle. For Augustine, the resurrection of the dead was, in fact, the primary truth testified to by the martyrs in their dying: [A]mong all the truths they speak this is the most important: that Christ rose from the dead and first displayed the immortality of the resurrection in his own body, and promised that it would come to us at the beginning of the new age or (which is the same) at the end of this world.65 The resurrection of the dead was not merely then the hope of the martyrs: it was the inner meaning of their dying. There is, however, an objection that arises at this point: if the true martyr eschews earthly glory and honour, why is it that the Christians venerate them?66 Why is it that Thomas can imagine the pilgrims queuing outside his 61 ‘Apology’, L, in Tertullian, The Writings of Tertullianus, p. 139. 62 Historian Carole Straw (2001: 41) writes: ‘Romans sacrificed their lives to win honor, immortal fame, and the prosperity of their earthly community. In the Christian’s eyes, this was a sorry substitute for the true glory of eternal life and the beatitude of the transcendent city of God.’ 63 Taylor (1989b: 218–19) describes how Christianity in this way is not ‘Stoicism by other means’. 64 Augustine, City of God, XXII.ix, p. 1047. Tertullian commented: ‘. . . we conquer in dying; we go forth victorious at the very time we are subdued’ (‘Apology’, L, Tertullian, The Writings of Tertullianus, p. 139). 65 Ibid., XXII.x, p. 1048. 66 In the third, fourth and fifth centuries there flourished on an amazing scale the practice of revering the relics and shrines of the martyrs. The care of the dead was a visible

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shrine? Is there not a double standard at work in this – in that honour is given to the martyrs in precisely the manner they died renouncing? Will this not encourage possible future martyrs to consider their earthly glory – bringing about Thomas’s temptation, in fact? Augustine’s defence of the veneration of the martyrs is on the grounds that they are not in themselves gods.67 This is not, then, the same as the pagan cult of the dead. Rather, in the acts of veneration at the martyrs’ shrines, thanks is offered to God for their witness. In other words, the martyrs are accorded honour in a mediating role, as a way of honouring God, who worked in them. If this is not an altogether convincing explanation (the acts of adoration at the shrines of the martyrs described by Augustine are separated from the worship of the dead merely by a hair’s breadth), then at least Augustine has put his finger on a problem for martyrdom as a renunciation of earthly honour. If martyrdom is to be true to itself as ‘witness’, then the martyrologist who preserves and transmits the story of the martyrdom is essential to the function of that witness. And yet he or she must do so without creating an independently functioning cult of the martyr’s fame that might reverse the transformation of the honour ethic deeply encoded in the act of martyrdom. This, of course, was not always – and is not always – achieved. Augustine is essentially correct: martyrs are to be honoured not for their noble deeds as they stand on their own terms, but for what God has done in them.68

and shocking demonstration to the pagan world of Christian belief. Traditionally, historians have accounted for this as an adoption by Christians of pagan practices. Addressing this phenomenon, Peter Brown (1981: 31) writes: ‘we must remember that the Christian church had risen to prominence largely because its central ritual practices and its increasingly centralised organisation and financial administration presented the pagan world with an ideal community that had claimed to modify, to redirect, and even to delimit the bonds of the kin. The church was an artificial kin group. Its members were expected to project onto the new community a fair measure of the sense of solidarity, of the loyalties, and of the obligations that had previously been directed to the physical family. Nowhere was this made more plain than in the care of the dead.’ Christians began to have their own cemeteries, and to note carefully the anniversaries of the deaths of martyrs and bishops. By the time of the Constantinian turn, with the growth in Christian belief among the wealthy élites, this meant the appearance en masse of endowed shrines and cemeteries all over the empire. As Brown (1981: 48) writes: ‘What we have seen is not the growth of new beliefs within the Christian communities, but the restructuring of old beliefs in such a way as to allow them to carry a far heavier charge of public meaning.’ The continuity was not with pagan popular religion, but in fact with Christian belief of the previous eras. This was not merely a feature of popular religion either, but was encouraged and sponsored by the lay and clerical élites. Noticeably, the reverence for the martyrs outlasted the persecutions which made them; the churches were insistent that this was a self-identifying practice of utter necessity for who they were as a group. 67 Augustine, City of God, VIII.xvii, p. 323. 68 In NT terms, to give honour to human beings acting in their capacity as God’s agents is not problematic at all – whether that be to the emperor (1 Pet. 2.17) or to a parent (Eph. 6.2) or to an office-bearer in the church (1 Tim. 5.17). This principle is legitimately extended to martyrs.

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ii. The self-proclaimed martyr: forcing God’s hand In this section we turn to consider the matter of heavenly rewards. Does the offer of heavenly rewards corrupt the idea of martyrdom, and so prove the Christian concept of selfhood to be incoherent after all? In a letter to Eberhard Bethge written in July 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remembered a conversation with ‘a young French pastor’ (identified by the editor as Jean Lasserre):

He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realise the depth of the contrast.69 Bonhoeffer’s intuition is that intending ‘to become a saint’ is not the way to become one.70 Even though desiring the honour of heaven appears to be a way to surmount the lust for earthly glory, is it not merely a displacement of the same desire? Eliot’s Thomas is not swayed by the promise of earthly honour, appealing though it is. Far dearer to his heart is the promise of heavenly glory. This temptation introduces a complex problem for Eliot and indeed for the whole theological tradition: what place does the heavenly prize have in the motivation of the holy to serve God? Does the offer of a heavenly reward or a martyr’s crown corrupt the pursuit of true sanctity? The question is most troublesome: the very idea of martyrdom threatens to collapse under its weight – and with it Christian identity. Is the heavenly city merely the earthly city on a larger scale? Is the desire for a higher place in heaven, which Origen among others certainly believed would be bestowed on the martyrs,71 any better than a desire for earthly glory? Thomas discovers himself in the untenable situation of wanting that for which the desiring makes the having apparently impossible.72 Is some form of what has been known as ‘Quietism’ the only way forward? The controversy over Quietism in late-seventeenth-century France brought just this dilemma to the fore. The impulse of the movement was certainly not new: Meister Eckhardt had been promulgating its main features over 400 years earlier. Essentially, Quietism taught that any action motivated by self-interest to any degree was offensive to God. To achieve the purity of love characteristic of a saint, one must utterly divest oneself of self-interest – even to the extent of renouncing interest in salvation itself (and thus, like Bonhoeffer, renouncing the desire to become a saint). As the Quietist mystic Madame Guyon wrote:

69 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 369. 70 His bracketed comment is perhaps to be read as not wishing to appear malignant about Lasserre. 71 Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, L, p. 79. 72 In his study of martyrdom, Balthasar (1994: 36) makes a comment that in one sense encapsulates Thomas’s predicament: ‘Man is capable of misusing and abusing everything for his own selfish ends, even the invitation to sacrifice his life for the sake of that love from which faith springs.’ Could even the pursuit of martyrdom turn out to be perverse? Certainly, this is what the modern world (Salman Rushdie being our example) has suspected. Who, then, can be saved?

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‘[W]e must suppress all desire . . . even the desire for the joys of Paradise.’73 Her ecclesiastical advocate, Bishop François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, defended this ideal in more academic terms in his Explication des Maximes des Saints, arguing that, for a few especially gifted saints, there was the possibility to achieve a pure or disinterested love of God. Pressed by his adversary and fellow bishop Jean-Bénigne Bossuet, Fénelon conceded that the saint might continue to hope, but argued that this was simply because this is commanded by God. Rightly, Bossuet could see that his opponent was stretching: this was no hope worthy of the name, just as Fénelon’s ‘pure love’ was mechanistic and inert, and barely recognizable as a species of love at all.74 Quite apart from the problem of the overwhelming scriptural testimony to heavenly rewards which it is apparently right to desire, the Quietist alternative foundered on the rocks of its own logic – not least because, in making a nothing of the self, it made the value of self-sacrifice questionable. What of this ‘overwhelming scriptural testimony’? The desire for heavenly glory is what the brothers Zebedee, James and John bring to Jesus in Mk 10.35-45. The story seems to sit as a counterpoint to the promise of eternal life as an affirmation of the disciples in Mk 10.29-31. The approach of the brothers in the first place is crass in its attempt to elicit a blank cheque from the Messiah: (‘we want you to do for us whatever we ask’ (Mk 10.35)). Their request is not a small thing either, as it turns out: to be seated in the places of honour next to the exalted Son in his heavenly session (Mk 10.37). They wish to usurp the highest positions in order that they might bask in the glory of the Christ. The abruptness of the request should not prevent us from seeing it as a genuine desire for closer proximity to holiness and a desire to be seen as pleasing in the sight of God. They are willing to take their discipleship of Christ to the very throne-room of heaven. Jesus’s reply reminds them of the true demands of that discipleship if it is to be true discipleship of the true Christ. Their request betrays in fact their ignorance of the path he is about to tread (‘you do not know what you are asking’ (Mk 10.38)). The real proposition for the follower of Jesus Christ is the one he next puts to them: ‘[C]an you drink the cup I drink or be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with?’ (Mk 10.38).75 The ‘cup’, in Mark’s symbolic world the cup of divine judgement from Isa. 51.17, 22, returns as a recognizable image in Gethsemane when Jesus cries out ‘[T]ake this cup from me’ (Mk 14.36). Can the brothers join with Jesus in the God-forsakenness of the execution of the Christ? Likewise, the baptismal image points forward to the bloody conclusion of Jesus’s earthly career.76 Origen for one reads

73 Quoted in Kenneth E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum (Bampton Lectures; London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1931), p. 454. 74 Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 300–301. The same criticism could be levelled against Nygren’s thesis about the (alleged) distinction between agape and eros. (Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (London: SPCK, 1982).) 75 Hovey, To Share in the Body, p. 100. 76 In Rom. 6.3 Paul likewise links the symbolism of baptism to death.

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both images as referring to martyrdom:77 his reading is confirmed by Jesus’s prophecy about the brothers (Mk 10.39). However, Origen curiously seems to imply that a promise is given here to those who would pursue martyrdom of a greater reward, as if Jesus’s question (‘can you . . .?’) is a condition that the brothers can choose to meet. He overlooks the brothers’ inability to realize the full meaning of their own question, and the rebuff strongly implied in ‘to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant’ (Mk 10.40). The request for the seats of privilege is not denied outright: the brothers will learn the real meaning of following Jesus in due course. God’s hand will not be forced in the name of serving him. ‘The first shall be last, the last first’ does not mean that being the last ought to be pursued as a way of coming first – as if this were the point of Jesus’s reversal. Rather, it is a promise of vindication given to those who would follow him in the giving of life in service (Mk 10.45). In Rom. 2.6-10, on the other hand, Paul does use do,xa and timh. as representative of those virtues that God promises to reward. Those who ‘by persistence in doing good seek glory and honour and immortality’ (toi/j me.n kaqV u`pomonh.n e;rgou avgaqou/ do,xan kai. timh.n kai. avfqarsi,an zhtou/sin (Rom. 2.7)) are the ones who are rewarded with eternal life. Could Paul here be endorsing the brothers’ desire to share more highly in Christ’s glory at the heavenly banquet table; or Thomas’s desire to be a martyr exalted in heaven? It is necessary to consider the contrast between the two options that are balanced here. The path to destruction is ‘for those who are self-seeking’ (toi/j de. evx evriqei,aj); so seeking glory and honour in this context cannot indicate pursuing one’s own (even heavenly) exaltation. In Rom. 1.18ff, it is the problem of human beings not honouring the divine nature that is in view. The exchange of the ‘glory of the immortal God’ (th.n do,xan tou/ avfqa,rtou qeou/) for that of idols signifies that they are exchanging the worship of the glory of the immortal God for a poor alternative. Therefore Paul’s seeking glory, honour and immortality actually indicates the divine glory, honour and immortality and the possibility of sharing in them; it thus sits less uncomfortably with Jesus’s warnings about the pursuit of heavenly glory than might have first appeared. In the martyrologies and the writings of theologians of martyrdom, the tendency is to make the talk of the heavenly prize into an alternative honour to be desired for itself. Origen is representative: he conceives of Christian discipleship as being akin to a contract, with baptism as its seal.78 Taking Christ’s words ‘what shall a man give in exchange for th.n yuch.n auvtou/ (his life)’, remembered in Mk 8.36, he maps out an entire metaphor of exchange such that God is bound to grant to the martyr ‘a special and greater fullness of beatitude’.79 From this framework he goes on to explain how the rich martyr, in giving up so much more, is deserving of a higher place in heaven than the poor martyr. With the guarantee of heavenly reward Origen seeks to exhort his disciples to take the course of martyrdom. 77 Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, XXVII, p. 68. Tertullian also speaks of the ‘baptism of blood’ (‘On Baptism’, XVI, in Tertullian, The Writings of Tertullianus, p. 250). 78 Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, XII, p. 49. 79 Ibid., XIV, p. 51.

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Augustine is more subtle. For him the difference between the pagan desire for glory in the earthly city and the Christian desire for the Eternal City lies in the difference between the things that are desired in both cases. However, it is not sufficient to say that they are both desired with different objects, because in Augustine’s scheme the nature of the thing desired does affect the manner of its desiring.80 Whereas the earthly city is built by self-love, the Heavenly City is created by the love of God ‘carried as far as contempt of self’.81 For Augustine, love of God absorbs and reorders all other types of love, so that the one who desires the Heavenly City is driven by the vision of the holy God. For him: The earthly [city] lifts up its head in its own glory, the Heavenly City says to its God: ‘My glory; you lift up my head’ (Ps. 3.3).82 God himself is the glory of the Eternal City; it is in the longing for and submitting to God that glory and honour are returned to the Christian. Under this way of conceiving it, the true martyr does not pursue the golden crown or the higher position in heaven; rather, she testifies merely to her love of God, and seeks for him to be honoured – and in doing so, herself shares in glory. It still might be possible, however, to see in ‘the love of God’ the operation of a system of exchange. Calvin, like Luther at pains to show that he agrees with Augustine (especially his latter writings), at the same time clarifies and even extends his thought in terms of the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith.83 He interprets the promises of heavenly rewards as a promise that comes after the ‘free covenant of his mercy’ – sealed not by meritorious works but indeed by grace through faith. The assurance given to believers that their tribulations are not in vain is given in addition to the strength to endure. Without the free bestowal of grace upon the ungodly in Christ, there is no ‘crown of righteousness’ (2 Tim. 4.8). As Calvin writes: ‘the righteousness of good works depends upon the fact that God by pardon approves them’.84 The emphasis lies on the self-consistency of God rather than on the rendering of a due payment to some worthy deed. For the purposes of the present discussion, this is significant because of the motivation implied: the language of heavenly rewards is not used in order to induce a self-interested desire for that heavenly reward; rather, heavenly rewards are a reminder of the faithfulness of God to his own promises. The honour is a recognition of that which God himself does in the life of the believer. By placing the desire for heavenly glory before Thomas, Eliot has been able to highlight a facet of the tradition of martyrdom that has not always had a satisfactory resolution. The talk of a contracted heavenly reward was

80 This thought was repeated by Bossuet against Fénelon, and by C. S. Lewis in his ‘Weight of Glory’ sermon. (C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses (ed. Walter Hooper; New York: Macmillan, rev. and expanded edn, 1980) pp. 25–46.) 81 Augustine, City of God, XIV.xxviii, p. 593. 82 Ibid. 83 Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1998), pp. 222–6. 84 Calvin, Institutes, III.xviii.5, p. 827.

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part of the appalling rhetoric of the September 11th terrorists (and, presciently, in Rushdie’s descriptions of religious fanaticism); but it has also been present in the Christian tradition, as I have here acknowledged. However, the martyr who thinks to force God’s hand or to take heaven by storm does not witness truly to Christ; and neither do his martyrologists. Self-narration may well mean self-justification. The promises of heavenly reward in Scripture are offered as a comforting vindication for those who have suffered for following Christ, not as a wage arranged by means of a contract that God must honour. Eliot’s Thomas does not overcome this temptation. He has no riposte to it that will clear his name and vindicate him before people or before God. As his sermon shows, however, he finds hope not in his clear conscience, but in the victory of Christ.

E

The renunciation of honour

Thomas is tempted to pursue earthly honour as a means to realizing his selfhood, even though it is as a spiritual hero – to narrate himself into the role of saint. He considers the pleasing possibility of his own posthumous cult of spiritual celebrity. However, renouncing this is not enough: he is further tempted to pursue heavenly glory as a satisfaction for the demands of his own ego. In both instances, the problem lies with the corrupting motivation – it is a temptation to do ‘the right deed for the wrong reason’. The Scriptures and the tradition have a strong critique of earthly honour as a motive in terms of pride. Following the model of Christ, the martyrs (and their martyrologists) co-opted and displaced the discourse of honour – not merely as the Stoics had, but in a uniquely Christian way. They exercised their volition in obedience; they saw themselves as channels for divine glory; and they hoped in union with Christ for the resurrection of the body as a substitute for posthumous renown. But was the motivation really any different if a heavenly reward was on offer? Was dying for heavenly recognition really just another species of self-regard? Is it demanding of God that he give me what I clearly deserve – presenting God with his I.O.U.? It certainly can be. This was a tricky question for the tradition. However, drawing on the teachings of Jesus and of Augustine we have been able to see how the desire for the Eternal City differs in kind from the desire for earthly glory. The self that has delight in the glory and honour of God – a delight expressed sublimely in martyrdom – is in fact restored to selfhood in communion with the divine, and shares in the divine splendour. As Eliot has Thomas say in his sermon: ‘[A] martyrdom is always the design of God . . .’ (Interlude, 65). By not grasping at human honour, the Christian martyr exposes the triviality and changeability of human honouring. The value of human recognition in the form of fame and honour is relativized by the willing embrace of an apparently shameful death. The exercise of will at the heart of honour is thrown into stark relief by the martyr’s choice to will as God wills. The martyr, with a shocking clarity, allows himself to be made available to God’s signification rather than keep himself for the assertion of his own meaning. Christ’s resurrection body – characterized by its glory – is given as a promise of that divine

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signification. If men and women have glory and honour it is not because they have grasped it for themselves but because they have been crowned from above (Ps. 8; Heb. 2.7); and in fact, as the Epistle to the Hebrews argues, it is Christ alone who as Son of Man has won this crown (Heb. 2.10). The martyr has seen this, and by sharing Christ’s disgrace also shares his crown. That earthly honour is relativized in this way means that things that are good to do may still be good even if they are not recognized. In fact, giving honour to those who do good in public may corrupt the motives of those who do so – even advocates of the honour ethic recognize this. The public/private dichotomy is also in this way relativized, because a truly honourable deed may be perfectly anonymous but still honoured because it gives itself to the judgement of God first and foremost. The individual of true honour may be partially or even completely unrecognized in a community. In fact, the martyr’s witness – which mediates Christ’s – is that the truly honourable person may be shamed and condemned by human society.

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7

‘Who killed the Archbishop?’ Martyrdom, temptation and providence

A

Introduction

I began by postulating martyrdom as the outward enactment, in the lives of a few, of the identity of every Christian person. In Balthasar’s expression, it is ‘the external representation of the inner reality’ of the Christian life.1 The Christian martyr, as we have seen, is a self who eschews to the end an ordinary definition of the safety and security needed for a person to flourish; will not, as a citizen, accept the ultimate hegemony of the ruler; refuses to use action, even in the name of an ideal, as a means to self-definition; and turns away from honour and even from a certain construal of heavenly rewards. In each instance the movement is away from a possible identity that is apparently concrete, recognizable and achievable, and towards the future that belongs to divine agency alone. The martyr resists the possible selves that may emerge from taking up the various offers and accepts identity only as God himself chooses to give it. I have argued (recalling the first of the three ‘questions of selfhood’) that, as our readings of Scripture have shown, the narrative of the self given in Christian martyrdom is bound up with the narrative of the divine redemption of human beings in Jesus Christ. The notion of ‘martyrdom’ recalls a particular narrative shape which is a verdict on a sequence of events. As with tragedy, it offers an answer to the question ‘what was the meaning of this death?’ To label a sequence of events a ‘martyrdom’ indicates that the events are related in a certain way – that they form a mythos, or a plot, which gives rise to a discernible pattern with its own theme. That there is an extensive tradition of martyrological narratives, from the ancient martyr-acts (as collected by Musurillo2) through to John Foxe’s 1 Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, p. 22. 2 Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. 159

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Actes and Monuments (first published 1563) and beyond, indicates that this pattern has been long recognized and indeed, is deeply embedded in the cultural consciousness of what once was Christendom.3 As has been shown by the analysis thus far, temptation and its renunciation on the one hand, and providence on the other, have particular prominence in the mythos of martyrdom. It is the task of this chapter to inquire into the relationship between these themes and their martyrological configuration.4 From the outset, I have sought to expound selfhood and identity with reference to narrative (see Chapter 1). What is the narrative logic that requires temptation in order to establish martyrdom? ‘Narrative logic’ indicates the ‘patterns of order which are proper to story rather than to discursive reasoning’.5 Stories are composed of actions and events ordered to one another by reference to chronological sequence. To view the story as a unity, each subsequent event must be intelligible in relation to what preceded it. It can be surprising, or the intelligibility may not be obvious immediately – but the events must show some kind of fitness. Paul Ricoeur’s way of putting this is to say that narrative conclusions must be acceptable rather than deducible. They follow a ‘particular directedness’ that propels them forward to a conclusion – though, of course, we need to follow it to the conclusion because it is only from that point of view that we can ultimately judge the acceptability of the sequence.6 That is not to say that there is not a ‘logic’ to the way stories proceed, of course. Rather, it is almost a truism to say that successful narratives possess an explanatory power that resonates – profoundly so – with the human experience of events. Ricoeur goes on to develop his analysis of the logic of narratives by claiming that all narratives combine two aspects, one of which is chronological and one of which is non-chronological. The first he calls the ‘episodic dimension’, by which he means to indicate the way in which narratives throw up the question of ‘and then’? – that is, ‘what happened next’? Simultaneously, however, telling a story is also about construing ‘significant wholes out of scattered events’, attempting to grasp the series of events as a unity – its ‘configurational dimen-

3 For a discussion of martyr plays as a distinct genre in their own right, see Paul Hernadi, ‘Modern martyr plays beyond genre’, Neohelicon, 13(1) (1986), pp. 141–62. 4 In the 1940s, Jewish scholar H. A. Fischel outlined in chronological order a table of 24 events that (in his opinion) characterized the typical Jewish/Christian martyr’s story (‘a stereotyped scheme’). He included, for example, ‘The great publicity of the trial’ (no. 3) and ‘He remains victorious in the last debate’ (no. 11). There is no place for a temptation scene at all in his scheme: the closest is probably no. 2, ‘The martyr refuses to flee.’ Certainly, the voluntary nature of the martyrdom is generally established in these early narratives – but it is usually depicted as an external deliberation rather than an internal one. Fischel’s aim was to compare rather than contrast Jewish and Christian martyrdoms, so he was rather inattentive to disparities between the two. (H. A. Fischel, ‘Martyr and prophet’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 37 (1946–47), pp. 265–80.) 5 Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), p. 223. (Originally PhD dissertation, Emory University, 1981.) 6 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The narrative function’, Semeia, 13 (1978), pp. 177–202 (182).

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sion’, as Ricoeur labels it.7 Ricoeur observes, then, that narratives combine both sequence and pattern – though it must be said that these two elements exist somewhat in tension with each other: ‘this structure is so paradoxical that every narrative may be seen as a competition between its episodic and its configurational dimensions, between its sequence and its pattern’.8 Part of Ricoeur’s point is that the patterning of the events is already always an interpretation of them. It already ascribes significance to the particular form of events. In order to address the acceptability of temptation within the narrative logic of martyrdom, I shall first examine Eliot’s dramatic presentation of temptation in a martyrological setting; secondly, I shall make temptation, or rather peirasmo,j, the object of a theological investigation and show in this its link to the mythos of martyrdom; and thirdly, I shall seek to relate testing/trial to the Christian doctrine of providence, showing how belief in the providentia dei is the ground by which renunciation and resistance of peirasmo,j – even to the point of death – is made possible. I shall show how Christ, who as the second Adam underwent peirasmo,j, both carries out the providential design and shows his disciples how to cling to it, even in the face of their own terrible peirasmoi..

B

Who killed the Archbishop?

In the final scene of Murder in the Cathedral, the dramatist has the Four Knights, who have just completed their gruesome assassination of Archbishop Thomas in his own Cathedral, advance to the front of the stage and address the audience. It is a startling moment, the shift in tone indicated by a marked change in the style of the language. The use of this dramatic device invites the process of a judgement ‘in time’ as, with no small irony, the four assassins offer their rationalizations for their actions, in plain ignoble prose. They make flattering appeal to the tradition of ‘Trial by Jury’ and to the ‘fair play’ of the English audience; no doubt, we feel ourselves privileged as judges over the action we have just witnessed (notwithstanding that the execution has already been carried out). It is an invitation to judge.9 The explanations of the Knights are also accusations against Thomas, which means that this is in effect a trial scene after the fact. There are three chief counts against him. The first two are intertwined: first, that he was anti-order and justice, and so, secondly, that he was disloyal. The Second Knight makes the case that the King’s aim all along was to restore the good order of the state against the continual disruption of local interests. The final step in his programme would have been ‘a union of spiritual and temporal administration, under the central government’ (II.503-4), with Thomas as Chancellor and Archbishop combining the two in the one person. Rather 7 Ibid., pp. 183–4. 8 Ibid., p. 184. 9 In Ricoeur’s terms, there is an invitation to consider the configurational dimension of the drama.

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than co-operating with this high-minded plan (which need not be read with any cynicism), Thomas ‘affirmed immediately that there was a higher order’ and that ‘the two orders were incompatible’ (II.512-5). In other words, he was disloyal to the harmonious vision of the King, and – inexplicably and irrationally – pitted the spiritual against the temporal. This was despite the fact that it was the King who appointed him Archbishop in the first place. In fact, he was guilty of asserting ecclesiastical power as another form of power over against the royal rule. His open hostility to temporal rule was coupled with an ostentatious (and possibly hypocritical) asceticism, suggestively and needlessly critical of the behaviour of the ruling group. His behaviour, therefore, was disloyal and disorderly. It was counter to the welfare of the kingdom – uncitizenly, one might say.10 The third accusation pertains to Thomas’s psychological state. The Fourth Knight, picking up on the comment about his ‘ostentatious asceticism’, declares Thomas ‘a monster of egotism’ (II.558-9). Thomas’s problem was ultimately his self-obsession, to the point of mania. He had prophesied his own martyrdom: was it any wonder that he became a provocateur? Ignoring the real and pressing needs of his own congregation, he had determined on a death by martyrdom as a means of confirming to himself his own spiritual greatness. He deliberately courted death by returning from France when he knew there was danger. He could have chosen the path of escape; he could have kept the doors to the cathedral closed. The Fourth Knight thus appeals to the audience to deliver a verdict of ‘Suicide while of Unsound Mind’ (II.574-5). His death was an act of unfathomable and pointless self-destruction, serving only Thomas’s overweening pride. ‘Who killed the Archbishop?’ – he did it himself. If, then, the first two accusations are that the martyr is willfully and self-servingly subversive of good order and justice, and of holding to a dualism that makes for war between spiritual and temporal orders, the third charge is that he has been overtaken by a psychotic pride to the point at which even the self is desecrated. The martyr is guilty of pointless inflammation of conflict, and of courting the very violence with which he is killed. Why is the charge so serious? As Lacey Baldwin Smith puts it (echoing Rushdie): The possibility that martyrdom might be only faintly disguised suicide on the part of emotionally disturbed people who were determined, consciously or unconsciously, to end their own lives is a deeply worrisome 10 Eliot was no doubt well aware of the Hildebrandian challenge to Carolingian models of Christian kingship as a privileged patronage of the church. What became known as the ‘investiture controversy’ of the later eleventh century inflicted scars on the political face of central Europe that did not fade for several centuries. In the period 1103 to 1107, Henry I of England forged his own compromise solution to problems with Pope Paschal II; but clearly the old tensions were never far from the surface, as the career of Thomas Becket shows, and as becomes most evident in the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s. The historical Becket was most certainly guided by Hildebrandian aims when he was in office at Canterbury. For his part, Henry II attempted to reassert his predecessor’s hard-won rights – and the duties of his ecclesiastical subjects – in declaring the 16 ‘Constitutions of Clarendon’ in 1164. After this point, the confrontation with the Archbishop was inevitable. (Barlow, Thomas Becket, pp. 100–1.)

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proposition, because it strikes at the teleological roots of a performance that for many Christians is regarded as being providential.11 If Thomas was not a fool, he was certainly a traitor. Indeed, the whole concept of martyrdom is threatened with collapse if he was merely a ‘faintly disguised suicide’ – it becomes, rather than the design of God, the concocted performance of an individual of dubious sanity. Baldwin Smith perceptively recognizes what is at issue – if the martyr is deluded or malicious, then certainly there is no providential vindication for him. His witness to the sovereignty of God is a sham.12 Eliot thus admits into evidence the quite plausible counter-witness of the knights, and they appear to have the last say. However, the play closes not here, but with the song of the Chorus celebrating the entry of Thomas into glory. And at this point another kind of invitation is issued – an invitation to thankfulness and repentance: Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man, Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire; (II.638-9) The audience are pointed to their own complicity in the shedding of blood through their tolerance of injustice and their apathetic acceptance of the status quo; they are invited to contemplate the example of Thomas in his submission to the will, and the love, of God – his acceptance of providence and his renunciation of his temptations.13 Another possible configuration of the narrative – another judgement, no less – is now on view. How does Eliot prevent this final hymning of Thomas the martyr from coming across as an assertion of one interpretation of Thomas – a more sentimental and perhaps less plausible one – over and against the other accounts 11 L. B. Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors, p. 17. 12 The uncanny and uncomfortable resemblance of the Knights’ self-justifying speeches to those of the Nuremberg defendants (especially Hermann Göring) was not lost on post-war audiences of Mord im Dom, the German version of Murder in the Cathedral. (Däumer, ‘Blood and witness’, pp. 92–3.) 13 Robin Grove certainly is not convinced by Thomas: ‘. . . he sweeps forward through temptations progressively more inward, until the victory is gained . . . We know, because he says so. Or maybe, the doubt springs up, he has conformed God to his will, and chosen martyrdom vaingloriously after all. There is simply no way anyone could tell. Whatever Becket’s motives, an audience can never be sure of them; only God can see his heart . . . Having directed us towards a light into which we cannot peer, the drama leaves us simultaneously exalted (God has given us ‘another Saint in Canterbury’) and pleasurably skeptical (the pious have been taken in by another holy fraud . . .).’ Perhaps the Knights are right after all? Whatever the case, Grove’s insight is that the true action of the drama, which is the nature of Thomas’s final choice and the divine verdict on it, has become ‘inaccessible to view’; and the spectators themselves become the subject of judgement by the play. Grove seems to find this turn to the audience quite unpleasant. (Robin Grove, ‘Pereira and after: The cures of Eliot’s theatre’, in Anthony David Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 158–75 (170).)

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we have just heard? The accusations of the Knights are certainly credible given what we have been told of Thomas’s character and his former life, and especially his tendency to an overweening pride ‘always feeding upon his own virtues’ (I.118). Isn’t this really quite a glib finale, ignoring the very real questions of the Knights? It is the permission granted to the audience to witness Thomas’s encounter with the four Tempters in the first act that makes all the difference. If we had not seen him at his ‘strife with shadows’, then his vindication would make no dramatic or theological sense. His innocence in his own slaughter must be known to us for us to be able to read the Knights’ accusations for the self-justifications that they are. Thus, by making the central part of his first act the scene of Thomas’s temptation, Eliot suggests that temptation – or, rather, its renunciation – is a crucial martyrological theme. This series of episodes is indispensable for making sense of the configurational dimension. Prior to the entrance of the Archbishop, the chatter of the Priests and the Chorus highlights their own misgivings about Thomas’s return to England from France. The First Priest in particular recalls his well-known flaws: I saw him as Chancellor, flattered by the King. Liked or feared by courtiers, in their overbearing fashion, Despised and despising, always isolated, Never one among them, always insecure; His pride always feeding upon his own virtues, Pride drawing sustenance from impartiality, Pride drawing sustenance from generosity, Loathing power given by temporal devolution, Wishing subjection to God alone. (I.114-22) Thomas is prone to pride, a sin that lies alongside great virtues.14 To the audience it is suggested that this central figure of the drama is extremely vulnerable, whatever his strengths; that in fact his strengths – the qualities that have made him justly celebrated among his people – might in the end be his undoing. This suggestion, which flowers into the Knight’s accusation (namely, that perhaps the return of the Archbishop was not as nobly motivated as it seemed, that perhaps his egotism was driving him to seek a showdown with the King, rather than his pastoral devotion to his flock) is only answered by the dramatic encounter of Thomas with his Tempters. That is: if Thomas is to be declared a true martyr – indeed, if the concept of martyrdom itself is to have any coherence – then the drama must show that he did not die from his own pride or folly, even though he was, to be sure, proud and foolish. When the Archbishop finally enters, with his speech about the ‘pattern’ and the ‘wheel’, it is clear that he knows the highly charged political situation into which he has stepped. There is no question of his ignorance or naïvety here: 14 The historical Thomas certainly knew this susceptibility, a fact which his mediaeval hagiographers struggled to conceal. As Barlow (1986: 44) puts it, in his term as Chancellor Thomas ‘gloried in all the pomps of the world’.

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he is well aware of the murderous intent of his enemies. For now he is granted a delay, as he explains to the First Priest (I.246-9); and so . . . the substance of our first act Will be shadows, and the strife with shadows. Heavier the interval than the consummation. All things prepare the event. Watch. (I. 251-4) ‘Strife with shadows’ is Thomas’s description of his temptation. The ghostliness of the tempters indicates to the audience that they come from within him – this is to be a moment of strife within himself, in contrast to his more external wrestle with the King and his agents. In fact, this period of inner testing, this ‘interval’, is ‘heavier’ than the later moment of his bloody assassination will be. In other words, this temptation episode is far more a test for Thomas and in the end will reveal more about his identity than his subsequent death. His death is, in fact, given its configurational significance as a consummation through the passage of this heavier ‘interval’. What Eliot has also hinted at is that Christian martyr-actions need to be read in deep connection with and in allusion to the gospel narratives. As we have seen, Eliot has his protagonist evoke the moment when Jesus urged his disciples to attentiveness ‘lest you fall into temptation’ in Gethsemane. Is this a moment of hubris? Isn’t it impossibly self-aggrandizing for this Archbishop-politician to cast himself in the role of Christ – and by implication his opponents in the roles of the Sanhedrin and Pilate? That is certainly a possibility that we are invited to entertain this side of the heavy ‘interval’. Whether this suspicion is unwarranted or not remains to be seen; but the suggestion is put to the audience that they ought to read these events in terms of the Christological pattern. By echoing the episodes of the gospel, the martyrologist evokes the whole Christological configuration; the Christian martyr-action is, in other words, configured as an imitation of Christ. In sum: Eliot’s dramatic presentation of a martyrdom suggests that temptation is part of the narrative logic of martyrdom. The audience (or the reader) need to see in some way that the martyr is not guilty of wanton self-destruction, grandiose delusions or sabotage of the peace. Yet this is not unproblematic. What human being is truly innocent? The Christological evocations that I have already noted are a suggestion that the analysis of the significance of temptation in martyrdom can only proceed with reference to the life and death of Christ. My next concern, then, is with an exposition of the place and meaning of temptation as it falls within the pattern of martyrdom.

C

Trials and temptations

In this section I seek to give an account of ‘temptation’ in its scriptural and theological setting. As we shall see, the discussion necessarily leads us in the direction of Christology and anthropology, and to a number of passages in which the NT offers a Christological reading of OT narratives. Bonhoeffer will once again be of assistance.

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The biblical words hS’M; and peirasmo,j are translated into English as both ‘trial’ and ‘temptation’. The linguistic separation of the two concepts is a feature of later Latin translations (probatio and tentatio). Roughly speaking, a trial (probatio) is an external and public event; a temptation (tentatio) is more internal and personal. Temptation is a moment of decision for the individual prior to the public testing before the court or in the circus, an inward crisis the outward counterpart of which is the trial before the powers. It is obvious that peirasmo,j as ‘trial’ has a connection with martyrdom: ‘witness’ is itself a concept drawn from the courtroom, where an individual’s testimony is put under pressure. But does peirasmo,j as ‘temptation’ also form part of the pattern of martyrdom (as Eliot suggests it does)? For their part, the early martyr-acts do not depict the martyrs being visited in this way by diabolical visitors;15 nor do they dramatize the inner world of their protagonists in the way that the modern writer does. However, they most certainly do see the public testing of the martyr as a temptation to renounce the faith that is sent from the Devil himself. There is no doubt for them that this public scrutiny, this probatio, has a spiritual dimension. For example, in ‘The Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius’, the first-person narrator describes how, having remained resilient in the courtroom, he and the others were thrown in prison, to be attacked there by the Devil using the weapons of hunger and thirst.16 For his part, Origen quite explicitly links temptation with martyrdom.17 Furthermore, as has already been noted (Chapter 4), in the period after the persecutions the example of the martyrs facing probatio was used in meeting the challenges of tentatio. The original unity of the concept of hS’M;/peirasmo,j lies, as Niels Henrik Gregersen observes, in three aspects.18 First, the notion of peirasmo,j does not merely refer to the external circumstances alone, nor to a possibly vulnerable psychological state, but to the presence of both intertwined. Secondly, peirasmo,j appears when human beings are placed on the defensive – that is, at a moment in which we are about to lose control over events, when ‘reality has approached us, before we are approaching reality’.19 Thirdly, the language of peirasmo,j presupposes ‘an open-ended predicament’. In temptation and in 15 Though the martyr-acts are replete with reports of visions (see for example ‘The martyrdom of Saints Marian and James’, VI, in Musurillo (2000: 201), and ‘The martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius’, VII (ibid., p. 219), these are usually held to be from a divine rather than from a diabolical source, and serve the purpose of strengthening the martyr for the peirasmo,j ahead. 16 ‘The martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius’, VII (ibid., pp. 218–19). To this example many others could be added. Of Fructuosus and his friends it is said that ‘they trod underfoot the Devil’s head’, in clear allusion to the temptation narrative of Genesis 3 (‘The martyrdom of Fructuosus and his companions’, VII (ibid., p. 185)). In the actions of the prefect who interrogated Marian and James is seen the ‘manum diabolus insatiabilem’ (‘The martyrdom of James and Marian’, III (ibid., p. 197)). 17 ‘. . . we must suppose that the present temptation [i.e. the pressure to renounce Christ or be killed] has come about as a testing and trying of our love for God’ (Origen, ‘An exhortation to martyrdom’, VI, p. 45). 18 Niels Henrik Gregersen, ‘Trial and temptation: An essay in the multiple logics of faith’, Theology Today, 57(3) (2000), pp. 325–43 (332). 19 Ibid.

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trial, there is the question asked of the human subject to which he or she must respond; the assumption is that there is a freedom to respond. Taking these three facets together, peirasmo,j can only be seen as a moment of crisis for the self. It is a moment when the individual is forced to a point of decision, yet remains responsible to decide. Balthasar uses the term Ernstfall: the ‘decisive moment’ or the ‘moment of decision’.20 The threat, whatever form it takes, is against the individual and her identity, her soul and her body. The unity of the two concepts is confirmed by the Epistle to the Hebrews in the context of its account of Christology. As the author interprets the life of Jesus, probatio and tentatio remain indistinct. It is hard to see to which part of the narrative of Jesus’s life the author is referring – is it his temptation in the wilderness (i.e. tentatio) or his trial before Pilate (probatio)? See, for example, Heb. 2.17-18: Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself was tested [peirasqei,j] by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested [peirazome,noij].21 Linking suffering to temptation/testing here is probably evidence that he is talking about the ‘test’ of Gethsemane and the Passion, the suffering that comes from an external source or threat. But, interestingly, it is this suffering test that Jesus needed to endure in order to fulfil the purpose of the incarnation, to complete his identification with his brethren – ‘in every respect’ – so that he could function properly as the ‘great high priest’. The effectiveness of his priesthood is dependent on his complete identification with the people he represents in making the sacrifice – the peirasmo,j is, while not the whole of this identification, the significant last part of it. The author describes in a very elaborate way the process by which Jesus became qualified to offer the sacrifice of purification. The mere fact of the birth of the Son as a human baby was not sufficient to demonstrate or achieve his human perfection (telei,wsij): he had to undergo the trials and sufferings of human life and overcome them in obedient submission to the Father.22 From here the author moves on to a typological discussion of the wilderness period and the temptation at Massah, using the sonorous tones of Psalm 95 – which is itself a call to resist temptation – as his verbal map. The recipients of his letter are warned not to give in to the temptation of unbelief (Heb. 3.19) and deafness to God’s voice. Of course, the one being tested at

20 Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, p. 37. 21 Where NRSV has ‘tested’, ESV (English Standard Version) prefers ‘tempted’. 22 ‘How has Christ abolished sin, banished the separation between us and God, and acquired righteousness to render God favourable and kindly towards us? To this we can in general reply that he has achieved this for us by the whole course of his obedience . . . In short, from the time when he took on the form of a servant, he began to pay the price of liberation in order to redeem us’ (Calvin, Institutes, II.xvi.5, pp. 507–8; emphasis mine).

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Massah was Yhwh himself: the people’s testing of him was evidence of their hard-heartedness and resulted in their inability to enter the rest of God. The recipients of Hebrews, however, have a significant advantage in their resistance against hardness of heart: they have possession not merely of the law-giver Moses, great as a servant in God’s house, but of a high priest who is the Son of God; he is also one who has ‘in every respect’ been tempted as we are – so he is able to sumpaqh/sai (literally, ‘suffer along with’) us – so Heb. 4.14-15: Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Christ is our co-tempted; he is our fellow sufferer of trials. The anthropological conclusion that might be drawn is that, if in order to completely identify with humankind Christ had to undergo peirasmo,j, then peirasmo,j must in some sense be a human universal. Peirasmo,j, it seems, is so closely bound up with human experience, is so universally a feature of what we undergo in this life, that we are not truly represented by a saviour who has not undergone it. Who is Adam after all if he is not the one who was tempted, even before he fell? As Bonhoeffer puts it: ‘[I]f he was to help man, who is flesh, he had to take upon himself the whole temptation experience of the flesh.’23 So it is in the synoptic gospels: the wilderness temptation of Christ is necessarily shown to the readers so that we are in no doubt, not merely in respect of Jesus’s innocence and complete obedience, but in respect of his real humanity.24 Christology has shown us the centrality of peirasmo,j for anthropology. If a full account of this anthropology of peirasmo,j is to be given, we must return to the biblical origins of humankind – to the peirasmo,j that appeared in the primordial garden. Prior to the peirasmo,j stands God’s charge to the man: to fill and till, name and tame the creation. He is to bring it to fruition. He is invited to stand as co-agent of God’s providential care of all that he has made. This is the positive aspect of God’s first Word to his creature. It is a Word that confers honour – and with it, responsibility.25 This Word is a vocation, in other words.26 The size and scope of the calling is so enormous that Man will only 23 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Temptation (London: SCM Press, 1955), p. 16. 24 Paul in 1 Cor. 10:13 says: ‘No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.’ Evidently there is a temptation ‘common to man’ – including Jesus of Nazareth. 25 I have already noted (see Chapter 5) Bonhoeffer’s exposition of ‘responsibility’ (Verantwortung). For Barth, the similar term Verantwortlichkeit sums up the human situation before God, who addresses us: ‘It is the idea of responsibility which gives us the most exact definition of the human situation in face of the absolute transcendence of the divine judgment. We live in responsibility, which means that our being and willing, what we do and what we do not do, is a continuous answer to the Word of God spoken to us as a command’ (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.ii, p. 641). 26 ‘Human being as vocation’ is the suggestion made by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Human being: Individual and social’, in C. E. Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to

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be able to approach it in fellowship and in partnership with others of his kind (hence, the necessity for the creation of Woman). There is but one restriction: the notorious tree. The restriction stands as a reminder to the creature of his creatureliness – for Man of all creatures is most likely to forget this about himself and to believe in his own independence from God and his Word. And yet, as Bonhoeffer writes, ‘innocence means clinging to the Word of God with pure undivided hearts’.27 That is why the Tempter, when he comes, comes armed with the Word of God, and concealing his true nature.28 The beauty of the lie he tells the woman and the man is that it is not completely a lie. In fact, it is close to the truth. ‘Did God really say,’ he whispers, ‘“[Y]ou shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ (Gen. 3.1). There has been a command – and it was about trees and eating. But Eve is able to put aside this first suggestion, for God in fact said, ‘[Y]ou shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die’ (Gen. 2.16-17); only one tree is off limits. Far greater is their freedom than their restriction. Yet the serpent says to the woman, ‘[Y]ou will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (Gen. 3.4-5). These are profoundly attractive – indeed, tempting – lies. They are an attack on the Word of God itself: on the very God-ness of God. Adam’s ingratitude at the extraordinary liberty in the task offered to him and his failure to imagine his task as sufficient for his needs explain (but do not justify) his deafness to the voice of God, his lack of response to his call. There are, then, three identifiable aspects to peirasmo,j: it tempts/tests Adam in his flesh, in his faith, and in his allegiance to God.29 The allure of the fruit is matched by the hunger in the flesh of the man and the woman. There is a sheer disbelief in them, as they are seen to lack faith in the Word of God about himself and about them. There is also a challenge to the power and authority of God: a suggestion that his rule is not as absolute as it appears. The scent of revolution is in the air. Just as significant for the history of human temptation is the story of the failure of Israel to heed the voice of God in the wilderness – to which I have already referred. Between them, the two stories confirm that what is true for Israel is true for the human race as a whole; that what is true for the one individual is true for the many; and that the Word of God may fall on stopped-up ears even among the redeemed.30 In the Sinai covenant (Exodus 19–20) the

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29 30

Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 158–88. See also Alistair I. McFadyen, The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Bonhoeffer, Temptation, p. 15. ‘The voice of the tempter does not come out of an abyss only recognized as “Hell”. It completely conceals its origin. It is suddenly near me and speaks to me . . . Indeed there is no sign of the origin of the tempter in fire and brimstone. The denial of the origin belongs to the essence of the seducer’ (ibid.). Bonhoeffer (1955: 18–21) applies this triad to Jesus, but doesn’t read it back into Adam’s (and Israel’s) peirasmo,j as I have here. The singularity of Adam and Jesus, as it is given full typological play in passages like Romans 5, may lead us to say with Bonhoeffer (1955: 14) that there are only two temptations in the Bible. Unfortunately, this can only be said if the separation

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dual nature of the Word of God as promise on the one side and command on the other is given dramatic theological significance in the life and identity of Israel itself. The promise precedes and is the ground of the command; the command invites an obedience that corresponds to faith in the promise. In the wilderness, as in the garden, we see temptation (though over a series of incidents) in terms of the flesh, faith and allegiance to God. The Israelites are dissatisfied with the provision of food; they refuse to believe in his protection of them; and they contest his absolute right to rule over them. The temptations of Jesus also occur in the wilderness and in a garden. These locations are not accidentally chosen, but indicate how Jesus is being identified with both Adam and Israel in his peirasmo,j. The importance of the wilderness temptation for the Christologies of both Matthew and Luke cannot be overstated.31 The location (e;rhmoj) and the duration (40 days and nights) evoke the Exodus period (especially in Matthew).32 But here one man goes alone in place of a whole people, ‘led by the Spirit into solitude and abandonment’.33 The wilderness is the place of the apparent absence of God, of God-forsakenness. Jesus is tempted when he is weak, lonely and hungry. Just as in paradise, the tempter offers his enticements concealed in the vocabulary of the Word of God. Following Bonhoeffer’s reading, we see that he tempts Jesus according to his flesh, his faith and his allegiance to God. First, he entices the flesh of Jesus: ‘if you are the Son of God . . .’ Notably, he does not make an offer of something obviously immoral, or even as obviously contrary to the command of God as the Edenic fruit. He suggests that Jesus, using his divine power, might conjure up bread from the stones, so as to quell his fleshly hunger. This would be tantamount to a withdrawal from the true life of the flesh in its suffering; it would a handing over of the flesh to Satan. Jesus’s reply shows that even he stands under the Word of God, and that he will rely on it even in his flesh. If it was not enough for Adam, it will be enough for him. Secondly, he makes a bid for Jesus to prove his Sonship by demanding a sign from God – a sign from God of his willingness to save Jesus at any time. Jesus recognizes this as a temptation to test God, as Israel did in the wilderness, not satisfied with what God had promised and commanded them. As Bonhoeffer puts it, ‘[F]aith which demands more than the Word of God in precept and promise, becomes a temptation of God.’34 It is a temptation to engineer providence rather than to submit to it; and its rejection shows – as Gethsemane will also show – that here is one who will indeed truly submit to the pattern of God.

31 32 33 34

of tentatio and probatio is made without an adequate recognition of their connection. The way in which the temptations of Jesus are depicted – in the gospels and in Hebrews – in terms of the Exodus period rather than the garden means that we cannot neglect this temptation of Israel in favour of the temptation of Adam. Rather, we should and can see that both temptations mutually inform each other, or are part of the same narrative logic. See Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, p. 457ff. Luke inverts Matthew’s ordering of the second and third temptations. Bonhoeffer, Temptation, p. 17. Ibid., p. 19.

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The third temptation tests Jesus’s allegiance to the Father: Satan (not this time quoting Scripture) offers the glorious kingdoms of the world; in return, Jesus must worship him. There is no third option, notably, where Jesus might rule without worship. It is either Satan, or God himself: he must choose. Can we imagine that Jesus knows that the pattern of rule will be different under Satan? There will be no costly sacrifice, no shameful dying – only glory and triumph. In Jesus’s riposte – ‘[A]way with you, Satan! For it is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”’ (Mt. 4.10) – is the knowledge that service of God will cost him. Bonhoeffer observes perceptively that the temptations – of flesh, of faith and of allegiance – are united in their intent to separate Jesus from the Word of God.35 Jesus does not overcome Satan and bind him by means of his strength or power or his heroism or his unbowed moral courage. He defeats him by clinging to the Word of God – to command and covenant, precept and promise. It is not that he shows himself as a moral exemplar as such: he succeeds where Adam fails because of his determination to rest only on the Word. There is in the temptations of Jesus nothing else remaining ‘except God’s Word and promise, no native strength and joy for the fight against wickedness, only God’s strength and victory, which holds fast in the Word, and the Word robs Satan of his power’.36 Though the tempter suffered defeat here, it was by no means the end of his activity; nor was this victory sufficient to accomplish Jesus’s work. Luke comments that the Devil avpe,sth avpV auvtou/ a;cri kairou (‘departed from him until an opportune time’ (Lk. 4.13)). There was certainly more to come. There was a second garden of testing: Gethsemane. I have already noted (Chapter 6) that there are two actions of response to testing that are foregrounded in the scene: proseu,cesqe (‘pray’) and grhgorei/te (‘watch’). Jesus prays (as I noted also in Chapter 6), in great distress and agony, even fear: we read in Mt. 26.39: And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’ At the moment of his greatest distress, he prays to God, knowing that nothing is impossible for him, even finding some other way than to. poth,rion tou/ to. Despite this, he throws himself into the will of God. Along with watching, praying is what Jesus commands his disciples as a response to peirasmo,j:

grhgorei/te kai. proseu,cesqe( i[na mh. eivse,lqhte eivj peirasmo,n (Mt. 26.41). The i[na indicates that the watching and praying are to be the

safeguards against temptation/trial, rather than introducing the content of the prayer as such – though, of course, there are strong hints of the famous clause of the Lord’s Prayer (from Mt. 6.13).37 In the peirasmo/i of Jesus, then, it is not so much the victory of moral rectitude, or finally of one human being who 35 Ibid., p. 20. 36 Ibid., p. 20–1. 37 In Acts 20.31 and 1 Cor. 16.13 believers are also enjoined to grhgorei/te.

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has developed the strength to overcome, that is observed, but rather an example of dependence on the Word of God and trust in his will. He overcomes not by being superhuman, but by being truly human. a. EXCURSUS: Irenaeus of Lyon and the temptations of Christ My reading of the salvation-historical significance of the temptations of Christ has ancient pedigree, recalling Irenaeus of Lyons’ theory of ‘recapitulation’ (anakefalaiwsij), whereby the incarnate Son victoriously retraces the phases of Adam’s life – ‘in order that, as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one; and as through a man death received the palm against us, so again by a man we may receive the palm against death’. In Irenaeus’ reading, Jesus’s fast of 40 days is actually performed in order to give the tempter a chance to attack him: he is weakened in body so that he is vulnerable in spirit. Irenaeus fondly notes the parallel between the food used in Genesis and that in the gospels: ‘The corruption of man, therefore, which occurred in paradise by both eating was done with by want of food in this world.’ Jesus meets the challenge of the Devil with the words of the law, calling on his Father’s Word as a counter-testimony. Satan (like the heretics) wraps his lies in Scripture: to answer him with Scripture is the right response, ‘showing him to be the enemy of God by the expression of his thoughts’. Using the law to conquer the Devil shows that the mistake of Adam has been undone: ‘He spurned him from Him finally as being conquered out of the law; and there was done away with that infringement of God’s commandment which had occurred in Adam, by means of the precept of the law, which the Son of man observed, who did not transgress the commandment of God.’ The Devil is exposed and defeated by means of the very law he attempts to wield. As Irenaeus writes: ‘as in the beginning he enticed man to transgress his Maker’s law, and thereby got into his power; yet his power consists in transgression and apostasy . . . so again: on the other hand, it was necessary that through man himself he should, when conquered be bound with the same chains with which he had bound man, in order that man, being set free, might return to his Lord, leaving to him those bonds by which he himself had been fettered, that is, sin’.38 The redemption of man involves the enslavement of the Devil, reversing completely the situation of Eden. Irenaeus’ account is perhaps an over-explicit account of what is only hinted at in Scripture; it has, however, the virtue of explaining the significance of Jesus’s entire ministry rather than focusing on a particular aspect of it. If Christ has experienced his trials and temptations and overcome them, then what of the disciples of Jesus? The disciples are not spared further peirasmo/ i ; on the contrary, temptation and trial come at them with a renewed force if anything. qli/ yij is to be expected as normal; they are not to be surprised by the coming of the purw,sei pro.j peirasmo.n (‘fiery trial’ (1 Pet. 4.12)). The allusion to Jesus was offered in Hebrews to comfort believers who were in the midst of trials. The disciple is thrown back on the human question of the flesh, faith and allegiance to God. Can he himself now 38 Irenaeus, Against the Heresies (trans. Dominic J. Unger and John J. Dillon; Ancient Christian Writers, No. 55; New York: Paulist Press, 1992), V.xxi.2.

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overcome the peirasmo,j, perhaps because he looks with new eyes on the old problem? That would mean that Jesus merely exemplified the right response to peirasmo,j. The testimony of the NT is otherwise: Jesus supremely and uniquely passed through this test and temptation. The disciple, who in affliction may even become a martyr, does not witness to his own overcoming of peirasmo,j; rather, he points, by faith, to the victory of Christ in his flesh, his faith and his allegiance to God. That he is tested and remains steadfast even to the death is a witness to Christ’s decisive defeat of the Devil – not to a fresh victory, but only to a participation in the same original victory that belongs to him through being united to Christ in the power of the Spirit. It is not a declaration of the martyr’s innocence or virtue as such, though it is a testimony to his vindication – that is, his justification.39 The trial of Thomas is, in a sense, beside the point: it is the innocence of Jesus with Satan and before Pilate that counts, an innocence in which the martyr has a share.

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Temptation and providentia dei

If peirasmo,j (in both its senses) is part of the narrative logic of martyrdom, in that it demonstrates the free submission of the martyr, what are the conditions which make such a concession of one’s own freedom not evidence of insanity or self-destructiveness? The martyr submits to a particular ‘horizon of significance’ (as Taylor would put it) – the providential will as it is revealed and exemplified in Christ. Thus it is no accident that the form of the martyr’s suffering is an imitation of Christ’s own passion.40 The testing of an individual – whether he or she is put under pressure by seduction or by threat of force – is a test of his or her belief in providence. How, amidst the turbulence of human existence, will the presence and the activity of God be discerned? And how will the believing individual act in response? The renunciation of temptation leading to martyrdom is the fruit of a particular account of divine providence. However, human life with its peirasmo/i is lived under conditions that appear much less than providential (in the sense

39 The NT speaks of a ‘participation in Christ’s sufferings’ – for example, see 1 Pet. 4.12 and Rom. 8.17. An intriguing comment is made by Paul in Col. 1.24: ‘I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.’ The martyr-acts read the suffering of the martyrs in these terms: for example, in the stories of Polycarp (VII, in Musurillo (2000: 7)) and Carpus (ibid., p. 27). Calvin, hearkening back somewhat to Luther, elucidated this teaching in terms of the ‘mystical union’ of the believer with Christ. Not only is the believer declared righteous, in forensic terms; she is also now the receiver of Christ himself: ‘[N]ot only does he cleave to us by an indivisible bond of fellowship, but with a wonderful communion . . . he grows more and more into one body with us, until he becomes completely one with us’ (Calvin, Institutes, III. ii.24, pp. 570–71). 40 See my comments about typology in Chapter 3. Eliot’s theo-dramatic instinct is to position temptation and providence very prominently in the narrative logic of martyrdom. In the scene of Thomas’s temptation are repeated evocations of the divine design or pattern – ‘the wheel’, in the language of the Third Priest (I.137-9).

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that Christian orthodoxy means it). There are several alternative explanations. As we have seen in Chapter 3, Nussbaum explores what existence and identity might mean under conditions in which management of luck is the dominant concern. An account could plausibly be given in which temptation/trial occurs within an apparently dualistic framework in which the tempters (and, what is more, the Tempter himself) have an unrestricted power to attack, and in which the outcome is uncertain. Or it could be said that history is under the sway of a remorseless and unyielding force whose plan and person remain entirely hidden from view. In each of these instances, a Christian martyrdom would indeed appear ludicrous. Against dualism and luck, the doctrine of providentia dei is a reminder of the overarching monotheistic structure of Christian belief; that nothing, not even the temptation, falls outside or is a convincing challenge to the sovereign design of God.41 He is the author of the narrative of history. However, the Christian doctrine of providence is not merely theistic. It gives expression to providence in Trinitarian terms.42 So, amidst the chaos of experience with all of its peirasmo/i, the martyr rests on the singularity of the Father’s providence, expressed in the supreme and effective example of the Son’s renunciation of temptation and his strength under trial to the point of death, and in the comforting presence of the Paraclete. It is in this act of reconciliation that the providence of the God ‘who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ is revealed. The self-emptying of the Son was to the extent (and beyond) of his subjecting himself in the likeness of sinful flesh to the trials and temptations of life in the world, under the auspices of the Devil. Thus, the testimony of the martyr is not merely to

41 This is something Eliot certainly perceived. Paul Hernadi (1986: 147) makes him sound rather more dualistic than he is: ‘In Eliot’s view, history is not simply the background of smartly progressive and foolishly conservative human forces, both required for the steady evolution of our species. It is, rather, the visible site of the unceasing spiritual struggle between creative, divine order and the destructive stirrings of chaos ever to be loathed and defeated.’ 42 Barth offers a strong critique of Calvin, his forebear, on precisely this score. In Calvin’s otherwise impressive chapters on providence in the Institutes (I.xvi–xviii), so Barth complains, there is scant reference to the revelation of God in Christ. Calvin (and those who followed him) works his doctrine of providence out from his doctrine of the knowledge of God – even using Jesus’s own teaching on God’s providential care, but not showing how the providence of God is chiefly exercised, and revealed, in the life and death of that man. This tendency was then inherited by Protestant orthodoxy: ‘It does not seem to have occurred to whole generations of Protestant theologians to ask what this lordship has to do with Jesus Christ, and the knowledge and confession of this lordship, and readiness to subject oneself to it, with faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ’ (Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.iii., pp. 30–1). The Christian belief in providence is not a belief in an absolute will or an absolute power, but in the God who exercises his will and his power (and his love) in Jesus Christ. Perhaps this is in reality not far from what Calvin meant, with his characteristic emphasis on the fatherly care of God. In turn, Barth’s description of providence could be critiqued as insufficiently pneumatological, as it is by Gunton. (Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh Studies in Constructive Theology; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 179–80.)

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a remote understanding of the divine mastery of events from outside, but to the loving providential action of God in Christ from within the sphere of the human. Here are the climactic events of the divine narrative, to which all other events relate. As Colin Gunton writes: A Christological structuring of divine providential action understands it in the light of the one who became human, identifying with the world’s structures in order to reshape them to their eschatological destiny.43 The divine being whose sovereignty is unchallengeable lives for a while ‘a little lower than the angels’.44 It is thus through the work of one in it that creation is brought to its fulfilment. This is the noetic basis on which, Christianly speaking, a belief in providence is founded. Belief in providence is not an inference from history; nor is it a claim to know the pattern of the times. It is not augury or cloud-reading. Belief in providence is not even a claim to special knowledge of the providential plan. It is merely a claim to knowledge that there is such a plan and that it has been made by one with the power and the will to accomplish it ‘for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’ (Rom. 8.28). From the covenant history which culminates in the Son of God’s action for salvation of the world we learn of the purpose and character of God to which all other history is ordered. When Paul exclaims, at the end of his troubled and troubling discussion of the election of Israel in Romans 9–11: O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. (Rom. 11.33-36) he is not expressing an apophatic despair of ever knowing the ineffable deity who must himself remain ever hidden behind a cloud of unknowing, but rather his joy in the righteous and loving character of God revealed in the gospel of his power (Rom. 1.16). Though the full plan of God is as yet concealed from view, his character has in fact been made known in the gospel of the Son. This thought is Paul’s consolation. This gospel is, however, thoroughly embedded in the history of salvation that preceded it. Prior to the NT witness to the providence of God in Christ, 43 Gunton, The Triune Creator, p. 192. In Luke’s gospel, famously, Jesus refers to the necessity – presumably the divinely ordained necessity – of certain courses of action. But the Lukan dei/ is not a fatalistic necessity. When Jesus says out loud in Lk. 9.22: Dei/ to.n ui`o.n tou/ avnqrw,pou polla. paqei/n (‘It is necessary for the Son of Man to suffer many things . . .’), he is describing the human need and the divine remedy; but it is a necessity to which he freely submits. 44 The otherwise helpful article by Gregersen (2000) tries to relate temptation and providence by describing ‘multiple logics of faith’ – but completely overlooks a Trinitarian and Christological description of providence. Thus he sinks into a morass of unnecessary complications.

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Gen. 22.1-19 tells the story to which Israel herself looked back for the revelation of ha,r”yE hw”hy> – ‘Yhwh the provider’. It was the story of Yhwh’s trial (hS’nI) of Abraham, too. At the outset, a word comes from God that makes Abraham’s experience of God to this point baffling (Gen. 22.1). He cannot see the pattern of the divine plan. He cannot make sense of this command according to some rational scheme; or according to some morality which he imagines God to be subject to like everyone else; or, by dint of some hermeneutic strategy lately learned, hear something other than what he has heard. He does not even begin to doubt his own sanity. There is the semblance of cruelty in the request, even: God reminds him that he, Abraham, loves his son (Gen. 22.2). With what attitude does Abraham set out on his journey? In the other pieces we have of his story, we have presented to us a fearful doubter. In Egypt he presents his wife as his sister; in the disastrous begetting of Ishmael, he is seen (with Sarai) as attempting to foreshorten the gap between the divine promise and its realization in his life. In those tests he stumbles; here now, he silently presses on towards the mountain. He cannot see what is ahead, but rather only possesses the promises of the God who called him. As he says to Isaac, ‘God himself will provide the sacrifice.’ At the climax of the story, the angel stays Abraham’s hand, and the ram – a superior sacrifice? – is found caught in the thicket. This provision of God, of course, is not merely a result of his action as a distant supreme being – if it were, then this whole episode would certainly be an exercise in divine sadism of the hapless human subject. This is not the God that Abraham encounters here. He proceeds on the basis of the God who has previously revealed himself to him in promises, and meets at his journey’s end the ha,r”yE hw”hy>.45 Abraham receives the provision of a ram as a demonstration of God’s determination to be the Lord of the covenant with his people in their actual history.46 Jesus’s own teaching on providence in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 6.2534) is likewise not a statement about the order of things as they are, but a bold declaration about the coming of the kingdom of God.47 He urges his hearers against anxiety about material provisions, and to be comforted instead. He asks them not worry about th/| yuch/| u`mw/n (Mt. 6.25), their ‘lives’.48 The birds are well-fed; the lilies are finely dressed. In both cases this happens without the labour of those who benefit. Yet: ‘[A]re you not much more valuable than they?’ (Mt. 6.26). Jesus here highlights what has traditionally been called God’s ‘general’ providence in upholding even the smallest parts of the natural world. The fact of this provision for the natural world should prompt a reassurance of the ‘special’ providence of God for his people, and an end to running like the pagans after material securities. And yet, the Sermon itself 45 The author of Hebrews configures Abraham’s trust in God’s providence in terms of the resurrection from the dead (Heb. 11.17-19). 46 See Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.iii., p. 35. 47 Ibid., II.ii, p. 695. 48 th/| yuch/| u`mw/n is translated ‘life’. Here is survival for which food is required, but also clothing as adornment. Is it possible to see yuch as indicating ‘identity’ and ‘personhood’, as well as ‘life’ in the sense of ‘existence’? Whatever the case, Jesus is turning the attention of the disciple away from the self and its needs, even its basic ones.

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begins with recognition of the fraught conditions of lived experience for the people of God: mourning, persecution, being slandered and insulted, and so on (Mt. 5.11-12). Whatever is meant by the providence of God, it is not merely that his people will be well fed and beautifully clothed. There is no promise that consists in an earthly prosperity or security, which would be temporary in any case (Mt. 6.19-21). The promise in which this faith in providence rests is a promise that the kingdom of God will bring vindication – that is the implication of the maka,rioi (Mt. 5.1-12). There is an unavoidable eschatological dimension to this account of providence. Jesus recognizes that the experience of life as it is – and especially for the people of God – is not of itself reassuring without reference to the eschatological fulfilment of the divine promises (as we saw in Chapter 3). For her part, the disciple of Jesus has to refrain from worry, and pursue as a priority the kingdom of God. In other words, as Bonhoeffer puts it: ‘[T]he Christian lives from the times of God, and not from his own idea of life.’49 This was the lesson of Abraham, too.50 It is the same attitude that Jesus himself taught his disciples, in the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer itself is an articulation of a subjectivity experienced in medias res, but also in the hope of eschatological deliverance. It is distinguished from the verbose Gentile prayers which try to demand divine notice by sheer volume of words (Mt. 6.7). This prayer is a very different kind of speech-act. First, it addresses the one in heaven (Mt. 6.9); which is to say, it addresses the ruler of all things as he sits on his throne. This is a prayer from one who has a limited view of things to a being who sees all. It is a prayer to a known rather than to an unknown divinity, it should be noted: this prayer proceeds on the basis of the prior revelation of God’s identity, on the basis of promises he has already spoken. He can be addressed by his name because he is known and identified. Second, the primary request of the prayer (to which the others are subordinated) is that the Father would hallow his own name, and carry out his will (to. qe,lhma,) ‘as in heaven also on earth’ (w`j evn ouvranw/| kai. evpi. gh/j (Mt. 6.10)). Clearly the (earthly) perspective of the praying subject is one which observes that the divine will is not yet fulfilled, and the divine name not yet hallowed. The experience of the pray-er is that of not being able to see that God’s rule is everywhere enforced;51 yet there is a drawing-down into the character of God as he has revealed himself that can only be named ‘faith’. Indeed, we may go further here: the eschatological orientation of faith in the Father’s providence means that it can withstand even the threat of torture and death.52 49 Bonhoeffer, Temptation, p. 11. 50 And of many of the Psalms. For example, Ps. 31.15: yt’_To[i ^ïd>y”B. (‘[I]n your hands are my times . . .’). 51 Gregersen (2000: 341) puts it succinctly: from the point of view of the one praying, ‘[T]he world is certainly not a mirror of God’s reality’. Well, not yet. 52 William Cavanaugh addresses a similar concept with the term ‘eschatological imagination’, noting how powerful for martyrs this inward, hopeful vision is in all kinds of extreme conditions of testing: ‘The eschatological imagination sees that, although they presume to kill us, Christ has vanquished the powers of death once and for all. The eschatological imagination of martyrdom is not a vertical ascension to another place and time, a distant heaven; the movement instead brings a foretaste of heavenly

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The saints of the OT could have prayed this prayer on the basis of the memory of God’s historical acts and the witness of the prophetic word. Their faith was not in a different Lord. But the NT adds to the history of God’s people the decisive appearance of the Son of God (Heb. 1.1-3; 11.39-40). In his death and resurrection, the kingdom of God was inaugurated. We have from the story of Abraham and Isaac the view of divine providence as not merely the provision of sustenance but the provision of a sacrifice that God himself demands of his creatures. God himself is the provider of what he requires of men and women. On the other hand, Jesus’s own teaching about the kingdom of God points to its eschatological nature. The world and its history as they are lie under the judgement of God. Its destiny, as things stand, is to be wound down, unravelled and subject to destruction. The testimony of the NT authors, on the basis of the resurrection of Christ from the dead in the power of the Spirit, is that Jesus Christ was the sacrifice provided by God to meet his just requirement and to reconcile fallen humankind to himself (e.g. Rom. 5.1-11). This was not decisive only for individuals, nor even merely for Israel, but indeed for the destiny of the whole created order (Col. 1.19-20; Rom. 8.19-23).53 To accept a martyr’s death in the name of the one in whom all things are reconciled to God is not, then, as astonishing as it might seem. The nonchalance with which the first generations of martyrs are depicted as accepting their terrible fate is no doubt exaggerated; but the truth that it serves to illustrate is that for the disciple of Christ there is, in the scriptural account of providence, both a way to make sense of the persecution and no reason to fear its consequences. Not only are the martyrs recorded as entrusting themselves to the providential care of the Father in the face of demonic opposition; the very martyrdoms themselves are depicted as being (in Eliot’s words) ‘by the design of God himself’. They even understand their own suffering as under his providential hand. As the author of ‘The Martyrdom of St Polycarp’ comments: Blessed indeed and noble are all the martyrdoms that took place in accordance with God’s will. For we must devoutly assign to God a providence over them all.54 As we saw in Chapter 3, the presbyter Pionius was accused by his interrogators of foolishness, self-destruction, impiety and madness. To the question ‘[W]hich god do you worship?’ he gave this reply:

space-time to earth’ (William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 65). 53 As I have tried to demonstrate throughout (for example in Chapter 3), the theological narrative in terms of which the Christian self is shaped and Christian martyrdom makes sense is at once both an affirmation of the goodness of creation and its ordering to a higher good. My eschatological and Christological description of providence shows how Christian martyrdom is rational as a preference for higher goods over lower ones in the hope that in the light of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, even the lower ones might be recovered. 54 ‘The martyrdom of Polycarp’, I, in Musurillo (2000: 3).

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The God who is almighty . . . who made the heavens and the earth and things that are in them, and all of us; the God who richly furnishes us with everything, the God we know through Christ his Word.55 Pionius claims that he knows God in Christ; and in Christ he knows God the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. And for that divinity, he is prepared to die – though, as he describes it, he is ‘not rushing towards death, but towards life’.56 What we have seen in this brief discussion of providentia dei is that though temptation and testing threaten the stability and even the identity of the subject, awareness of and reliance on the providence of God are the ground that enables resistance. Providence also gives the testing its meaning qua peirasmo,j. This knowledge is not merely an abstract item of data but in fact the knowledge of the revelation and enactment of God’s providential care for his creatures in the particular history of Christ Jesus. Remarkably, the whole action of the martyrdom, from the renunciation of temptation to the suffering of a painful death, itself belongs within God’s providential action.57 The Christian doctrine of providence has an eschatological horizon. It takes the form of a longing for the kingdom of God, which means that even the threat of a bloody death does not surpass it. This is the witness of the martyr.

E

Martyrdom, temptation and providence

I shall now venture to draw together some of the themes of the discussion of temptation and providence as they relate to the martyred self. I have argued that temptation – or, more rightly, peirasmo,j – is genuinely a part of the narrative logic of martyrdom. But what does this observation itself in turn reveal? Peirasmo,j as tentatio is a given of human existence: it is Adamic. It is a feature of the primal human story, and also part of the redeemer’s experience in identifying with hapless human beings. The human situation is not ever found aside from this battle with sarx and diaboloj, a battle which

55 ‘The martyrdom of Pionius’, VIII, in Musurillo (2000: 147). Acts 4.24, on the lips of Pionius here, is by far the most cited text in Musurillo’s collection of martyr-acts. Later on in Pionius’ story (ibid., p. 157) we read: ‘“Which god do you worship?” asked Lepidus. Pionius answered: “The God who made heaven and earth and the sea and all that is in them”. Lepidus said: “You mean, then, the one who was crucified?” “Yes”, said Pionius, “him whom God sent for the redemption of the world”.’ 56 ‘The martyrdom of Pionius’, VIII, in Musurillo (2000: 163). 57 The martyr Stephen, widely regarded as undergoing the type of martyrdom to follow, enflames his judges by recounting salvation-history in summary form with the shocking twist that Jesus Christ is the fulfilment and climax of that narrative (Acts 7). For Luke he is a model biblical-theologian, reading Israel’s past in terms of the promises and actions of Yhwh and the recalcitrance of the people. It is an interpretation of providence, in other words; and, ironically, it is this view of providence to which he witnesses that brings him into fatal conflict. See Pelikan, Acts, pp. 106–8.

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threatens to unself the self. We do not know of a time when human subjects did not have to face these opponents.58 This leads to a problem: how does the martyr, a fellow human being, hope to be victorious in the strife? The temptation/testing of the martyr is in this sense not unusual. This situation is not the result of luck or fate. Peirasmo,j is a test of the free human response and obedience to the divine call. As such, it tests our awareness of our own existence as God’s creatures – our recognition of our maker’s voice and our responsiveness to him. It describes not the moment of that call, but our memory of the call at the moment when it appears to be gainsaid in our experience: ‘Did God really say . . .?’ The trial or temptation comes to us as a contradiction of the Word of God: it came as temptation in the garden, and in the infralapsarian era has been intensified through the unyielding nature of the world itself and the unending fraternal struggle within the human community. As Barth puts it: Face to face with temptation he cannot maintain the goodness of his creation in the divine image and foreordination to the divine likeness . . . [I]n himself and as such man will always do as Adam did in Gen. 3.59 Because of the catastrophic human failure under peirasmo,j, the individual is threatened with her own disintegration as a person – and, indeed, her eventual death. Peirasmo,j is the gateway to the captivity of the self to the world of sin, the flesh and the Devil (to use NT language). The biblical history records the history of the human subject’s utter capriciousness; of the human individual’s unwilling inability to be truly herself, even to herself. That is to say, trial and temptation throw into radical question – a question not readily answered – what the ingredients of authentic human life might be. For Gregersen, under the pressure of trial and temptation ‘both the objective arena of the world and the subjective arena of the self are seen as unreliable. Only God is reliable.’ We see something of this disintegrating human subjectivity under the power of sin famously expressed by Paul in Rom. 7.7-24: ‘[O] wretched man that I am!’60 It was necessary for Jesus Christ to undergo peirasmo,j to demonstrate his total solidarity with humankind and to defeat the evil one. If the Son of God really was to share the human condition, then he needed to be exposed to the actuality of peirasmo,j. The trials and temptations of Jesus in the wilderness and in Gethsemane are shown so that it might be known that there was one who passed through the peirasmo,j and emerged victorious over Satan. Here was one whose identity did not disintegrate under the testing. These episodes 58 This, of course, raises a theodicial question: how does the presence of temptation/ trial square logically with belief in the providentia dei? To attempt to answer this is beyond our present scope, other than to note that Christian martyrs, as they witness to Christ’s own victory through suffering, testify to powerful hope in the sovereign God (their ‘eschatological imagination’) in such a way that the question loses its existential force – for them at least. For a theodicy that makes use of martyrdom, see Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 126. 59 Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.ii., p. 122. 60 Gregersen, ‘Trial and temptation’, p. 343.

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reveal not only Satan’s impotence against the Son of God, but also the fittingness of Christ to become High Priest and sacrifice. The cross of Christ itself is the sign of his ultimate defeat of Satan.61 In answer to the peirasmo,j of human experience, Christ re-invites and empowers trust in the providence of a righteous, covenanting God – whose providential care of the world is revealed most completely in him. We learn much from the manner of his victory: he reaches down into the Word of God and rests on it; he submits his will to God as he prays, for the good of others. Further, he himself carries out the divine providential action in his death and resurrection, by these actions enabling the world ‘to become itself by action within, and over against, its fallen structures’.62 This is inclusive of human beings, who rightly respond when they cry out to the Lord for deliverance. I have in mind in particular Rom. 8.19ff, where the redemption-action of Christ has its effect in terms of the adoption of human beings into the family of God and also the future liberation of the creation itself, which elicits much groaning under the present conditions of trial. The Lord’s Prayer – the prayer taught by the Son of God to his disciples – gives voice to this felt disparity in human experience. For their part, Christ’s disciples are thrust anew into the experience of peirasmo,j: the weakness of the flesh, the hostility of the world and the attacks of the Evil One. As they seek to imitate him, peirasmo,j naturally features as part of that mimetic action; as it was part of the narrative logic of his life, so it is now of theirs, given their union with him. Satan renews his efforts against those whose determination is to defy him, though it is not by their strength in this battle that he is defeated. These are merely the lashings of a bestial tail (Rev. 12.4). The peirasmo,j may result in bloody martyrdom, which is entirely unsurprising, given the nature of the challenger and his challenge. However, the victory belongs already to Christ himself.

61 This is a theme in Pauline theology: ‘He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it’ (Col. 2.15). 62 Gunton, The Triune Creator, p. 190.

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8

Martyrdom and the self in review

A

Introduction

The final chapter begins by resituating the discussion of the Christian self in the context of the lines of thought set in train in Chapter 2. In that chapter, I outlined Salman Rushdie’s attack on martyrdom as an identity, and his concern that any mindset or world-view that celebrated martyrdom is positively dangerous to human thriving on a global scale. It is, in terms of ‘the self’, an incoherent narrative, an orientation of the individual away from the good, and destructive of human community. The problem for his account – and even for Charles Taylor’s – is that authentically Christian martyrdom is not adequately reckoned with in their conception of the full human life though it is itself basic to Christian self-identity. Here, I start again with the play; or, more accurately, with a review of a relatively recent production of the play. A challenge is offered to the meaningfulness of the play in its own terms; a challenge which is illustrative of the challenge against Christian self-as-martyr.

B

A review of Murder in the Cathedral in production

In his essay-length review of Stephen Pimlott’s 1993 Stratford-upon-Avon production of Murder in the Cathedral, Emrys Jones argued that Eliot’s play succeeded in performance as a drama – though helped significantly by some adventurous and skilful direction – despite the fact that the religious appeal of the play was now no longer relevant to most of the audience. Another reviewer, Sir Frank Kermode, went so far as to claim that, in his judgement, it was true that ‘[G]enerally speaking, the emphasis has shifted from martyrdom to agonised secular heroism . . .’1 Pimlott, it seems, had to reckon with a much more secular audience than perhaps Eliot had imagined. As Jones writes: 1 In The Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 1993, cited in Emrys Jones, ‘Murder in the Cathedral at Stratford’, in Marianne Thormählen (ed.), T. S. Eliot at the Turn of the Century (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994), p. 150. 183

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Loosened from its ecclesiastical origins, the play has inescapably become more of a purely literary classic, and as it has moved further into the past, its 1930s Christian religiosity has also become more of an historical phenomenon.2 Jones is not arguing for such a change; rather, he counts himself as merely observing it, as the director seems to have. The power of the drama is less likely to reside in the identification of the audience with Thomas or with the Chorus as Christians trying to live the Christian life, and the drama must find its connection by other means. Pimlott deliberately cast Thomas as a non-spiritual man: a skilful manager and politician, perhaps, but certainly not an obvious priest-type. For his part, Craig Raine questions whether the play itself can now really work as a play even if a skilful production of it can.3 If the key component at the core of Thomas’s motivation is no longer credible, then are we not forced to supply another meaning to the death before us than the one given? It is surely the case that, if the religion of Eliot and of Thomas is now redundant, we must side with one of the alternative interpretations of the murder that the play itself makes available. Removing the ‘religious’ component of the death of the Archbishop leaves you with – what kind of death exactly? In what way is the death at all honourable or noble or admirable or representative if it is a secular martyrdom of some kind? In fact, Eliot makes sure that we cannot make this move. There is no ‘cause’ for which he dies – he is no Martin Luther King or Gandhi, no secularized saint. There is no particular noble cause of which he is the symbol. In fact, Thomas resists at every turn secularizing himself: that is surely the point! Eliot resists making him a modern hero representative of some modern cause. He does not even succumb to pride – unless you side with his murderers, who justify themselves (as he does not) by accusing him of delusions of spiritual grandeur. If the religious component is excised like that, is he not guilty of neglect of his duty, his people and his country? Is he not convicted of seditious action, or of wilfully provoking the wrath of the king in order to secure his place in history? What comfort or lesson can modern audiences take from this? Kermode’s suggestion of an ‘agonised secular heroism’ is clearly untenable. There is nothing heroic about Thomas in the ordinary (or in any) sense; in fact, as we have seen, heroism is one of his temptations. Jones for his part makes a stronger case. He reminds us that ‘the play is a play and not a theological or devotional discourse’;4 in his opinion, too many critics have read the play precisely the other way around.5 It is not intended as a flat text, but as a script to be enlivened by performance. Jones asserts that Murder in the Cathedral has a real dramatic action at its centre and that it expresses a powerful aesthetic coherence of its own that is independent of the religious ideas that stimulated its creator. Just as the Greek plays continue to be powerful, 2 3 4 5

Ibid., p. 151. Raine, T. S. Eliot, p. 194. Jones, ‘Murder in the Cathedral at Stratford’, p. 157. No doubt the accusation could be levelled at this book!

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humanly convincing and aesthetically pleasing to contemporary audiences even though virtually no one holds to the mythic and religious ideas found in them, so Eliot’s drama will become part of the canon of great writing for the stage in the English language. Eliot has written a play that works in terms of its action – produced on stage it is rather less static than the use of verse would indicate. These critical responses are illustrative of the contemporary inability to come to terms with the martyr as anything but a pitiable and/or possibly dangerous figure. If the convictions that move Thomas do not convince the audience at some level, then it is hard to know how the drama can have any purchase other than as a historical curio. However, Jones thinks the historical reference and authenticity of the events depicted are perhaps more significant than they at first seem. Because these events are not invented as a morality tale of rather sentimental proportions, and because the characters are representations of real people engaged in what was a well-testified event locatable in space and dateable in time, the audience is not afforded the luxury of dismissing them as somehow fantastical and inhuman: ‘the play takes its strength from its fidelity to history; as we watch we remember that this is an imitation of something that actually happened’.6 Jones, I presume, means by this that there is something universal about this, or rather something identifiably human in the calamity that plays out before us. I would wish to argue that the play is powerful as a drama, certainly, at that immediate and surface level of the audience’s first encounter with it; but that this unusual and striking power is dependent on the Christian component of the play in a way in which the Greek tragedy is not in the same way dependent upon its religious world-view.7 This is because the Christian gospel is itself of the form of a dramatic action. Christianity is not at all disconnected from the action of the play, as if it inhabits only the fringes of the script in abstruse religious forms; rather, it everywhere and necessarily gives its actual form to the action of the play. The death of Thomas is so obviously and so insistently an imitation of the death of Christ; the form of the action of the play resembles in outline the temptation, passion and death of Jesus, without which it cannot bear its full meaning. We could go further in taking up Jones’s point about the historical aspect of the play: the connection with historical events through imaginative and symbolic reconstruction is quite distinctively a Christian development. Granted, Greek drama and literature on occasion took its subjects from history, or from pre-history; but it turned them into types and showed no real interest in the correspondence of the action to the action in history. In the Christian imagination, historical events are traceable in direct line back from the present; and though clearly ‘fictional’ elements are added to the reconstruction of the event in order to make the dramatization appealing within the conventions of literary forms, we see reminders to the 6 Jones, ‘Murder in the Cathedral at Stratford’, p. 163. 7 Or it could be that the Greek experience of living in a world governed by a hidden fortuna is very similar to living in the contemporary secular world. The feeling of having to manage luck, as we have seen in our discussion of Nussbaum’s reading of Greek tragedy, is only too real for the post-Christian person.

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audience everywhere that there are real historical events to which the action is intended to correspond, and of which the audience is meant to have a vicarious experience.8 Could it ever be said of a Greek drama, as Jones says of Murder in the Cathedral, that it ‘takes its strength from its fidelity to history’? As we have seen, and as Eliot demonstrates in his play, a Christian view of the world – and of the self within that world – rests on an understanding of providence, not fortuna; and so history necessarily takes on a different significance as a meaningfully continuous series of events. Not that the protagonist has to hand what that meaning is, any more than the Greek protagonist did. What Thomas possesses is a belief in the character of the ‘wheel’, however much he expresses bewilderment at the confusion of events that surround him. The contention that the play works as a drama when the religious aspect of it has lost its appeal is, then, quite ill-founded. The dramatic impact of the play – whatever connection it might make with its audience – comes (if it does) precisely on account of its construction as narrative within a Christian framework. To be drawn into the world of the play is to accept (at least, for a time) Eliot’s construal of the way time and space are ordered and arranged; the alternative, it seems, is that the audience must become hostile to Thomas and to his playwright and so side with the Tempters and the Knights in accusing and convicting him. It is facile to suggest, as Jones does, that the contemporary audience’s lack of interest in and even mistrust of institutional Christianity can be set aside by skilful direction and sound acting; or to draw, as he does, the false dichotomy between drama and religious text. Rather, the narrative logic of the play and its theological meaning are inseparable. This discussion of responses to the drama captures in nuce the concern of this work: to elucidate Christian selfhood via martyrdom against the backdrop of an often hostile secular verdict – namely, the charge that it is an inauthentic form of human life. It is true that sometimes an attempt is made to secularize the Christian martyrs, by focusing possibly on the manner of their deaths, or on some exercise of impressive virtue they showed under trial, or perhaps on the injustice against which they stood: to recast them as heroes of acceptable values under a secular paradigm, in other words. But, as in the case of Salman

8 Paul Ricoeur argues that the history and fiction intersect in the way they refer to the ‘real’ world. As he puts it: ‘Our ultimate interest when we do history is to enlarge our sphere of communication: that is, to encounter that which is different to us. But this requires an imaginative act, which is, to suspend your own conditions and desires and assumptions, in order to be communicated to . . . My contention . . . is that it is in this exchange between history and fiction and between their opposite referential claims that our historicity is brought to language.’ This, I suspect, is a lesson that Ricoeur learnt from biblical hermeneutics. It takes the biblical world-view to connect history and fiction in this way. He concludes his article, somewhat characteristically, with a question: ‘Could we not say that by opening us to the different, history opens us to the possible, while fiction, by opening us to the unreal, brings us back to the essential?’ (Ricoeur, 1978: 199–202). There is an important point to be made about history here, too: that a play like Murder in the Cathedral, with all its obviously ‘fictionalized’ elements, may actually ‘open us’ to the historical events to a far greater degree than a more conventionally modern historical account – which may, for all its technical impressiveness, actually alienate us from them.

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Rushdie, martyrdom is frequently cast as the result of a dangerous overdose of ego: it is a failure to live, and a corruption of love. It amounts to a denial of the duty to live with others, a denial which is particularly unacceptable in the contemporary world of shifting global allegiances and identities. It is a form of life of dubious authenticity, even in the terms set out more sympathetically by a Charles Taylor. It might be suggested at this point that there are really two incompatible and rival anthropologies (or rationalities) in play, with no conceivable way of mediating between them.9 These different reactions to Christian martyrdom indicate that there is a dissonance between the two different ‘rationalities’ (or perhaps Weltanschauungen). It is worth asking at this point, therefore, whether martyrdom becomes the ultimate ‘no’ to further communication with the other point of view. The willingness to be killed (as much as it is chosen by the martyr), almost as much as the willingness to kill, is the placing of an insurmountable barrier of blood between the two parties. Is martyrdom, then, merely a point at which two world-views are shown to be irreconcilable, and no more can be said: the scene of a great collision of identities? Is it merely a gesture of defiance against the alternative order of power? However, martyrdom is a remarkably successful form of communication to the world – if not universally so. It succeeds as witness. By the fourth century, the martyrs had succeeded not only in overcoming but in convincing many of their enemies.10 The note that Christian martyrdom strikes is dissonant to the extent that it exposes the futility of opposition to God. It testifies to the non-ultimacy of human political power – and it testifies in address to that power itself. Sometimes, it seems, even the rulers and the executioners – or if not they, then the people – get the message. For the church, as Tertullian’s axiom runs, semen est sanguis Christianorum; which is to say, the martyrs’ blood convinces outsiders of the need to become insiders. In the detailing of the four temptations, we have seen in several instances that the Christian martyrdom is not rebarbative or merely destructive, but rather, when it is authentically expressed, follows the example of the Lord who enjoined his followers to ‘love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you’. As we have seen, the self understood in Christian martyrdom is loyal even when resistant, but at the same time manages to relativize and critique human pretentions to power. If it is to be true to its fundamental nature as witness, it cannot in the last resort be seen as a defiant gesture, merely, but as one which is an invitation to join with the martyr in worship of the one Lord of heaven and earth. As such, there is in Christian martyrdom the invitation of contact – the possibility that the observer of the martyr’s death, or the hearer of her

9 To use terms gleaned from Alasdair MacIntyre (Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990)). 10 It is also apposite to recall the role of bloody martyrdoms in the evangelization of Africa, in resistance to atheistic totalitarianism behind the ‘iron curtain’, and in the survival and growth of the churches in contemporary China – all within the last two centuries. For an account of persecution in the twentieth century, see David Adeney, ‘The church and persecution’, in D. A. Carson (ed.), The Church in the Bible and the World: An International Study (Exeter: Paternoster, 1987), pp. 275–348.

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story, might be drawn into the world that the martyr describes. The question, then, must be: what is it about this form of selfhood that communicates (if it does)? This question asks at a deeper level: what is it in martyrdom, coming as it does out of a precisely Christian understanding of the self and the world, that is able to be meaningful enough in the terms of a world-view that is, at least at face value, utterly hostile to it? The word of the cross is, after all, a skandalon – and so, indeed, are its re-enactments. Theologically speaking, it is only the Spirit of God himself that illuminates this enactment of the gospel of Jesus Christ as a testimony to the truth. Martyrologists who exaggerate the details of the suffering and torture of the martyrs in order to increase the rhetorical impact of their work are in fact doing the martyr a great disservice. They are acting as if a divine act were in need of human enhancement to be effective. The risk here is that the martyr is painted as merely a victim, and the rhetorical impact of telling the story is then limited to pathos for the suffering of the victim. The content of his or her witness then disintegrates. The gospels show the way here: as we read of the death of Jesus, we may feel pity for the disciples, and sorrow for the role our fellow human beings played in his execution, and even disgust and outrage at the injustice perpetuated. But the evangelists do not draw us to pity Jesus; they do not dwell on the gruesome details of his torture and suffering (pace Mel Gibson); they do not portray him as powerless or voiceless; they do not depict the sadistic pleasure of his executioners. Jesus is no victim; events do not get out of hand for him at all – he is seen as always ahead of them. His innocence is not established merely so we can feel appalled at the miscarriage of justice, but so that we can understand the significance of his sacrifice in a theological matrix. There were (and are) worse, more painful deaths; there certainly were (and are) more pitiable victims of injustice. Jesus is not, like some protagonist in a Greek tragedy, the victim of a twist in fate or the misalignment of the planets. An account that emphasizes the pathos of Jesus’s death quite misses the point – which is that the cross of Christ is the expression par excellence of the divine rule over all. It is the moment of the enthronement of Israel’s messiah in Zion and over the whole world. Likewise, a martyrology that dwells too luridly on the blood that flows is not a martyrology but a victimology. A death cast in these terms in the end witnesses only to itself as a death. The best of the early martyr-acts, for all their faults, do not lapse in this direction: Polycarp, for example, though of great age, dies in such a way that his captors look more pitiable than he. Events are not in their control (nor Polycarp’s); but Polycarp’s faith and assurance make it a triumph. Who could feel sorry for him? For David Bentley Hart, the ‘gift of martyrdom’ is the apogee of the Christian practice of persuasion, encapsulating its form and referencing its content. His stated project is to mount a defence of the ‘beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism appeals’11 against the charge from contemporary philosophy that this Christian rhetoric of peace is in fact inescapably violent. As Hart writes: 11 David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 1.

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Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a great, as an episode in the endless epic of power.12 If the gospel is merely an iron fist, even if placed in a velvet glove, then the Nietzschean/postmodern charge is sustained. Hart closes his book with a chapter entitled ‘The Gift of Martyrs’, in which he shows well that the Christian practice of authority contrasts markedly in form with the exercise of governmentality (to use Foucault’s term) because it is different in nature: . . . theology has no choice but to cling to its own peculiar practice of persuasion, in order to resist the temptations of power (and in a history governed by sin, these temptations inhabit every moment); Christianity can only return to its understanding of peace, its unique style of rhetoric, as the sole source of accord; it must always obey the form of Christ, its persuasion must always assume the shape of the gift he is, it must practice its rhetoric under the only aspect it may wear if it is indeed Christian at all: martyrdom . . . Theology must, because of what its particular story is, have the form of martyrdom, witness, a peaceful offer that has already suffered rejection and must be prepared for rejection as a consequence.13 Through its imitation of Christ’s manner of rule – which the martyrs exemplify – the Christian community shows itself to be ruled by such a servant Lord (echoing the argument of Chapter 4). Hart’s emphasis on the ‘renunciation of violence’ as the core meaning of the crucifixion to be imitated in the practices of the church takes the place that rightly belongs to ‘sacrificial love’ – which is not tantamount to the same thing.14 However, what he rightly shows is that, in the very ‘clinging’ of the disciples of Christ to that mode of speech and life which is the only one consonant with the message of the gospel Christians are commissioned to preach, the ubiquitous temptations of power are to be evaded. Thus, it is also possible to speak on the human side of the question: the witness of the martyr occurs within the human sphere of speaking and listening, acting and observing. This question is addressed by Kevin Vanhoozer in The Drama of Doctrine.15 Fittingly, he uses in the book the motifs of the theatre and performance with which to describe Christian speech and action as they

12 Ibid., p. 3. 13 Ibid., p. 441. 14 I would complain here that Hart’s language of ‘theology must . . .’ is a dangerous abstraction which contrasts with the concrete experience and the verbal expression of martyrs. ‘Theology’ is not an entity of agency that it can be the subject of a verb in this way. 15 Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, pp. 431–4.

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are generated and respond to divine speech-acts.16 For Vanhoozer, martyrdom as an imitation of the cross of Christ is an embodiment by the church of the gospel it preaches. As such, nothing is more alienating to the world: by acting in this way the church ‘throws into question Everyman’s everyday assumptions about the meaning of life and the human good’.17 This has almost exactly been my contention throughout: the martyr walks away from those meanings and goods, not because they are blatantly wrong, or not-goods, but because they aren’t enough. But martyrdom is not only given a critical function: martyrdom is a dramatic performance of the death of Christ for the world;18 it is the ‘quintessential form of prophetic action’ implying that it is inherently an addressed action.19 As a drama, then – a narrative performed or enacted – Christian martyrdom invites the outsider to consider the truth to which the martyr testifies. In martyrdom, speech and action are spectacularly united. It is truth-telling to the last degree. Bruce D. Marshall observes: the cruciform holiness of the saints – perhaps above all of the martyrs . . . – displays the habitability of the demanding world which there must be if the church’s central beliefs are true, the world into which the Spirit aims to draw us all.20 In this perceptive comment Marshall ties together several of the threads of the present discussion: the way in which martyrs actually reveal to the world the way the world really is for the sake of the world on the one hand, and the transforming power of the Spirit at work through the ‘cruciform holiness of the saints’ on the other. It is a narrative-action which makes a claim about what is true; it claims for itself a referent in the real world of flesh and blood, life and death.

C

In review

Our intention throughout has been to give a theological (rather than, say, historical, philosophical or sociological) account of selfhood and identity as it is informed by Christian martyrdom. I have deployed throughout – and observed how other accounts make use of – three ‘questions of the self’ in order to orient (though not to limit) the discussion: ‘what kind of narration of 16 An idea he adapted from his own teacher, Nicholas Lash: ‘. . . the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity and organization of the believing community . . . Christian practice, as interpretative action, consists in the performance of texts which are construed as “rendering”, bearing witness to, one whose words and deeds, discourse and suffering, “rendered” the truth of God in human history’. See Lash, ‘Performing the scriptures’, p. 42. 17 Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 428. 18 Though, note, not a repetition: the martyr’s death is not an atoning death; only Christ’s is held to be this. 19 Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 429. 20 B. Marshall, Trinity and Truth, p. 207.

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the self is indicated?’, ‘what account of the good is given, and how is it to be realized?’ and ‘how are the relationships between this self and other selves to be described?’ The basic theological datum with which I began was that martyrdom in the form of witness was inseparable from the identity of the Christian, with bloody martyrdom as its ‘external representation’. Bloody martyrdom, then, is a sign of what the inner reality of the Christian life is like. I noted at this stage that discussions of religious martyrdom occur under pressure of a severe critique: it is certainly not a given that martyrdom is esteemed as a form of death just in and of itself. Rather, martyrs are accused of denying life and of perverting love, of resiling from their duty to do good, of neglecting the bonds of family and friendship, of extreme egotism of a destructive kind. This amounts to an inauthentic or dubious form of selfhood, it would seem. The spectre of religious violence hangs always and already over any discussion of martyrdom in the modern setting. Martyrs are more likely to inspire fear and loathing than reverence. However (I asked), is it the case that Christian martyrdom really falls under this critique? Chapter 2 then examined two powerful and very different attempts to describe authentic selfhood in the contemporary world and asked whether either of them could make sense of an identity informed by the idea of Christian martyrdom. Of Charles Taylor it was argued that he was bending over backwards to make room for the possibility of Christian martyrdom, or something like it, in his account of authenticity, but that he was not firm enough about the possibility of distorted or disreputable ‘horizons of significance’. Martyrs are not those who accept that their understanding of reality is just one among many, after all. Salman Rushdie, for his part, presents a far more irascible figure. He is vehemently opposed to martyrdom as a model for human self-identity: it is far too embedded in traditional ways of seeing the world that do not adequately understand the shifting and liquid conditions of the present order. It is insufficiently open to new experiences and corrupting of the love between individuals. It perpetuates the cycle of violence by preaching resentment and hatred, by viewing the subject as identifiable through his or her victimhood. It allows human beings excuses for not feeling and for not living as they might. It is the result of a fideistic form of religion that cordons itself off from reason. However, Rushdie’s account is not without its own difficulties: it is hard to see that he has successfully escaped from the ‘self-determination’ problem that Taylor derides in his account. Furthermore, while his depiction of martyrdom may be valid for some Christian and other religious martyrdoms, it is certainly not the case that his criticisms of martyrdom in this guise fairly describe a Christian martyrdom that is true to its own sources – in the example of Christ himself, in the canonical Scriptures and in the ripening tradition. In fact, what Rushdie seeks in a self-identity is in some ways quite similar to that which is described by Christian martyrdom. Rushdie seeks to free the individual from the matrices of the past: culture, religion, race, gender and so on; and as we have seen, the Christian martyr is one who is not beholden to these either. Rushdie applauds the embrace of ‘the new’, delights in unforeseen possibilities and the potential for boundary-crossing connections between human beings in the name of peace – again, these themes are affirmed rather than denied by Christian martyrdom, it turns out. However, the characters

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that Rushdie introduces are still masters of their own destinies and makers of their own images. They are paragons of self-determining freedom, above all, attempting to narrate themselves into authentic selfhood. Into this context I offered the reading of Christian martyrdom as generated by Eliot in his perceptive play. The meaning of the martyrdom – and, indeed, the identity of the martyr – is informed, as we watch the visitation of the Tempters to Thomas, by that which the martyr renounces. Many of the things renounced are very good and worthy ways to be: they are all the more powerful as temptations for being so. These are promising potential selves, full of opportunity to be useful to society and to be fulfilled and powerful as an individual. The First Tempter offers Thomas the chance to guard himself against the twists and turns of fate by pursuing a life of ease and security; or, at least, he offers him the yearning for the time when he had this life. Transposing this temptation into the terms offered by Martha C. Nussbaum in her analysis of Greek tragedy, we saw how the management of luck and the securing of safety was (and remains) a crucial component of successful existence in a world fraught with chance. However, the martyr walks away from this potential for security. Discipleship of Christ is described as not a matter for looking back to home, or even looking around in the present for cover against whatever may come, but rather for looking ahead to the eternal city promised in the gospel of Jesus (as we discovered with Augustine’s help). The martyr-disciple steps out into risk knowing that there is no turning back, and that the cost may be great. However, he or she is not merely a thrill-seeker, riding a wave of risk all the way to the shoreline; on the contrary, the risk is taken in the context of hope secured in the ascended Lord Christ. This ‘risk-taking’ by the disciple also exposes the temporary nature of human fortifications against luck. Christian martyrdom is not a cult of death. The accusation levelled against martyrs is that the stance they take is merely negative and wholly life-denying; that martyrdom is a denial of the goodness of the created world; that it leans towards an eschatology of disruption and destruction rather than towards one of transformation. As we have seen in answer to the First Tempter, Christian discipleship does mean a renunciation of the things of the world – but it also means a return to them. The martyr’s faith in providence relativizes the importance of all created things but in doing so does not anathematize them. In Bonhoeffer’s terms, it orders the Penultimate to the Ultimate (this language was used in Chapter 5). In particular, the martyr who gives away his or her life does so because there is nothing more valuable that he or she might give. After all, as the Jesus of John’s gospel says: ‘[G]reater love has no one than this . . .’ The death of the martyr is not a resignation to fate, but truly points to the value of life. You cannot consider laying down your life for your friends a sacrifice of any significance if you hold life cheap. As Charles Taylor recognizes, there is a ‘powerful sense of loss’21 at the heart of Christian martyrdom, because there is something given away that is worth losing. Life in its fullness is hallowed by martyrdom. The structure of the resurrection belief to which the martyr witnesses is an affirmation of the goodness of the created order,

21 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 219.

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pointing not to its eradication by the coming new order but to its transformation. In the words of John Paul II, ‘martyrdom is also the exaltation of a person’s perfect “humanity” and of true “life”’.22 The Second Tempter, in a tactic pursued also by the Fourth, tries to catch Thomas in a double-bind. On the one hand he offers to him the chance to make peace with his (God-appointed) ruler so that the two may collaborate in performing the business of government: meting out justice for the good of the people. The price? ‘A certain submission’ to the king. When Thomas draws back from this, appealing to the ‘power of the keys’, the Tempter accuses him of power-hunger. We saw next in the discussion of Richard Rorty that this temptation is not unique to conditions of monarchy and papacy; in fact, even under contemporary forms of liberal order a version of this temptation will be on offer. Churches may be tempted to secede their distinctive speech in favour of being able to participate in the public square, or may be accused of sectarianism if they refrain. The response from Scripture and the tradition (this time chiefly Augustine, Tyndale and O’Donovan) is to advance the insight, revealed in the martyr’s renunciation, that power and authority have a single source though a dual expression. This helps both to relativize the power of the imperium and to show it as circumscribed by divine authority at every point; and also to encourage the church that in the gospel it has its own authority – though it is of a distinctively non-coercive and persuasive nature. Christian martyrdom is not merely a stand of eternal dissidence, it is a witness to the rule of God in Christ. While on the one hand the martyr refuses to accept the absolute claims of human rule outside Christ, on the other he or she readily acknowledges the delegation of divine authority to even the pagan ruler. This was evidenced in the reports of the early martyrs and their attitudes of respectful defiance when it came to their interrogators. Martyrdom exposes the folly of human imperialism and so is a great comfort to the oppressed. Thus, it can indeed accept peace terms when they come. A return to the catacombs is not what it is to be truly Christian, but the Christian must always be at the ready for the time when the tide turns and martyrdom becomes a possibility again. The churches must always remember the nature of the particular task for which they carry divine authorization. The Third Tempter, also interested in power, offers to Thomas the option of rebellion against the King on behalf of the true essence of the nation. There is a case to be made here: after all, tyranny is worth fighting against. There may be more natural and more just forms of government available. Again the case is made that this is the way in which more just outcomes for the English people can be pursued. This would be the more patriotic option. What is more, this is a path of action, of putting noble thoughts into concrete practice. Yet again, the martyr refuses. The form that his resistance to power takes is loyal; he does not hold national identity as an absolute value by any means; and he refuses to assert himself by seizing at action that will achieve that end. In fact (as we saw with the assistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer), he acts ‘passively’ – which is 22 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (1993), www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor_en.html (accessed 5 June 2007).

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to say, in a way that takes responsibility for others, that is prepared to suffer what may come. In the Fourth Tempter we have the most surprising of the temptations and another one that takes a twofold course: martyrdom itself is offered, first with Thomas imagining how he will be remembered and honoured by posterity, and secondly with him imagining the crown of heaven being placed on his deserving temples. The renunciation of the first three temptations runs headlong into this fourth: if Thomas imagines himself accruing heavenly merit and forcing the divine hand on account of his repudiation of the secured self, the powerful self and the active self, he is sorely mistaken. He must also set aside his own self-designation of himself as a martyred self. We find these temptations maintained first in the representation of the ancient ‘honour ethic’, with all its military trappings; and secondly in the theology of heavenly rewards, which is widespread in religious accounts of martyrdom including some Christian ones, admittedly. Both of these descriptions of martyrdom are proven to be problematically self-justifying. The insight given in the renunciation of this temptation is that, as Thomas is able to declare to his congregation in the Cathedral on St Stephen’s Day, martyrdom is itself an act of God. The making of martyrs is given to divine providence and not to human hands. As we saw, it was Augustine in particular who had to wrestle with this in the context of great enthusiasm for martyrdom in the church of his day. The Christian offers himself or herself in free obedience as a witness to the divine rule; the outcome is not for him or her to determine. As Eliot puts it: ‘Christian martyrdom is no accident.’ Christian martyrdom is an act only made possible by God in Jesus Christ. As Thomas learns, one cannot self-designate as a martyr, or pursue martyrdom for its own sake. Dying a martyr’s death isn’t the result of a persecution complex, or of the choice of a disciple that he or she is going to be granted this particular crown. Christians are only called to discipleship, of which bloody martyrdom might be the terrifying consequence. The example of martyrdom is a testimony to the divine work rather than the choice and action of a human being. As we see in the fourth temptation, a martyrdom taken as a human performance in search of divine affirmation becomes something other than martyrdom. The martyr, rather, engages in an ‘eternal patience’, a watching for God like Christ in Gethsemane. As such, Christian martyrdom is not the result of some virtue like courage, but of seeing the world with the eyes of faith, as the gospel of Jesus Christ declares it to be. This is not to say, of course, that remarkable courage isn’t displayed by those who are martyred; only that courage or some other virtue is not its ground. In all the temptations offered to Thomas, we see that the martyr is, rather than pursuing some course of action per se, the one who places him- or herself in the hands of providence. This is a response of faith rather than an act of courage. In Chapter 7, I drew attention to the twin poles of temptation and providence. These themes had been constantly with us as the four temptations were examined. The move in the narrative was away from temptation, not towards a construction or assertion of a new identity or self, but towards a vision of the providence of God, in Christ. I asked, ‘Who killed the Archbishop?’, which is to do just as the play itself invites us. peirasmo,j – a concept inclusive of trial

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and temptation – is part of the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom. peirasmo,j, it was determined, is an inescapable condition for human beings; but it is not clear from within the human sphere by what strength a human being may overcome it. It is an inescapable and undefeatable given. There is no self, no identity, that a person may put forward or construct in order to overcome and endure peirasmo,j with any hope of success. What is more, peirasmo,j is so severe as to threaten the individual with her own disintegration as a person. By investigating the pattern of martyrdom, once again with the aid of the narrative structure provided for us by Eliot in his play, it was shown that it is the Christian faith in the providence of God, consummated in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, which is the foundation for resistance and renunciation of peirasmo,j – and, thus, for authentic selfhood. Christ himself undergoes peirasmo,j as a trial and as a temptation, and is revealed as overcoming both. In this last chapter I have attempted to bring my study to its consummation by returning – conveniently by means of critical discussion of Murder in the Cathedral in performance – to the question of whether martyrdom represents, in fact, the utter breakdown in communication between two competing views of the world and of human identity. What I propose is that the self expressed in Christian martyrdom, as a testimony to truth, does not entirely repel, but rather invites. It is offered as a suffering form of persuasion to which the persuader is entirely committed, as a self. The dramatic form that martyrdom takes draws the observer into the narrative thought-world, shaped by peirasmo,j from the human side and by providence from the divine side; and ultimately finds these two aspects conjoined in the (hi)story of Jesus Christ. Christian martyrdom shows that the Christian life is lived for the world, and not just for the Christian churches. While it is true that the deaths of the martyrs are a great encouragement to the body of Christ, it is also the case that Christian martyrdoms are oriented to the outside. As William Cavanaugh puts it: ‘[T]he pyres which burn the martyrs’ bodies serve as light for the world, not isolating the community of believers but calling all to the city on the hill.’23 That a martyr brings about the exposure of the folly of tyranny brings benefits to all citizens, and not just to Christians. In being for the world, identity shaped by Christian martyrdom follows the pattern of the distinctively Christian way of speaking to the world. Martyrdom is part of the missio dei to the world, and shows how Christian discipleship in general is to be oriented to the world. In keeping their presentation of the crucified messiah to the world, Christians offer a suffering witness as against a speech of power and domination. Neither is the Christian gospel a discourse of rights or ideals, unless perhaps it is on behalf of others. It does not participate in the victim-identity mode of speech. Rather, it embodies the ‘message of the cross’. To use Paul’s language: it is a making-strong-through-weakness, not an assertion of the will-to-power. Christian martyrdom is a sign of the ongoing power and effectiveness of the gospel of Jesus in the world. That people are willing to die for Christ shows

23 Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, p. 64.

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that the gospel of Jesus Christ is really effective to change the lives – the selves – of human beings. Clearly, in an ongoing way, people are prepared to stake all they have, and are, and potentially could be, on this construal of reality. Martyrs are, in this way, a divine provision for the edification of the body of Christ; they are also a divine gift to all the nations. They witness in their suffering bodies to the nature and scope of divine authority as it was established in the person and work of Christ.

D

Conclusion

Saint Ignatius of Antioch, addressing the Christians of Rome, where he was himself soon to be martyred, wrote: ‘[H]ave mercy on me, brethren: do not hold me back from living; do not wish that I die . . . Let me arrive at the pure light; once there I will be truly a man [a;nqrwpoj]. Let me imitate the passion of my God.’24 Christian martyrdom is not a making of one’s own meaning as a human being or the tracing out of one’s own authenticity or identity. The Christian disciple is satisfied merely to declare ‘I am a Christian’, and to leave the rest in the hands of providence – known as it is in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In martyrdom, there is an attempt by one human being to eviscerate the humanity of another; yet the promise is that it is the inhumanity of the perpetrator which is actually unmasked. Further, we see anticipated in martyrdom – in the true humanity of the martyr, to use Ignatius’ notion – the divine vindication of the martyr, in that it echoes the decisive death of Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead: I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; they cried out with a loud voice, ‘Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?’ They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed. (Rev. 6.9-11)

24 ‘Epistle to the Romans’, XVI, in Musurillo (2000: 214–15).

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Abbreviations JSNT JSOT SPCK

Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

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Name Index

Entries in bold refer to lengthy references to the subject. Cavanaugh, William T. 66, 177n. 52, 195 Cavell, Edith 123n. 70 Clement of Alexandria 6, 139, 143 Clement of Rome 70, 86n. 16 Cook, David 141 Cyprian 6, 87n. 17, 88n. 25, 139, 144

Agapius (martyr) 119 Aghapour, Andrew 28n. 45, 37 Aristotle 49, 72, 115n. 49, 119n. 59, 125, 126, 137n. 11 Arkwright, Sir John 121n. 65 Asad, Talal 2n. 4, 27n. 38, 28n. 41 Auerbach, Eric 43 Augustine of Hippo 6, 20, 20n. 13, 30n. 48, 42, 46, 53, 59-62, 65, 66n. 77, 71, 71n. 93, 72, 83, 86–9, 94, 96, 132, 139–40, 142–4, 147–51, 155–6, 192–4

Davie, Donald 106 de Ste Croix, G.E.M. 144n. 34 Derrida, Jacques 22 Descartes, Rene 20 Dilthey, Wilhelm 7n. 25, 8n. 27 Dragas, George 4

Balthasar, Hans Urs von 6, 59, 61, 83, 83n. 11, 152n. 72, 159, 167 Barlow, Frank 47n. 18, 133n. 2, 164n. 14 Barth, Karl 125, 168n. 25, 174n. 42, 180 Bell, George 12 Benhabib, Seyla 7, 10n. 38, 21n. 17 Blandina (martyr) 111 Bloom, Allan D. 19n. 8 Bond, Edward 36n. 63 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 6, 42, 69, 96n. 53, 108n. 20, 114–15, 121, 121n. 62, 126– 8, 145–6, 152, 165, 168–71, 168n. 25, 169n. 29, 169n. 30, 177, 192–3 Bossuet, Jean-Bénigne 153, 155n. 80 Boyarin, Daniel 3 Boyle, David 24n. 31 Brock, Brian 42n. 2, 71n. 93 Brown, Peter 123n. 69, 151n. 66 Brueggeman, Walter 54n. 37 Bultmann, Rudolf 91n. 35, 118n. 52 Butler, Joseph 8n. 31 Butterfield, Herbert 95, 95n. 50

Eichrodt, Walther 43n. 8 Eliot, Thomas Stearns (T.S.) 12–15, 46–7, 61, 72, 86n. 16, 90, 95, 105–7, 110, 117, 122–4, 128–9, 134, 143, 152, 155–6, 161–6, 162n. 10, 173n. 40, 174n. 41, 178, 183–6, 192, 194–5 Eusebius of Caesarea 87n. 20, 89 Farrow, Douglas 70n. 89 Fenélon, François 153, 155n. 80 Fischel, H.A. 160n. 4 Foucault, Michel 22, 23n. 24, 108, 189 Foxe, John 133n. 4, 159 Frei, Hans 43–5 Frend, W.H.C. 110 Frye, Northrop 44n. 11 Giddens, Anthony 7, 7n. 26, 22n. 21, 39n. 71, 49n. 22, 66n. 79 Göring, Hermann 163n. 12 Gregersen, Niels Henrik 166, 175n. 44, 177n. 51, 180 Gregory VII (Pope) 90n. 31 Gregory, Brad S. 42n. 1, 94n. 45, 145n. 40

Calvin, John 20n. 13, 30n. 48, 70n. 85, 91n. 33, 155, 167n. 22, 173n. 39, 174n. 42 Castelli, Elizabeth 6n. 21 206

NAME INDEX

Grove, Robin 163n. 13 Gunton, Colin E. 174n. 42, 175 Hanson, Paul D. 56n. 41, Hart, David Bentley 188–9, 189n. 14 Hauerwas, Stanley 52n. 34, 89n. 28, 90 Herder, Johan Gottfried 21, 25 Hernadi, Paul 160n. 3 Hooker, Richard 82 Hütter, Reinhard 115n. 49, 123n. 71, 126n. 77 Ignatius of Antioch 147, 196 Irenaeus of Lyons 172 Jensen, Peter F. 6n. 22, 94n. 46 John of Salisbury 133n. 2 John Paul II (Pope) 193 Jones, Emrys 183–6 Jüngel, Eberhard 125–6 Kant, Immanuel 7n. 25, 25, 79 Kermode, Sir Frank 183–4 Kerr, Fergus 61n. 66 Khomeini, Ruhollah (Ayatollah) 27, 33, 38n. 67 Kim, Seyoon 4n. 12 Krause, Sharon 137–8 Lactantius 143 Lash, Nicholas 42–3, 45, 190n. 16 Lasserre, Jean 152, 152n. 70 Lincoln, Andrew 5n. 16 Locke, John 7n. 25, 8n. 31, 9n. 35, 20 Lucan 136 Luther, Martin 20, 20n. 13, 67n. 82, 91, 121, 123n. 71, 125–6, 155, 173n. 39, 184 Luz, Ulrich 90n. 32, 91n. 33 MacIntyre, Alasdair 8n. 28, 10n. 36, 187n. 9 Marcuse, Herbert 125 Marshall, Bruce D. 93n. 42, 190 McFadyen, Alistair I. 25n. 34 McVeigh, Timothy 31 Meister Eckhardt 152 Middleton, Paul 144n. 34 Milton, John 130 Moltmann, Jürgen 146n. 45 Musurillo, Herbert 159

207

Nietzsche, Friedrich 7n. 25, 18, 22–3, 37n. 65, 189 Nussbaum, Martha Craven 13, 41, 46, 49–53, 49n. 19, 49n. 22, 50n. 26, 52n. 34, 53n. 35, 59, 61n. 66, 62–3, 65, 72, 174, 185n. 7, 192 Nygren, Anders 153n. 74 O’Donovan, Oliver 45n. 16, 83, 87, 89, 94–5, 153n. 74, 193 Origen 6, 6n. 18, 87, 89, 139, 141–3, 145n. 38, 149n. 60, 152–4, 166 Perkins, Judith 88 Perpetua (martyr) 126, 138–9, 144, 145n. 42 Peter of Celle 133n. 2 Pimlott, Stephen 14, 183–4 Pionius (martyr) 62, 178–9 Plato 49, 60, 137, 139 Polycarp (martyr) 87n. 17, 111, 144, 173n. 39, 188 Rad, Gerhard von 45n. 14, 54n. 36 Rahner, Karl 62n. 69, Raine, Craig 135n. 6, 184 Ratzinger, Joseph (Benedict XVI) 38n. 70, 85n. 12 Rawls, John 81n. 10 Reventlow, Henning 44n. 13 Ricoeur, Paul 7–8, 7n. 25, 9n. 35, 10n. 36, 125n. 75, 160–1, 161n. 9, 186n. 8 Rorty, Richard 13, 38n. 69, 41, 75, 79–81, 83, 94–6, 96n. 51, 103n. 4, 104, 104n. 7, 193 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 18, 20, 25, 137n. 12, Rushdie, Salman 3n. 9, 11, 17, 25–40, 27n. 39, 28n. 41, 28n. 45, 29n. 46, 33n. 55, 38n. 67, 41, 49n. 20, 82, 85n. 12, 90, 115, 129n. 90, 152n. 72, 156, 162, 183, 187, 191–2 Ruskin, John 22n. 23 Sanctus (martyr) 112, 122 Schrag, Calvin 7, 8n. 29 Scruton, Roger 14, 41, 99, 103–7, 104n. 6, 105n. 12, 111, 129 Secunda (martyr) 1–2, 114 Shakespeare, William 100n. 1 Shelton, W. Brian 85n. 13

208

NAME INDEX

Slane, Craig A. 4–5, 108n. 20 Smith, Lacey Baldwin 38n. 66, 162 Smith, Warren J. 12n. 41 Sophocles 50 Stockton, Ian 145n. 43 Straw, Carole 89, 145, 150n. 62 Taylor, Charles 11–12, 17–26, 17n. 1, 18n. 4, 19n. 5, 20n. 11, 20n. 13, 21n. 16, 22n. 22, 26n. 52, 31, 37–40, 38n. 67, 41, 53n. 35, 62n. 71, 104, 137, 150n. 63, 173, 183, 187, 191–2 Tertullian 6, 108–9, 134n. 5, 139–40, 149, 150n. 64, 154n. 77, 187 Trilling, Lionel 18, 22n. 23, 23n. 25

Trites, Allison 4 Tyndale, William 64, 83, 90–6, 193 Vanhoozer, Kevin J. 42n. 2, 168n. 26, 189–90 Walzer, Michael 137–8 Williams, Rowan 6n. 20, 30, 70, 88n. 22 Woodruff, Paul B. 50n. 26 Wright, N.T. (Tom) 57n. 44, 65n. 75 Wyschorogrod, Edith 23n. 26 Yeats, William Butler 66n. 77 Žižek, Slavoj 120n. 60

Scripture Index

2 Samuel 1 116 1:18-27 116 7:10-11 67 18:4 116 21:7 116

Old Testament Genesis 2:16-17 169 3 166n. 16, 180 3:1 169 3:4-5 169 4:17 66 6:5 66 9:1 66 11:4 66 12 66 16 113n. 37 18:18 122 22:1-19 176

Ezra 3:11-13

56

Nehemiah 8 56n. 42 Esther 1-10 86n. 15

Exodus 14:12 54 16:3 54 19-20 169 20:11-12 63

Psalms 2 122 2:1-2 68 3:3 68, 155 8 58, 157 19:14 68 27 71n. 93 31:15 177 37 57n. 46 40:1-3 125n. 73 46 67 59:16 68 95 58, 167 137:1-4 55

Numbers 11:4-6 54 13:31-33 67 20:1-8 54 Deuteronomy 5:12-15 63 7:12-18 63, 113 8:11ff 63

Ecclesiastes 2:24 64 12:14 64

Judges 16 27 1 Samuel 24 116 26 116

Isaiah 40:1ff 56 51:17, 22 153 61 57 209

SCRIPTURE INDEX

210

Jeremiah 5:28 64n. 73 6:14 69 8:11 69 31:31-34 55 Ezekiel 10:1-22 68 16:49-50 64n. 73 40-48 55 43-48 68 43:1-12 55 Daniel 2 85 2:46-49 86 3 86n. 16 3-6 86 Joel 2:14

122

Amos 4:1 64 New Testament Matthew 2:13-18 57 4:1-10 57 4:10 171 5:1-12 177 5:10-12 142 5:11-12 93, 177 5:16 148 6:7-10 177 6:13 171 6:19-21 177 6:25-34 176 10:1-42 83 10:16 71, 84, 108 10:18f 6n. 23 10:20 84 10:24-25 84 10:34 84 10:36 84 10:42 84 16:19 133 16:13-20 90–1 18:18 91 19:27-29 142 22:16-21 109 24:14 93n. 41

25:1ff 69, 145 25:31-46 93 25:45 83 26:39 171 26:41 145, 171 28:18-20 87, 93 Mark 4:20 65 8:36 153 10:29-45 153–4 12:13-17 109 14:32-52 124 14:36 153 14:48 125 15:6-30 146 Luke 4:13 171 4:16-20 65 7:34 65 8:17-19 116 9:22 175n. 42 9:58 65 14:16-24 65 14:26-27 65 17:28-32 57 18:18-34 65 18:28-30 65n. 76 18:31-34 68 20:21-25 109 21 117 John 1:16 146 13:34-35 119 13:36-38 117–18 14:26 118 15:13 119, 121n. 65 15:13-15 116, 117 15:18-20 118 15:26-27 118 18:36 109 19:35 5 20:21-23 90–1 21:19 118n. 52 Acts 1:8 4, 71 4:24 179n. 55 5:29 97 7 69, 179n. 57

SCRIPTURE INDEX

Acts (continued) 7:58-60 5 20:31 171n. 37 22 4 22:25-29 122 Romans 1:1-5 85 1:18ff 154 2:6-10 154 2:7 154 5 45, 169n. 30 5:1-11 117 6 6n. 18 6:1-10 5 6:3 153 8:17 173n. 39 8:18 141 9-11 122 12 84 12:1-2 117 12:17ff 85 13 83, 84, 87, 93, 96 13:1 84 13:4 85 13:7 109n. 23, 138 16 120 1 Corinthians 1-2 146 1:31 146 2:11 60 4:1 147 4:1-21 147 9:25 149 10:11 45 10:13 168n. 24 12:23 138 13:3 88 15 149 15:28 146n. 45 16:13 171n. 37 2 Corinthians 3 92 4:8-10 5 4:17 141 5:18 126 6:4-10 147 12:19 120

211

Galatians 3:18 122 4:26 58n. 48 5:14 138 Ephesians 2 122 2:8-10 126 3:19 146 6:2 151 Philippians 2:3 138 Colossians 1:19-20 178 1:24 173n. 39 2:15 181n. 61 3:3 69 1 Thessalonians 5:3 69, 69n. 84 1 Timothy 5:17 138 5:17 151n. 68 2 Timothy 2:5 142 2:8 90 4:8 155 Hebrews 1:1-3 178 2:7 157 2:10 157 2:17-18 167 3:19 167 4:14-15 168 5:7-10 125 11-12 61 11:13 58 11:17-19 176n. 45 11:39-40 178 12:22-23 58, 71n. 92 James 3:14-16 1 Peter 1:1-2 71 1:6 110

138

212

1:13 110 1:17 110 1:23 110 2:9 111 2:11 110 2:13 111 2:17 111, 151n. 68 3:1 111 3:15 111 3:16 111 4:12 172, 173n. 39 4:12-13 110 1 John 4:1ff 117

SCRIPTURE INDEX

Revelation 1:1 113 1:3 113 1:5 5 6:9-11 196 7:9 122 12:4 181, 13:10 113 17:6 113 19:2 113 19:15-16 122 21:26 122 22:2 122 22:10 113

Subject Index

Entries in bold refer to lengthy references to the subject. action, actions 2, 9–10, 14, 43, 79, 99, 108n. 20, 116, 135, 145, 159, 161, 165, 190, 193 divine 115n. 49, 120, 129, 175–6, 175n. 43, 179, 181 honourable 136, 145 ‘passive’ 99, 107, 110, 115, 123–7, 129, 165, 193 political 13–14, 100–3, 110, 129, 184 responsible 126–8 ascension 65, 70, 70n. 85, 70n. 89 atonement 167

martyrdom as imitation of 5, 42–3, 45, 65, 128, 143, 145–6, 165, 185, 190 desire 24, 47, 52, 57, 65–6, 80, 118, 135, 137–8, 148, 152–6, 186n. 8, 189 drama 12, 41, 46, 61, 111, 161, 161n. 9, 163n. 13, 164, 173n. 40, 183–6, 190 eschatology 68n. 84, 192 faith 5, 32–9, 50, 52–62, 72, 87, 109, 115, 123n. 71, 125–6, 141, 143, 146, 152, 155, 166, 169–73, 174n. 42, 177, 188, 192, 194–5 friendship 47, 49, 51, 101–2, 101n. 2, 107, 115–20, 129, 191

Christology 165, 167–8 church, ecclesiology 3, 13, 45, 58, 61–2, 69, 71, 71n. 93, 83, 94–5, 118–20, 150n. 66, 189–90, 193 Augustine on 87–9, 194 honouring martyrs in 143–4 martyrdom as sign of 123n. 71, 195 martyrdom as seed of 187 power of the keys 91–2 and state power, nationalism 78, 82, 89–91, 94–6, 99, 102–3, 105–7, 110, 114–15, 121–2, 128–9, 162n. 10, 193 creation 62–4, 66, 146n. 46, 168–9, 175, 179 goodness of 52, 63, 142, 178n. 53, 180, 192 renewal of 70, 178, 181

heavenly rewards 13–14, 131–2, 135, 140–3, 152–5, 159, 194 in Islam 140–1 hermeneutics 42–5, 43n. 8, 186n. 8 honour 3, 13–14, 108–11, 120, 122, 131, 135–9, 140, 143–57, 168, 194 identity, self-identity 7, 10, 13–14, 17–18, 30–3, 38, 63, 99, 120, 191 Christian 88, 107, 183 identity-politics 28n. 42 and victimhood 30–1 Islam, martyrdom in 33, 140–1 justification 155–6

death, dying 3, 5, 15, 27, 29n. 45, 33n. 45, 35–6, 51, 61–2, 62n. 69, 71n. 93, 88–9, 105, 111, 131, 133, 136, 139–40, 144–5, 150, 156, 159, 162, 172, 177–81 death of Christ 3, 6, 68, 70, 83,89, 117, 128, 143, 146–7, 178, 181, 188, 195

literature and theology 9n. 35, 49n. 12, 19, 185 memory 6n. 21, 8n. 31, 46, 55, 59–63, 115, 133, 136, 178, 180 mission 4, 75, 83, 87, 90, 93–6, 104 213

214

SUBJECT INDEX

Murder in the Cathedral 12–14, 46, 124, 161, 186n. 8, 195 performances of 13, 183–6 performed in postwar Germany 46n. 17, 163n. 12 narrative 8–9, 9n. 35, 12, 30, 35, 40, 44–6, 59, 95, 121, 159, 178n. 53, 183, 186, 190, 195 narrative logic 14, 160–3, 165, 170n. 30, 173, 173n. 40, 179, 181, 186, 195 nostalgia 8, 19, 48, 55, 59, 62 power 2, 13, 31, 49, 66, 69n. 84, 75–86, 89–90, 96, 99–115, 124, 127, 132–3, 135, 144, 148, 162, 169–73, 174n. 42, 187–90, 195 clavis potentiae 75, 78, 90–5, 193 providence 3, 5, 9, 12, 14, 31, 44–5, 72, 85, 87–8, 101, 112, 124, 129, 145, 148, 160–1, 163, 168, 170, 173–81, 174n. 42, 186, 192, 194–6

responsibility 75, 124–9, 168, 194 as Verantwornung 128, 168n. 25 scripture 42–6, 63, 71, 71n. 93, 85n. 13, 94, 96, 156, 159, 172, 190n. 16, 193 self 2–6, 12–15 and authenticity 17–18, 22, 24, 26, 38, 40, 191 definition of 7–11 questions of 10–11, 18, 45, 190 Spirit, Holy Spirit 60, 65, 70–1, 84, 91, 94–5, 118–20, 122, 123n. 71, 138, 148, 170, 173, 178, 188, 190 suicide 27n. 37, 50, 136, 139, 143, 162–3 suicide bombing 2, 25, 36, temptation 3, 12–14, 40–1, 47, 89, 160– 75, 179–80, 184–5, 187, 189, 192–5 terrorism 25–7, 156 witness 3–6, 11, 14–15, 28, 42, 49, 52, 62, 65, 70, 76, 81–96, 83n. 11, 112, 115, 118–22, 143, 147, 151, 156, 163–4, 167, 173, 178–80, 187–96