Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (53 page)

The Pyrenees were a thinner screen than the Bosporus, and the thriving center of Jewish learning that had the largest impact on Europe was in Spain. We shall see more of this in Part Five. Suffice to note here that classic works of Arabic philosophy, like those of the Andalusian Ibn Rashid, known in Europe as Averroës (1126—1198), were mediated by Jewish linguists and scholars whose tradition was well established by the millennium. Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1020–1070) was a Jewish Neo-Platonist whose portrait of creation as a cosmic struggle between, in Plato's terms, form and matter, was widely circulated in Latin under the title
Fons Vitae.
The work had tremendous influence among Catholic scholars, who did not know the identity of its author. In a way, the encounter with classical philosophy came more naturally to Jewish sages than to the early schoolmen attached to cathedrals. The ancient tradition of Talmudic commentary on sacred texts had prepared Jewish scholars both to take in what was written and to elaborate on it. This tradition in Spain would permanently stamp Jewish thought when it culminated in the genius of the philosopher Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1135–1204) and of the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (d. 1290). It would have an equal, though less direct, impact among Christians, many of whom, like Aquinas, would imitate Maimonides's methods and retrace his lines of inquiry, knowing full well he was a Jew.

Among churchmen, the new intellectual confidence led to the conclusion that the rational truth of Christian doctrine, once properly expounded, could be grasped by all people. Now it would be possible to explicate the faith according to a logic that would be irrefutable. The syllogism thus became a missionary tool.

Perhaps more surprisingly, so did the respectful impulse to appreciate the religious and intellectual traditions of those labeled as infidels or unbelievers. The ordered methods of reason were introduced into the religious discourse of the Church by the liberals and humanists associated with new urban universities. Peter Abelard can be taken as a type of this group, standing against conservatives tied to the rural monasteries, of whom Bernard was a type.
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Reactionaries wanted Aristotle, the pagan, to be banned. They regarded the scientific "theology" to be a kind of heresy. Thus Abelard was condemned as a heretic—but so was Thomas Aquinas, although obviously his condemnation would not stick.
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The new Christian intellectuals distrusted the warm feelings of mysticism and the mindless pieties of the sodalities. Neither would sustain authentic religion in the coming age, nor would they break the chains of superstition that were still locked to Europe's recent past. The new intellectuals asserted that the Church had nothing to fear from the spaciousness of the educated human mind. Wasn't reason as much a gift of God as faith?

But there was a catch. Was the spirit of rational inquiry to be free, or was it to be placed at the service of a sacred purpose? This is a question with which the Christian intellectual must still grapple, and it posed itself at the start. Abelard's ecumenical argument, for example, that all people can glimpse traces of Christian revelation in the logic of their own experience—more specifically, that Jews can recognize the Second Person of the Trinity in the eternal Word by whom, in Genesis, God creates the world—this argument retains an ecumenical character only if used to advance a mutual understanding. If Christians and Jews are engaged in a common stretch toward the elusive mystery of God, such exploration of related but distinct analogies can illuminate. But if such analysis is used to "prove" an a priori Christian claim, or to demonstrate a Jewish doctrinal inadequacy—an "unfulfillment"—then even an apparently open-minded intellectual exercise is placed at the service not of truth but of domination.

As it happened, when the energy of the Crusades was channeled, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, into an unprecedented conversionist movement, the missionary impulse overwhelmed the goal of bringing faith and reason together. This was partly the result of the humane Christian rejection of violence against Jews—the
Sicut Judaeis.
Yet the Crusades of the twelfth century also exacerbated Christian impatience with the crucifiers, which is why the first universal restrictions against Jews were introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. In the new era of absolute universalism, heterodoxy was intolerable. This may be the most lasting result of the crusading period: Society discovered the efficiency with which it could organize itself around the project of attacking an enemy.
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Thus heretics are ferreted out and offered the choice of recanting or being killed. Jews are pressed on every side, with the clear purpose of the long-sought conversion of the whole people. And the new rational theology, with its irrefutable analysis—Anselm's ontological proof is perfected a century and a half later by the "five proofs" of Thomas Aquinas—forms the heart of this offensive of the mind.

The advent of logic as a missionary tool was a welcome relief to Christians because the tradition of arguing against Jews from their own Scriptures was such an abysmal failure. Each note of Catholic faith—from the Virgin Birth to the Seamless Robe to the darkness at noon on Good Friday—was part of a mystical harmony scored in the Hebrew Scriptures. So why couldn't Jews hear it? Augustine's answer, following Paul, had been that for God's own purposes, God had made Jews tone deaf. Neither Paul nor Augustine nor any who followed this train of thought could ever explain why Jews should be held responsible, in grotesquely condemnatory terms, for enacting a role ordained by God, performing a function necessary to the salvation of the world.

Christians, for their part, could not hear the consistent Jewish answer to their arguments, which might describe the Jewish habit of reading the Scriptures in context. For example, when Christian apologists cited Isaiah 7:14—"The virgin is with child"—as proof of the Virgin Birth and, therefore, the messianic character of Jesus, Jews might have drawn attention to the next phrase in Isaiah, which clearly says that she "will soon give birth to a son." Soon after Isaiah's proclamation, that is. What may have happened many generations later in Bethlehem was of no account.
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Or, for that matter, the Jewish response might have drawn attention to the fact that in the original Hebrew, Isaiah had written, "The young woman is with child." It was the Septuagint translators, rendering the Hebrew into Greek, who introduced the word "virgin." To Jews, the Christian claims could appear shallow.

Yet to Christian polemicists, such replies could only seem like splitting the hair of the prophet, which left them asking, Why don't Jews get it? Positively assessing the Jewish refusal to recognize patterns of "fulfillment" in Christianity, as Abelard saw it, one would regard Jews as "invincibly ignorant." A negative assessment would see the stubborn Jews as less than human. Here is Abelard's nemesis, Bernard: "A Jew might complain, perhaps, that I go too far in baiting him when I term his understanding 'oxlike'...'The ox,' he says, 'knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib: Israel has not known Me, My people had no understanding' [Isaiah 1:3]. You see, O Jew, I am milder than your own prophet: I put you on a par with the beasts, he puts you beneath them!"
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But now something new began to happen. Pope Innocent III, whom we saw earlier as the avatar of the new Catholic universalism, commissioned two new religious orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, to carry out the conversionist program. Thousands of men joined these orders at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a spiritualized, and one could say domesticated, version of the Crusade impulse. Bands of these friars, as they were known, from the word for "brother," spread out across Europe. They traveled as mendicants, embodying the virtues of the apostolic life and, not incidentally, channeling the religious enthusiasm of the age into structures of Church control. Not for nothing would the Dominicans be known as the Order of Preachers, for they excelled at applying the new rationalism to the mysteries of the Gospel. The friars were famously devoted to Christ in his Passion—Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) would have the wounds of the stigmata on his hands, feet, and side—but they also embraced lives of serious study. It was their command of reason applied to faith that made them relevant at that moment in a coalescing, young, and increasingly univocal civilization.

An exemplar of this emerging civilization was the intellectual enterprise of a man who would soon become the greatest of the Dominicans and the greatest of the era's thinkers, Thomas Aquinas. He was trained, in part, at Cologne. Then he followed Abelard at the University of Paris. He set for himself the ambitious goal of assembling two
Summas,
summaries of all human knowledge in the only two spheres that mattered. The
Sumrna Theologiae
(1273) would be a complete statement of Christian belief, arranged according to Aristotelian logic and drawing on Aristotelian metaphysics. This
Summa
would quote Aristotle 3,500 times.
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The
Summa Contra Gentiles
(1259), written for Christians engaged in the debate with unbelievers, would be a complete synthesis of the faith as it should be presented to those who reject it. Thomas argued, he said, using "natural reason, to which all are compelled to assent."
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His ambition was the intellectual equivalent of the Gothic masterpiece that he saw completed in Paris in 1250, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which was one of eighty massive churches completed in France between 1180 and 1270. Such construction was an extraordinary achievement by a population of fewer than eighteen million, an irrefutable signal of the vitality of this culture.
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Thomas's ambition could also be said to be the intellectual equivalent of Innocent Ill's claim to universal power, for Thomas articulated a philosophical rationale for the hierarchical order that the medieval Church embraced. He offered a theological justification for the central papacy that is still a mark of the Roman Catholic Church.
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Hans Küng points out that in the
World Catechism,
published by the Vatican in 1993, Thomas Aquinas is quoted 63 times, which is more than any other authority except Saint Augustine (88 times) and Pope John Paul II himself (137 times).
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Thomas created an intellectual structure of faith that is so internally coherent, so logically consistent, and so religiously devoted that its advocates could not imagine how anyone could honestly consider its claims and not assent. Thomas, in other words, proved it.

Aristotle's idea of the necessity of truth, which compels assent, led Thomas to one of the most important innovations of his career—and it concerned the Jews. It was Thomas who overturned the idea of the Jew's "invincible ignorance," which had been held from Augustine through Abelard. Thomas concluded that Jews, confronted with the truth of Jesus, had not been ignorant at all. They knew very well that Jesus was the Messiah, Son of God, but they murdered him anyway. "The disbelief of Jews derived, therefore," the scholar Jeremy Cohen summarizes Aquinas, "not from ignorance, but from a deliberate defiance of the truth."
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Thomas's patron was the founder of his order, a Spaniard, Saint Dominic de Guzman (1170–1221), for whom the Dominicans are named. Dominic had been dispatched by Innocent III against the heretics in southern France. The expectation was that the preached word would overcome the Cathari, the various sects that defined the cosmic struggle, in the tradition of the Manichaeans, as between a good and an evil God, a belief that led to rigid puritanism and a concomitant rejection of the Catholic Church. When the preaching failed to convince the heretics—an ominous pattern reveals itself here—the Fourth Lateran Council sent its Crusade against them.

Dominicans and Franciscans were inevitably directed to preach to Jews. As always, Jews were easier to identify than heretics, and closer at hand than Saracens. Then, of course, it was necessary to forcibly require Jews to listen to the preachers. Here is an edict, issued in 1242 by King James I of Aragon: "Likewise we wish and decree that, whenever the archbishop, bishops, or Dominican or Franciscan friars visit a town or a locale where Saracens or Jews dwell and wish to present the word of God to the said Jews or Saracens, these must gather at their call and must patiently hear their preaching. If they do not wish to come of their own will, our officials shall compel them to do so, putting aside all excuses."
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Jews were herded into churches and preached at. Disputations were arranged, great debates at which Jews were allowed to rebut the arguments of the preachers. The movement of organized anti-Jewish polemic would grow throughout the thirteenth century. Friars would enter synagogues uninvited. Kings would order Jews to cooperate with the missionaries, and when Jews did convert, they would often become anti-Jewish polemicists themselves.

Early in this process, though, a problem surfaced. Despite the unprecedented level of missionary organization, despite the fresh edge that rational argument lent the polemic, and despite the staggering intellectual achievement of the new Christian scholarship, Jews remained, by and large, unmoved. Some converted, but the vast majority did not. How was this possible?

The mass hysteria that led, in this period, to widespread belief that Jews had secret powers, rituals, and magic gave rise to the Blood Libel and to charges of well poisoning. As we have seen, the Church establishment roundly rejected such paranoid impulses, but now that establishment was overtaken by one of its own. If the Church knew anything, it knew what Jews were—in Augustine's phrase, "bearers of the Old Testament."
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Jewish religion was what Jesus had set himself against. Christians had never attended to the post-Temple rise of rabbinic Judaism, nor understood the relationship of instruction, commentaries, legal teachings, and stories to the study of Torah.
¹⁵
Such expositions had been assembled in the third century by Rabbi Judah the Prince, a collection that came to be known as the Mishnah. But Jews had treated this, too, as a living text, and it inspired further rabbinic interpretations and commentaries, which came to be known as the Talmud. Rabbinic Judaism had developed a thorough tradition of Talmudic study by the thirteenth century, yet only now did Christians seem to notice. When converted Jews spoke to Christians of the sacred writings of the Talmud, prelates and polemicists reacted as if this unknown text were a kind of intellectual well poisoning. They seized on news of the Talmud as an explanation for Jewish recalcitrance, as if the work's secrets equipped Jews with the power to withhold the assent that the friars' preaching would otherwise compel. Once an irrational fear arises, it can take over, and that is what happened as Jewish secrets now became suspect, as the source not only of ongoing Jewish rejection of Christian claims but also of heresy among Christians themselves.