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The Jihād of St. Alban

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Ralph Lerner
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Extract

The imperative for a people to become bearers of light and proselytizers of truth is present in differing degrees and modes in the great monotheistic religions. This set of mind has struck some philosophers in the past as problematic, especially when it manifested itself as a call for a war of civilization. It is from this perspective that the present essay reexamines a relatively neglected small dialogue by Sir Francis Bacon, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War. The anarchy resulting from religious conflict in 16th- and 17th-century Europe casts its shadow over every page of this puzzling little work. Bacon's enactment shows that while zeal is in some sense the problem, it might also contribute toward a solution. Religious passions ought to be tamed and redirected, not extirpated. In proposing that Christianity itself be reconstituted, Bacon sees a way of rendering it a willing handmaiden in his farreaching humanitarian project to make man comfortably at home in this world.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , Winter 2002 , pp. 5 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2002

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References

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2. See the sober cautionary remarks in Partner, Peter, God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. xv–xxvii.Google Scholar

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4. Ungentle scriptural language sometimes lent—and lends—itself to fierce explications. On the different and evolving meanings of jihād, see Johnson, James Turner, The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 60–75,143–68Google Scholar; and, more summarily, Lewis, Bernard, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 72–74, 145–47 n. 4Google Scholar. Helpful for stressing the ways in which the term cannot simply be equated with “holy war” is the discussion in Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 16–18Google Scholar.

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11. Parenthetical page references are to: Bacon, Francis, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2000)Google Scholar, with introduction, notes, concordance, and interpretive essay by Laurence Lampert. Inexplicably there is no indication that this admirable essay is almost entirely carried over from chapter 4 of Lampert's, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, lacking only the earlier version's outspoken final paragraph and its epigraph from Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 62, beginning). Lampert's Bacon means to capture Christianity; less clear is whether he means to take any prisoners.

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13. The assiduous Lampert follows Bacon's hint. He reproduces a twelfth-century spectacle of frenzy that mirrors seventeenth-century Europe's incapacity to sustain civil moderation in the face of religious zeal (Ibid., pp. 50–51).

14. In Jerry Weinberger's interpretation, this call for a new Catholicism is none other than the universal claim of a perfected science to save and preserve the corruptible things and to liberate man from God's rule. In pursuit of this great end, the dialogue insistently subverts and ultimately abandons all moderation. There is thus no place for the moderate Eusebius or for the sacred history associated with his eponym (“On Bacon's Advertisement Touching a Holy War,” Interpretation 9 [;1981]: 191–206)Google Scholar. For Lampert, in contrast, the silence of Eusebius “makes Bacon's character historically authentic. Not Greek Eusebius but Greek Eupolis, not ‘piety’ or Christian moderation but ‘good city’ or classical moderation, tempers the world threatened by escalating zeal.” Lampert's extremely subtle interpretation of Pollio's proposal for a holy war sees it as an attempt by Bacon to enlist moderate Christian divinity in support of the politic wisdom of Plato (Advertisement, pp. 48, 55–57)Google Scholar.

15. It should go without saying that Attorney General Bacon viewed the papal doctrine of tyrannicide as criminal in the highest degree. See Advertisement, p. 60Google Scholar.

16. In Islam, too, the term jihād came in time to be applied to the war against domestic enemies as well, including highwaymen. See Kraemer, Joel L., “Apostates, Rebels and Brigands,” in Religion and Government in the World of Islam, Israel Oriental Studies, no. 10 (Tel Aviv, 1983), pp. 34–35, 70–71Google Scholar.

17. Zebedaeus uses the authority of Francisco de Vitoria to reach an outcome in total opposition to that theologian's conclusions. See Advertisement, pp. 70, 74Google Scholar.

18. “Other kings papists content themselves to maintain their religion in their own dominions. But the kings of Spain run a course to make themselves protectors of the popish religion even amongst the subjects of other kings. Almost like the Ottomans that profess to plant the law of Mahomet by the sword; and so the Spaniards do of the Pope's law. And therefore if either the King's blood or our own blood or Christ's blood be dear unto us, the quarrel is just, and to be embraced.” “Notes of a Speech concerning a War with Spain,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, James, Ellis, Robert Leslie, and Heath, Douglas Denon, 14 vols. (London, 1857–1874), 14:461Google Scholar. Permanently debarred from sitting in Parliament, the disgraced Bacon could only sketch the argument he would have spoken.

19. Thus Chancellor James Kent was ready to extend New York State's criminal law over Indians who were no part of that body politic and to punish them without the consent and against the will of their own governments. Goodell v. Jackson, 20 Johnson's, Reports (N.Y.) 693, at 717 (1823)Google Scholar. Even more ambitiously, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston could speak of his nation as “the main instrument in the Hands of Providence” as Victorian Britain projected its overwhelming naval power to suppress the slave trade in both East Africa and Brazil. See Fairbanks, Charles H. Jr, “The British Campaign Against the Slave Trade: An Example of Successful Human Rights Policy,” in Human Rights and American Foreign Policy: Essays, ed. Baumann, Fred (Gambier, OH: Public Affairs Conference Center, Kenyon College, 1982), pp. 87–135, esp. 117–18Google Scholar.

20. “The Charge of Owen, indicted of High Treason,” in Works of Bacon, 12:156–58Google Scholar.

21. See especially Paterson, Timothy H., “On the Role of Christianity in the Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon,” Polity 19 (1987): 419–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. “Beside the humanitarian creed of charity, brother, and neighbor, Christianity appears ”schismatic,’ that is, meanly and narrowly warlike and unsocial, and beside the civil creed of prosperity and empire it seems cruel, hypocritical, and impractical. The true holy war will be an enlightened war against religion and against nature on behalf of liberty and the real progress of humanity” (Faulkner, Robert K., Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993], p. 226)Google Scholar.