Digging at the roots of Christian intolerance

Why buy a book about monks, or check it out from the library? Monks are invisible in our culture nowadays, utterly marginal, even superfluous; it’s even difficult to fathom their existence. If they have an image at all, it is usually one of meekness, compassion and goodwill. More often than not, though, they are a blank to the world at large, or an enigma. Monks are also a measure of our distance from the Middle Ages. Most of us can’t even begin to imagine a world in which monasteries were often at the very center of things, and where monks played a pivotal role in politics and the definition of culture. Much less is anyone prepared, perhaps, to imagine a world in which monks were feisty and intolerant in addition to being powerful. Yet such is the world painstakingly, even brilliantly, reconstructed in Dominique Iogna-Prat’s “Order and Exclusion.”

A renowned French medieval historian, Iogna-Prat argues that the Cluniac monks of the 12th century helped create a new climate of hostility toward “the other” in the Christian West. His villain is the eighth abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (1092-1156), whose polemics against heretics, Jews and Muslims contributed, he charges, to the rise of intolerance in Western Europe. Iogna-Prat claims to have found the taproot of the crusading mentality that is now being ascribed to the entire West by Muslim extremists such as Osama bin Laden. He contends that the Cluniac monks were instrumental in developing the idea of “Christendom,” the notion that all of Western Europe should be considered one religio-political entity with no room for heresy or unbelief of any kind.

In “Order and Exclusion,” Iogna-Prat has written two books: one on monastic history and the other on the history of intolerance. The history of the Cluniac monks, which takes up roughly half the volume, is the most concise and insightful survey yet written of the place of monasticism in medieval society from the 6th to the 12th centuries. Anyone who wishes to understand how monasticism took shape in Western Europe and how it was, exactly, that monks and monasteries fit into the whole of medieval society will find here a superb introduction to the subject that is not only anchored in an impressive array of primary sources but also in constant conversation with other historians through footnotes as dense as the forests of medieval Europe. Though this is a book aimed at scholars, nonspecialists should not fear getting lost. When it comes to clarity of expression and insights into often puzzling complexities, “Order and Exclusion” complements and even rivals Georges Duby’s magnificent “The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined.”

As far as the history of intolerance is concerned, the book’s merits are more problematic, for Iogna-Prat makes some large (and debatable) revisionist claims. Up to now, the Cluniac monks and Peter the Venerable, in particular, have not been linked to intolerance so intensely. Indeed, Peter the Venerable has long been portrayed as a progressive of sorts: He was the first Christian to cite the Talmud; he arranged for the first translation of the Koran into Latin; he gave refuge to the controversial theologian Peter Abelard and helped to reconcile him with his bitterest foe, Bernard of Clairvaux.

Iogna-Prat nonetheless argues that Peter and the Cluniac monks did intensify Christian intolerance, dehumanizing heretics, Jews and Muslims and thus making it easier for them to be excluded, persecuted and killed. His argument is complex and finely nuanced but boldly stated: Peter the Venerable saw the world in a highly polarized way, in black-and-white terms, as a struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, error and truth, God and Satan, and this mentality led him to vilify his opponents and to exclude them from fully human status. Of course, for Peter it was the Catholic Church that was on God’s side, and it was the monks who should be his most active agents on Earth. Given such a worldview, argues Iogna-Prat, it was inevitable that Peter would demonize those who failed to embrace the church.

Is Iogna-Prat right in assigning so crucial a role to Peter and his Cluniac monks in the evolution of Christian intolerance?

Few experts will take issue with his incisive analysis of the role of the Cluniac monks in feudal society or with his close reading of Peter the Venerable’s convictions. Differences of opinion are likely to surface, however, over his assessment of Abbot Peter as an apostle of intolerance. To be sure, Iogna-Prat is always careful with his sources, but he nonetheless strains to prove that there is something especially intense about the abbot’s intolerant rhetoric, perhaps even something new and unique. But it could be argued that Peter is not all that different from earlier Christian apologists and that his rhetoric is derived from tradition.

Abundant evidence of intolerance exists from earlier Christian history. One date alone casts a long shadow of a doubt over Abbot Peter’s contribution to intolerance: 1096, the year the First Crusade was launched. Peter was 4 years old when Christian knights took off to wrest the Holy Land from the “infidels” and when they slaughtered thousands of Jews in Germany and France. Iogna-Prat is aware of this, of course, and mentions it, but finds no way to diminish its challenge to his thesis. The dehumanization of “the other” had long been deeply ingrained in Christian Europe, but this one terrible fact alone might suffice: For centuries, dead heretics, Jews and Muslims by the hundreds and thousands, slain with a relatively clean Christian conscience, had been bearing witness most tragically to the dehumanization later voiced by Peter the Venerable.

Whether or not Peter the Venerable and the monks of Cluny really made a unique contribution to the development of intolerance in medieval Europe remains uncertain. Exclusion is deeply ingrained in all three monotheistic religions. Excluders and excluded share common traits, since they are “the other” to one another. Exclusion is always potentially there beneath the surface in religions that claim to have sole access to Truth with a capital T. What Voltaire said about God also applies here: If “the other” did not exist, it would have to be invented.

“Order and Exclusion” is excellent at showing how changes in exclusionary practices have often been a byproduct of power shifts, bubbling up to the surface because of changes in the social, political or economic fabric of society. No matter how unsettled the question of causality remains in this book, it nonetheless brings us closer to understanding this process in the history of Christian Europe. For that reason alone, “Order and Exclusion” is indispensable reading, especially for anyone trying to understand the deep roots of the religiously inspired fanaticisms that still bedevil us in the 21st century.