Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History.
Peters, Edward
Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History. By David Nash
(Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv plus 269 pp. ill.
23. $75.00).
The Christian world is a big and old place whose territorial
boundaries and the ubiquity, varieties, and intensity of whose
Christianity have changed considerably over the course of centuries. Few
people today are likely to swear publicly by the hair or head of God
(spontaneously or deliberately, drunk or sober), and fewer still are
likely to call them to any sort of account for doing so. But blasphemy,
as David Nash points out in this immensely informative and intelligently
argued book, has meant and now means many more things than such
anthropomorphizing oaths and has had more targets than Christian
religious sensibility. In the very first line of the book, Nash defines
blasphemy as "the attacking, wounding, and damaging of religious
belief," implying that blasphemy, like beauty, is in the eye (and
ear) of the beholder. But he immediately acknowledges that it is better
understood as a kind of trace-element for the entire process of
modernization and secularization as understood in the West, the
"Christian World" of the title. And he lays out the irony that
that very "Christian world," with its articulation of
toleration and rights, multiculturalism and free expression, has gotten
itself into a dilemma with which it is ableis barely able to cope. His
broad approach makes Blasphemy a more useful and informative (and
generally less single-minded) book than Leonard Levy's and David
Lawton's recent studies, because he does not assume as narrow a
perspective as they. (1)
Nash opens the book with a chapter that puts the contemporary
relevance and problematic of blasphemy as outraged religious sensibility
squarely in front of the reader, from the cases of Pym Fortuyn and Theo
van Gogh in the Netherlands to the UK debates over jerry Springer: The
Opera and the riots over the Sikh drama Behzti in 2004, as well, of
course, as the Rushdie affair and Muslim outrage at the Danish cartoons
of 2005. His second and third chapters offer a chronological account of
blasphemy definitions and prosecutions from 1500 to 1800 and from 1800
to 2000. The second chapter briefly discusses biblical and other
antiquity and early medieval Christianity, but unfortunately Nash is
inexperienced and quite out of his depth with Christian (and general
European) history before 1500, and the scholarship he seems to have
relied on has not served him well. (2) But he hits his stride in the
early modern period when he has some first rate scholarly help, as he
does in the early modern period, especially from the work of Alain
Cabantous, Maureen Flynn, and Gerd Schwerhoff. (3) These chapters are
also impressive because of the range of territory covered by Nash, from
Scandinavia and the Netherlands to Australia and North America.
Nash's chronology serves him well in his discussion of the
changing sociology of blasphemers in Ch. 4, the socio-political control
of blasphemy and blasphemers in Ch. 5, and responses to blasphemy--a
study of victims and communities--in Ch. 6. Nash is astute in
considering theologians' (especially Aquinas and Vives) changing
discussion of the psychology of the blasphemer and the problem of
momentary passion and prophylactic devotional measures of guarding
against it. Chapter 7 is a fine study of the relatively new role of film
and media generally, the latter, as seen in the Rushdie and Danish
cartoon cases, immensely influential in creating an outraged global
public which can increase the pressure applied by minority groups in the
country where the offense took place. (4) These chapters are intelligent
social history and constitute a useful perspective on the process of
modernization, one that, as Schwerhoff among others has pointed out,
often conflicts with current master narratives, e.g., thoseat of Johan
Huizinga and Norbert Elias. Nash is also very good on the visual
evidence, from the in-your-face savagely polemical religio-political
cartoons of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which, with
portraits, constitute most of his illustrations) to the power of film,
from Luis Bunuel to Monty Python and Martin Scorsese and the role of the
artist as blasphemer.
Everyone who writes about blasphemy has recognized its highly
elusive and changing character. Nash is good at distinguishing blasphemy
from heresy (particularly important because in some times and places,
blasphemy, sometimes along with magic and witchcraft, was regarded and
treated as a greater offense than heresy) and anti-blasphemy laws from
simple censorship. He takes religion and religious sensibilities
seriously and wisely does not overestimate the triumph of
secularization, particularly in the case of Providentialism, when the
prospect of indiscriminate divine wrath is a significant component of
belief. But he also notes the different treatment meted out to
blasphemers of different social ranks or those whose manner or motive
pass whatever muster is currently applicable, especially when that
muster and the victim of blasphemy happened to become the state itself.
Although he points out the trope, he does not usually assume that the
European past is the same as the non-European present, i.e., that such
terms as "medieval obscurantism" are appropriate or remotely
accurate in dealing with non-western cultures, religious or other.
In short, this is the book in English to start with. It will
readily instruct, but it will also irritate. It is often awkwardly
written and very badly edited. The surname of the current pope is twice
misspelled as Reitzinger (19). Robert Darnton becomes Daunt on (68), and
Robert Rossellini becomes Rossolini (93). James Nayler often becomes
Naylor (e.g., 122). Chapel Hill is not in Nebraska (65, n.80). St.
Columbanus syntactically becomes a contemporary of Origen of Alexandria
(43). Much as they hated him, the Jesuits did not murder William of
Orange (14). German Grenzen (borders) becomes Granzen (73, n. 3), not,
as far as I know, a German word. Nash usually avoids postmodern jargon,
but there is rather too much of the "gaze" here for comfort
(e.g. 9, 143). And there is more. These criticisms are not picky - this
is a good book, the product of a lot of work and thought. The author
should have treated his considerable achievement more carefully.
ENDNOTES
(1.) Leonard W. Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred,
from Moses to Salman Rushdie (New York, 1993); David Lawton, Blasphemy
(Philadelphia, 1993). A good review article is Gauri Viswanathan,
"Blasphemy and Heresy: The Modernist Challenge," Cimperative
Studies in Society and History 37 (1995). 399-412, not cited by Nash.
(2.) Nash should have used the monumental study of Corinne
Leveleux, La parole interdite. Le blaspheme dans la France medievale
(XIIIe-XVle siecles):du peche au crime (Paris, 2001), which deals very
well extensively with earlier periods, as does the work of Edwin D.
Craun, "Inordinata locutio: Blasphemy in Pastoral Literature,
1200-1500," Traditio, 39 (1983) and Silvana Vecchio in Carla
Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio. I peccati dela lingua (Rome, 1987),
229-240. Fr. trans. 1991, neither of which is cited by Nash.
(3.) Nash does not offer much in the way of a survey of the field
of scholarship. A good survey is that in Gerd Schwerhoff, Zungen wie
Schwereter. Blasphemie in alteuropaischen Gesellschaften 1200-1650
(Constance, 2005), 7-20, with a final comment on modernity, 312-18.
(4.) On the semantic range of the Arabic terms for blasphemy see
the work of the literary scholar Ian Richard Netton, Text and Trauma: An
East-West Primer (London, 1996), 1-7.
Edward Peters
University of Pennsylvania
