Rethinking the Crusades, Part I

The City of the Skull

We have enjoyed reading Rodney Stark's God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (New York: HarperOne, 2009). It is a fine piece of anti-revisionist history. We have also enjoyed Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem, The Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2011) which covers some of the same ground from a different perspective.

The Crusades have never been a cause celebre amongst Protestant Churches, nor, we imagine, amongst those Roman Catholic believers who have eschewed papo-Caesarism. In the West, the Crusades were largely approbated by secularists during the imperialist and colonialist eras--as a proto-manifestation of Western superiority and imperialist pretensions. Then, as imperialism fell out of favour in the twentieth century, historians have tended to gloss the Crusades as a great evil. The rise of Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism have resulted in the Islamic world in general endorsing this new narrative, employing it effectively in their propaganda.

Stark's recent work serves as an effective call to re-think the whole phenomenon of the Crusades, and the revisionist narratives of our day. We will endeavour to do just that in a short series of posts.

The first stake which must be put firmly in the ground, it seems to us, is to get our position right on the significance of Jerusalem and Palestine per se--that is, ensure our position conforms to Scriptural revelation. Montefiore argues, grandiloquently it seems to us, that Jerusalem is the centre of world history. It is a spiritually false claim, yet, we admit, with a good deal of empirical evidence, which says a lot about the stubbornness of Unbelief. In this regard he quotes Benjamin Disraeli: "The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more; it is the history of heaven and earth." It is true that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity have all made Jerusalem to be a special and holy place. However, in the case of Christianity this has been a deceptive idolatry--a superstitious perversion of the Christian faith, and a denial of redemptive history and the work of the Christ.

But Montefiore also acknowledges that Jerusalem is a city of death. We believe that one of the most penetrating paragraphs in his magnum opus is this:

Death is our constant companion: pilgrims have long come to Jerusalem to die and be buried around the Temple Mount to be ready to rise again in the Apocalypse, and they continue to come. The city is surrounded by and founded upon cemeteries; the wizened body-parts of ancient saints are revered--the dessicated blackened right hand of Mary Magdalene is still displayed in the Greek Orthodox Superior's Room in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many shrines, even many private houses, are built around tombs.

The darkness of this city of the dead stems not just from a sort of necrophilia, but also from necromancy: the dead here are almost alive, even as they await the resurrection. The unending struggle for Jerusalem--massacres, mayhem, wars, terrorism, sieges and catastrophes--have made this place into a battlefield, in Aldous Huxley's words the 'slaughterhouse of the religions', in Faubert's a 'charnel house'. Melville called the city a 'skull' besieged by 'armies of the dead'; while Edward Said remembered that his father had hated Jerusalem because it 'reminded him of death'.
(Montefiore, Jerusalem: the Biography, p. xix)

"A skull besieged by the armies of the dead". We wonder whether Melville himself understood just how profoundly perceptive his phrase continues to be. Into that city is heaped up many of the perversions of the Christian faith, together with the idolatries of Judaism and Islam, all claiming that this is the Holy Place. It has become a Babel of Unbelief--a monument to the folly of rebellion against the Lord and His Christ. Montefiore puts it well:

Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city's asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason."
(Ibid., p. xxi)

Now we do not wish to descend into brute philistinism here. Jerusalem has architecture, art, artifacts, museums and religious buildings which portray its history--but then so does every old city in the world. These have their own interest and fascination. But so does 2000 year old Chinese pottery. And, yes, we are interested in the archaeology, geography and topography of Israel to help shed light upon redemptive history, as recorded in Genesis, I and II Samuel, the Gospels and so forth. But that is it. Beyond that the earthly city of Jerusalem has no significance whatsoever in the Kingdom of God--except as a warning to apostates and Unbelievers.

Before the work of making propitiation for the sins of His people--of those the Father had given Him--our Lord pronounced a final doom upon Jerusalem: "Behold, your house is being left to you desolate." (Matthew 23: 38) From that time forward, Jerusalem had played no further part and has no further place in redemptive history and in the Kingdom of God. It is covenantally, spiritually desolate. A waste place.

The repeated successive attempts to rebuild it into a Christian shrine or place of spiritual significance is not only a grave error, it is a rebellious idolatry of the first order. It was under Constantine that the first imperial attempts were made to "sanctify" Jerusalem and to confuse the heavenly city with the earthly desolation. Even so, the Church's great teachers of the time animadverted against making Jerusalem a holy place, a place of pilgrimage.

As Rodney Stark acutely observes:

. . . Jerome did not think it at all important for anyone to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and many early church fathers condemned or ridiculed the practice. Saint Augustine (354-430) denounced pilgrimages, Saint John Chrysostom (344-407) mocked them, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) pointed out that pilgrimages were nowhere suggested in the Bible and that Jerusalem was a rather unattractive and sinful city. Jerome agreed, noting that it was full of "prostitutes . . . [and] the dregs of the whole world gathered there."
(Stark, op cit., p.81f.)

But the pilgrims, led at first by Byzantine female aristocracy, gradually mounted in number, until they became a torrent.

. . . by the end of the fifth century there were more than three hundred hostels and monasteries offering lodging to pilgrims in the city of Jerusalem alone. If we assume that on average each of these could accommodate twenty guests, that would he been a daily capacity of six thousand, which is suggestive of very heavy travel, given that the resident population of the city at that time was only about ten thousand.
(Stark, ibid., p. 82)

The resurrection of Jerusalem as a Holy City was (and is) a perversion of the Christian faith and of redemptive history. It should never have happened--and would not have, had church leaders, teachers, and Christians paid more attention to their Bibles than to superstitions. The spawn of all this was to build the city of the skull, besieged by the armies of the dead.

What God makes desolate, let not man try to rebuild--especially in His Name. Here lies the root problem with the Crusades.