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The Crusades and Their Critics
JAMES HITCHCOCK
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While it has become customary to view the Crusades as a historical aberration, they can also be viewed as an important factor in the formation of the Christian West. Many of those who condemn the Crusades fully understand this and wish that the Muslims had conquered Europe and aborted the rise of Christendom.
The Crusades, perhaps more than any other event in history, manifest the
ambiguities and contradictions inherent in religion itself, the fact
that what is perfect and eternal must be incarnated among imperfect
human beings, subjected to the limitations of a merely temporal
perspective.
Modern liberal Christians blame the conversion of Constantine for almost
everything of which they disapprove in later Christian history. Among
other things the conversion presented the Church with an entirely new
question of baffling perplexity — whether Christians could use force on
behalf of spiritual goods. St. Augustine, the principal formulator of
the doctrine of the just war, taught that it was impermissible to use
force to impose religious orthodoxy. But he also justified force,
notably in the case of the Donatists in North Africa, when religious
heterodoxy was the cause of civil disorder.
The pacifist position, which finds little warrant in Christian history,
in effect seeks to nullify the Constantinian conversion, in that
pacifism would require the Church to remain on the margins of society,
preaching a wholly other-worldly message, refusing to assume any
relevant social leadership, allowing the political enterprise to
function wholly according to secular principles. Such a position is
itself a radical denial of the Incarnation.
Thus, paradoxes and contradictions have been present for 1700 years —
the disorder of war for the sake of restoring order, acts of violence to
establish peace. In a sense, every just war must include some motive of
love towards the enemy, not only in the refusal to demonize the enemy
but in the sense that defeating an unjust enemy is itself an act of
love, thwarting his ability to persist in his wickedness. The German
surrender in 1945 was essential to the moral recovery of the German
people.
Discovering people’s “real” motives is always elusive, and the medieval
Crusades were undoubtedly fought for a variety of contradictory motives
— to free the holy places and once more make them available to Christian
pilgrims, to free the Christians of the Near East from Muslim
domination, from sheer hatred of “the other,” from ambition for
territory, from the love of war for its own sake. As Thomas Madden
characterizes the crusaders, “They were men of the sword: pious and
idealistic, but also crude, arrogant, and, at times, savage.” Because
they merely assumed the sinfulness of mankind, medieval people could
perhaps understand these contradictions much better than modern people
inclined to dismiss the entire crusading effort as either murderous
religious fanaticism or a mere cloak for greed.
The Crusades satisfied the requirements of a just war in at least two
ways. The Muslims had taken certain Christian territories by force and
had thereby denied to Christians, east and west, the opportunity to
engage in one of the most important of medieval religious exercises,
namely, pilgrimages. The concept of the just war not only permits people
to defend themselves when directly attacked, it also permits them to go
to the aid of others who have been attacked.
It is a major index of the arrogant anti-Christian bigotry now prevalent
in “enlightened” Western circles that, while the Crusaders are treated
as aggressive interlopers against the Muslims of the Near East, little
attention is paid to the means by which Islam had come to dominate that
region to begin with. (Following the terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center in September, some Americans, including some orthodox Catholics,
insist that we must ask ourselves “Why do they hate us so?” One answer,
obviously, is the Crusades, an event that those same orthodox Catholics
admire as a proud episode in world history.)
There appear to be comparable ambiguities in Islam itself. In places the
Qu’ran seems to forbid coercion directed at the “people of the Book” —
Jews and Christians — while in others it appears to extol it. It is
further evidence of bigotry that “enlightened” opinion is quite ready to
believe that murderous intolerance is endemic to Christianity, while
primly insisting that those who kill in the name of Allah are distorting
an essentially tolerant faith.
But if the Crusaders were in part engaged in defending Christians
already threatened by the Muslims, the Fourth Crusade (1204), when the
crusaders got only as far as Constantinople and satisfied themselves by
overthrowing the Byzantine emperor and putting one of their own on his
throne, illustrates the potentially treacherous nature of such an
undertaking, the way in which the human lust for power and wealth can so
easily corrupt the most idealistic of enterprises. So too, if the
Crusades can be thought of as the highest example of the chivalric
ideal, they also provide some of the worst examples of knightly power
used to trample the weak without pity.
Attempting a moral judgment on this tangled and tragic story requires,
as do all such judgments, some assessment of the long-term results of
these events, a judgment which is always difficult and elusive. But it
is certainly plausible to conclude that, without the Crusades, Islam
would have been a serious threat to the Western world, and to
Christianity itself, long before the fateful battles of Lepanto (1571)
and Vienna (1683). All of Christendom came close to falling to the
Muslims in the seventh century, when Spain in fact did fall; and the
Crusades, if they did nothing else, allowed Western Christianity to grow
in relative security.
While it has become customary to view the Crusades as a historical
aberration, they can also be viewed as an important factor in the
formation of the Christian West. Many of those who condemn the Crusades
fully understand this and wish that the Muslims had conquered Europe and
aborted the rise of Christendom.
In principle the Crusades are the story of the highest human idealism in
the service of the divine will. In practice they provide also many
sordid stories of blindness, corruption, and hatred. In this they are
scarcely unique but serve as an exceptionally graphic paradigm of the
nature of all human efforts on behalf of good.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
James Hitchcock. "The Crusades and Their Critics." Catholic Dossier 8 no. 1 (January-February 2002).
This article is reprinted with permission from Catholic Dossier. To subscribe to Catholic Dossier call 1-800-651-1531.
THE AUTHOR
James Hitchcock, a regular columnist for Catholic Dossier, is Professor of History at Saint Louis University.
Copyright © 2002 Catholic Dossier
