Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (61 page)

Nicolaus of Cusa's masterwork was called
On Learned Ignorance,
and his approach to God is characterized as apophatic, which means to posit by negating (an apophasis: "I will not bring up my opponent's questionable financial dealings"
¹⁸
). Nicolaus argued not that God is unknowable, but that God's unknowability is the most profound and illuminating thing humans can know about God. This idea is the theological equivalent of the Copernican insight into the cosmos—that the earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa—that would come a generation later. Both ideas mean, as Tracy put it, that the old cosmology is finished, the closed system is collapsed, replaced by an open, infinite system.

We have seen repeatedly how basic theological assumptions translate into the political sphere, with importance—sometimes positive, sometimes negative—for relations between Christians and Jews. That is certainly true in the case of Nicolaus of Cusa, but like Abelard before him, his insights and their political implications would not carry the day. The political crisis that cast its shadow over Abelard's thought was the crusading movement. Nicolaus was challenged by the historic conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. This event is a marker on the arc of this narrative for several reasons. It brought to a conclusion the story begun when newly anointed Constantine left Trier to unify the empire. Constantine's city had stood against invaders for a thousand years before the Turkish artillery pieces rolled into place below its ancient walls. The last Christian defender of Constantinople was himself named Constantine, and fittingly his enemy was named Mohammed II.

By 1453, Constantinople was a city depopulated and impoverished by the numerous wars it had withstood. This last Constantine had only 10,000 soldiers to command, while the besieging Turks numbered between 100,000 and 150,000. The siege began in early April and went on, brutally, until the end of May. When the wall was breached, the Turks rushed in, and in the final battle Constantine was killed. He was the last Christian emperor of the East. Mohammed, established by this victory, would be regarded as the founder of the Ottoman Empire, which would last into the twentieth century.
¹⁹

Such was the savagery of these wars that the six hundredth anniversary of the previous victory of the Ottomans, at Kosovo on June 15, 1389, would give Slobodan Milosevic the occasion to whip up Serbian Orthodox resentment against Albanian Muslims, whom Serbs regarded as the descendants of the Turk conquerors. Milosevic's 1989 speech is usually charged with igniting the four Balkan wars of the 1990s, but the tinder Milosevic ignited was the long Serbian memory of those distant defeats.

After Constantinople fell, the Turks pillaged the city for days. Santa Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom, was made into a mosque. News of the violence, rape, and slaughter that came down on the Greek Christians traumatized Europe. Nicolaus was like most Christians in being horrified at the reports of the siege and fall of Constantinople.

He was unlike most Christians, though, in what he made of that news. He had been named a cardinal of the Church only five years before, but now he put pen to paper in a way that would set him apart from others in the Catholic hierarchy. He composed what remains one of the most poignant pleas ever written by a Catholic theologian and prelate,
De Pace Fidei
—"On Peace Among the Faiths," or, less literally, "Reconciliation Between the World Religions." What stung Nicolaus was the image of human beings savaging each other because of their opposing ideas of God—God who was, to him, unknowable. If that was so, how could men kill one another in the name of what they claimed to know of God? He began by asking the question of Muslims, but, no doubt with an eye on history, he addressed it equally to Christians and to those of other religions. It was a question that inevitably led him to confront the issue of the Church's relationship to the Jews. Here are excerpts from what he wrote soon after the fall of Constantinople:

News of the atrocities which have recently been perpetrated by the Turkish king in Constantinople and now have been divulged, has so inflamed a man, who once saw that region, with zeal for God, that amongst many sighs he asked the Creator of all things if in His kindness He might moderate the persecution, which raged more than usual on account of diverse religious rites. Then it occurred that after several days—indeed on account of lengthy, continuous meditation—a vision was manifested to the zealous man, from which he concluded that it would be possible, through the experience of a few wise men who are well acquainted with all the diverse practices which are observed in religions across the world, to find a unique and propitious concordance, and through this to constitute a perpetual peace in religion upon the appropriate and true course."

Nicolaus assumed, of course, the truth of Christian revelation, and he was seeking to discover how that truth was embodied in other faiths, which from one point of view assumes a superior Christian authority. But what is notable about this work is its more basic assumption that all religions embody the truth and that all offer a way to the unknowable God. In his treatise, he goes on, addressing God:

Although the intellectual spirit, which is sown in the earth and is absorbed by shadows, does not see the light and the beginning of its origin, You have nonetheless created in him all that through which he, full of wonder over that which he attains with the senses, is at some time able to elevate his mental eyes to You ... To the various nations, however, You have sent various prophets and masters, the one for this, the other for another time. It is a condition of earthly human nature to defend as truth lengthy custom, which is regarded as part of nature. And thus no small dissensions arise, when any community prefers its beliefs over another's. Therefore come to our assistance, You who alone are powerful. For this rivalry is on account of You, whom alone all venerate in all that they seem to adore.
²⁰

Nicolaus constructs a conversation among a Jew, a Muslim, a Tatar, an Indian, a Persian, a Syrian, a Spaniard, a Turk, a German, a Bohemian, an Englander, a Greek, an Arab, and an Italian. For Christians, he lets Paul speak. Here is an example:

Tatar: "It is proper to keep the commandments of God. But the Jews say they have received these commandments from Moses, the Arabs say they have them from Mohammed, and the Christians from Jesus. And there are perhaps other nations who honor their prophets, through whose hands they assert they have received the divine precepts. Therefore, how shall we arrive at concord?"

Paul: "The divine commandments are very brief and are all well known and common in every nation, for the light that reveals them to us is created along with the rational soul. For within us God says to love Him, from whom we received being, and to do nothing to another, except that which we wish done to us. Love is therefore the fulfillment of the law of God and all laws are reduced to this."
²¹

This is a long way from the burning of Hus, the hauling of
conversos
before inquisitors, and, for that matter, the decrees of the Council of Florence, issued barely a decade before. That may be why "On Peace Among the Faiths" and other works were published in a volume entitled
Toward a New Council of Florence.
As Nicolaus could entertain the elusive thought that the "contraries" united in the "coincidence of opposites" that is God nevertheless retained their distinctive identity, so he could imagine a concord among religions that celebrated what they had in common and still accepted their ongoing independent existence. This is not the difference-obliterating universalism that swallows all religious distinctiveness in a triumphant Christianity. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that before the unknowable God, all religions are finite. Only God is absolute.

Alas, this vision, prophetic in its pluralism, did not take hold. Perhaps it would have, but the absolutizing impulses set loose by the dawn of the Age of Discovery and the coming of the Reformation outweighed such nuance. The simplicities of preachers and radicals and conquistadors were preferred to the complexities of a first humanist theologian. He had reversed the usual method of religious reflection, drawing a theological conclusion about the nature of God from a passionate ethical insight. His moral outrage at slaughter committed in the name of God had forced a new theology, but neither method nor theology would take. His plea would not be heard, which is why the name of Nicolaus of Cusa remains obscure. Instead of his vision of peace among the religions being realized, the opposite happened. A massive cultural shift was under way, and it had deeply unsettling effects on all people. A spirit of agitated skepticism was spreading through Europe, just as the unidentified bacillus had spread a century before. And once again, many Christians, and most of their leaders, moved against doubt in the traditional way—by repressing existential anxiety, defining it as evil, and projecting it especially onto Jews.

As the detritus of the social upheavals of the late fifteenth century rained more and more on the heads of Jews—and, in Spain, on
conversos
—there were Christians who saw what was at stake. They may have lacked the vision and integrity of Nicolaus of Cusa, but in this one area of egregious abuse, at least, they were not indifferent. Nor were they silent. There was Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484), for example, another worldly Renaissance pope. It was he who ordered the beautification of the Sistine Chapel, but it was also he who began the selling of indulgences. But like others of the hedonist pontiffs, and more than the puritanical reforming popes—an irony—Sixtus IV's inclination was to protect Jews.

In Renaissance Rome, Jews were thriving. The coming of humanism to Italy brought unprecedented collaborations, like that between the Christian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) and the Jewish Aristotelian Elijah del Medigo (c. 1450–1493), who participated in friendly exchanges in Pico's home.
²²
Pico was an audacious aristocrat who, at age twenty-three, published a work consisting of nine hundred
conclusiones,
attempting a synthesis of science and religion.
²³
He learned Hebrew and was one of the first Christians to plumb the mysteries of Kabbalah. An apparent syncretist, he could seem to have caught the ecumenical spirit of Nicolaus of Cusa, who died within a year of Pico's birth. But in fact, Pico, like Christian Talmudists before him, sought, with Kabbalah, to prove the all-encompassing truth of Christianity, using Jewish texts, in effect, in a campaign to convert Jews. "The very fundamentals of the Hebrew sages..." he said, "most decisively confirm the Christian religion."
²⁴
Because thirteen of his nine hundred
conclusiones
were suspect, however, Pico himself was labeled a heretic, and arrested.
²⁵
The times had blades. Even intellectual collaboration that Jews could welcome now invariably had an apologetic thrust, and mortal danger lurked in the most abstract of discussions. Still, the give-and-take between Pico and his Jewish masters would bear fruit. His appreciation of Kabbalah, and his appropriation of its method of decoding both texts and observed phenomena, would seed mainstream European thought, helping to lead, for example, to the next century's adoption of the scientific method.
²⁶

Renaissance Jews were advisors and physicians in the papal court. They were teachers of music, theater, and science. Rome was a center of Hebrew literature and publishing. To be sure, there were the usual limits, even special indignities, like the primitive foot race of Jews on the Corso, a feature of the annual carnival.
²⁷
But Sixtus IV, like most of his predecessors, took his role as a defender of Jews from violence more or less for granted.

Yet Sixtus was politically weak. He had set out to consolidate the Papal States, but competition among regional dynasties made it impossible. The pope's troops were being humiliated by those of Naples and Venice. At the critical moment, he could not oppose the powerful young rulers, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose marriage in 1469 had united the two great Iberian kingdoms. When, in 1478, they asked the pope to authorize the establishment of ecclesiastical tribunals to ferret out "crypto-Jews" and Judaizers from among the
conversos
,
²⁸
Sixtus IV would surely have been reluctant. More than twenty years before, the king of Castile, Henry IV, had applied to Rome for similar authorization. Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455), who in another context had cited Saint Paul's rejection of distinctions between Jew and Greek (Romans 10, 12) to reject distinctions between Spain's Old and New Christians,
²⁹
simply never replied.
³⁰

The Inquisition had been active, as we have seen, against heresy in France, Germany, and elsewhere, but the Christian faith had always been regarded as unpolluted in Iberia—despite
convivencia
or, somehow, because of it. The Inquisition had never been wanted or seen as needed on the peninsula, but now, according to rulers and friars together, it was both. Either because he was convinced or because power politics made it impossible for him to resist, Sixtus IV yielded, and gave his approval. This marked the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition.

There was the matter of who would preside over the tribunals. Numerous Dominicans had undertaken investigations throughout Castile and Aragon, but a more ambitious campaign would require a central
(suprema)
administration. Perhaps Sixtus IV, a master of intrigue in his own sphere, knew that one of the Dominican inquisitors was in fact a man of Jewish blood; perhaps Sixtus hoped that such a man would have some capacity for sympathy toward the maligned
conversos.
As it happened, this Dominican was also the confessor to Ferdinand and Isabella. For whatever reason, Sixtus appointed him the first grand inquisitor—Fray Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498). The secret of his Jewish ancestry would, if anything, fuel his hatred. Sixtus and his two successors would try, without success, to restrain him.