Violent times, the horror of the unspeakable and the temporality of religious experience
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Violent times, the horror of the unspeakable and the temporality of religious experience Felix Ó Murchadha1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Violence is essential to religion, while religion holds the promise of transcending violence. The designation religious refers not to a type of violence, but to a specific issue of violence, namely the claim to higher (theodical) justification. This religious aspect is not confined to religion; it is also evident in the secular domain. A critique of religious violence needs to show the gap between violence and its justifications, experienced affectively in horror. This horror in response to the unspeakable is structurally akin to mystical experience, the temporal structure of which indicates the failure of the theodical justification for violence. Keywords Violence · Religion · Walter Benjamin · Theodicy · Leibniz · Mysticism A question which resonates in our time is whether religious violence is inherent to religion or an aberration of religion. The question, however well meaning, is misleading. The examples of how religion and violence intertwine are too many and varied to be ignored, but equally within religion itself a powerful, perhaps even decisive unravelling of violence is evident. The two aspects are deeply related: just as in nature the antidote grows near the poison, so in human society the negation is often entwined in the artefact itself. In the case of religious violence, we can look to religion, specifically to its mystical sense to find a most radical critique of violence and the justifications which accompany it. In attempting to live and engage with a world of religious violence we need to concern ourselves with the complex intertwining of religion and violence as it is manifest affectively and in terms of the manner in which its defenders seek to justify it. It is a mistake to limit religious violence to violence “justified” on explicitly religious grounds, such as attacks on abortion clinics, organized “jihadist” terrorist attacks, or gender violence. Not only can each of these types of violence be given * Felix Ó Murchadha [email protected] 1
School of History and Philosophy, National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway H91 TK33, Ireland
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non-religious “justifications,” but it is also not clear that the religious aspect of violence can be limited to that which trumpets itself explicitly as “religious.” There is, however, a specifically religious aspect of violence which is its theodical mode of justification. This is not to say that everything we might categorize as religious violence is understandable in this way. Much of what happens as religious violence such as the Inquisitions, structural violence particularly against women and homosexuals, abuse of children can be understood in Benjamin’s terms as “law preserving” violence; it is violence to support the institutional religion.1 While such violence has a certain theodical justification, in this article my concern is w
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