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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
This paper is dedicated to the memory of Herbert McCabe OP, the best theologian / have ever met, whose work will remain exemplary for all who aspire to think theologically in the twenty-first century.
George Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ is presumably part of what this conference is about. Certainly, the intentional killing of the innocent, that is people who have done us no harm, must be one of the most blatant examples of evil anybody can think of. Dealing with this evil has, alas, become one of the pre-occupations of the present age. The last century saw enough of it, from Auschwitz and Hiroshima to Srebrenica and Omagh. But today we are confronted by what many see as a new form of this evil: namely suicidal terrorism. Yet even this is not so unambiguously evil that people cannot find religious justifications of it. Indeed the existence of a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent is, I take it, part of the evil that we are dealing with at this conference.
Many Muslims, and perhaps some Christians too, think of those who perpetrate suicidal murders as martyrs for the faith, specially blessed by the Almighty with a vocation to kill. Some even find arguments for it in the Qu’ran or in Islamic law, or in the Old Testament. But before we rush in to condemn their arguments, we must remember some precedents. The most obvious is that of Samson.
1 In The Guardian for 17th July 2002 Paul Ekdle refers to a website run by the Centre for Islamic Studies and Research (an Al Qu’aida front organisation) as follows: ‘One statement on the subject of “the legality of the operations in Washington and New York” laid out seven grounds in Islamic law on which it is permissible to kill ‘sacrosanct infidels’-essentially civilians-and six grounds on which it is permissible to kill Muslims’.
2 Apart from the Judges story, these are all Christian interpretations. After I had written this paper I came across Linda Grant's essay Defenders of the Faith (see The Guardian Review for July 6 2002), which includes a fascinating modern Jewish angle on the story. In this the strongman Samson figures as ‘the Golem’, a mediaeval progenitor of Frankenstein (built by a Rabbi to fight anti-Semitism). However, in many respects Grant's way of viewing Samson is close to my own. Yet it is significant that she herself initially remembered the tale only for the Delilah episode. This shows how strong has been the romantic way of remembering the myth.
3 Hebrews, 11.:32
4 The City of God Book I Chap. 20
5 Summa Theologiae IIaIIae, Q. 64, Art. 5 ad 4
6 Samson Agonistes II. 307ff
7 The Living World of the Old Testament (London, Longman, 1975) pp.200-01
8 It is possible that Samson's Nazirite status was not original to the Samson story. If so, this would help to resolve the difficulties faced by Augustine and his successors. See: Mary Joan Winn Leith in The Oxford Companion to the Bible ed by Metzger and Coogan (NY and Oxford, OUP, 1993) p. 673
9 Samson Agonistes, II. 1665-66
10 see note vii above
11 John A.T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (London, SCM Press, 1952) p. 40
12 see above, note iv. With this pronouncement Augustine practically put paid to the argument of the Donatists of his day in favour of suicidal martyrdom. On this, see G.W .Bowerstock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge University Press 1995) and Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, Faber and Faber, 1967) Chapter 19
13 Sum. Theol. IIaIIae, Q. 64
14 Sum. Theol. IIaIIae Q. 124, Art 2
15 William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Poems of William Blake, Ed. W.H.Stevenson (London, Longman, 1971) p. 107. Cf. Coleridge, Table Talk in Selected Poetry and Prose (Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1951) p. 469: ‘In every one of his poems it is Milton himself whom you see … the egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit’.
16 on Milton's personality, see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, Faber and Faber, 1977) Part I, Chapter 5, ii; Part 5, Chapter 20; and Part 7 Chapter 32.
17 C.Hill, op.cit. Part I, 5, i. During this tour Milton met Hugo Grotius in Paris, and in Italy he was able to talk to Galileo.
18 Samson Agonistes, 11. 523-31
19 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets in Dr.Johnson: Prose and Poetry selected by M. Davies (London, Rupert Hart Davis, 1950) p. 827
20 On the first, see the Areopagitica (1644) and on the second The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643-4). Milton's writings were however always constrained by the censorship, leading him to speak in round-about ways to avoid trouble, especially after the Restoration: see C.Hill, op.cit., pp. 64-66, 405-09
21 C.Hill, op.cit. p. 235
22 C.Mill points out that references to Samson as a politically significant figure in the context of seventeenth century England were numerous in the 1640s and 1650s. Milton himself had been toying with a Samson poem since the early 1640s. Op.cit.Part VI Chapter 31, pp. 428-32.
23 C. Hill, op. cit. p. 362
24 Henry V, iv, 1
25 Samson Agonistes 1. 1659
26 e.g. Paradise Lost Book XI, II.691-97; Paradise Regained Book III.II.387ff.
27 According to Christopher Hill, Milton was a ‘mortalist’ who did not believe in the immortality of soul. His is a predominantly this-worldly religion, which precludes such popish notions as purgatory or praying to the saints. Hill, op. cit., p. 52 and Part 5, Ch. 25 passim
28 I am assuming that Samson Agonistes was written after the Restoration, and was probably his last major poetic work. It was first published in 1671.
29 Samson Agonistes 11. 1721-37
30 Robert Browning, Pippa Passes, Part I, I. 222
31 cf. Newburgh Hamilton's Preface to his Word-Book of ‘Samson’ (18th February 1743), in Handel: A documentary Biography by Otto Erich Deutsch (London, A&C Black, 1955) p. 559. The emergence of the Handelian dramatic oratorio was partly the result of two factors: the decline of public interest in the formalities of Italian Opera Seria, of which Handel had long been an exponent; and a ban on staging Biblical stories in the theatre due to Puritanical objections by, among others, the Bishop of London. See Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques by Winton Dean (Oxford University Press 1959) Chapter 7 passim.
32 Handel had completed the work in a concise form by 1741, only a few weeks after The Messiah: but he expanded it somewhat after the return from Ireland in 1742, adding the final triumphant Let the Bright Seraphim.
33 This was a feeling inherited from the previous century. See note xxxi.
34 For example, by the distorted version of the great Act 2 aria which Saint-Saens gives to Delilah in Act 3, when she confesses she did everything out of hate.
35 The first performance of Götterdämmerung also took place in 1876
36 Hebrews 1 1 :32-40 and note i in the Jeerusalem Bible.
37 I limit myself here to what Augustine says in Book I Chapter 20 of the City of God.
38 Perhaps Milton was thinking of the appalling atrocities against civilians during the seemingly endless Thirty Years war of his youth: atrocities made familiar to modern sensibility by Brecht's epic drama Mother Courage. It is also possible that Milton's meeting with Grotius, in Pans in 1838, had some effect here. Grotius was one of the first writers on international law to insist on the immunity of non-combatants from attack, especially during sieges. His De Jure Betli et Pacis had been published in 1625. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (London, Penguin Books, 1980) p. 168.
39 I have not been able here to consider the views of Philip Bobbit, in whose monumental study of modem politics, The Shield of Achilles, the theory is put forward that the modern world is becoming a society of ‘marketstates’: but 1 doubt if Bobbit's theories undermine my central thesis.
40 However, Linda Grant's Jewish interpretation sees Ariel Sharon as the modem Samson, the strongman defending Israel. After his supervision of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres Sharon was temporarily shorn of his powers by an Israeli investigative committee, Grant points out, but is now back as a prime minister fuelled by hunger for vengeance. Grant's interpretation and my own are not, however, incompatible: myths of this kind are capable of many mutually re-inforcing re-interpretations.
41 In a forthcoming book on the Idea of a Just War Barrie Paskins writes of war as a kind of drunken brawling, not as an orderly rational duel as understood by von Clausewitz and his followers.
42 ‘Responding to violence with more violence will more likely set in process a cycle of violence-in a sense it is the very currency the terrorist understands...a world-wide “war on terror”, attacking any terrorist groups that are seen as a potential threat will be deeply counterproductive, leading to endless conflict’. A Never-Ending War? Consequences of 11 September, Briefing Paper, March 2002, by Paul Rogers and Scilla Elworthy (Oxford Research Group, 2002)
43 On this interpretation of the current world scene see Lee Griffith, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God (Grand Rapids and Cambridge UK, W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), esp. Chapter III.
44 Herbert McCabe OP, God Mutters (London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1987) pp. 93-34
45 Abdul-Aziz Rantissi,talking to Robert Fisk, The Independent, 28th April 2002
46 Sum. Theol. IIaIIae, Q. 124 Art 1 ad 1
47 Sum.Theol. IIaIIae Q. 21 Art.
