Thoughts arising from Sophie Oliver, ‘Sacred and (Sub)humanPain: The Body as Witness in Early Modern Hagiography and ContemporaryLiterature of Atrocity’, in Nancy Billias, ed., Promoting and Producing Evil (Editions Rodopi, 2010), pp. 119-137. An earlier version of this paper is available online here. In the following I draw on both versions. 

Oliver contrasts the suffering of Christian martyrs with that of victims of the Rwanda genocide. She takes as her starting point Gentille’s assertion that she is ‘a body that’s decomposing, an ugly thing I don’t want you to see’, in Gil Courtemanche’s novel Un
dimanche à la piscine à Kigali (2000), translated into English as A
Sunday by the Pool in Kigali (2003), p. 257. Oliver starts from the
observation that ‘while Gentille’s story as she tells it attests to the loss of her human subjectivity, to her sub-humanity, stories of Christian sufferers bear witness to a sacred humanity attained through suffering, in particular corporeal suffering’.

   She then makes the point that the outcome of suffering – the sacramentality or dehumanizing of the disfigured body – depends largely on how it is perceived by others. She cites Primo Levi’s
Se questo è un uomo (1947), translated in 1957 as If this is a Man,
as evidence of how the eyes of others have ‘a crucial and active role to play in providing psychological and emotional restitution for victims of atrocity’. Without the audience, without ‘the pagan spectators who convert to Christianity’ and ‘the medieval layperson who reveres relics and images of exotic martyred flesh’ – without these, ‘the saint would quite simply not be a saint’:

The apparently passive observer is always also an actor, performing – consciously or unconsciously – a specific symbolic function within the logic of the spectacle of violence and oppression enacted by the perpetrator.

Kyriakidou summarizes research suggesting that dehumanization of the victim is only one of a range of responses:

the spectator’s engagement with the distant other can vary from empathetic identification or compassion (Höijer, 2004) to the reproduction of cultural stereotypes (Philo, 2002; Philo and Berry, 2004) to hostility and de-humanisation (Butler, 2004; 2009). (Maria Kyriakidou, Watching the Pain of Others: Audience Discourses of Distant Suffering in Greece, unpublished thesis, p. 59.)

Oliver effectively conflates these different responses, asserting that ‘Abject embodied sufferers…almost always fall into the perceived character of (subhuman) other in the minds of even the most humanitarian long-distance spectators of atrocity’. Kyriakidou cites Cohen (States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, 2001, p. 194) on ‘a general sociology of “denial and bystanding”, the essence of which is the “the active looking away, a sense of a situation so utterly hopeless and incomprehensible that we cannot
bear to think about it”’, which Oliver echoes in her characterization of the body as ‘a symbol of the inhumanity of the act of cruelty perpetrated against it’, leading to ‘The desire to look away, the wish never to have seen’.

Oliver emphasizes the semantic origins of the word ‘martyr’, noting its original sense of ‘witness’, and makes the point that ‘The Christian narrative of sacred (non) humanity, like the universalising gaze of the western, humanitarian spectator of suffering, fails, precisely, to witness, and thus deprives suffering subjects of their individual, specific experiences of pain, and the knowledge that these imply’.  She wraps up her argument with the observation that ‘representations of atrocity…run the risk of symbolically repeating the dehumanising violence enacted upon the body of the victim’, and emphasizes the need for recognition of this risk; ‘an ethical reception of embodied witnessing implies…in the first instance, a self-conscious acknowledgement of the potential for dehumanisation in our own perception’, so that, instead of – consciously or unconsciously – denying the humanity of the victim, the witnesses acknowledge ‘the particularity of real experiences of suffering’ and so recognize, in its ‘terrifying specificity’, the ‘universal’ humanity of the victim of atrocity.

Oliver’s paper takes on a particular resonance in the context of the current furor over Facebook’s policy on videos of beheadings. Jenny McCartney, writing for the Telegraph, makes the telling point that 

The victim in a beheading video, of course, has not given their consent either to their own murder or the filming and circulation of it, a dynamic of helplessness that applies equally to child pornography. Yet we do not circulate child pornography on the understanding that decent people will need to watch it and think “isn’t that dreadful?” (‘Facebook beheading: Some videos should never be watched‘, Telegraph, November 03, 2013.)

The issue of consent probably forms a large part of the public response. Political suicides, such as that of Thich Quang Duc,  who invited the press to his own public immolation, are not considered taboo in the same way, and the video of  Thich Quang Duc’s death features prominently on his Facebook page.

   The outcry in the present case, however, was enough to force Facebook to rethink its policy, though the portrayal of suffering and mutilated victims in the media continues to be a thorny issue. Oliver’s comparison of such portrayal with the representation of the sufferings of martyred saints throws into relief some important points, but it is – as she herself recognizes – an imperfect analogy. The martyr is a witness in the sense of bearing testimony to her faith
(rather than, as Oliver seems to understand it, as a testimony to her suffering), whereas the victims of atrocity are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and not setting out to bear testimony to anything. Thich Quang Duc’s act of self-martyrdom remains very much what martyrdom always has been. Even in the modern world, the martyr is exalted by suffering.

The debate, then, would appear to centre on three types of depiction – the voluntary suffering of the martyr, the involuntary suffering of the victim of atrocity, and the staging of involuntary suffering as spectacle. There are further distinctions to be made based on who actually inflicts the suffering; Quang Duc lit the match to burn him to death himself, the anonymous Mexican woman in the Facebook video was murdered by a criminal, and other victims may be the result of the handiwork of governments (including one’s own), dissidents, accidents and so forth.

Like the stagings of martyrdom, videos of beheadings have been orchestrated as media events, whereas cameras which capture scenes of violence and cruelty simply happen to be there. Unlike the martyr, however, the unwilling victim of cruelty is a cipher, with no choice and no voice. But there is more to it than that. The victim whose suffering is incidentally recorded can be given a voice, of sorts, by making that suffering public, by letting the world know. By contrast, the victim whose suffering is orchestrated as a media event is being mocked for her helplessness; her lack of choice and of voice is part of her humiliation.

Jenny McCartney is writing for the Telegraph, which – like most of the major media – publishes videos of people being stoned to death, being publicly hanged, or receiving other gory punishments. What is the rationale for broadcasting this kind of material if not that ‘decent
people will need to watch it and think “isn’t that dreadful?”’ – the very rationale that McCartney condemns? McCartney begins her article with the words, ‘The question of our time is not “what am I allowed to see?” but “what do I have the right to see?”’ – but what useful purpose would be served by removing such material from the eyes of the world? Ultimately, as Oliver points out, ‘the pagan torturer’s power…is undermined’, partly by the martyr’s heroic resistance, but also by the very act of making the demonstration of power into a spectacle. The public enactment of corporal punishment during the early modern period is a closer parallel to videos of public stonings than the burning or dismembering of martyrs, and the lesson we can learn from the past here would seem to be that such spectacles carry the seeds of their own destruction; the stocks, the whipping post and the gallows are no longer features of our urban landscapes. As Foucault observes, the horror of the spectacle of such punishments was not only ‘apt to transform the shame that was inflicted on the sufferer into pity or glory’, but also ‘often recast the executioner’s legalized violence as an atrocity’ (Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, 1975, p. 15; my translation).

The recent flare-up over Facebook’s policies shows clearly where the line between acceptable and unacceptable portrayals of cruelty is drawn in today’s (western) world. There is a need to give those who suffer a kind of voice, the chance to cry out and perhaps be heard by others who will respond with horror, with outrage, with determination to stamp out the root causes of such suffering. There is even some justification for cameras recording public executions, which would have taken place whether or not the camera was present. But viewing atrocities orchestrated for the camera is, as Oliver says, ‘symbolically repeating the dehumanising violence enacted upon the body of the victim’; the viewer is almost inevitably drawn into perpetuating the intent of the perpetrators, particularly when – as in the case of the Facebook video – the violence takes the form of coldblooded murder by criminals.

An atavistic response to cruelty lies at the animal roots of the human psyche, but it is not the only response. Acknowledging that, at some level, the spectacle of cruelty satisfies an instinctual capacity for cruelty that lies within everyone is, as Oliver says, a first step towards an ethical response.

UPDATE: June 2020; The Telegraph is behind a pay wall these days, but it appears that the videos of stoning and hanging have been removed. The video of  Thich Quang Duc‘s immolation is still on Facebook

Far from originating in the Jamaican ska scene of the 1960s, rude boys (and girls) were flourishing in the seventeenth century, gaining particular note for their attacks on Quakers, to the extent that George Foxe recommended ‘that some Friends be appointed at every Meeting to keep the Doors, to keep down rude Boys and unruly Spirits; that so the Meetings may be kept Civil and Quiet’ (George Foxe, A Collection of many Select and Christian Epistles, London, 1698, volume 2, part 1, p. 276).

This is not just a chance one-off coupling of the two words; rude boys ‘were a recognizable group’ (John Miller, ‘”A Suffering People”: English Quakers and Their Neighbours c.1650-c.1700’, Past & Present, 188, 2005, pp. 71-103; p. 98. Miller’s paper, which also gives references for ‘rude girls’, and rude people generally, can be downloaded here), and the expression occurs in more than two dozen early modern texts.

Miller focuses on the use of this expression in Quaker contexts; ‘rude boys’, he says,

maltreated a small group of Quakers, most of them
women. They pelted them with missiles, beat them, dragged
them through the mire and forced dirt into their mouths. One
old woman nearly died.These youths showed a taste for
sadistic violence… (Miller, p. 97.)

Apparently, the rude boys were encouraged to perform these acts of violence by the constables and even by the clergy. At Hull in 1661–2 the governor ordered that some Quakers who had been arrested should be handed over to the “rude boys”‘, and ‘In Truro in 1670 a
constable “set on the rude boys” to pelt an old woman with
stones and dirt’ (Miller, 98; Miller’s source for these snippets is
Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers 2 volumes, London, 1753).

Miller notes that there were also sympathizers, particularly towards the end of the century, who helped to pick up the pieces and even sheltered Quakers against attacks of this kind. He also explores the fascinating line between the Quaker assertion that suffering was ‘easy, sweet and pleasant unto their souls’ (p. 76, citing the  Great Book of Sufferings, Friends’ House Library, London, 1650-1790, 6/2, p. 436) and the active seeking out of suffering. The records of the Meeting for Sufferings, a weekly meeting held by Quakers in London from 1676 on,

depicted Friends as having no option but to act as they did. The light within them, Christ Himself, commanded them to meet at specific times and places, to ignore interruptions and to continue the meeting until the spirit told them that it was time to bring it to an end. By contrast, those who attacked them and disrupted their meetings did so out of choice — and out of the wickedness to which the ‘people of the world’ were all too inclined. (P. 74.)

As Miller shows, the behaviour which the early Quakers felt constrained by their God to engage in included disrupting church services, denouncing the ministers as ‘false teachers’ and the congregations as living ‘in envy and malice’, reproving people in the street for profaneness, and going naked (p. 75).

In addition to Miller’s piece, there’s a fairly good account of early Quakers here.

Click here for a detailed programme of events. Please don’t contact me in connection with this event, since I am neither organizing it nor taking part in it! I am simply passing on the information. If anyone does attend it and would like to pass on some feedback to me, that would be very welcome!

UPDATE: Although I was unable to attend the conference, I was delighted to be invited to be invited to contribute to the publication that grew out of it.

I’d like in this post to ruminate a bit on some points raised in a couple of papers on early modern thinking on the nature of evil by Samuel Newlands.

The papers are:

Leibniz on Privations, Limitations, and the Metaphysics of Evil (henceforth ‘Leibnitz’)

Evils, Privations, and the Early Moderns (henceforth ‘Evils’)

A full list of Newlands’ papers can be found here.

Although I cite both papers, there is quite a lot of content that is common to both of them (the second is perhaps an early draft of the first). I won’t bother with page references, since quotes from these papers can be located by a text search in the relevant document. For more detailed discussion of the seventeenth-century reception of Stoic and Epicurean ideas, see Pain, Pleasure and Perversity, chapter 1, section 1.

 NEWLANDS APPROACHES the question of evil via the Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages and the development of philosophical thought on the subject as represented by (mainly) Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibnitz, and takes as his starting point the idea that ‘evil was a privation of goodness’. This, which he calls ‘traditional privation theory’, is predicated on the premise that ‘evils are absences or lacks of appropriate perfections, perfections that things ought to have’ (‘Evils’):

In Scholastic Aristotelianism, the nature of a thing was given by its intrinsic telos: the end towards which a thing tended determined the perfections or excellences it ought to have. A subject was evil, therefore, insofar as it lacked perfections that, by its telic nature, it ought to have. Among other things, this meant that the lack of sight would be an evil for a goat but not an evil for a rock. (‘Leibnitz’)

Perfections, by their nature, are good, so the Scholastic position, largely laid down by Aquinas, is that evil is the absence of good. However, it is not simply that. Aquinas took exception to the Neoplatonic idea that ‘evils are just a lack of being, goodness, perfection, and reality’, which Newlands calls the ‘evil as negation’ theory. By this theory, Aquinas argues, ‘a man would be evil who had not the swiftness of the roe, or the strength of a lion’ (‘Leibnitz’). Therefore, there is an important distinction between the idea of evil as an absence of good in a negative sense and in a privative sense.

 Nevertheless, both the negative and the privative views of evil share in common the idea that evil does not exist in itself, but only as the absence of its opposite. At this point, I would like to stand back a moment from what Newlands is saying and introduce another, completely contradictory point of view, the Epicurean postulation of pleasure as merely the absence of pain. To understand just how categorically opposed the two positions are we need to recognize that, from an Epicurean point of view, pleasure is essentially equatable with good, and pain with evil. Therefore, the assertion that pleasure is the absence of pain is tantamount to an assertion that good is the absence of evil.

From a Christian point of view, the Epicurean position is theologically very suspect. If God made everything, and everything that God made was good (Genesis 1:31), then evil could not be a ‘thing’; it could only be a lack, an absence. The Epicurean notion that good is the absence of evil is a direct reversal of this notion, and it follows from such reasoning that evil must exist as an objective entity. The idea that evil existed in its own right was ‘traditionally associated with Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism’, and could not be consistently combined with two other central Scholastic doctrines. First, goodness and being are convertible, which meant that to the degree to which a thing or any of its properties are real or have being (esse), to that degree the thing or its properties are also good – and vice versa. Second, God is the primary source of all and only goodness, which, by the convertibility of goodness and being, entails that God is also the primary source of all and only reality or being. (‘Leibnitz’)

By denying that evil had an independent, objective existence, God could be exonerated from being the cause of evil. Evil was not part of God’s creation, but came about only through ‘the privative failure to act as one ought’, or, as Descartes has it, ‘error is not a pure negation, but rather a privation or lack of some knowledge which should be in me’ (‘Evils’).

Descartes’ reiteration of the theory of evil as privation suggests its survival beyond medieval times. However, as Newlands shows, it is under threat from ‘The growing belief in the triumph of 17^th century mechanism, according to which the motion and impact of bodies sufficed to explain all physical events’ (‘Evils’). While accepting privation in the abstract domains of mental and moral worlds, Descartes challenged it in the physical world; a clock that failed to keep proper time, or a person who suffered from a sickness was not merely the result of a lack, but could be ascribed to a physical cause (‘Evils’).

 As the seventeenth century got under way, the privation theory of evil came under attack from both philosophers and theologians (‘Evils’). Newlands devotes considerable attention to Malebranche, saying:

Malebranche focuses on one of the toughest cases for privation theory: pain. Malebranche argues that the experience of pain is not just the deprivation of an appropriate good such as pleasure. Rather, ‘pain is a real and true evil…thus not every evil is an evil just because it deprives us of good,’ adding later that pain ‘is always a real evil to those who suffer it, as long as they suffer it.’ Malebranche implies that at least some physical evils like pain and suffering are not merely absences of an appropriate good. The evil of pain is sometimes quite positive and real, suggesting that the evil of pains has a positive nature that is opposed to the good, pace privation theory. According to Malebranche, some pains are intrinsically evil.

Newlands does not bring Epicurus into the picture, but the association is clear and significant; ‘Malebranche[’s] verdict on the intrinsic evil of some pains is now the dominant and mostly unquestioned view in most contemporary discussions of evil’. The Epicurean approach has, in effect, largely ousted the Scholastic view.

Stoicism (which also lies outside the scope of Newlands’ paper) is more easily reconcilable with the privation theory of evil. Pain, as Newlands has pointed out, is one of the biggest problems for the privation theory, and the Epicurean idea that pain is intrinsically evil undermines it from several points of view. The Stoic approach, which denies that pain and suffering are in themselves evil, or that pleasure is in itself good, fits more closely with the perspective of the Scholastics. Stoic philosophers themselves were divided over the issue of how to respond to pain and pleasure, with some asserting that the wise man will avoid the one and embrace the other insofar as this is not incompatible with the practice of virtue, and others pursuing the aim of inuring the self to both pain and pleasure, and attempting to rise above them. The first approach is suitable for the average Christian, while the second one is the posture of the ascetic saint and the martyr. In Pain, Pleasure and Perversity, I trace the steady tendency towards the rejection of Stoic principles over the course of the seventeenth century, and the trend towards seeing pain as an evil to be avoided, laying down the foundations of the taboo on suffering that largely prevails in modern Western society. Newlands takes a different path, through the Scholastics and the reception of their ideas by the philosophers of the seventeenth century, but comes to a very similar conclusion.