Putting terror into the fear of God: the King James Bible

Abstract

's effort to drum up a coalition of the willing in a war against terror relied upon a number of myths and misapprehensions as well as on what now look to have been outright lies. Some of these exploited the slipperiness of the language, and above all the currency of the word terror as indicating either an objective agent or an emotion, or both at once: a terror is what causes us to feel terror. Working within a contemporary language culture and a media consensus in which the word terrorist has been almost wholly applied to enemies of the state rather than to the operations of the state itself -where it began (in revolutionary France) and where it is still arguably routine, given the overwhelming possession of the power of terror by the militarised nation states -the Bush administration was able to convince most of the people most of the time of a causal connection between two rather different ideas: that terror was the exclusive property of the enemy-other, and that their own psychic insecurities, manufactured of course, could be assuaged by making war on that enemy. So powerful was this conflation that it survived the seemingly implausible substitution of Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden as the agent of objective terror and the designated enemy, even as it was becoming clearer and clearer that the events of 9/11 were almost certainly unrepeatable as such.This much is history, but it is a history with very deep roots that are worth recovering. The currency of terror as an aesthetic experience was well-established in English by the early 1700s, in part thanks to a propensity to translate Aristotle's phobos (paired with pity as a constitutive response to tragic drama) as terror rather than fear. Since tragedy is a spectacle on the stage, the emotion one feels is embodied in something one sees: an agent outside ourselves which causes us to feel intensely within ourselves. Being terrified at terror goes all the way back to the Greeks. But there is another formative tradition that has contributed to the present state of the common language, which probably owes rather little to Aristotle and his kind: translations of the Bible into English. The English Bible, before the relatively recent spate of efforts at user-friendlier versions, usually meant the King James or