Readers may recall that during the Vietnam War, US soldiers were wont to justify their presence in that country by claiming they were there to ‘kill a Commie for Christ’. 

Before attempting to unpack this phrase, let me suggest that it encapsulates the very essence of the relationship between religion and war. I also suggest that it offers at least a sliver of hope that the historically deeply intertwined relationship between the two might one day be severed.

In October 2011, Dylan Ratigan wrote an article for the HuffPost entitled ‘How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?’ Written some eight years after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ratigan argued that ‘the only real consistency in policy-making is Washington’s commitment to war and oil, and increasingly often, war for oil.’ Suppose this is an accurate description of at least one of the US government’s major motivations for the Iraq War. In that case, it’s a far cry from the initial rationale for that war presented to the American people.

During an interview on CNN on September 8, 2002, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice infamously warned that Saddam Hussein could be close to producing a nuclear weapon. When asked just how close Saddam was to ‘developing a nuclear capacity’, Rice replied: ‘The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’

In contrast to Rice’s assertion, Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, reported the same day that there was no ‘smoking gun’ inasmuch as the Bush administration had failed to substantiate its case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Ritter’s conclusion was later substantiated prior to the war by onsite inspections conducted by both the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

Needless to say, the testimony of Scott Ritter and other reputable organisations did nothing to dissuade the Bush administration from invading Iraq on March 19, 2003. The result would be the violent deaths of between 268,000 and 295,000 people between March 2003 and October 2018. It also did nothing to dissuade many Christian clergy in the US from voicing their full support for the invasion. For example, Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta and a former Southern Baptist Convention president, stated in a sermon broadcast internationally on TV: ‘Throughout Scripture, there is evidence that God favors war for divine reasons and sometimes uses it to accomplish His will. He has also given governments and their citizens very specific responsibilities in regards to this matter.’ 

Further, Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, noted that ‘Most evangelicals in America subscribe to the theological position called ‘Just War Theory,’ that it is morally justified to go to war under certain conditions.’ Similarly, Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson, a Baptist, argued in 2002 that the classical definition of Christian just war theory should be ‘stretched’ to accommodate a new age in which terrorism and warfare are intertwined. Colson alleged that ‘out of love of neighbor, then, Christians can and should support a preemptive strike’ on Iraq to prevent Iraqi-based or -funded attacks on the United States or its allies. Colson was one of the signatories to the Land letter, a letter sent by several evangelical Christian leaders to Bush giving their ‘just war’-based support to the invasion of Iraq.

As the above quotations indicate, one of the most frequent justifications for Christian support of war, shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, is the belief in ‘just wars’. Christian just war theory, first developed by Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and later by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), was designed to provide a reliable guide for determining if a specific war was in accord with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Laying aside what Jesus actually said about the use of violence for the moment, just war doctrine clearly empowered the Pope, as Vicar of Christ on earth, to determine which war, if any, the faithful should fight (and die) in.

Just war theory, at its most basic, declares that a war must be fought for a just cause, i.e., it must correct a grave, public evil. Further, only duly constituted public authorities may wage war exclusively for the reasons set forth as a just cause. Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in cases where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success. Finally, force may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted and the force used must be proportional to the injury suffered. That is to say, the harm caused by the war must not be greater than the harm to be eradicated.

If one believes that the use of force is sometimes unavoidable, it is difficult to fault just war theory, at least at the theoretical level. But what of historical practice? In the long history of the Roman Catholic Church, has the Church, i.e., the Pope, ever formally declared that even one of the numerous wars occurring since the adoption of just war doctrine is ‘unjust’? The surprising answer is ‘no’. No Pope has ever issued a formal declaration using their full papal authority to categorically label a specific war as unjust. Not even in the Second World War did Pope Pius XII see fit to formally declare that Nazi Germany, with its sizable Catholic population, was fighting an unjust war. That said, it is true that numerous Popes have used their moral and spiritual authority to speak out strongly against certain wars. For example, Pope John Paul II was strongly opposed to the Iraq War. Nevertheless, he, too, failed to issue a formal declaration explicitly stating that that war was unjust.

What of the opposite case, i.e., have any Popes declared that certain wars have been ‘just’? Here the answer is an unambiguous ‘yes’. Successive Popes declared the multiple Crusades of the late 11^th to 13^th centuries to be just wars. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II framed the very First Crusade as a penitential act, a holy pilgrimage, and a just war to reclaim the Holy Land and protect Eastern Christians from Muslim rule. Urban further promised spiritual rewards, including indulgences (remissions of sins), to those who took up the sword and the cross.

Following in Urban’s footsteps, various Popes issued bulls (formal papal decrees) supporting and legitimising the Crusades. For example, Pope Eugenius III issued the bull Quantum praedecessores in 1145, calling for the Second Crusade, and Pope Innocent III issued Post miserabile in 1198, urging the launch of the Fourth Crusade. These papal bulls not only called for the Crusades but also outlined the spiritual benefits, protections, and financial support to be had by those who participated in them. They promoted the Crusades by emphasising themes of Christian duty, divine favour, and spiritual rewards, further reinforcing the just war narrative.

Today, thanks to a reconsideration of the historical relationship between Christians and Muslims set in motion by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the Church has undergone a major change in its outlook. In 1976, Paul Johnson, an English Catholic historian, described the Crusades as follows:

The Crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonization; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military… A Crusade was in essence nothing more than a mob of armed and fanatical Christians. Once its numbers rose to over 10,000 it could no longer be controlled, only guided. It might be used to attack Moslems, or unleashed against Jews, or heretics… The fall of Jerusalem [in 1099] was followed by a prolonged and hideous massacre of Moslems and Jews, men, women and children… In general, the effect of the Crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make the Moslems far less tolerant: crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture.

In short, over the centuries just war doctrine has been, at least in practice, little more than a moral fig leaf to disguise an age-old pattern, i.e., what we (the Church and its adherents) do is by definition ‘just’ (no matter how horrendous) and what others do is not. Just how far just war doctrine varies from, if not violates, Jesus’ teachings is clear when we turn to the New Testament. Jesus not only advocated non-violence but directed his followers to love one’s enemies. Key passages include the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and urges his followers to turn the other cheek if they are attacked. These teachings were foundational for early Christians, with substantial evidence suggesting that early Christian communities leaned heavily towards pacifism. Early Church fathers like Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220), for example, argued that Christians should not participate in military service, stating that ‘Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.’

Nevertheless, by the time of Constantine I in the 4th century, Christianity was becoming enmeshed with the militaristic Roman state. As a result, the Church’s stance on violence and military service began to change. It was this change that prompted figures like Augustine to a shift in thinking, accommodating the realities of Christians to the political power of the state. Note, too, that this shift not only led to Christianity’s acceptance by the Roman state, but it greatly enhanced the influence, prestige, and wealth of the prelates themselves.

As for Christianity and war specifically, one of the most momentous changes occurred when, in the aftermath of Constantine’s victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in October 312 (which he came to attribute to the support of the Christian God), he agreed to exempt Christian clergy (but not laity) from service in the Roman army, among other benefits. Constantine did this in exchange for the clergy’s commitment to pray for the victory of his soldiers. This marked the beginning of the military chaplaincy we have today and explains the origins of why in the UK and US, for example, chaplains remain unarmed even as they meet the ‘spiritual needs’ of soldiers on the battlefield.

The importance of the role of military chaplains is explained in the following article that appeared in the Associated Press in 2004 during the Iraq War:

As American troops cope with life—and death—on a faraway battlefield, military chaplains cope with them, offering prayers, comfort and spiritual advice to keep the American military machine running… Chaplains help grease the wheels of any soldier’s troubled conscience by arguing that killing combatants is justified.

Capt. Warren Haggray, a 48-year-old Baptist Army chaplain said: “I teach them from the scripture, and in the scripture I can see many times where men were told…to go out and defeat the enemy. This is real stuff. You’re out there and you gotta eliminate that guy, because if you don’t, he’s gonna eliminate you.” [Emphasis mine]

Note, too, that it is not just military chaplains who ‘grease the wheels’ of those who are engaged, directly or indirectly, in the killing business. That is to say, those who order soldiers into battle also benefit from Christianity’s alliance with the state. For example, at the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898, following Spain’s defeat and America’s takeover of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines, President McKinley invited a group of Methodist church leaders to the White House in 1899. He told them:

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came … that there was nothing left for the US to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States.

The Spanish, albeit Roman Catholics, had used the same ‘Christianizing’ mission to justify their own colonisation of that country from 1565. Nevertheless, none of the US Protestant clergy present opposed the colonialist decision of a president who had ‘went down on [his] knees’ to ask for divine guidance. In the Philippine-American War that followed between 1899 and 1902, the total number of Filipino casualties is estimated to have been between 220,000 and 250,000—all in the name of being uplifted, civilized, and ‘Christianized’ (i.e., ‘Protestantized’) by the US. The unity of Christianity and the state that began under Constantine has for many centuries provided both spiritual and material blessings for Christian soldiers, their political rulers, and their clergy throughout the world, and not only in the US.

At this point, I would not be surprised if some readers may be thinking, ‘Why is the author of this article so relentless in his criticism of Christianity? Wasn’t he once a Christian missionary in Japan? Is it perhaps because, now that he’s a Buddhist priest, he thinks Buddhism is so different from Christianity, i.e., a true religion of peace?’

While the author did once labour under that misapprehension, it is no longer the case, for like all world religions, Buddhism, despite its undeserved reputation as a religion of peace, is not substantially different when viewed in its actual historical practice. One of the first times I realised this was when I read a quotation from D.T. Suzuki, famous for his introduction of the (Rinzai) Zen sect of Buddhism to the West.

At the time of Imperial Japan’s attempt to colonise Korea, leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, Suzuki wrote an English-language article entitled ‘A Buddhist View of War’. He concluded the article with the following appeal to Japan’s soldiers:

When our ideals clash, let there be no flinching, no backsliding, no undecidedness, but for ever and ever pressing onwards. In this kind of war there is nothing personal, egotistic, or individual. It is the holiest spiritual war… Let us then shuffle off this mortal coil whenever it becomes necessary, and not raise a grunting voice against the fates… Resting in this conviction, Buddhists carry the banner of Dharma over the dead and dying until they gain final victory.

Simply stated, Suzuki was exhorting Japanese soldiers to simply die without complaint in ‘the holiest spiritual war’ since their deaths would ensure that the Dharma (i.e., Buddhism) reigned supreme. Placed within historical context, Suzuki’s admonition is unsurprising inasmuch as Suzuki’s own Zen master, Shaku Sōen, a Buddhist military chaplain in the same conflict, said essentially the same thing. In explaining the motivation for his service, Sōen wrote:

I wished to have my faith tested by going through the greatest horrors of life, but I also wished to inspire, if I could, our valiant soldiers with the ennobling thoughts of the Buddha, so as to enable them to die on the battlefield with the confidence that the task in which they are engaged is great and noble.

In the preceding quotation, if one were to replace ‘the ennobling thoughts of Buddha’ with ‘the ennobling thoughts of Christ’, I suggest you would have, at least doctrinally speaking, a nearly identical stance.

Further, when Leo Tolstoi, the famous Russian author and pacifist, sent a letter to Sōen asking him to sign a joint statement denouncing the war between their two peoples, Sōen responded:  

Even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. Therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things that are incompatible, killing and war are necessary.

In the following years, as Imperial Japan continued its colonisation of additional Asian countries, Buddhist support for this effort, on the part of all of Japan’s many Buddhist sects, became ever more strident. It reached the point that even the fundamental Buddhist precept proscribing the taking of life proved no impediment to those espousing support for Japan’s war effort. For example, in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, Sōtō Zen master Yasutani Haku’un wrote:

One should, fighting hard, kill everyone in the enemy army. The reason for this is that in order to carry [Buddhist] compassion and filial obedience through to perfection it is necessary to assist good and punish evil… Failing to kill an evil man who ought to be killed, or destroying an enemy army that ought to be destroyed, would be to betray compassion and filial obedience, to break the precept forbidding the taking of life.

Not content with advocating the killing of the enemy army, Yasutani, like the Nazis, found yet another group to demonise—the Jews. Yasutani wrote:

We must be aware of the existence of the demonic teachings of the Jews… They are caught up in the delusion that they alone have been chosen by God and are [therefore] an exceptionally superior people… The result of all this is a treacherous design to usurp [control of] and dominate the entire world, thus provoking the great upheavals of today. It must be said that this is an extreme example of the evil resulting from superstitious belief and deep-rooted delusion.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about D.T. Suzuki, Yasutani Haku’un, and the many other wartime Japanese Zen Buddhist leaders is that even today large numbers of Western Zen Buddhists continue to revere them as the very embodiment of ‘enlightenment’. And lest there are readers who think that statements like the above are limited to either wartime Japanese Zen masters or Japanese Buddhist leaders in general, we need only look at the more recent statement of Thai monk Kitti Wuttho who, in 1976 in the aftermath of a massacre of leftist protesters, claimed: ‘Killing communists is not killing persons because whoever destroys the nation, the religion, or the monarchy, such bestial types are not complete persons. Thus we must intend not to kill people but to kill the Devil (Mara); this is the duty of all Thai.’ Based on this statement, one can assume Venerable Wuttho would have had no objection to the statement ‘Kill a Commie for Buddha’.

Were space available, I could give examples of similar statements made by the leaders of all the world’s major faiths. With regard to Islam, for example, on 23 April 2004, the well-known Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr encouraged his followers to rise up against the US occupation of Iraq. He said:

Tell America, tell all the world, tell the Governing Council, that I have God by my side and they have the devil by theirs, and to my followers, I say, do not think we are not powerful. We can fight and defeat anyone!

A few months later, he crowed:

The only reward for those who make war on Allah and on Muhammad, his messenger, and plunge into corruption, will be to be killed or crucified or have their hands and feet severed on alternate sides, or be expelled from the land.

Judaism, too, is no exception to religion-endorsed warfare, as revealed in the current mass murder of Palestinians being carried out by the Jewish state of Israel. While contemporary statements by Israeli leaders calling the Palestinians ‘human animals’ and the like are well known, it is important to recall that a denial of the shared humanity of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews has long been the staple of some Israeli Jewish rabbis.

In a 2001 sermon, the now deceased Ovadia Yosef, then the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and a founder of the ultra-orthodox Shas religious political party, exclaimed: ‘May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them… It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.’ Twenty-three years later, Rabbi Yosef’s words are being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza.

Finally, readers will recall that I found a sliver of hope in the phrase ‘Kill a Commie for Christ’. By this, I meant that history suggests that when we see the ‘other’ as an extension of, or a reflection of, our self, we cannot easily kill them. Instead, we must first believe (or be led to believe) that the ‘other’, in this case, the ‘Commie’, is the very incarnation of evil while at the same time believing (or being led to believe) that we are the ‘good guys’ (and increasingly ‘good gals’) killing for a ‘righteous cause’, e.g., on behalf of Jesus, the ‘Prince of Peace’.   

But what happens when soldiers discover that the enemy is actually an extension of themselves? That they are fellow human beings with the same wants, desires, fears, and, indeed, weaknesses? In this connection, I recall my own personal experience as a civilian college instructor in the US Navy’s Program for Afloat College Education. In 1980 I was assigned to teach on board the USS Kirk, a destroyer escort homeported in Yokosuka, Japan. In addition to the Japanese language, I taught a course on modern Chinese history as the ship patrolled the Taiwan Strait on a ‘peace-keeping mission’.

At the beginning of the course, my sailor-students expressed interest in learning more about their putative enemy, the ‘ChiComs’ (derogatory GI slang for Chinese Communists). Knowing of their prejudice, I chose Edgar Snow’s famous work Red Star Over China as the course text due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Communist guerrilla movement led by Mao Tse-tung (aka Mao Zedong). Sailors were shocked to learn, for example, that in the late 1930s, Mao’s opponent, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Chinese and a professed Christian, expressed his admiration for fascism and believed that it held potential for China’s future development. ‘So we’re here in the Taiwan Strait risking our lives to defend fascism?’ they asked incredulously.

Toward the end of the class one of the sailors, having long abandoned the term ‘ChiCom’, said:

‘You know, Professor, if I’d been in the position of impoverished, landless Chinese peasants, faced with the choice of supporting either Chiang and his landlord backers or Mao, I would have become a Communist guerrilla, too!’ Other students in the class nodded in agreement. Needless to say, the purpose of the class was not to create ‘Communist guerrillas’ but, rather, to understand what led impoverished Chinese youth to become revolutionaries.

For this reason, I was heartened to see that with the knowledge they had acquired the sailors came to recognize the humanity, and understand the motives, of those who heretofore had been presented to them as evil incarnate. However, following the voyage, I was fired from my teaching position at the direction of the headquarters of the Seventh Fleet in Japan. The headquarters wrote my employer, Chapman College, explaining that ‘Brian Victoria is considered a threat to military order and discipline and must never be allowed to teach on board a Seventh Fleet ship again.’ So it goes…

Readers of Part One will recall that I identified the ongoing ‘tribal mentality’ of Homo sapiens as the root cause of our willingness to kill the ‘other’ in ever more massive numbers and with ever more lethal means. While all of today’s major religions claim to espouse universal truth and promote peace, when push comes to shove, religious leaders, almost without exception, resort to a tribal mentality that endorses if not promotes the murderous actions of their tribe’s (aka nation’s) soldiers. In doing so, they provide both their political leaders and the soldiers under their direction with the belief that they are acting righteously, ethically, with worthy goals that justify the means, no matter how cruel and heartless they may be.

Religious leaders also typically assure soldiers’ next of kin that in the event their loved ones fall in battle, they will be rewarded with some form of an afterlife, e.g., eternal life in the heaven of Christianity or rebirth in Buddha Amitābha’s ‘Pure Land’ in the case of Buddhism. At the same time, religious leaders enjoy the respect and approbation of their tribe/nation, for even should ‘their side’ lose the war, religious leaders are there to offer moral support and comfort, eulogising the patriotic ‘selflessness’ of the fallen and assuring their loved ones that the fallen have gone to a ‘better place’ and are ‘at peace’. In short, whether the war is won or lost, religious leaders, who need not risk their own lives on the battlefield, typically end up as the ‘winners’.

Given this, is there any hope?

In light of the ongoing, and widespread, strength of the tribal mentality of Homo sapiens, there is only one solution. First, we need to educate both ourselves and others regarding the true nature of conflicts (almost always fought in the self-interest of the rich and powerful on both sides).  Thereafter, we need to educate as many as possible to see the same humanity in others as they see in themselves, regardless of differences in skin colour, ethnic or national identity, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), gender, gender orientation, etc. Should we fail to do this, we would be well to recall the words Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in his Christmas Sermon of Sunday, December 24, 1967:

[We] must either learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or we are all going to perish together as fools.

Related reading

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’, by Daniel James Sharp

How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed, by Charles Freeman

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The roots of political Buddhism in Burma, by Hein Htet Kyaw

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem? by Khadija Khan

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people, by Zwan Mahmod

The post Can Religion Save Humanity? Part Two: Killing Commies for Christ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Charles Freeman is a scholar of the ancient world, perhaps best known for his books Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (first edition 1996) and The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003). The latter argued that the rise of an enforced Christian orthodoxy in the fourth century shut down a millennia-long Greek tradition that prized open-mindedness, argument, and freethought.

I recently met with Freeman over Zoom, both of us appropriately sipping a glass of wine, to discuss his life and work. In particular, we discussed his new book The Children of Athena, which explores, through portraits of major thinkers from the historian Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) to the mathematician Hypatia (c. AD 355-415), how the Greek intellectual tradition continued to thrive under the Roman Empire until the coming of Christian orthodoxy. Below is an edited transcript along with some audio extracts from our conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: In various of your books, you make mention of your own engagement, throughout your life, with the classical world. So how did this lifelong fascination start?

Charles Freeman: Well, I was at one of the traditional public schools where they did more classics than anything else. We read Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus and the playwrights in the original Greek, so I got some idea of the real versatility and curiosity of the Greek mind, and I much preferred it to Latin. I found the Greek mind much more interesting. I loved the literature and the curiosity about the world that you see, for instance, in the Greek playwrights of the fifth century BC. So it always lingered in the back of my mind that the Greek mind was something special.

When I got a place at Cambridge, I was going to do history. But my father, who was ex-army and struggled as a farmer, said that we did not have much money. My great-great grandfather was a top classicist at Cambridge and one of my great uncles, who died very young, was also a top classicist, so there was a classical tradition in the family. But we were a slightly impoverished family with a very traditional English background, so my father said I was better off with a degree in law because that would make me some money.

And you rebelled against this, presumably?

I think that over the time that I studied law at Cambridge I actually read more history books than law books! I got very bored with the law. I mean, you really have to master the law, and you are not going to be able to change it unless you become prime minister! And I realized by the end of my time in Cambridge that I would never become a lawyer.

But as a present to me for deciding to do law, my father had arranged for me to go to Rome for six months, and I worked like a slave at the British School there. My first job was mending Etruscan pottery and then I was allowed to go out onto excavations and so on [more in the audio extract above]. I was keen on archaeology, but I realised that I was much too harum-scarum to ever be an archaeologist. I noticed that the good archaeologists always had their trenches absolutely neat and tidy, and my trenches were a bit of a muddle.

After I left Cambridge, I went out to teach in Sudan. I did not know what to do in life, like so many people after university, but I did work on one of the sites on the Nile during my Christmas holidays at the ancient site of Meroë. I had also dug at Knidos, which was a Greek city in what is now in Turkey.

So I kept all of this experience at the back of my mind, but then I became a normal history teacher and I ended up working with the International Baccalaureate, which was just beginning in the late 1970s. I worked for 10 years at a sixth-form college in Oxford. And so I was working with modern history.

I finally got a job as chief writer on a 12-volume world history, which enabled me to go back to my interest in the ancient world. The whole project eventually collapsed, but I was able to publish my sections on ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as a single book for Oxford University Press. That gave me an academic basis from which to study the ancient world, and I have been working on that ever since, writing all kinds of books about it. In the early 2000s, I also began conducting my own tours of ancient sites, and I have kept that up, too.

How did you come to write ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’?

After I had written a book called The Greek Achievement in 1999, I decided that I wanted to write about the Greeks under the Roman Empire. I was fascinated by what actually happened to Greek philosophy when it came up against Christianity. And the end result of that was Closing, which made my name as a slightly alternative, freethinking author.

Your interest is in cultural and intellectual history, as opposed to kings and queens and battles. Why does that fascinate you so much?

I have always been interested in ideas and the way that ideas develop through history, and which ideas are taken up and which are rejected. This was embedded in me by my work with the International Baccalaureate, because there is a compulsory part of the curriculum called ‘Theory of Knowledge’. It is a course in critical thinking, with philosophical underpinnings, and I taught it for 10 years. I got very fascinated by it, and then I was asked to be an examiner, where we set questions based on the whole range of intellectual disciplines. I worked with brilliant minds from all over the world, and we came from all different kinds of disciplines, and I think that embedded the interest in ideas and critical thinking in my mind. I think that has enriched my approach to academic work, too.

That sounds rather similar to the ancient Greek tradition you have written so much about, with its commitment to open-ended enquiry and its great breadth.

Very much so. With my new book The Children of Athena, I have been able to explore all the different ways in which the Greek mind worked. Having had a very solid, traditional education, these Greek thinkers had a good foundation for very clear thinking, and for very diverse forms of thinking, which is really attractive to me.

Before we discuss your new book in more depth, can you talk a little about ‘Closing’ and your 2020 sequel of sorts, ‘The Awakening’ (published in the US as ‘The Reopening of the Western Mind’)?

Closing was concerned with the openness of the Greek mind, its versatility and curiosity, not only through the classical period but through the great Hellenistic period when figures like Archimedes and Hipparchus were flourishing. There were two main strands of Greek philosophy, one inspired by Aristotle’s fascination with the natural world and one inspired by Plato’s focus on the immaterial world, which he saw as being the ultimate reality. I argued that Platonic thought was integrated within the Christian tradition while Aristotle was forgotten until he came back into the university in the medieval period.

And in ‘Closing’, you argue that this Greek intellectual tradition was stifled by the emergence, from the fourth century onwards, of an enforced Christian orthodoxy. Do you think some of your critics misconstrued this as rehashing the now unfashionable idea that antiquity was followed by an age of darkness and ignorance?

I think the title is a good title, but it comes across quite strongly, which might be a reason for that misunderstanding. In The Awakening, I made a point of addressing the very traditional debate between the view that the medieval period was one of innovation versus the idea that it was an age of darkness. I think I was quite fair. I was determined in The Awakening to give full chapters on the medieval university, medieval philosophy, and medieval science, to really explore those in depth, so that I was not vulnerable to critics who might say I was leaping straight from antiquity to the Renaissance and ignoring medieval achievements.

What do you make of historians like Tom Holland, who in his 2019 book ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind’, argued that Christianity essentially made the modern world?

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state. And it has continued as such ever since! We still have 26 bishops in the House of Lords, and throughout history, they have always been forces for conservatism.

I wrote a book in 2009 called AD 381 because I saw that year as a turning point in European history. This was when Christianity became an authoritarian and conservative religion and when the revolutionary aspects you can find in the Gospels were abandoned. You can see a resurgence of those radical ideas in the seventeenth century, with the birth of the Quakers and other radical Christian sects during the English Civil War. You could also see that in early Christianity, but that tradition was destroyed in the fourth century.

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

What other alternative Christianities could there have been?

I also do feel that I am very heavily criticised for this view, but Augustine had far too much influence. I am an Origen man. Origen, a theologian of the third century, was a sophisticated biblical scholar who thought Greek philosophy could be brought into Christianity. He also disbelieved in eternal punishment. And that is another problem I have with Holland’s book: he writes a very effusive defence of Origen but does not discuss Origen’s theology in great depth. And then later, he very briefly mentions that Origen was declared heretical when the Trinity was proclaimed in 381!

Surely Holland should have probed what heresy meant and discussed why one of the greatest Christian intellectuals was declared a heretic. I felt that Holland did not in any serious way probe into the many problems of Christianity. As it happens, I have been thinking of writing a book called Europe and Christianity: The History of a Troubled Relationship. That is quite a good title, I think. It would, among other things, look at the conflicts between medieval states and the papacy.

The big ethical issue about Christianity is the ethics of exclusion. Jews, Muslims, pagans—you are either in or you are out. And Holland should have probed this more deeply. Why was Origen, one of Christianity’s best sales agents, declared heretical?

Holland might have it that Christianity was a great vehicle for universalism, in that it declared us all to be made in the image of God. But of course, as you say, there are the saved and the damned, which is almost the entire point of Christianity.

Yes, and so you have the problem of Calvinism and the predestination issue. Do you know whether you are saved or not? And then you have the problem with original sin.

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar, said that he got more out of reading one page of Origen than he did reading ten pages of Augustine. I think that says a lot. Erasmus is one of my heroes. He is so broad-minded. And Martin Luther, when he heard of his death, said that Erasmus was going to hell! The Catholic Church put Erasmus’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books and there is still that very traditional Catholic argument that Erasmus caused the Reformation, which is, of course, not true. There were many other factors which made the Church vulnerable to a reformer who could articulate an alternative theology.

To go back to Holland, perhaps the main problem with his thesis is that he seems to believe that there is just one version of Christianity, and it is the version that happens to align with modern values and that everything else was just an aberration, not ‘true’ Christianity.

Yes. Christianity, for example, buttressed the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Nazis had a Christian church. And, as I said, there were radical Christianities, like the Quakers. So Christianity could be interpreted in every kind of political context.

That sounds similar to the problem with theology that you outline in ‘Closing’, namely that there is an endless proliferation of interpretations in Christianity because there is no rational foundation or agreed-upon set of first principles from which to build. That is why both the defenders and the opponents of slavery in the American South could claim, with equal justification, that God was on their side.

Michael Taylor has written a very good book calledThe Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which discusses the Christian, biblical sources used by the defenders of slavery. He stresses how much the Christian churches were in favour of slavery. Remember that it was the Pope who granted the Portuguese the right to enslave Africans back in the fifteenth century. So slavery starts off with a Catholic imprimatur, if you like. Of course, Protestants defended slavery too, even though we hear more about the Christian abolitionists these days.

Moving on to your new book, ‘The Children of Athena’, how does it relate to your previous work?

The book is about how the Greek mind was fertile and intellectually diverse for centuries under the Roman Empire. There was no dogmatism, no sacred canon, no absolutely authoritative texts, no non-negotiable doctrines. All that came in with Christianity. I think the intelligent reader will pick up that theme right at the end of the book, but I did not want to preach. I just wanted to show that the Greek mind was fertile right to the very end.

I have been criticised by some conservative Christians in the past, who say that the Greek mind was stagnant by this period, and that Christianity came along and saved it. So I am trying to argue, in Athena, against that view, without preaching, to show that the Greek mind was alive and well in the period up to the early fifth century.

In the book, you say that Plutarch (c.AD 46—after AD 119) is probably the most appealing of the thinkers you discuss. Why?

I would have loved to have had a landed estate next to Plutarch’s! I would like to have been able to wander over in the cool of the evening for a glass of wine with him. He is a wonderful mind, because he is not only a philosopher, but also a very good historian, and he is very penetrating on the individuals that he includes in his Parallel Lives. He is also a very good practical philosopher, on things like how to control anger and what values you should express in public life. He says that you must be humble and that you must sort out your personality before you enter public life, which is something that I think is still relevant today.

Here is a telling story. Plutarch was far from home when he heard of his young daughter’s death, and he wrote a very moving letter to his wife, a very humane letter, which should be much better known than it is. It shows what a sensitive individual he was, quite apart from being a philosopher and historian. He is my favourite of the figures I discuss in the book.

How did you choose which figures to include in the book?

They were all intellectuals. And the idea was to show the diversity of the figures that I covered. And I obviously had to choose individuals whose material was relatively extant, so that I could get a sense of how they thought and what they achieved. Strabo the geographer (c. 63 BC—c. AD 25) and Dioscorides the botanist (c. AD 40—c. 90), for instance, left behind a lot of material that still survives. And Galen (AD 129—216), of course, the top physician of his day, also left behind an enormous amount of work. The figures I discuss argued for their own place, really, because of what we know about them and the legacy they left behind, which I discuss in a chapter called ‘Afterlives’ at the end of the book.

You include a lot of information on the world these thinkers inhabited, particularly its physicality. How important was this to you?

I think quite important. Particularly for Athens, which I know well. I have been to Sagalassos [an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey], the city that I describe in one of the book’s interludes, two or three times, and it is a wonderful site that has been beautifully excavated by the University of Leuven. I also know Aphrodisias with its ancient Sebasteion temple, having visited it three or four times. I have also led tours around the Peloponnese and southwestern Turkey, so I have a good feel for the sites.

The Greeks were wonderful at choosing sites for settlement. Sites had to be close to fertile land and sources of water. The Romans put aqueducts up in many Greek cities, too, so the Greeks and Romans collaborated. In the book, I quote Strabo’s statement that the Greeks chose wonderful sites, while the Romans came and put in pavements and sewers and so on. Basically, all the dirty work!

One of your subjects is the second-century travel writer Pausanias, who is a great source for understanding the sites of the ancient world.

Yes. I think he’s increasingly respected now. He was considered rather pedantic once upon a time, but the more excavations go on, the more they actually find out that he was accurate and that therefore he should be relied on as a guide.

Another figure you discuss is Lucian of Samosata, the fearless second-century satirist whose anti-religious works led to him being mostly disregarded until the Renaissance. Tell us more about him.

An enormous amount of Lucian has survived because he has been very popular throughout the ages. Erasmus was a great fan of his, as were the Renaissance humanists in general, who were much more relaxed about using classical sources than had been the case previously. In the Renaissance, people like Boccaccio, who also admired Lucian, got away from the strict Catholic tradition of dismissing heretics and pagans. They were much more relaxed during the Renaissance.

Who else among your subjects really stands out to you?

Well, my editor particularly liked my chapter on Dioscorides, the botanist, because he had cures for all sorts of ailments.

Then there is Epictetus, the first and second century Stoic philosopher. My son is a psychologist who works in Los Angeles with the meditation app Headspace, and Epictetus could be read today as a guide to mindfulness. So I put my son on to Epictetus!

Ptolemy, the second century astronomer and mathematician, was brilliant. He had quite an extraordinary mind.

Galen, of course, is the top doctor. He understood nerves and pulses [see audio extract, left, for more]. He was well ahead of his time, but very arrogant. He certainly would not have been a nice chap to meet, but if you had an illness, he was the man to go to.

I quite enjoy Plotinus, the third century philosopher. He is quite difficult to understand, but he was certainly a prominent intellectual. His idea of the One influenced Augustine quite a lot.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.AD 150—c.215) wrote beautifully and had a more optimistic outlook on Christianity. Origen, of course, was a brilliant intellectual, and I am pleased to see that he is coming back into favour.

Themistius, the fourth century court orator, always survived. Whenever a new emperor came along, he would say, thank goodness we have you now, the last one was hopeless. And then that emperor died and he would say the same to the next one!

So I think all of the figures I write about have something to say for themselves.

One of the unfortunate things about people like Galen was that as Christian orthodoxy became more rigid, they were frozen into place as absolute authorities. That happened to Aristotle eventually, too. And the open-minded, questioning, empirical method of these thinkers was almost forgotten. Do you think that today, something similar is going on with the narrowing of public discourse? Can we learn from the Greek tradition once more?

Yes, I think it is true that people are very quickly pigeonholed. The breadth of intellectual thought has diminished. We are in a narrower world. I think part of it is that people do not have enough time to read. I come from a tradition where it is assumed that you read widely, and I am not sure people read as widely as they used to. Partly because they do not have the leisure to do so. But there has also been a narrowing of political discourse.

How do you deal with critics of your work?

I noticed with the reception of my book The Closing of the Western Mind that people were open to the arguments, and I do not mind critical reviews that are thoughtful and make good points when disagreeing with me, but I have had one or two reviewers who have not really grasped the ideas behind the book and so they were not able to criticise it effectively.

Is there less tolerance these days?

My wife and I were just talking about this. She asked me if I was able to talk freely during this interview, and I said that the things I talk about are not really difficult topics. But yes, we were discussing what you cannot talk about now.

A couple of quick-fire questions as we approach the end of this interview. First, Plato or Aristotle?

Aristotle, because he saw the beauty in living things.

And second, Athens or Jerusalem?

Athens. I think you know that!

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I think I will see how The Children of Athena goes. I am beginning to run out of ideas, I think. I feel that I have done a good corpus of books, so we shall see. I am very happy with the range of books I have written. Even if I never wrote another book, I have completed a whole corpus of interlocking books which say what I wanted to say. But I always have ideas bubbling up in my head.

The post ‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman appeared first on The Freethinker.

In January 1876, an unprecedented event took place at Milan’s Cimitero Maggiore: Europe’s first modern crematory was put into operation. Within 90 minutes, the new incinerator for human corpses, invented by engineer Celeste Clericetti and professor of chemistry Giovanni Polli, transformed the mortal remains of silk merchant Alberto Keller into ashes. It was the very same Keller who had sponsored the construction of this crematory and who, embalmed and provisionally kept in the non-Catholic part of the cemetery, was the first to be officially cremated in Italy two years after his death.

The cremation was attended by friends and family, state officials, and members of the Milan Cremation Society (established in 1876 thanks to the tireless commitment of physician and freemason Gaetano Pini) as well as scientists, engineers and media representatives. A perhaps unexpected guest was the Protestant pastor Paira, who framed Keller’s funeral with words that stretched the principles of Christian teachings rather far. Paira declared that Christian religion should finally embrace humanism, progress, modernity and hygiene, and abandon what he perceived to be a superstitious tradition centred on a lifeless shell and a vulgar belief in bodily resurrection.

At first glance, the renewed interest in cremation in nineteenth-century Italy may be surprising, as this mode of treating the corpse did not conform to the Catholic burial traditions that had dominated the cultures of the Italian peninsula for most of its history after the rise of Christianity. But this is precisely why, during the Italian process of nation-building, those, like Giuseppe Garibaldi or the aforementioned Pini, who wished to create a civil public sphere free of religious influence, chose cremation as one of their means to oppose Catholicism, which was politically and culturally so influential. Cremation was a way of rejecting Catholic traditions, institutions and experts, which seemed altogether incompatible with the reformers’ visions of science-based progress, reason, rationality, civil morality and a bright Italian future in the European concert of nations. In the second half of the century, the idea of incinerating the dead in Italy became inseparably linked to a culture war between the Catholic Church and an emerging Italian secularist sphere. The latter was partly fostered by the secularisation policies of the liberal state.

Founded in 1861, the young nation-state of Italy actively upheld French revolutionary political traditions. Cremation, which had been introduced briefly during the revolution as an explicitly non-Catholic custom, formed part of this heritage. However, the cremation of the dead was not in itself a ‘secularist’ practice. Rather, it became charged with secularist significance. On the one hand, Italian secularists promoted cremation, considering it antithetical to Christian traditions. On the other hand, the Church’s dogmatisation and anti-modernisation policies in the second half of the nineteenth century included the condemnation of cremation in 1886, which came to be devalued as a Masonic ritual. Eventually, cremation was legalised, and therefore implicitly supported, by the Italian Sanitary Code in 1888.

A closer look sheds light on these competing parties in the Italian confessional-political conflicts of the later nineteenth century. On the one hand, Italian politics was dominated by the Historical Right (Destra Storica) with its liberal, reformist and secular orientation. Politicians such as Massimo d’Azeglio or Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour, represented this direction. Close to these positions, though less pragmatic and even more oriented towards ‘modernising’ the new state, was the democratic and urban-based Historical Left (Sinistra Storica) with leading figures such as Urbano Rattazzi and Agostino Depretis. Both parties shaped the outlook of the new state. Members of the Historical Left tended to be less tolerant of religion, its institutions, and its influence in society, and here they joined with the efforts of secularist organisations and campaigners. Among them were Italian freemasons like Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, both of whom worked at the forefront of the national cause, as well as freethinkers like Luigi Stefanoni, who edited the influential journal Libero Pensiero (‘Free Thought’), atheists, anarchists and early socialists.

Even though secularism in Italy was heterogeneous and also competitive in its branches, nevertheless, anti-Catholic and anti-clerical secularist publications and organisations openly and unanimously advocated cremation and civil burial to challenge the Church’s prerogative over the dead. But they also offered secularist explanations regarding life and death. Such thinking was inspired by the ideas  of the anti-clericalist and scientific materialist Jacob Moleschott on the cycles of ever-changing matter.

Rome only joined the new nation state in 1870, after the city had been captured by Italian troops. This marked the end of the popes’ temporal power. Even before that, the influence of the Church in society had already been reduced by the Italian Civil Code of 1865, as well as by legislative initiatives such as those of Giuseppe Siccardi, which abolished ecclesiastical courts. As a result of its loss of territory and power, the Church reacted harshly to the new state and the secularisation that accompanied it. Its particular bugbear was the radical secularists, with their campaign for cremation, their demands for the emancipation of women, for civil morality, and for an education free of religious influences. Cremation remained forbidden for Catholics until 1963. The leading Catholic journal Civiltà Cattolica spearheaded the polemics against the new practice, which it attacked as ‘a war against the dead’.

Numerous cremation societies were founded in Italy in the nineteenth century, united in an umbrella association led by Malachia de Cristoforis, a senator, professor of medicine and freemason. Crematoria were built in several Italian cities; by 1894 they existed in Milan, Lodi, Cremona, Rome, Brescia, Padua, Udine, Varese, Novara, Florence, Livorno, Pisa, Como, Asti, St. Remo, Turin, Mantua, Verona, Bologna, Modena, Venice, and Perugia. However, few Italians were willing to opt for cremation, given how charged this new way of treating the corpse was. While numbers have risen nowadays, cremation remains a minority practice in Italy whose population continues to be predominantly Catholic (around 75 per cent), followed by agnostics and atheists (approximately 12 per cent), various other Christian denominations, Islam and Buddhism. In 2019, only about 31 per cent of the deceased were cremated; inhumation predominates.

In 1878, two years after the first modern crematory was built in Milan, the second was constructed in Gotha, one of the capitals of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In this city, liberal and socialist ideas flourished. The German socialist party (the SPD), for instance, came into being here in 1875. Cremation was advocated by leading German freethinkers such as Ludwig Büchner, well-known monists like Wilhelm Ostwald, and the prominent socialist and later anarchist Johann Most.

Just as in Italy, the new way of dealing with the dead was accompanied by strong anti-clerical and anti-Catholic ideas in Wilhelmine Germany as well, for example by the professor of medicine Karl Reclam in the widely read bourgeois family magazine Die Gartenlaube (1874, 1879). In Protestant Germany, however, the issue of cremation seemed less politically charged. In Catholic-influenced cultures, the practice faced brusque rejection from the church. In Protestant Germany, on the other hand, after initial outright disapproval in 1898 (at the Conference of Eisenach), the Protestant churches, in practice, often adopted a more conciliatory approach. Comparatively early on, German Protestants could opt for cremation. In doing so, they affirmed their liberal and progressive convictions, or dispelled their fear of being buried alive, without giving up on a Christian ceremony. Of course, existing social norms favoured such Christian framing.

Scenarios such as those envisioned by Die Gartenlaube in 1874 were not possible in Protestant Prussia, where throne and altar were closely linked at the time and where, unlike in Italy, state law did not permit cremation until 1911. Nevertheless, the boundaries between secularism and liberal Protestantism in Germany and elsewhere eventually proved less solid than in Catholic cultures. Even so, cremation in the nineteenth century would still have carried an aura of the sensational, the deviant, even in Protestant regions, and would have indicated a turning away from the established religions and beliefs of those who opted for this practice.

After the turn of the century, with the rise of the German labour movement, cremation in Germany took on more socialist features. This was also due to special cremation insurance policies that were set up for workers and their families to provide them with financial security in the event of death. Prominent socialists such as Friedrich Engels and August Bebel chose to be cremated. In a sense, socialist culture disambiguated and politicised the secular and secularist notions of cremation. Later on, this socialist codification of cremation led to high cremation rates in the socialist workers’ and peasants’ state of East Germany. Even today, the number of cremations in the former East German states is considerably higher than, for instance, in Catholic Bavaria.

The history of modern cremation ultimately turns out to be a winding road, laid by political revolutionaries, freethinkers, and freemasons, and paved with anti-clerical and materialist secularism, but also with bourgeois reformist, liberal Protestant attitudes: even in Italy, during the first cremation, a Protestant priest presided over the ceremony. Irreligion or agnosticism are to this day main reasons for choosing cremation; however, today, as in the past, cremation can also be selected for reasons of finance, flexibility and mobility, or on environmental grounds. Matters of belief and modern preferences and values are intertwined.

Today, cremation rates are rising across Europe, but the figures are distributed very unevenly, from countries where it is supported by a quarter of the population or less, such as Greece, Poland or Ireland, to those where it is supported by over 70 per cent, such as Germany, the UK or Sweden. New methods of dealing with the dead body now compete with cremation and burial. These include ‘terramation’, invented in the US, in which the corpse, in special composting chambers, is rapidly transformed into humus to serve as a nutrient for new plants.

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The post The rediscovery of cremation in Italy and Germany appeared first on The Freethinker.