„Religiöse Gewalt“ in der Frühen Neuzeit? Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Revision

In this chapter the common parlance of “religious violence in early modern history” is put to the test, although it seems to be linked in an indissoluble way with the master narratives about this period. The first section shows that it makes no difference whether historians think of early modern history in terms of impersonal structures or of personal experience–they agree in regarding religion as a crucial cause of violence. Against this widespread conviction the paper unfolds two arguments. The first is that the Latin word “religio”, as it was used throughout the 16th and 17th century, did not mean ‘religion’ in our modern comprehensive understanding of the word. Instead its meaning was quite narrow and specific, referring either to the medieval sense of ‘committing oneself to God by joining a religious order’ (becoming a “religiosus” resp. a “religiosa”) or to the ancient sense of ‘scrupulously venerating God’. It did not mean ‘faith’, ‘doctrine’, ‘worship’, ‘church law’ or ‘denomination’, and definitely not all these things in conjunction. Only when the vernacular languages began to borrow the Latin word from the 16th century onwards was its narrow meaning broadened. As a consequence of reformation and counterreformation, the idea arose that one should make faith and doctrine and worship and church law match, although the attempt to implement this new rapport provoked much opposition and turned out to be a very violent process. From this point of view what is generally called “early modern religious violence” is violence caused not by religion, but by the ambition to establish a new idea of religion. The second argument is that our modern understanding of religion is coined by the 18th-century critique of religion. Only the Enlightenment’s claim to overcome religion (in the new sense of the word) declared it to be “irrational” or even “fanatic”. Thus the Enlightenment invented religious fanatism, using it as a retrospective explanation of the violence that had gripped the last centuries. Modern parlance of “religious violence” unintentionally prolongs a very poor idea of religion–and one that should not be mistaken for an explanation.