The Family Romance of Martyrdom in Second Maccabees

Naomi Janowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315464312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

Centering on the first extant martyr story (2 Maccabees 7), this study explores the "autonomous value" of martyrdom. The story of a mother and her seven sons who die under the torture of the Greek king Antiochus displaces the long-problematic Temple sacrificial cult with new cultic practices, and presents a new family romance that encodes unconscious fantasies of child-bearing fathers and eternal mergers with mothers. This study places the martyr story in the historical context of the Hasmonean struggle for legitimacy in the face of Jewish civil wars, and uses psychoanalytic theories to analyze the unconscious meaning of the martyr-family story.

1
The psychoanalytic study of martyrdom

Psychoanalytically informed studies of martyrdom are few in number.¹ The main exceptions are some recent studies of suicide bombers.² Ruth Stein’s book For the Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism (2009) illustrates the challenges of this type of analysis. Her study combines brilliant psychoanalytic insights with shaky cultural claims. Stein states her approach succinctly: “Informed, intuitive-imaginative synthesizing of various and contradictory sites of knowledge, supported by psychoanalytic theory, enables us to project ourselves into the minds that dwell behind the written, televised, or otherwise mediated expression” (2009, 4). Stein draws her evidence from the letter found in Mohammed Atta’s suitcase after the 9/11 attack. However, throughout the study, the “mind” she is trying to study shifts from Atta’s psyche to a more general mind-set of the Islamic religion. The danger of this is clear; an analysis of the Islamic mind-set based on one mind must inevitably be vastly oversimplified. Stein writes, for example, “Islam gave the faithful the promise of immortality in exchange for total submission to God” (2009, 55). Total submission to the deity is not found only in Islamic theology.³ She acknowledges that this description of Islam is applicable to other religious traditions since obedience to the deity as a means of sanctification is not limited to Islam.⁴ Therefore, at some points she characterizes the mind she seeks to analyze as “fundamentalist.” At other points, the “mind” turns out to be religion in its entirety.⁵

The bombers, in her clinical model, are attempting to repair their self-loathing by killing themselves (Stein 2009, 70). Their action represents a return to the father and the banishment of the mother. They do not regress to the pre-Oedipal mother, the standard Freudian theory. Instead she introduces the concept of a pre-Oedipal phallic father who displaces the pre-Oedipal mother (Stein 2009, 40–1).⁶ This father-deity offers them a phallus; their belief in that phallus leads to a kind of manic triumph. They then kill themselves out of a manic love for their father, hence the title of her book: For the Love of the Father.

Stein bolsters her theory with clinical examples of men who failed to separate from their fathers. Instead of competing with their fathers, they surrender to them. They share Atta’s psychic stance, but they do kill themselves and others. The question remains as to the link between clinical theories and specific texts or minds. Stein is a master clinician who brings a phenomenally rich set of ideas to her clinical work, but her patients, even if they seem to be suffering from symptoms similar to Atta’s, did not make bombs. Nor are we sure that the clinical theory fits Atta’s mind. The book is not a psychobiography per se, although she does introduce some biographical points about Atta.⁷ Nor do we have evidence that all the 9/11 bombers had the same psychological mind-set as Atta. Ultimately, the paradox Stein finds in the mind of the bombers is the willingness to harm in the name of love, an insight into the mind of humanity in general, she realizes, and nothing that she can relate specifically to religion, Islam or Atta.

These recent writings on suicide bombers, psychoanalytic or otherwise, tell us more about “liberal assumptions of religious subjectivities and political violence than they do about what is ostensibly being explained” (Asad 2007, 42).⁸ The violence of the suicide bomber must be set in the context of other, perhaps less dramatic, expressions of power (sanctioned or not). Without this historical grounding, Stein’s analysis becomes a tour of her mind. The moment when this is most clearly revealed is when she discusses her fear of bombers and her inability to retain a sense of security after the bombing.

The psychoanalytic analysis of political power

Given how little we know about the author of Second Maccabees, it would be even more difficult to try to examine his mind. Taking a different tack in her psychoanalytic study of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt specifically states that she does not “offer an analysis of a figure such as Robespierre in Freudian terms” (1992, 8). Instead, she borrows and modifies Freud’s trope of the family romance. For Freud, the family romance centered on a neurotic’s wish to flee from his family and find another one. For Hunt, the romance means “the collective political unconscious images of the familial order that underlie revolutionary politics” (1992, xiii).

Specifically, on the issue of family stories, it was Edmund Burke, according to Lynn Hunt, who most clearly saw the connection between “filial piety and the willingness to obey” (1992, 3). Adopting this insight, she argues, “the most obvious material at hand for thinking politically was the family, not the family as some kind of moral social experience, but that family as an imaginative construct of power relations.”⁹ In specific, Hunt uses French novels and art to outline the family romance that correlates with the French Revolution: the rise of a good father and then his disappearance, leaving only a “band of brothers” and the newly freed “sisters” (1992, 37). Killing the king is always a problem, Hunt explains, since it involves breaking taboos that define civilization. The brothers did not have an accepted idea of how to deal with the killing of the father and how to share authority after the revolution.¹⁰ In the case of the French Revolution, a cult of dead heroes “balanced out the killing of the father.” This cult proved that the activists who did away with the king were not doing away with sentiment and, as Hunt characterizes it, “turning into cannibals” (1992, 60–1). The problem of the killing of the king-father is central to many theories of sacrifice.¹¹

As part of her analysis, Hunt adopts a thin slice of René Girard’s (1977) revisions of Freudian theory.¹² Girard emphasizes the “sacrificial crisis,” the cycle of violence that can only be stopped via the sacrifice of a scapegoat. Participating in this ritual requires that those involved misunderstand what is happening. This is true of the “sacrificial crisis” in Second Maccabees as well. The crisis about the demand to sacrifice to the foreign king, the one everyone knows about, disguises another sacrificial crisis, which we discuss in Chapter 3. Psychoanalytic theory can clarify the unconscious basis of these “misunderstandings.” Uncovering these repressed stories helps us understand historical events better. Most significantly, it offers other motivations for why events are depicted as they are and what is left out of the surface story.¹³

Eric Santner’s study of modern Germany also focuses on a “sacrificial crisis” (1996). He locates “profound connections” between the fantasies about power at work in Germany during a time of conflict around authority. While a “band of brothers” in the form of landed gentry were in conflict with the emperor, the basis of their authority was not secure. Different solutions to this conflict appear in Nazism and in Daniel Schreber’s descriptions of his mental illness (Santner 1996, xi). Based on the famous diary by the lawyer Schreber, written during his period living in a mental asylum and describing mental breakdown, Santner examines the inner conflicts brought on by Schreber’s increasing power as he was elevated within the German judicial system. Schreber broke down in the face of his elevation as part of the “investiture crisis,” a crisis of power and authority (the role of the father). He wrote at length about struggles with a male authority figure in his diaries, as he described God’s wish to single him out as his wife. Schreber avoided the “totalitarian temptation” that others, including Nazis, succumbed to but was unable to function as a judge.

For Santner, as for Hunt, the crisis of modernity is presented and examined in numerous literary productions via stories of family sacrifice. For example, in The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka outlines the family crisis whereby Gregor must play out a “sacrifice of sacrifice” (Santner 1996, 132). Gregor always does what the family appears to expect from him but suffers from a disturbing lack of clarity about what that is. In the end, the reader learns that “[h]is life of self-abnegation has been, it now appears, a kind of social game he had actively worked to perpetuate through a kind of self-inflicted ‘law-preserving violence’” (Santner 1996, 132).¹⁴ The son is the one sacrificed, and after his death, the family resumes its normal existence.

Hunt and Santner both expand the purview of historical analysis through close study of family structures in narratives. They do not interpret the stories as factual descriptions of events but as models for thinking about issues of authority and power (power over other humans and power over death). The details of these stories are crucial because they outline the relationships between the family members and their interactions around the “sacrificial crisis.” The meaning of a family story is never just their actions but how the family relationships distribute, enact and contain some of the most basic tensions around power. If we listen closely, we can hear these stories behind the family romance of Second Maccabees.

The specific family romance of Second Maccabees

Working from the model of the family romance is not the usual way Second Maccabees is studied. Either the story is read as a straightforward factual account, in which case the details are accepted but not analyzed, or it is viewed as a trope, simply a story of a “typical” pious family. The story is then placed outside of historical inquiry, attracting attention only for the portrayal of the mother as having masculine traits and the mother’s presentation of “creation from nothing” theological doctrine.

To restate the point, the mother’s lack of a name and the lack of a father refuse a simple historical explanation. We can quickly dismiss the idea that a specific nameless mother from a fatherless family spoke before Antiochus while her sons were being tortured. This episode is not historical fact: Antiochus was in Antioch during the period of the persecutions and therefore did not personally oversee the torture of this family (van Henten 1997).¹⁵ Second Maccabees was composed at the same time names were given to many women who were nameless in biblical stories (Ilan 1993). Other characters who are given speeches as lengthy as the mother are identified by name. The “name” she is given is “mother,” which makes her into a living trope, that is, an occupant of a role and not an individual.

The anonymity of the mother was reversed in later versions of the story; in Jewish texts, she often received the name Hannah, and in later Christian texts, Miriam (G. Cohen 1991).¹⁶ From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the retroactive naming of the mother highlights her namelessness as a source of concern. The difference between two reports of the same dream draws our attention, to use Freud’s literary association, like the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s cloak. This is the only place where a weapon can penetrate, the weak spot in the “dream’s disguise” and therefore the place to begin interpretation (SE 5:515).

Our particular family story, I contend, is a carefully constructed trope.¹⁷ The absent (human) father and the loquacious mother with her seven ready-to-die sons figure in a new “family romance.” The new romance offers many new lessons to the reader. These include lessons about authority, law, politics and obedience, all encoded in its enigmatic family structure. The family scene is carefully constructed as a kind of “crib sheet” of instruction that outlines ways of interpreting conflicts over authority. The scene presents ideal models of theological submission and also of family loyalties, that is, a distinct solution to the sacrificial crisis. These lessons are part of the reason why Second Maccabees is a revolutionary text, although its innovative stance is often overlooked. Simply put, the text is the first to highlight the “autonomous value” of martyrdom, in the astute phrasing of Arnaldo Momigliano (1975, 87). That is, many of the terms used are familiar (father, sacrifice), but they have been given new meanings, and now death within the family has a special new value in and of itself.

This is not an easy shift in approach. An incommensurability exists between historical and psychoanalytic modes of investigation (Scott 2012). The hope here is that this incommensurability may turn out to be useful. The tension between thinking by means of historical time and psychoanalytic time might deter us from seeing the story as only a factual account or only a fantasy that has no connection to its historical setting. Examples of the former, thinking only by means of historical time, abound in the robust scholarship on Second Maccabees. These are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, but only to the extent they directly relate to the family story.

As to the former, seeing the story as only a fantasy, Elizabeth Castelli, for example, sets aside the search for “verifiable history” of the origins of martyrdom in favor of tracing the “self-writing” of martyrs as the “generation and maintenance of Christian collective memory” (2004, 70).¹⁸ Christians write these stories to clarify what it means to them to be Christian. Later readers turn to them for spiritual guidance. Yet, at the same time, Castelli sets Christian images of cultic self-sacrifice against Jewish and Roman models. This contrast is a very specific historical claim. Christians, she explains, needed to make sense of the “senselessness” of Roman violence. Christian memory is juxtaposed with Roman inane violence. These contrasts define Christian martyrdom but depend on unsupported depictions of Judaism and Roman society.¹⁹

The underlying psychological claims are also not articulated or supported. The self-sacrificing death is hard-wired into the collective consciousness of Western culture, according to Castelli (2004, 34). No mechanism for this consciousness is presented, though the claim reflects certain types of psychoanalytic analysis of myth. In a similar model of vague psychologizing, Michael Gaddis (2005) argues that early Christian intolerance of other religions was a result of the oppression early Christians had suffered.

Every fantasy takes on a very specific form based on available cultural norms. Our family sacrificial crisis is set within its own historical context, following late antique cultural norms and social expectations. Our family story brings into focus both the ever-present time of the u...