Suchergebnisse

Canipe reviews 'Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World' by Lacey Baldwin Smith.

AbstractThere is a growing literature on the theological roots of Schmitt's theory, however, such interpretations depart from the same position as Schmitt: from the political into the theological. In this quarrel between politics and theology, there is a less known contender, the theologian Erik Peterson, who developed a theological critique of Schmitt and shows the impossibility of a Christian political theology. InPolitical Theology II(1970), Schmitt criticizes the apolitical nature of Peterson's theology, but he ignores Peterson's theology of martyrdom. This paper recovers the centrality of martyrdom in Peterson's theology and argues that the martyr represents a counter model to Schmitt's sovereign. For Peterson, martyrdom is not apolitical act, but a public claim in which the martyrs testify in the public sphere that the highest human good is not political but eschatological. By recovering this eschatological dimension, Peterson shows the limits of Schmitt's interpretation of the political.

Martyrs in religions -- Martyrdom in the genesis of Islam -- Legal definitions, boundaries and rewards of the martyr -- Sectarian Islam: Sunni, Shi'ite and Sufi martyrdom -- Martyrs : warriors and missionaries in medieval Islam -- Martyrs of love and epic heroes -- Patterns of prognostication, narrative and expiation -- Martyrdom in contemporary radical Islam -- Martyrdom in Islam : past and present

This article emphasizes the similarities between such diverse instances of public-spirited suicide as the Islamic martyrs of yesterday and today, the anarchists, the Japanese kamikaze of World War II, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, and the Christian martyrs under the Roman Empire. It tries to accommodate this disparate evidence within a single two-period, expected utility model of a martyrdom contract, to which volunteers sign up in the expectation of probabilistic earthly rewards. Contract enforcement is ensured by a sufficiently strong stigma, or social sanction, placed on renegades. The main implication for counterterrorism policy is that the sanction should be softened, so as to turn prospective martyrs into apostates.

This chapter outlines the historical and historiographical inaccuracy of privileging definitions of martyrdom that center on death, and situates this argument within the current scholarly conversation. It establishes both the academic consensus that "real" martyrdom requires death and the record of living martyrs in Christian history that proves that consensus wrong: indeed, living martyrs persist as real objects of spiritual devotion and emulation across the span of Christian history, not just in late antiquity. I introduce the main players in the book (Prudentius [c. 348-413], Paulinus of Nola [353-431], and Augustine [354-430]), summarize the subsequent chapters, explicate my methodology (close readings informed by literary-historical context; a heuristic of tripartite witness; multiple means of assessing potential reception), and discuss various objections—including the existence of the category of confessors and the habits of mind and scholarship that have resulted in our failure to recognize living martyrs as martyrs, plain and simple.