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" There is no crime for those who have Christ "Sunday

Shenoute era un monaco cristiano egiziano, vissuto all'inizio of the fifth century, famous for having founded a monastery and its struggle against paganism. One of the most important saints of the Coptic Church. Among his opponents, there was the rich Gesio:

Shene and his followers took the law into their hands, the house ransacked and destroyed the pagan idols. In response to the charge of lesteia - banditry, crime, violence against the illegal-avanzatagli magnate, Shen proclaimed that "there is no crime for those who have Christ." This statement clearly expresses a paradigm of religious extremism, a faith that the righteous zeal for God transcends considerations of law and order land.

The previous track is taken from the book by Michael Gaddis on religious violence in the Roman Empire Christian appropriately titled There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ - Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (University of California Press, 2005, ISBN 0-520-24104-5).



Gaddis began to study the phenomenon of religious violence in Late Antiquity to understand the motives of the zealous monks to attack and destroy the pagan temples, welcoming the possibility of death as a result of their actions. The search then moved to the martyrdom violent sectarian disputes among Christians, and the enormous amount of Christian religious violence is a common thread emerged, a clue:

I found in the ideologies of martyrdom and resistance continuity between the undergoing violence and violent action, which aware of the behavior of zealous not only in their violence against non-Christians but also in the sectarian conflicts between Christians, and mix them with the ideology of martyrdom ascetic zeal I began to notice common elements outlined a paradigm of religious extremism a justification for the zeal that puts into practice the anger of God against the enemies of the faith.

The author, however, does not fall into the trap of examining only the acts of extremists, which by their very nature get more prominent positions than the moderate majority, and the results of which are not reached, however, very different:

emperors, magistrates, bishops, prominent, although they speak and act with more moderate tones, often instigated and ordered an even greater amount of coercive power over the zealous, and justified their repression of dissidents through a rhetoric of discipline and hierarchical paternalistic and compassionate concern.

The book seems interesting for those who are not fond of ancient history. As Gaddis notes, religious violence, which we have long considered to belong to the past, rose on stage the twenty-first century, with preponderance, demanding our attention.

Although the causes of the violence of the IV-VI century are radically different from those that afflict the modern fundamentalists, the violence of today and those of then have a common root:

Behind all these details that we see - in the fourth as in the XXI century - are human actors who must justify their actions both towards others and towards themselves, and whose strategies of rationalization and similar comparison in a surprising way in dramatically different cultural and historical contexts.

My final reflection is that although the reasons for change to make violence (and often even change religions), the violence still remain and also the reasons that the violent harm to themselves to rationalize who commit immoral acts otherwise, it is necessary to remove the excuses for the violent acts of violence, and between those claiming to act on account of God is stronger and more dangerous.