Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (10 page)

Come, O ye sons of Greeks,

Make free your country, make your children free,

Your wives, and fanes of your ancestral gods,

And your sires’ tombs! For all we now contend!
¹⁰

After the Persians were defeated, the Greek city-states fell again to fighting among themselves. The Greeks were saved from mutual destruction only by Alexander the Great’s power to unite them in a war to end the outside Persian threat once and for all. In the process, a brief but magnificent Greek Empire was forged from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas, which paved the way for regular commerce between the western and eastern ends of Eurasian civilization in goods and technology, art and architecture, and religious and natural philosophy.

Aristotle was one of the most rational and precise philosophers who ever lived, and his reason and clarity no doubt helped to form his pupil Alexander. But Alexander’s passion and imagination far transcended his teacher’s. Where Aristotle taught that the independent city-state was the ideal polity, Alexander merged the Greek city-states into a springboard for launching the first world empire. Where Aristotle taught preference for friends and family, Alexander forced his generals to marry into other cultures, which he considered full and equal members of the human family.

Alexander was willing to challenge the old gods and dare their lightning bolts to strike. He created the dream of a unified political world to attain some better life for all. Only, he lacked an overarching moral framework, such as monotheism, to enable his successors to solidify his achievements and advance that dream. Even earlier, Gautama Buddha taught that all people are of the same family and that the greater the harmony of their relationships with one another and the natural world, the better for our universe. But he abandoned the political will and engines, such as those that Rome would wed to monotheism, to make enduring material progress.

Along the edge of dreams between soaring hopes and the abyss, human history has been driving up a steepening grade, fueled by religion in fits of war and peace.

THE REPUBLIC OF GOD (CHRISTENDOM)

What is the other commonwealth that remains standing now that the mundane commonwealth, embodied in the Roman Empire, has fallen?

—SAINT AUGUSTINE, THE CITY OF GOD [
DE CIVITATE DEI
],
ON WHAT SURVIVED AND THRIVED AFTER THE VISIGOTH
SACK OF ROME IN
A.D.
410

By the time of Jesus Christ, two millennia ago, four great neighboring polities spanned Eurasia’s middle latitudes: the Roman Empire, the Parthian Empire centered in Persia and Mesopotamia, the Kushan Empire of Central Asia and Northern India, and the Han Empire of China and Korea. The Kushan Empire had diplomatic links with the other three, and all four were linked by a network of trade routes, known to posterity as the Silk Road. It’s along the Silk Road that Eurasia’s three universalist moral religions—Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism—continued to interact, mutating from their respective territorial and tribal origins into the three proselytizing, globalizing religions that today vie for the soul of humanity—Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

The three globalizing religions created two new concepts in human thought: individual free choice and collective humanity. People not born into these religions could, in principle, choose to belong (or remain outside), without regard to ethnicity, tribe, or territory. The mission of these religions was to extend moral salvation to all peoples, not just to a “Chosen People” who would light the way for others.

Still, it took some time for universal religion to overcome psychologically deep-seated ethnic and tribal biases. Although Christianity had declared people of all tribes and nations to be human beings, and potentially salvable, there was still the problem of figuring out which earthly creatures were indeed human. In 1322, Sir John Maundeville described the peoples of the known world, who became less human the farther they were from England and Christianity:

In Ethopia, the children, when young are all yellow; and when they grow older that yellowness turns to black…. Afterwards men go by many isles by sea to an isle called Milk, where [there] are very cursed people; for they delight in nothing more than to fight and slay men; and they drink gladly man’s blood, which they call Dieu…. And thence they go by sea from isle to isle, to an isle called Tracoda, the inhabitants of which are beasts, and unreasonable, and dwell in caves which they make in the earth, for they have not sense to make houses…. And they eat flesh of serpents, and they speak naught, but hiss, as serpents do. After that isle, men go by the Sea of Ocean, by many isles, to a great and fair isle called Nacumera, which is in circuit more than a thousand miles. And all the men and women of that isle have dog’s heads; and … they worship an ox for their god.
¹¹

Christianity, which merged Hebrew tribal belief in monotheism with Greek belief in universal laws applicable to the whole of creation, originated the inclusive concept of Humanity, the idea that all cultures and civilizations fell under one transcendent set of rules. Before universal monotheism, there was no notion of humanity in the sense of all humans being of a kind, and thus no idea of saving humankind for the “good,” or of a recalcitrant and residual part of humanity rejecting salvation because they were “bad” and “evil.”

During its first three centuries, Christianity gradually but inexorably won the hearts and minds of the Roman Empire’s majority population of slaves, women, and the educated Greek-speaking minorities through true works of charity. Sociologist Rodney Stark shows that when plague struck, Romans of every rank would leave their own diseased relatives to die without food or water, but Christians would risk their own lives to tend the non-Christian sick, and elevated compassion over hardness.
¹²
Christianity achieved political control of the empire in the fourth century with Constantine’s conversion. But by then Christianity had already become the majority religion of the empire through social networking and natural increase of a few percent each year over the previous centuries.

The institutions of Christianity survived Rome’s fall in the fifth century, as the Catholic Church emerged to stitch together the western empire’s broken pieces. But Christendom began turning from charity to violence in its mission to save humanity, and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages. By the mid-eighth century, Christendom was in lethal competition with Islam, a new variant of messianic monotheism.

As the Middle Ages tailed off in Western Europe and the second millennium began, power struggles ensued between the Western Church of Latin Rome and the Eastern Church of Greek Constantinople, and between the Roman Church and the Frank and German emperors. By the tenth century, Eastern Christians routinely denounced Western Christians as poor, uncultured barbarians. Westerners condemned Easterners as preoccupied with material wealth, effeminate, devious, wicked, and cowardly (in hiring others to fight their battles). In 1054, the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other.

The Roman Catholic will to dominate Europe and the Middle East began at the Abbaye de Cluny in France (then the building encompassing the largest indoor space in the world—like the Pentagon today). From there, in 1073, the future Pope Gregory VII started preaching a doctrine of conquest for Christ that forbade Christians to kill other Christians who agreed with Gregory, but forgave killing all other people, especially “Saracens” (Muslims) and Jews. The monks of Abbaye de Cluny took control of the papacy and launched the Crusades to unite Christendom in a great moral campaign to recapture the Holy Land from the followers of Mohammed. The First Crusade was driven also by divine promise of limitless booty and forgiveness for any imaginable cruelty toward non-Christians.

The Crusades officially began in 1095 under Pope Urban, Gregory’s successor and kindred spirit. He wanted to consolidate Christendom under Roman Church rule through a military campaign that would channel Europe’s self-predatory and economically ruinous feudal factions into a united mission to recapture the Holy Land from Islam. Although the First Crusade was partly justified as a response to a call from the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Roman Empire for help against expansion of the Muslim Seljuk Turks into Anatolia, Byzantium itself was also a target of papal ambitions.

The initial crusader wave, led by Peter the Hermit, was composed of tens of thousands of Western European peasants and vagabonds who had just barely survived a horrendous decade of famine, drought, and plague.
¹³
Urban promptly announced that as long as those who killed and pillaged did not turn back until they either died or reached Jerusalem, God would fulfill all of their material needs and remit all of their sins in this world and the next. The first to be looted and massacred were the Jews of Germany, in Worms, Mainz, Cologne, and elsewhere.

After ferrying the crusaders across the Bosporus Straits, Byzantine Christians reported their horror at witnessing the crusading knights and peasants skewering and roasting children on spits, as the invaders advanced from Nicaea in Anatolia (where many of the victims were actually Cappadocian Christians living under Turkish rule) to Marj Uyun in the Lebanon. When the soldiers finally took Jerusalem in 1099, they celebrated their victory by burning alive all the Jews they could find, massacring Muslim women and children, and destroying most mosques and every synagogue in the Holy City.
¹⁴

In 1204, the “Pirate Crusade” ravaged Constantinople. The treasure and riches of Byzantium shifted to Venice and other city-states in northern Italy, spurring Europe’s Renaissance. The final blow to Byzantium was the Muslim conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Ottoman Turks.

For a thousand years, between the fall of the Rome and the fall of Constantinople, Byzantium had resisted onslaught from all sides. Without this resistance, it is unlikely that Western Europe would have survived Asian invasions to reconstitute its civilization or that Arab civilization would have received the influx of Western knowledge and talent that allowed it to flourish. The political and economic organization of the Ottoman Muslim Empire was the stepchild of Byzantium, and the Orthodox Russian Empire was Byzantium’s natural-born heir.

During the sixteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition treated converted Jews as the gravest mortal danger to humanity’s immortal salvation, because they hid themselves like vermin from discovery and proper treatment. But it would be wrong to think that the crusading papacy was merely destructive, for at the same time it created Western civilization, uniting the fractious, feudal Germanic tribes with remnants of ruined Rome. The aim of the Crusades was not only to reclaim the Holy Land and to rescue the Eastern Christians from the Turks, but to liberate the Church from interference from secular powers, to forestall the anarchy and plunder of those same powers, and to purify the clergy from the greedy sins of concubinage and financial corruption. The overarching idea was to create an unimpeachable moral order for Europe that could eventually be extended to the rest of the world.

The innovation of the Church of Rome was the idea of spiritual unity that could permit political diversity. This allowed the Church to lure in such heathen warrior kingdoms as Hungary and Poland without demanding that they sacrifice political independence. This
Republica Christiana
was novel in world history for its internal political variety, comparative liberty, and competition. In principle, it had no problem in allowing Europe’s various kingdoms and principalities to develop the material side of culture as each saw fit—trade and roads, building and monuments, civic councils and assemblies, arms and armies, ships and exploration—so long as developments did not tear apart the spiritual unity of Europe’s social fabric.

The creative force of the papacy at this time, notes historian Arnold Toynbee, “was displayed, not in the ‘holy wars’ of the crusading Church Militant, but in a fruitful patronage of such promising institutions as the universities and the religious Orders [rediscovering the Greeks, thanks to the Arabs], and in the triumphant enlistment of the best talents of Christendom in the service of the Holy See.”
¹⁵
The spirit of science and exploration began to shift back westward, but with an allowance for diversity and competition that would rapidly lead to cumulative advances and breakthroughs in knowledge and technology, warfare and commerce on a scale vastly greater than anything that had ever come before. Like the Greek city-states that first inspired Western civilization, the dynastic and territorial states of Christian Europe formed a creative brew of cultural unity and cooperation, fervent competition and variety that would eventually drive the entire world on to a new level of interaction and innovation.

GOD WITHDRAWS

Upon the establishment of vast overseas empires, beginning in the fifteenth century, kings and princes started to gain the upper hand over the Church. With the resources of these new empires and the help of the merchant class to manage and distribute these resources, the great nobles of northern Europe fanned a Protestant Reformation that challenged the moral dominion of the Catholic Church. The Reformation, which began in 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, fractured Western Christendom, shaking the foundations of faith. This was barely half a century after the fall of Constantinople.