Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity ed. by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Christian R. Raschle (review)

Abstract

What is religious violence in the ancient world, and where do we even begin to construct definitions? These two questions are at the heart of the impressive volume edited by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Christian R. Raschle. The terms religion and violence have been the intense focus of scholarly debate for a few years now. Rather than shy away or dismiss how our contemporary definitions do or do not fit into an ancient context, this volume takes on this challenge and dares to be an explicitly interdisciplinary exercise from its very inception. This is a hefty volume so I will keep my comments and reflections brief. I first offer summaries of each section and spotlight contributions that stood out to me, but my review is by no means exhaustive. Scholars of religious violence in the ancient world have long since passed the decline and fall model touted by Edward Gibbon and have since spent much time wrestling with conceptualizing and defining slippery categories. The first section of the volume lays out the methodological framework for working with loaded terms and evolving definitions. For example, the first essay by Hans Kippenberg makes a careful distinction between the study of religious violence and the study of religion and violence. For far too long the dominant discourses, especially in a post-9/11 world, have defaulted to the former and Kippenberg helpfully lays out practical steps to draw religious scholars to the latter. This is a distinction that then Jan Bremmer draws further attention to in a focused case study on attempts to reconstruct violence perpetrated by Christians in the late ancient world. And while religion produced the language and justification for violence, Bremmer reminds us that religions are not inherently violent—despite what political pundits or Hollywood would lead the public to believe. The next section offers a comparative approach by sampling various groupings of religious communities. Esther Eideinow’s contribution examines the affective use of Athenian binding spells to curb larger social behaviors. It is a welcome shift away from studies that overemphasize the exceptional or marginal understanding of katadesmoi. The imperial consequences of trying to control or suppress deviant or seemingly fringe religious practices are then spotlighted in both essays by Christian Raschle and Steve Mason. These two essays pair nicely, as large-scale efforts to control Roman cult practices were intended more to enhance civic piety rather than to target the peculiar nature of any one tradition. Raschle, for example, focuses on efforts to control religious groups with boundaries, whereas Mason focuses on the literary response to those violent efforts to enforce control. Christian groups and violence still hold onto the peculiar, but the clash with Roman elite ideals remains central in this section. Both James Rives and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser turn to consider the imaginative play on potential competing ideologies central to a Christianizing vision of violence,