On the Cannibals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, looking back to a Renaissance philosopher to try and make sense of the present. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, looking back to a Renaissance philosopher to try and make sense of the present.

I was in my 8th grade year when Hamas took control of Gaza, and throughout my childhood as much as my own country was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq in what our government called the “War on Terror,” I knew of Israel and Palestine as a set of nations that had been in some state of war since the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. To hear then last week that Hamas had attacked Israel, starting a new war at the end of the Jewish high holy days filled me with a grief I thought had been lost in the jaded and bruised reactions of my conscience after decades of hearing of atrocities here at home and abroad. At one point in my life, I thought of war as a sort of grand adventure, of the glory that men like Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill looked to in combat. I never chose to serve, nor would I have likely been allowed to because of my health, though as I grew up, I found the very idea of war, let alone the idea of taking another person’s life to be anathema and horrific to behold.

The Catholic Church has a theory of just war, which argues that in the case of most need, when no other option is available that war is the only solution available to a good and morally upright people. I for one have trouble with this theory, though I do see how it could make sense. I’d rather negotiate for as long as possible, try to find common ground with a potential enemy in the same way that I try to speak to those I interact with on a daily basis in their own language. Yet sometimes it does come down to this question of whether after all the negotiating and the impasses that have resulted if fighting is justified?

In 1580, the French humanistic philosopher Michel de Montaigne, the first great essayist, published in his first volume of Essays one such document titled “Des cannibales,” or in English “On the Cannibals.” In it, Montaigne spoke about a Tupinambá man from Brazil who he met in Rouen, the great port in Normandy where most of France’s trade with Brazil was based. Montaigne described how the Tupinambá became famous in his time for their cannibalism, rituals which were an intrinsic part of their culture that made them seem alien to his own, and dreadful in their otherworldliness.

Yet Montaigne saw also in the Tupinambá something of a reflection of his own world. 1580 saw France embroiled in the Wars of Religion, which lasted nearly 40 years and cost the French people a great many lives across several generations. Montaigne retired from public life in the civil service in part out of disgust for how the course of French history had gone, disgust that Frenchmen were not just killing fellow Frenchmen but torturing them and bringing ruin onto their families and communities all in the name of religion.

Religion is a tricky thing in human cultures. Most religions today are intended to give their believers a guide to living a good and true life; the greatest commandment which Jesus offers in the Gospels is to “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27, NAB) I’m a practicing Roman Catholic, as a priest once said to me “I’m practicing, I’m still learning how to do it right,” and at the end of the day the best any of us can do is try to be good people, to make something positive and impactful of our lives, even if it is only a small impact on our immediate friends and families. I am religious for many reasons which perhaps someday I will write about here. 

Yet I am also a skeptic, much like Montaigne whose essays reflect this uncertainty about life, humanity, and established norms. Montaigne’s skepticism reflected the empiricism that was born in the following decades of the Scientific Revolution and flowered 150 years later during the earliest stirrings of the Enlightenment as much as it came from the humanism of his own time during the Renaissance. Montaigne challenged his readers, his fellow Frenchmen amid their own bloodletting, to save their cries of barbarity for the Tupinambá lest they also “call that barbarism which is not common to them” at the same time. Montaigne thought it more barbarous to “eat men alive than feed upon them when dead.” The way in which this war is being prosecuted by Hamas, while they hold clear grievances, loses any sense of moral justice when, as Montaigne charged his countrymen, they “mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, wresting him in pieces.” The horrors of this war then, in all their wanton cruelty, show this twisted version of the human character in its fullest expression.

When I thought more about the war after it began last week, and as I thought of what I could write about it, about the renewal of this long simmering conflict in lands thought to be holy by three of our species’s largest religions, I was drawn to Montaigne’s words again, especially after reading reports from a journalist friend about the killings of infants and children by Hamas still defenseless in the earliest verses of their song.

What worries me is this idea of religious war, fighting “under pretense of piety and religion” in Montaigne’s words, remains in my own Catholicism. I know there are some who adopt the image and iconography of the Crusaders of old to battle against what they see as the wickedness and snares of evil, desecrations against what they hold most dear. Theirs is a faith limited to only a few, a scarce number that will surely only grow within their own families. When one says, to quote Handel’s Messiah “if God be for us, who can be against us?” it is very hard to argue, let alone change the mind of those who see God on their side. That is a faith limited to only the most elect, denying the promises of salvation to “our neighbors and fellow citizens” who instead receive scorn at the least, torture, death, and dismemberment at the worst.

I worry about how large this war will become. It is not like the other sudden conflicts that Israel has found itself in throughout its young history as a modern nation-state. This is a war fought against a terrorist organization with clear backing from another power in the region. Will that power leave the shadows or be attacked directly by Israel to stop the flow of weapons and funds that at time of writing is likely going to Hamas? And if so, how far will the Israeli Defence Force go to defeat Hamas before they lose their own moral standing? This is why I do not care for the idea of just war; taken too far with too much emotion driving one’s judgement a just war can quickly become unjust and the warriors fighting in the defense of their own kind could resort to brutality like their foes “that exceeds them in all kinds of barbarism.” So, in the last week when I’ve been at Mass, when I’ve led my classes at my Catholic school in prayer, my thoughts have been on the victims of this war, the fighters who see their actions as their best and only recourse, and on the faint glimmer of hope that peace will someday return to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. In an age when terror is as potent a weapon as any other, I hope those able to see an end to this war will find a way to start talking with each other again. Until then, just as Montaigne wrote 443 years ago, so too today we find ourselves “not sorry we note the barbarous horror of such an action, but grieved, that prying so narrowly into their faults, we are so blinded in our own.”

The translation of Montaigne’s Essays used here is based off of John Florio’s 1603 first English edition of the Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Militaire Discourses of Lord Michell de Montaigne published in London.