MTS-03: Hauerwas on York

Discussed on October 17, 2012, with Stanley Hauerwas as part of my MTS Thesis Proposal.

Source: Tripp York, The Purple Crown (Wipf & Stock, 2020)

Discussion Prompt

Tripp York suggests that martyrdom "is the political act because it represents the ultimate imitation of Christ."[1] It is easily inferred, then, that in so far as war is "the" political act (as many modern political philosophies suggest), it represents the ultimate imitation of Cain. That the first city was "predicated on the punishing of a murderer"[2] serves to affirm a Yoderian reading of Romans 13, that the ordained nature of the authorities is good; restraining (or at least responding) to injustice "exists under the providence of God."[3] The city itself is not evil, even if it does "exist as though God did not exist."[4]

Martyrdom, from the Greek martus (a witness), defies tragedy and the ontology of violence in its giftedness by God to the martyr, to the church, and to the world. While we do not rejoice in the macabre ("the moment of death is not the moment of longing"[5]), we memorialize them as gift as well as blessed recipient.[6] Martyrs themselves became letters, words not unlike Christ, passed along in the written correspondences between churches in whose memory the martyrs "entrust the loss of their lives."[7] With Milbank, York insists that the very nature of the pilgrimage the Christian calls the life of faith is "founded on the memory of the murdered brother."

Though it would have helped, York does not explore the implications of memory in his short monograph. Instead he leaves it hidden in passing remarks. Indeed, the Fall's god-like positioning, perceptible in any imitation of the earthly city of Cain, is made possible by "the forgetting of our one true love: God." Drawing on Augustine for his Cain/Abel dichotomy, he leaves unmentioned the fertile theological debate that often accompanies such a dichotomy. Cain was a settler, an agrarian in perpetual need of land for agriculture. Certainly Cain's first settling was not in Nod, but in the land from which he draws his offering of "fruits of the soil."[8] Abel, on the other hand, represented the wandering shepherds who called home wherever their sheep led them. Though he dedicates an entire segment to Abel, York does not place his discourse on exile therein, but two segments later, with nary a mention of the junior progeny.[9]

This facet of the paradigm is crucial to build York's argument in favor of the exilic nature of Christian identity and citizenship. For instead of protecting the borders of some externally defined Home, Christians find themselves with Abel in their perpetual exile, which "is both a judgment and a calling"[10] that Christians betray if they "understand their scattering in a pejorative manner."[11] This critical distance from the seduction of political power is necessary for a "prophetic earthly citizenship"[12] that "calls the sinner out of disobedience."[13] The call of exile, now as it was in history, was often a sentence to die. But this anticipatory death is not the tragedy of victimhood, but the triumph of the apocalypse, a revealing of the "authentic world… inaugurated by the cross."

The martyr's "doxological performance" makes Christ present in the world by their death. At the same time, they witness against the reign of Cain and the earthly city that "exists as if God does not exist." Martyrdom is a gift from God to not just the individual Christian suffering persecution but also to the watching world; for martyrdom narrates the world as the world for its own benefit. However, martyrdom itself, the seal of death given as gift, is only properly understood as one "specific act within a larger vocation of witnessing."[14] The question this begs, at least etymologically, is whether the "larger vocation" properly understood as martus as well?

Questions

York mentions saints like Day, Theresa, and others not killed in their imitatio christi, but fails to extrapolate what the 'proof' was of their own fidelity to God. Is there something to be said here of intent, of actual willingness to suffer death, which possibly is hidden even from the believer themselves until the moment thereof?

What does York's martyrology/hagiography say of ecumenism, i.e. what does "saint" mean across theologically diverse denominations and traditions? Or "martyr," for that matter? Would Roman Catholics be right or wrong in suggesting that the very martyrs they created and that Anabaptists memorialize are not "martyrs" in the proper sense?

As a citizen suffering very little that could be called "persecution," and in a culture that increasingly medicalizes death, is it tenable to suggest that the Arena that produced martyrs for/by Rome has been replaced by the Clinic (or the Lynching Tree, or any place in which dying is dictated by contemporary "powers in rebellion to Christ?"[15])

Footnotes

[1] York, T. The Purple Crown, 22-23

[2] Ibid, 102

[3] Ibid, 104

[4] Ibid, 151

[5] Ibid, 20

[6] Ibid, 110

[7] Ibid, 105

[8] Genesis 4:3, NIV

[9] York, T. The Purple Crown, 114

[10] Ibid, 120

[11] Ibid, 147

[12] Ibid, 56

[13] Ibid, 48

[14] Ibid, 21. York acknowledges that martus properly understood encompasses an entire life, though the way in which he employs the word assumes a title earned almost exclusively under the heavy blade of the executioner.

[15] Ibid, 32

Discussion

Discussion Transcript

Logan: ...is how our house culture has changed so we don't get dragged to the arena. Are there other ways in which it is insisted that we not die well?

Stanley Hauerwas: I see.

Logan: I was thinking of Verhey's lecture during your ethics course, where he talked about how we've medicalized death. My grandma died of cancer because she refused treatment.

Hauerwas: Wow.

Logan: My mom's never had a problem with it — for whatever reason I always thought she would. That was what was running through my head in the early segments of Tripp's book: where is this happening now? One of the questions I don't think I included was: might death replace the emperor as the enemy we confront in this cosmic battle?

Hauerwas: Right. That's good.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: Yeah, I think that's good. The power of the modern state can be seen by the very fact that it makes martyrdom impossible — that's one way to put it.

Logan: Or maybe not impossible, but it comes in different forms. One thing that stuck with me — I asked Dr. Smith about this too, since we read a little about martyrdom there — the big question is: what about the witnesses who don't get killed by the king? He mentions Dorothy Day and a number of others at the end. Martin was what was in my mind — every soldier sent before Martin was killed, and he had every reason to think he'd be among their number, and yet when the dust settled he's still there, and he becomes a bishop. Tripp doesn't give that much ink, and it — along with the Old Testament question — was really on my mind. Do people like Abel represent a kind of martyrdom? I think I can anticipate why they might not, because he's very clear about what martyrdom does, and I don't know if it's possible prior to Christ, given York's definition.

Hauerwas: No, it is not possible prior to Christ. Christ was not a martyr.

Logan: Yeah — that was really helpful too. But then what do we make of those people who suffer death? I had this phrase, "the prophet's death," in my head — I looked it up, couldn't find it. I would've liked to ask Tripp by email, "Why didn't you at least articulate how the Old Testament is different?" He left some breadcrumbs as to why it might be, but I really would've liked to hear more about Abel. He talks about exile but never goes into the debate about Cain as settled agrarian worker who needs land he must defend to eat, and Abel as wandering nomadic shepherd dependent entirely on his flock for where he'll sleep and what he'll eat. He never seemed to go into that — unfortunate, but still a great book.

Hauerwas: Right. I'm preaching at Holy Family on All Saints.

Logan: That's not a Sunday, is it?

Hauerwas: It's not a Sunday, but we use Sunday as All Saints day. I deal with martyrdom a bit — it has to do with memory. I talk about how Pliny, in the second century, thought Christians were a burial society. And then I say Christians remember the martyrs: "A people constituted by such a memory could not help but come into conflict with Rome. Christians refused Rome's presumption that the only memory that mattered was how you were remembered by eternal Rome. There were many reasons Christians were eventually killed by Rome, not the least being that the churches challenged the Roman presumption that only Rome could determine the significance of life. The Christian challenge only intensified and confounded the Romans, who simply could not comprehend that they could not defeat the Christians by killing them. Of course Christians well understood that Rome had power over life and death, but the very fact that the Christian dead were called martyrs meant Rome lost. To be a martyr, to be a saint, meant Rome could kill Christians for being Christian, but Rome could not determine the meaning of their death. The meaning of their death, the meaning of our death, is determined in baptism. That Christians could be happily remembered by the Church was the ultimate challenge to Rome. To be so remembered means those lives are constituted by a narrative in which Christ is the center." Then I give a passage from the Wisdom of Solomon: "None of us know who we are until God tells us. That we only discover who we are when God tells us is why, as we learn from our sainted martyrs, we may be killed, but we cannot be victimized. Victims, even if they've in some sense been liberated, remain captive just to the extent they continue to think of themselves as victims. To continue to think of oneself as a victim lets the oppressor win. As Christians, we refuse to let our enemies determine who we are because we have learned to recognize ourselves first and foremost through the communion of saints. Holiness is shorthand for saying we have been saved by being made part of an extraordinary community that refuses to let the oppressor determine who we are."

Logan: Hmm.

Hauerwas: I think that's not unrelated — I do think martyrdom is the defeat of victimization, and that it drove Rome crazy that they couldn't victimize us.

Logan: Memory — yeah, Tripp didn't mention memory much. I'm finding the more reading I do, the less this is really about Augustine and the more it's about Martin. But what still trips me up with Augustine — and I don't have the energy or time to read the whole City of God, though I'll be reading some of his letters — is that he seems to fail to keep the memory of the soldier saints alive, and doesn't seem to assume they have relevance to a political theology. I'm trying to figure out what to do with that — whether there's anything behind it, or whether it's just something I have to save for later.

Hauerwas: Have you read Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints?

Logan: I don't think so.

Hauerwas: That might be worth doing — the saints and martyrs were patrons for the early Christians. They were power, because literally they were God on earth insofar as they partook of Christ. I talk about Martin in this sermon, as a matter of fact — how they'd gather at his tomb to say, "This is the city; this is where we are protected by God in this very special way." Have I given you Josh Whitfield's book?

Logan: You have — that's why I chose this one over Whitfield's. I looked at his dissertation, but I had to choose one, since I'm not able to skim books — I have to read them and get into them.

Hauerwas: Well, good, that's fine.

Logan: It was really hard to decide which to go with.

Hauerwas: I mention it because Whitfield deals more with memory. On your first question — is there something to be said of intent, of actual willingness to suffer death, which is possibly hidden even from the believer themselves until the moment of it? The martyr cannot intend to be a martyr, because their obligation is to live — you don't want the sin of your own murder to be on the one who would kill you.

Logan: Right — behind that question I was trying to figure out what marks... Tripp mentions, and it was really intriguing, the idea that martyrs are the elect because God has chosen them for martyrdom. But I kept coming back to the question of those who are fully willing but just don't die. What constitutes their faith, or their fidelity — I think fidelity was the word I used. Martin was willing; he knew he had no reason to think he'd be killed. I was trying to work out whether martyrdom is most properly understood as the death itself — its culmination — or whether it can be understood as the whole life leading up to it.

Hauerwas: That's what monasticism is the answer to. After the Constantinian settlement, when Christians were no longer martyred, the asceticism embedded in the desert became the slow death of the self. Monasticism developed at almost exactly the same time as the Constantinian settlement — that's surely a way of continuing martyrdom by Christians, that same intention toward death.

Logan: I know how Tripp would probably narrate Ignatius of Antioch, but given what you just said — what do you call what Ignatius was doing, if it wasn't suicidal? Tripp also mentions that fleeing wasn't uncommon or a poor choice. So what do you call what Ignatius was doing, if not — I think I used the word "anticipatory"?

Hauerwas: Yes. Ignatius wanted to die too readily, but it wasn't suicide — he didn't use his own hand. The death has to come externally; that's the crucial sign. The rabbis have a lot of discussion of this, by the way — there's a real dispute, for example, about Masada, because Conservative Judaism thinks Masada was suicide, since they took their own lives. I think Christians follow that same logic. Did you know the Israeli military, for many years, took new recruits to Masada and had them take their oath to the state there?

Logan: Oh, wow.

Hauerwas: Have you ever seen Martyrs Mirror?

Logan: Yeah, Harold sent me a copy — I didn't know it was that thick. Unfortunately it's not indexed either.

Hauerwas: Right. The Anabaptists, interestingly, tell the story of the faith not unlike some forms of Catholicism — through the story of the martyrs. It goes back to the New Testament.

Logan: That was one of my other questions — Tripp uses the language of the lineage, or heritage, of the martyrs, and one of his subtitles is something like "whose martyrdom, whose ecclesiology." Which begs the question: who has the right or authority to name martyrs? Some Anabaptist martyrs, the Catholic Church might not be all that excited about naming as martyrs.

Hauerwas: Absolutely.

Logan: What's the proper response to that — how do you deal ecumenically with martyrs who often name things we don't want named?

Hauerwas: Wonderful question, and there's no answer to it other than that it's a matter of ecclesial differences. One of the interesting lives in this regard is Bonhoeffer — he was very much a Lutheran, and Lutherans have some ambiguity about naming saints, but he's practically the saint of — well, Catholics have quite an elaborate procedure for naming saints, and it works more informally in other traditions. I've been among Catholics when they claim Bonhoeffer as a saint. They don't think about it very much, but officially the church wouldn't do that.

Logan: My ecclesiology is kind of — for lack of a better word — anarchic. To me, the fact that we have a lineage of martyrs that isn't always in agreement with itself speaks to a very-difficult-to-define ecclesiology.

Hauerwas: Absolutely, you're exactly right. Another figure is Romero — think about how many Protestants want to claim Romero as a martyr, and a saint. And he was.

Logan: I skipped that one — I'm waiting to read it in McClendon's book. I skimmed it but didn't read all the way through. I did see he was relatively conservative, kind of the pick to maintain the status quo, and then he changed after his friend's death.

Hauerwas: Ah, Romero — yes, he was a very conventional Catholic bishop.

Logan: Would you say more about — it's difficult, but I still want to believe there's some kind of final authority over what constitutes a martyr — whether it's that they didn't take their own life, or that they stood up for something.

Hauerwas: They had to have died because of their embodiment of Christ — you can't be a martyr if you're killed for protesting something that isn't seen as having to do with the expression of the faith. Let me think — there was a wonderful man who was murdered—

Logan: Matt Shepard?

Hauerwas: No — an African American man in Mississippi.

Logan: Recently?

Hauerwas: No, many years ago. Matt Shepard's actually a good example, though — Matt Shepard would not be a martyr. The man murdered for his civil rights work would not be a martyr either.

Logan: John Perkins' brother, or someone else?

Hauerwas: Someone else. Perkins' brother would be a more ambiguous case.

Logan: What I was also getting at — what about saints we've beatified who may not fit what you or I would expect? Ignatius of Loyola — great saint, but as a Spanish knight he probably killed people. Francis of Assisi went to war. Where are the boundaries we want to maintain, and where are they permeable? I'm asking because I'm writing this project about soldier saints and patriot pacifists, and some people won't agree with me. Or Joshua Casteel — he converted in the military while at Abu Ghraib, and he died recently. He was struggling with cancer, diagnosed a week before our conference last year — he thought it was the burn pits. So someone could make the case that he experienced conversion while in the military and was still exercising that vocation when he contracted whatever led to his cancer. There are always these mitigating factors that complicate what it means to be a saint. Though maybe we should keep to talking about martyrs specifically.

Hauerwas: Yeah, I was going to say — martyrs are a special category, different from saints. Martyrs are saints, but not all saints are martyrs.

Logan: That's a good way to put it.

Hauerwas: But I think — no one — St. Martin of Tours refused to kill. I take that as an indication of the road he was on, toward being a martyr. And I don't know anyone — it's interesting — can someone be a martyr who continued to kill?

Logan: Joan of Arc would probably be the first one I'd think of.

Hauerwas: That's a good one.

Logan: I have the Régine [Pernoud?] biography — haven't read it yet, but one person who has says she never actually swung her sword herself, though she did oversee a number of battles.

Hauerwas: She certainly did.

Logan: But she was killed.

Hauerwas: Is she officially a saint of the churches?

Logan: I think so — Roman Catholic might be the only tradition where I'm not fully sure, but I'm quite confident she's an official saint. It wasn't long after she was burned that they recanted the verdict, and shortly after that she became a saint. I'm almost positive it's official.

Hauerwas: I think that's very problematic, honestly. There's a kind of rule — all saints are local — and Joan of Arc becoming officially a saint, if she did, had a lot to do with underwriting a sense of French ownership.

Logan: I don't want to cut you off, but I had a thought on that — it was the last reading I did with Smith. We read about how the early church would take — there'd be shrines out in the middle of nowhere for martyrs killed in the wilderness—

Hauerwas: Right.

Logan: —and in order to establish a kind of, what's the word, ecclesial prestige, they'd take the relics from those shrines and bring them into a church, put them under the altar. One of the most famous examples I know is Saint Florian, patron saint of firefighters, who drowned during the same persecution a lot of these soldier saints died in — he was a soldier too. Florian's Cross is almost exactly the symbol firefighters use today. His relics were taken to Poland — I think Kraków, though I can't remember for certain — specifically so that city would be made the capital. So the relics were given a kind of false political prestige.

Hauerwas: Right.

Logan: One of the conversations I got into with Smith was: does that serve the heritage of the saint or martyr themselves, or does it really serve our own interests and desires? What happens to the holiness of not just the life, but the place it was taken to?

Hauerwas: Well, that has to do with the cult of the saints, and that this is power. There really is a sense in which God is present in those relics in a way God is not present in other places — it really is powerful. And the veneration — Protestants learned to call that idolatry, but Catholics maintain that this is what it means to understand that God was in Christ redeeming the world in terms of the concreteness of a human life. Insofar as these lives participate in Christ's life, you've drawn on the power of God's life in Christ. Have you ever seen a reliquary?

Logan: Yeah, I've been to the one at Notre Dame. It was interesting which saint they chose and the motto embodied there — Marcellus, the centurion.

Hauerwas: Oh, that's right.

Logan: Very similar to Maximilian — basically, "I refuse to [serve]," and so he's beheaded. And then they've got a World War II helmet in the chapel, and it's all "for God, country, and Notre Dame" — the same country that killed the very saint they honor at the altar.

Hauerwas: Right. No, it's very—

Logan: And then the reliquaries are off on one of the transepts — these little dots, tiny pieces.

Hauerwas: A chip of bone.

Logan: Yeah.

Hauerwas: Right. As someone who's lived around Catholics for so many years — at first I found the reliquaries bizarre, had the typical Protestant reaction of thinking it was idolatry. But the longer I lived around Catholics, the more I thought there was something to the veneration of the remains of quite extraordinary people — that they were clearly manifestations of a life with God that we need.

Logan: Mm-hmm. I'm still trying to think through how to apply this to Martin's life. And I still want to maintain — Tripp didn't mention war at all — was I right to suggest that modern political philosophies often say war is "the" political act, the most fundamental expression between states? I can't remember where I've heard that, but I hear it over and over.

Hauerwas: That's from Clausewitz — war is the continuation of politics by other means.

Logan: Right — here's my thing. I still want to keep my focus on narrative theology and Martin of Tours, but I'm still trying to figure out how to tie that concretely to just war. I may need help figuring out how this connects. I think we have two more meetings — McClendon next, and then the last one I can't remember.

Hauerwas: Okay. I don't see how they're going to connect, honestly. I just don't. Martin of Tours — there isn't anything around him in which he articulates any just war position, right?

Logan: Well, that's the thing — I think his life suggests something that was taken for granted. The lives of the soldier saints, I think, are taken for granted as not having political-theological implications, and that's really what's behind all this. Does someone like Marlantes — actually, I'm trying to think of someone more in the Christian fold — does he have something credible to say about just war? What he describes, and the way he describes it — should that affect our policy, our philosophy? I think it should. But in the absence of that being said outright, I have to find a way to narrate why it should. That's why I'm still intrigued by Augustine — it's not really about Augustine so much as what we've done with him, though I think that's based on things Augustine himself failed to see. The problem is, in a thirty- or forty-page thesis, I can't get into Priscillian and all the rest of it — so it may have to be a side note in explaining what Martin really has to say about just war. That's why I think martyrdom is one of the keys. I really want to get into what we call the life of the faithful that doesn't end in martyrdom, because I think lives like that have theological substance. Dorothy Day's life gives us something of theological substance — I don't quite know what to call it.

Hauerwas: Are you reading McClendon's Ethics?

Logan: No, just Biography as Theology.

Hauerwas: Okay — that'll help you, I think. In particular his discussion of Habermas.

Logan: All right, I'm planning to read the whole thing — I just ordered it. That'll be a question in my mind, and maybe by our last session I'll have some of this thought out more fully.

Hauerwas: I'm not sure how a book like Marlantes's—

Logan: Bad example, but there's — maybe Joshua Casteel is a better one. He wrote a book of letters, emails to and from his family.

Hauerwas: Mm-hmm.

Logan: If the lives of martyrs and saints have theological significance and should inform our thinking, where is that present in contemporary — or more ancient — forms of what we now call just war? That's what I'm looking for, I think.

Hauerwas: What if you asked: could someone, because of their deep commitment to just war, become a martyr? There's a figure who actually existed — Franz Jägerstätter.

Logan: Yeah, right.

Hauerwas: He'd be a figure you could think through some of this with — you could use Gordon Zahn's book on Jägerstätter.

Logan: Zahn, Gordon Zahn — okay. Him being a martyr through deep commitment—

Hauerwas: Because he was a just warrior.

Logan: Was he?

Hauerwas: Uh-huh — he wasn't a pacifist.

Logan: Okay. I think that's all I've got. Next time is McClendon.

Hauerwas: You'll really like him.

Logan: I'm looking forward to it — that and Sulpicius Severus in the same week are going to be a hoot and a holler for me.

Hauerwas: Uh-huh.

Logan: Looking forward to it. Okay.