[Serious] Book reports

[Belacqua]

@Grandizer asked:

And what exactly is Christian about the Crusades?

I guess the Crusades were Christian because they were done by people who called themselves Christians.

Some people, who feel certain about a sort of true core or essence of Christianity, might argue that the Crusades weren't really Christian, but I'm not one of those people. I have said many times before that I see the label Christianity as a big baggy category of things, many of which are incompatible.

Here are some things Holland says about the Crusades:

In the Book of Revelation it was foretold that, at the end of days, an angel
would gather grapes from the earth’s vine, and trample them in the winepress of
God’s wrath, and that blood would flow out of the press, and rise as high as a
horse’s bridle. The passage was one that Gregory’s followers knew well. One
bishop who had travelled in Urban’s train to Clermont openly wondered whether
it was the enemies of reformatio who were destined to be crushed in the final
harvest. In the event, though, it was not on the battlegrounds of the papacy’s
great conflict with Henry IV that blood would be made to flow through the
streets, but in Jerusalem. Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous effect.
A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West had taken a familiar
road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time of the millennium, they had
journeyed across Hungary to Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to
the Holy Land. Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them they had defeated.
Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims had arrived
before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls. The city was theirs. Then,
once the slaughter was done, and they had dried their dripping swords, they
headed for the tomb of Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises
to God. Jerusalem – after centuries of Saracen rule – was Christian once again.
So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable – and the news
redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy. Urban himself died a fortnight
after the city’s capture, too soon for news of the great victory that he had
inspired to reach him; but the programme of reform to which he had devoted his
life was much burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the
time of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of Christ;
but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage. Warriors present at the
capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a beautiful person sitting atop a white
horse’19 – and there were some prepared to wonder if it might not have been
Christ himself. Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one
thing was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king or
emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.
But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West, the word starting
to be used was one that, until the capture of Jerusalem, had barely been heard.
The warrior pilgrims, so it came to be said, had fought under the banner of
Christianitas: Christendom. Such a categorisation – divorced as it was from the
dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords – was one well suited
to the ambitions of the papacy.

And on page 223:

Back in 1095, when Urban II had summoned the warriors of Christendom
to set out for the Holy Land, he had instructed them, as a symbol of their vow, to
wear the sign of the cross. Now, in July 1209, when an immense army of knights
unmatched since the time of Urban assembled at Lyon, they too were
crucesignati: ‘signed with the cross’. It marked them as pilgrims who, like their
Saviour, were so aflame with love of mankind that they were ready to be killed
in the cause of redeeming them from hell. ‘The cross that is fixed to your coats
with a soft thread,’ a preacher reminded them, ‘was fixed to His flesh with iron
nails.’26 Even those in the path of the great force as it lumbered down the Rhine
and then along the coast towards the town of Béziers could recognise in the
invaders a formidable sense of identification with the sufferings of Christ. A
crozada, they called the campaign: a ‘crusade’. Yet although the word would in
time be applied retrospectively to the great expedition that had been launched by
Urban, the crusade against the Albigensians was war of a kind that Christians
had never fought before. It was not, as Charlemagne’s campaigns against the
Saxons had been, an exercise in territorial expansion; nor was it, in the manner
of the crusades that aimed at the liberation of Jerusalem, an armed pilgrimage to
a destination of transcendent holiness. Rather, it had as its goal the extirpation of
dangerous beliefs. Only blood could wash Christendom clean of the pollution
presented to the Christian people by heresy.

In the interview, Holland emphasizes the paradox of going to kill people who fail to love correctly. He points to this as an enduring and unsolvable result of Christian influence, in which the "enlightened" group has to deal with people who refuse to be enlightened. He mentions the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution as cases where dreams of a loving and moral future end up making people commit mass murder. (He doesn't mention the modern U.S.'s practice killing lots of people in order to bring peace to the Middle East and elsewhere.) Again, he sees this as something that could not have happened without Christianity or Christian ways of thinking. Pre-Christian rulers were clearer, that their invasions were for power and resources.

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Grandizer:

I see secularism as a response to centuries of religious rule but it need not have been Christian. Secular Christianity necessarily must be Christian, I suppose, but not secularism in general.

Holland posits that the very idea of a separation of church and state was suggested first by Christians.

Personally, I don't know about everywhere, but in Greece and Rome the rituals that we modern people call "religious" were largely conducted for or by the government. Emperors were said to be divine, etc. There was some division of labor, just because no one can do everything, but the idea that what we do "religiously" and what we do "in non-religious life" wasn't clearly divided.

There's an old British joke, that religion is like drinking: it's a fine thing as long as it doesn't interfere with your daily life. This is an expression of secularism that, Holland claims, wouldn't have made much sense before about the time of Augustine.

Augustine, looking about him at the great cities of the world, at Rome, and
Carthage, and Milan, had imagined the City of God as a pilgrim, unshackled by
worldly cares. ‘There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness;
instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.’31 This, when supplicants
ventured through the woods that surrounded Luxeuil and approached the
settlement founded by Columbanus, was what they hoped to find. The very wall
that enclosed the monastery, raised by the saint’s own hand, proclaimed the
triumph of the City of God over that of man. The shattered fragments of bathhouses
and temples had been built into its fabric: pillars, pediments, broken
statuary. These, converted to the uses of religio, were the bric-à-brac of what
Augustine, two centuries previously, had identified as the order of the saeculum.
The word had various shades of meaning. Originally, it had signified the span of
a human life, whether defined as a generation, or as the maximum number of
years that any one individual could hope to live: a hundred years. Increasingly,
though, it had come to denote the limits of living recollection. Throughout
Rome’s history, from its earliest days to the time of Constantine, games to mark
the passing of a saeculum had repeatedly been held: ‘a spectacle such as no one
had ever witnessed, nor ever would again’.32 This was why Augustine, looking
for a word to counterpoint the unchanging eternity of the City of God, had seized
upon it. Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their
memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so
Augustine declared, were saecularia – ‘secular things’.33

Augustine's new use of the word came to be widespread. From page 197:

The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers – of a
Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top
to bottom, from palace to meanest village – no longer appeared a fantasy, but
eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and
meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian
people as a model of purity, and bring them to God. No longer would it be
monasteries and nunneries alone that stood separate from the flux of the
saeculum, but the entire Church. Bishops who pledged themselves to the
radicalism of this vision could reassure themselves that it was in reality nothing
new, nothing out of tune with the teachings of their Saviour. In the gospels, after
all, it was recorded that Jesus, approached by questioners looking to trip him up,
had been asked whether it was permitted to pay taxes to pagan Rome. Telling
them to show him a coin, he had asked them whose image was stamped on it.
‘Caesar’s,’ they had replied. ‘Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ Jesus had
answered, ‘and to God what is God’s.’14
Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil
of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the
‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a
spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the
distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the
profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West,
‘for the first time and permanently’.15

So I agree with you, that "it need not have been Christian." If Mithraism had taken over, it might have been Mithraic. But in the history we actually have, the distinction came about through Christian thought.