Holy wars- Week 1

Question 1

Function of Clubbing

Answer 1

The typical form of personal violence engaged in by Circumcellion’s was the physical beating, especially that administered with wooden clubs. Persons who were drageed from their homes, who were stopped while they were travelling on the public roads, or who were trapped inside churches, were detained, physically threatened, and beaten with wooden staves. Cicumcellion’s were bands of men armed with wooden clubs who acted in unison and who often formed marching unites.

Question 2

Council of Elvira

Answer 2

. It was the first known council of the Christian church in Spain. It was a prohibition in southern spain that ruled any persons killed while breaking and destroying idols were not to be counted as martyrs

Question 3

Blinding: Meaning and Function

Answer 3

Most attackers were not intent on killing the person but they want to ‘reshape the body of the enemy’. It was a punishment inflicted due to the victims act of personal betrayal. The plucking out of the eye is the blinding of someone who was already blind to the Christian message, ‘Blind to the Truth’. Augustine ‘blinded by their pride had lost the light of the truth’.

Question 4

Dogs (Symbol)

Answer 4

In Jewish and Christian cultures, dogs were seen as repugnant and vile. A dog is also used as a metaphorical symbol for a heretic. A dead dog could be draped over the enemy to show he was defeated and to humiliate them.

Question 5

Basicila (symbolic meaning)

Answer 5

Each basilicia represented the community of the living and the community of the dead, including the martyrs and saints. The ownership of the burial places reasserted ones claim to the past

Question 6

Augustine on militant suicide

Answer 6

He highlight their suicides in an imperical offical Bonifitius soon after his arrival in Africa in 417. He called their suicides demnted and the men degenerate, and condemned their actions by saying they threw chaos into the peaces of innocent persons

Question 7

Latrocinium (Banditry)

Answer 7

Ambushes of rural villages in which inhabitants were kidnapped and dragged off to a life of slavery. Catholic loyybists contrued them as a fighting menace, as a general insurgency that threatedned the whole fabric of socila order

Question 8

Publica Disciplina

Answer 8

Addressed in a letter by Augustine to Apringius in 412, he raised the issue that the Donatist clerics were a serious threat to the public order. From this, the conditions for Publica Disciplina were found; the use of normal state compulsion to restrain violence. Augustine struck the connection between the threat of Circumcellion violence and the just use of secular force to repress them; they should not complain about persecutions when Circumcellion’s commit so many terrible evil acts under the leadership of their clergy