Aristotle Meets Augustine in Fourteenth-Century Liège: Religious Violence in the Chronicon of Jean Hocsem

Abstract

As William Cavanaugh has remarked, the scholarly notion of religion “should often be surrounded by scare quotes. Its flexibility and occasional nebulousness make evaluating its role in conceiving of, effecting, and justifying violence even more difficult. At the same time, it sticks around and remains a vital category of contemporary analysis. What if getting behind the Wars of Religion—the period to which Cavanaugh traces the emergence of his “myth of religious violence”—could plant the seeds for a new paradigm in understanding the relationship between religion and violence? In this article, I analyze the Chronicon of Jean Hocsem, a fourteenth-century canon from Liège. Untranslated into English and rarely written about, Hocsem’s text offers an unexpectedly political perspective on this question. Combining insights from Augustine’s City of God as well as Aristotle’s Politics and basing his ideas on his own experience of nearly constant conflict, Hocsem develops the idea that class antagonisms and human frailty make violence—especially political violence—inevitable. He takes this approach within a polity ruled by a prince-bishop, though one he would not have thought of as “religious”. Hocsem’s solutions are thus avowedly political. His pessimism about such questions leads to an emphasis on mitigating violence through the institution of proper socio-political structures. This reading of Hocsem and his politicizing of the question of violence opens new possibilities for scholars, further calling into question any easy relationship between the modern categories of “religion” and violence.

1. Introduction

If scholars of religion can agree on one point, it is that “religion” is still a contested, even nebulous, term. It remains a concept that, as William Cavanaugh has put it, “should often be surrounded by scare quotes”.1 To make sense of “religion and violence” in any essential way is always to reduce one or the other. Escaping this trap requires some specific hermeneutic—sociological, evolutionary, genealogical, or otherwise.2 Moreover, in every case, such heuristics necessitate adopting a contemporary lens in making historical sense of the relationship between religion and violence.

In what follows, I test William Cavanaugh’s “myth of religious violence”. Put broadly, Cavanaugh contends that the modern scholarly and popular notion that religion is a unique or special source for violent behavior is incorrect.3 He traces this “myth” back to historiography on the European Wars of Religion, which are supposed to have been the first European outbreaks of truly “religious” violence on a grand scale. In carefully dissecting and exposing this historiographic genealogy, Cavanaugh critiques the efficacy of the scholarly notion of “religion” and suggests that scholars examine pre- or non-modern interactions between human spirituality and violence to develop a more holistic understanding.

With this in mind, rather than entering a discursive quagmire and investigating what kinds of violence “religion” does and does not authorize in an absolute sense, this article concerns a medieval jurist named Jean Hocsem, who is religious in modern eyes and utterly secular (that is to say, not a monastic) in those of his own time. In this way, I hope to get behind or undercut some of the assumptions that often come with evaluating the relationship between religion and violence. In this way, I show how Hocsem’s life and work reveal the soundness of Cavanaugh’s thesis and offer us a glimpse of Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions of political philosophy and theology that may advance a more holistic understanding of the relationship between religion and violence.

A canon of St. Lambert’s Cathedral in fourteenth century Liège, Jean Hocsem fell on the “secular,” which is to say non-monastic or mendicant, side of clerical life.4 He occupied positions of political importance and even includes some of his letters to popes, bishops, and the king of France in his Chronicon,5 a chronicle of Liégeois history, especially during his own lifetime. Put otherwise, he was both a secular priest and a major political player and observer. Through this lifetime of service, he developed a theory of political change and violence rooted in a pragmatical Augustinianism.6 For Hocsem—himself a man of faith—violence was inevitable, a product of fallen humanity. Authorities, “religious” and otherwise, exist to contain, funnel, and structurally inhibit the development of that violence. When these fail, faithful people can even rise up—indeed ineluctably will rise up—against the authorities, even religious ones with secular mandates, like the bishop of Liège. In other words, by examining his Chronicon, modern scholars have an opportunity to understand how a medieval cleric theorized the role of violence within his own tradition, including against ecclesiastical potentates.

2. Canonical Life and Times

The central point in understanding Hocsem’s political theory is the city to which he devoted much of his adult life—Liège. The city was founded on a myth of religious violence all its own. In 1612, for instance, John of Chapeaville wrote of the martyrdom of St. Lambert, who “spilled his blood for truth and justice”.7 Lambert was a bishop of Maastricht in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, who died as a result of a disagreement with political authorities as the Merovingian dynasty gave way to its Carolingian successor. Once the next bishop transferred Lambert’s relics to Liège, his name became nearly synonymous with the city, such that its cathedral—the one to which Hocsem was attached—would bear his name. Lambert’s uncle and predecessor in Maastricht, Theodard, similarly enjoyed the title of martyr, and each was commemorated annually for their faithful sacrifice.8 In later centuries, the people of the city also venerated Lambert’s successor, Hubert, as a lawgiver.9 Political and ecclesiastical matters were deeply intertwined in Liège, where, by Hocsem’s day, the prime worldly authority was also the bishop of the diocese and thus the successor of Hubert and the martyrs. The city predicated its very identity on political violence, specifically that which arose from the contending of ecclesiastical and lay forces. In itself, this laid the groundwork for future protest against the prince-bishops.

Hocsem’s Chronicon bears witness to nigh constant conflict among the bishop, the clergy, the notables of the city, other lords, and urban residents between 1247–1348. After studying law in Orleans from 1305–1308,10 Hocsem shows up at a meeting between the bishop and the duke of Brabant in 1315.11 Not long after, he would have to flee the city due to a conflict breaking out between the city’s notables and Adolphe de la Marck, the prince-bishop.12 Despite their return, Hocsem and the chapter would end up exiled from Liège again in 1325 when the city notables took umbrage at Bishop de la Marck.13 During this exile, Hocsem would visit Avignon and ingratiate himself with the papal court, earning him further trust and putting him in a position to draft a variety of letters to foreign dignitaries on behalf of the prince-bishop.14 Upon his return in 1330, Hocsem participated in further negotiations with the duke of Brabant, most likely in his capacity as a lawyer.15 In 1346, near the end of Hocsem’s life, Adolphe’s nephew and successor, Englebert, demanded the chapter’s removal from the city once again.16 Hocsem refused, angered by the two times he had already been forced to flee and, condemning the bishop and defending the chapter, lived just long enough to witness the arrival of the Black Death in 1348.17

Taken as a whole, Hocsem’s life traces the lineaments of existence in late medieval Liège. Conflict was a near constant and violence came with it, as Hocsem himself testifies in reporting the burning of Miremort, the killing of 120 people, and his own experience as a survivor.18 As we shall see below, Hocsem’s views on violence are deeply informed by the consistency of such displays of human cruelty. To his mind, cities and other polities were inevitably loci for violence. Practically, he taught law at the chapter school, advised the bishop, and wrote letters to various secular and ecclesiastical lords. In broader terms, however, he sought to imagine how the inevitability of such violence might be channeled or reduced. How, in other words, might others not have to face the same level of horror that he did?

3. Aristotle, Augustine, Liège

Among the first events Hocsem narrates are the violent outbursts caused by class upheaval in the mid thirteenth century. Chapter III of Book I, for instance, carries the subtitle: De variis dissentionibus et tumultibus qui initio episcopatus Henrici in civitate Leodiensi acciderunt (On the various dissensions and tumults that befell the city of Liège and began during the episcopate of Henry).19 At the center of these disturbances are the conflicting demands of the groups that make up the city. Hocsem calls them by slightly different names throughout his account of this turmoil; in broad terms, however, they match the three estates of medieval political theory.20 He develops these larger categories along specific lines, mentioning the canonicos (canons)21 as their own group (indeed the one to which he belonged). He also specifies that the populares (common people),22 insignes (aristocrats),23 dives (rich),24 burgenses (burghers),25 and scabini (aldermen)26 played distinct roles in the conflict, even if some overlap may exist between the classifications. There was, according to Hocsem, the hope that the rich and poor alike could share the city (in unam simul dives et pauper possint convivere civitatem).27 This wish, itself revealing of the tensions always apparent in Liège, inheres in one of the oldest slogans associated with urban protest there: Que le pauvre puisse demeurer en paix delez le riche (that the poor may dwell in peace alongside the rich).28 Even from the earliest part of this chronicle, Hocsem shows a clear emphasis on the genere et causis (kind and causes)29 of conflict in the principality. In every case, he comes back to the diverse and complicated class composition of the city—it seems, to his mind, to portend and even require constant adjudication of differences.

He reveals the inevitability of such conflict just as he apologizes to the reader for turning from history to political theory. Telling his readers to skip this section if they prefer the narration of historical events, Hocsem expresses his interest in understanding the causae of the conflict inter insignes et populum (between the aristocrats and the people).30 To accomplish this, he turns to Aristotle and the model polities adumbrated in his Politics. Accepting that government can be by the few, the many, or by one and may be aimed at the good of all or simply the ruler(s), Hocsem argues that democratia (democracy)31 is better than oligarcia (oligarchy)32 because, while the insignes plot against the populares and themselves, the people only plot against those above them in the social order (et sic orta ceditione frequenter, si vincant, ad tempus divicie principantur, donec nova ceditione vincantur).33 In a word, democracy means less violence.

Here, Hocsem reveals his assumptions about conflict. By its very nature, the city is doomed to struggle between its constituent groups. In this way, he betrays a species of Augustinian pessimism about worldly governance, a fact that should not be surprising given that he quotes Augustine’s City of God in the Chronicon.34 At the beginning of Book II, for example, he cites Aristotle,35 Boethius,36 and Ovid37 to argue for the enduring reign of fortune over the just and the unjust. In his eyes, equanimity in the face of consistent misfortune and strife is the fruit of virtue, the mark of a saintly existence. He adds Augustine to this chorus, citing liberally from De Civitate Dei’s Book V.38 In this passage, Augustine (and by extension Hocsem) argues that a Christian ruler is not called happy because of a long reign, an easy succession, or wealth but because of his hope and faith. Hocsem uses this aside to comment that, while he must continue to narrate deeds related to war, victory in conflict is an effect of fortune, not a question of true divine happiness (Et quia gesta et fortia facta principum bellica a fortuna plerumque procedunt, conscripta consideratione predicta non debent quoad vixerint publicari, juxta illud).39 Augustine, in other words, offers the canon an authority through whom to comment on the inevitability of human conflict and violence, even as he holds out hope for Christian magnanimity in times of trial.

For Hocsem, then, the fallibility of human beings as glimpsed through Augustine combines with their necessarily opposed class interests (an insight he gleans from Aristotle) to make the city a microcosmic vale of tears. Violence is baked into the very idea of inhabiting a common space; it is unavoidable, a product of original sin and the limits of human sociality. This is the ultimate causa of the internecine violence he bore witness to throughout his active, politically savvy life.

4. Religio Leodiensis

As noted above, the term “religious violence” would not have had meaning for Hocsem. He was one of the canonicos, not a professed monk and certainly not “religious” in a way that could be neatly separated from his role as a legal theorist, a diplomat, and a defender of the privileges of his particular social group. His living in Liège, however, allows us to glimpse a particular role (or non-role) for “religion” in his theory of violence. Liège was a city ruled by an ecclesiastical official who exerted both spiritual and secular authority over his subjects. Indeed, the beginning of his chronicle insistently mentions both the threat and reality of interdiction,40 a powerful and coercive weapon available to the prince-bishop, one unavailable to his lay-aristocratic equivalents. Hocsem’s own cathedral chapter, which sided with the guilds against the bishop in 1302–1303,41 was an avowedly Christian organization, one composed of priests who cared both for souls and for their own material privileges.42 In this context, all conflict was religious insofar as it almost always involved institutionally religious actors. And this is not even to mention that even those from outside the First Estate would have belonged to religious confraternities and parishes and found themselves opposing believers from within their own tradition. Each of these groups justified the soundness of their position in religious terms. All violence in medieval Liège was thus “religious” in some sense or another.

This ambivalent view of “religious violence” is nowhere clearer than in Hocsem’s introduction to the episcopate of Adolphe de la Marck, with whom he worked closely. Citing Augustine once more (this time in his praise of Josephus—again from the City of God), Hocsem tells the reader that he has esteem for the ancients and their mode of historical writing, drawing an implicit comparison between Bishop Adolphe and leaders of old. He underscores the point by declaring in re militari nullus compar ponteficum (in military matters, no one compared to the pontiff).43 According to Hocsem, Adolphe is like an ancient hero; he did not, as was customary in his own time, rely on others to do his fighting but instead faced down his enemies with bravery and mettle: non enim per duces belli suffectos, ut assolet, belligerare consuevit, sed quociens dimicandi necessitas incumbebat nunquam retrospiciens consertis manibus reportavit semper ab hoste triumphum (For he did not tend to wage war through military leaders, as is customary, but as often as the need to fight arose, he never looked back with his hands folded but always won back victory from the enemy).44 Here, the bishop—undeniably a religious leader according to any modern sensibility—is memorialized in the vein of a Caesar or an Alexander. His reign is a list of gesta (deeds),45 the standard way of summarizing the content of a chronicle in the Middle Ages—whether the subject was clerical or lay. His title may be episcopus (bishop) but what defines him is his role in the historical tapestry (ut latiorem ad texendum telam historie ordiamur).46

In this sense, Hocsem’s perspective on violence’s religious quality parallels his view of its regularity. Just as strife comes for rulers whether Christian or pagan, just or unjust, so violence results from all ideological configurations, whether “religious” in a modern scholarly sense or not. The canons of the city were not religious in their own terms, but they are by any definition that accords with contemporary usage. The guilds of the city, with whom the canons occasionally sided against the bishop, had patron saints but saw no conflict in revolting against their heavenly and earthly prince. It should not surprise us, then, that what mostly concerns Hocsem throughout the Chronicon are discord (discordia)47 and concord (concordia)48 in the prince-bishopric of Liège and their relationship to the gesta of particular leaders and other figures of repute. Where violence is a given, and where its character is natural rather than cultivated by particular forms of spiritual ideology, the question is how to contain and how to theorize and control it, above all else.

5. Hocsem and the Myth of Religious Violence

Hocsem’s views on internecine strife and the inevitability of violence accord with William Cavanaugh’s famous thesis on the myth of religious violence (Cavanaugh 2009). Predating the Wars of Religion, Hocsem seeks to determine the nature and causes of violence in specific situations understood with no reference to “religion” as scholars now use the term. He simply stands outside of the norms of that discourse. By taking this approach, Hocsem’s focus is on political questions, because, where violence is inevitable, the only thing to be done is to examine strategies for mitigation. For this reason, he follows Aristotle in advocating a mixed, “democratic” form of government for cities like Liège. In this way, Hocsem also proves himself a staunch Augustinian, providing a gloss on the fundamental position proffered by Augustine that “Christians ought to hate all war and desire peace but resign themselves to the fact that real peace cannot be achieved on earth”.49 He anticipates something like contemporary realism (or even liberalism) and asks scholars to better investigate how political theory can be a vital conversation partner in the questions that surround religion and violence. He seems to ask: which structures impede violence? Which structures encourage it? By doing so, he casts light on a more holistic approach of the sort preferred by Cavanaugh. Peace, he suggests, is always inter (between),50 a respite to be cultivated, a product of hope, rather than a consistent state to be expected, a baseline that simply exists when not impinged upon by especially violent forms of religion.