Chapter 13 - Violence and Monks: From a Mystical Concept to an Intolerant Practice (Fourth to Fifth Century)

Summary

In its early days, monasticism went hand in hand with several manifestations of violence. While it is true that the semantic scope of the word ‘violence’ and the concept that it evokes need to be defined,¹ there is still a premise that we cannot afford to disregard: the literary sources contain a significant number of passages in which violence occurs in the literal sense, which will be taken here as ‘the use of physical force against an opponent’. In the accounts preserved about the first monks, this violence appears to have been used against adherents of other cults (in the context of an opposition between Christianity and paganism),² or against people from Christian movements different from the one to which the protagonist belongs and vice versa (in cases where there was an intra-Christian conflict between Nicaeans and Arians, or between Chalcedonians and miaphysites);³ it may also be exerted on objects of worship or sacred buildings of non-Christians,⁴ which, as has recently been argued, may have acted as a safety valve against a more serious aggravation of hostilities.⁵ Finally, within the more restricted framework of monastic life, violence could be employed against those who disobeyed the precepts of the master or challenged his authority and, by doing so, adopted an attitude of religious dissent.⁶