Excellent though biased account of Europe and Islam in the Dark Ages

Christendom ceased to exist centuries ago, as Europe, once united under pope and emperor, proceeded in the Reformation, Enlightenment and thereafter to reject its religious heritage while trying to retain a sense of European identity and unity. The European Union currently incarnates the latest secularized attempt at a culturally, economically and politically united continent.

As hard as current European politicians and mythmakers try to exterminate the ghosts of Christendom past, however, its inhabitants cannot fully move into a value-free, ahistorical postmodern reality. In other words, Europe and its people carry heavy baggage from the past.

In "God's Crucible," a riveting, fast-paced, extremely well-written book, David Levering Lewis explains why Islam and Europe have such deep, controversial and uncomfortable holds on each other. He follows in a long line of historians who depict the making of Europe as largely a reaction to not only the breakdown of the Roman Empire, but to the subsequent unleashing of Islam into the vacuum.

Christendom defined itself in opposition to the "new religion." Europenses, as some of the Latinate monks called the Christian people of Europe, defined themselves for centuries as inhabiting the civilization of light, and the Saracens, a common medieval Christian name for Muslims, as troops of the Antichrist.

Lewis does us all a favor by showing how things were actually much more complicated than that. Yes, wars of religion unleashed tremendous power and violence. But Islam succeeded in its initial expansion out of Arabia not on the backs of countless hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs. Arab Muslims succeeded largely because of a huge vacuum left by constant wars between the Roman and Persian empires, who for centuries violently bumped up against each other in modern Iraq, Armenia and Arabia.

Once these empires had exhausted themselves, and buffer states between Arabia and the Fertile Crescent (countries to the north of Arabia controlled by one or the other empire) had also collapsed, occasional Arab raids into places like Syria became more common, organized and effective, especially as the Arabs became more confident in themselves and more convinced of their divine mission.

Lewis highlights the excessive damage caused to the Roman and, later, Byzantine empires in their persecution of nonorthodox Christians, such as the Nestorians, and Jews. Both groups of people tended to see the Muslims as liberators or at least as being less obnoxious than the empires representing Christian orthodoxy. Alienated from their own states, they accepted Islamic overlordship at the price of an extra tax.

Contrary to popular belief that has traveled down the centuries, Muslims were usually not excessively violent toward the populations they conquered, nor did they force conversions.

Inner-Christian and inner-Roman/Byzantine squabbling, even in the face of Islam, led to the weakening of the papacy, especially as the Germanic peoples intensified their centuries of wandering the entire continent of Europe, reaching and sacking Rome more than once and adopting the heretical Arian version of Christianity:

"The Holy Father had few illusions about the efficacy of Scripture, crucifixes or holy relics to turn away the threatening (Germanic) horde. ... For a good many decades, it seemed that the decline of Catholicism and the rise of Arianism was as inescapable as had been the fall of Rome. Drowning in a hostile sea with no hope of rescue from the Arian Lombards by the Second Rome (the Byzantine Empire), the Roman pontiffs anxiously scanned the confessional horizon for an ally among the multitudinous wild men beyond the Alps."

Great writing, and these words regarding the bleak situation give hope to us today, as Catholics and our pope are also under a power siege. "God's Crucible" often gets into the nitty-gritty of countless battles and political or theological intrigue, as concerning the heirs to Charlemagne. Yet Lewis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this book, is also great at summing up in a few lines complicated, far-reaching pieces of political and religious history.

Lewis adopts the postmodern approach to history, Christianity and belief, and this weakens the book. Like many today, he seems to need to apologize for the supposedly narrow, imperialistic ways of Christianity, yet fails to apply the same standard to non-Christian, non-European pieces of history.

He also tends to assume that religion is inherently violent: "Bitterness of the mindlessly masochistic intensity that only religious hatreds can engender may well have roiled the populations' factions to such an intensity that Copts and Orthodox raced one another to make the best surrender terms."

Lewis fails to admit how Christianity often tempered the extremely warlike tendencies of the Middle Ages or to show, as in the above case, that violence related to Christian theological disputes reflected the brutality of the Dark Ages rather than any inherent bloodthirstiness to Christianity.

Despite these biases, "God's Crucible" is well worth the money, time and effort.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops