Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics State Intervention And
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Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics State Intervention and Holy Violence Timgad / Paleostrovsk / Waco Version 1.3 June 2009 Brent D. Shaw Princeton University Abstract: The investigation attempts to analyze the role of state violence in the particular circumstance of a religious community that is put under siege by state military forces. It does this by comparing three type cases: two pre-modern instances, those of Timgad in early fifth-century north Africa and the sieges of dissident monasteries and churches in mid-seventeenth-century Muscovy; and the modern-day siege at Waco, Texas. © Brent D. Shaw bshaw@ princeton.edu 2 STATE INTERVENTION AND HOLY VIOLENCE TIMGAD / PALEOSTROVSK / WACO In the panorama of holy violence, there are special cases of violent confrontations that involve the state as one of the main protagonists. In this investigation, I shall focus on three historical cases where the violent force of the state was involved in the repression of religious communities that were within its normal sphere of jurisdiction. The first is the standoff that occurred in the year 419 in which armed forces of the Roman imperial state surrounded the great basilica complex at Timgad, ancient Thamugadi, in what is today central Algeria. A large number of Christian dissidents, so-called Donatists, were hold up in the basilica with their bishop Gaudentius, refusing to surrender to the demands of the authorities.1 The second case concerns another marginalized Christian group, the ‘Old Believers’ as they were called, or Raskolniki, religious rebels of seventeenth-century Muscovy.2 The analysis here is centered on incidents that occurred in 1687 and 1688, in which forces of the Tsarist state surrounded the large monastic compound at Paleostrovsk, located on the shores of Lake Onega on the Russo-Finnish borderlands.3 And, finally, Waco, Texas, where in 1993, another marginal group of Christians, the Branch Davidians, had taken refuge in a compound named Mount Carmel, as they awaited a final assault by the armed forces of the federal government of the United States.4 These are far from the only examples of attacks on barricaded religious groups that involved the mobilization of state forces in episodes of violent coercion. There are many such cases, including the assault by the military forces of the new Brazilian Republic on the holy city of Canudos or Belo Monte in the Brazilian northeast in 1897.5 They also include, famously, the siege directed by the Prince-Bishop Waldeck against the Anabaptist kingdom in the city of 3 Münster in northern German lands in 1534-35.6 And, more recently, the siege of the Lal Majid or ‘Red Mosque’ in Islamabad in July 2007 by the armed forces of the Pakistani state.7 At a less dramatic, and much less violent level, we might also include the siege of a convent of rebellious nuns at Kazmierz, Poland, in October 2007.8 The three particular cases that I have selected have been chosen because they involve structurally similar elements of a dissident group of Christians under siege in which the military forces of the central state were marshaled against them. In all of them, the besieged were confined in a sacred sanctuary that was, in a manifest sense, their last place of refuge on earth. The example of the Old Believers of seventeenth-century Russia was chosen for elements of similarity in a premodern state that might permit comparison with events in the later Roman empire. Waco, on the other hand, was selected because of its temporal and cultural proximity and because of the greater depth of the day-to- day documentation of the events of the siege. It was chosen for purposes of contrast: a contemporary case that would enable the comparison of the response mechanisms of a modern government with those of two premodern empires. Finally, although we cannot be absolutely certain that the dissident Christians at Timgad in 419 met their end in a fiery conflagration, this fate was expected by all concerned.9 Such was certainly the result at Paleostrovsk and also at Waco. Competitive Salience The violent incidents at Waco, Paleostrovsk, and Timgad raise the question of under what conditions states have intervened with violent miliitary force in religious divisions and disputes within their borders. Among the basic factors involved in the mobilization of state force were serious pre-existing internal conflicts within the religious groups concerned—disputes that provoked competitive bidding for the government’s attention. In each of the three cases, the degree of integration and prior involvement of the state with the whole of the religious group concerned was significantly different and so affected the nature of the armed repression by government forces. In Muscovy, the Tsarist state had long-term close connections with the Orthodox Church. In the seventeenth century, these ties became especially intense since the founder of the new Romanov dynasty, Filaret, was himself, from 1619, Patriarch of Moscow. Waco is 4 at the opposite extreme, since any formal connections between the United States federal government and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church—or groups that were splinter offshoots from it—were fortuitous and occasional in nature. The Roman state lies between these two extremes of connection and distance. For over a century before the siege at Timgad, the imperial state had been ruled by emperors who were Christian and who supported one type or another of a limited number of ‘orthodoxies.’ The relationship of the imperial court to Christian churches was close and yet technically separate; in most cases, its interests and involvements were remote from the local exercise of secular power. The particularities of each set of relationships conditioned the ways in which each state intervened. In the case of the siege of the dissident basilica at Timgad in 419, earlier imperial decrees issued by Roman emperors, beginning in 412, that sanctioned the use of state force in matters of religious affiliation had been the result of intense efforts by Catholic bishops in lobbying the imperial court at Ravenna. Their embassies had petitioned the state to use its armed resources to force the dissident Christians in Africa to surrender their churches and to rejoin the Catholic church. A critical turning point, as far as direct state intervention was concerned, was the holding of a great church conference at Carthage in the year 411 in which an imperial plenipotentiary in the matter, the tribune and notary Marcellinus, heard the case for legitimacy argued by both the dissident and the Catholic churches. At its conclusion, he issued his final decision that declared in favor of the Catholics and against their rivals, the so-called Donatists.10 It is important to note that this impressive hearing at Carthage, conducted in the manner of a Roman civil trial, provided the state with the formal declaration that was the basis for its subsequent involvement in the heavy-handed repression of the dissidents. But it is equally important to remember that the conference was the end-point of a decades-long campaign of lobbying the imperial court at Milan and at Ravenna to see the dissenters in Africa not just as schismatics or heretics, but also as dangers to the secular public order. One important aim of the lobbying was to get the state to accept the pejorative label of ‘Donatist’ as an officially sanctioned name for a specific type of heretic, a step that the state finally took in 405, but which it only began fully to enforce after 414, at a rather 5 late point in the history of the history of the conflict. It is in this context that soldiers of the Roman state came to surround the basilica complex at Timgad. Like the Donatists in Roman Africa, the religious rebels, the Raskolniki, or the Old Believers, known as Staroobriadtsy or ‘old ritualists,’ of seventeenth- century Russia were labeled as heretics by their enemies and successfully castigated as dangerous religious deviants. The terms Raskol, meaning rebellion, division, or schism, and Raskolniki, meaning rebels or dissidents, were at first general ones applied to a broad range of disobedient and unacceptable persons from the perspective of the Orthodox Church. As in the case of ‘the Donatists,’ the pejorative labeling was imposed by outsiders and was first formally applied to a specific kind of dissenter long after the original division had emerged.11 When the term Raskol first appeared in the 1650s, it was not applied to the Old Believers as such, but was used to designate a broad spectrum of disobedience and dissent. Coming into more frequent use in the 1660s, it was used by both sides, the one to accuse the other of being the real schismatics. It took the action of a large official forum—the great church council of 1666-67 that declared the Old Believers to be heretics—to make the term both an official and a technical one to designate illicit dissent.12 The dissenters, on the other hand, thought of themselves as preserving the true traditional church and so referred to themselves as ‘the elect,’ ‘the true brothers,’ or, more usually, simply as Christians.13 The external label of ‘Old Believer’ was only introduced into the dissidents’ own texts in the 1720s, two generations after the events described here (Michels 1999: 17). In both the cases of ‘the Donatists’ and ‘the Old Believers,’ the invention of the disparaging labels was integrally connected with the campaigns directed by their sectarian enemies to get the state to act. The move ‘to jump’ the struggle to the level of the state resulted from prior internal struggles that had compelled both sides to solicit state support.