BOOK REVIEWS: Crusades Examined in New Light, But Not Enough Light

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) “The First Crusade: A New History,” by Thomas Asbridge (Oxford University Press, 408 pages, $35) The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks brought into high profile the sometimes tension-fraught relationship between Islam and Christianity. In the United States, where religious diversity and pluralism were not real factors until the last decades […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “The First Crusade: A New History,” by Thomas Asbridge (Oxford University Press, 408 pages, $35)

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks brought into high profile the sometimes tension-fraught relationship between Islam and Christianity. In the United States, where religious diversity and pluralism were not real factors until the last decades of the 20th century, the long and complex history of the interaction between the two faiths has been little known and even less understood.


That could have made Thomas Asbridge’s new book, “The First Crusade: A New History,” a valuable contribution to the post-Sept. 11 spate of volumes attempting to explain Islam to American Christian believers.

Asbridge’s thesis, implied in his subtitle _ “The Roots of the Conflict Between Christianity and Islam” _ is that the four-year adventure to wrest Jerusalem from Muslim control that began in November 1095 and mobilized some 100,000 people marked a watershed in relations between Islam and the West and set the two faiths on a course of deep-seated animosity that often expressed itself in violence.

While his description of the unprecedented faith-based military campaign in all its complex chaos is vivid and well-told and is replete with new and convincing interpretations of a number of scholarly disputes, he ultimately fails to make the case that the First Crusade was the watershed his subtitle promises, in part because the story is told almost exclusively from the Christian point of view.

Still, this is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the crusades, the crusader ideal and the remarkable mobilization of the tens of thousands of people _ from the very rich to the very poor _ who left their homes and way of life to make this violent pilgrimage, which ended with the capture of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099.

Asbridge excels in bringing to life the rich complexity of motives _ the spiritual fears and economic enticement _ that propelled knight and peasant alike on the long and grueling campaign. He certainly lays to rest the shibboleth that the crusade was only about plunder and greed. “Devotion inspired Europe to crusade, and on the road to Jerusalem the First Crusaders proved time and again that their most powerful weapon was a shared sense of purpose and indestructible spiritual resolution.”

At the same time, Asbridge’s reading of the sources lead him to conclude the spiritual reasons motivating many crusaders were not simple.

“Their struggle to re-conquer Jerusalem was not primarily powered by any passionate allegiance to the church, nor by a dutiful desire to defend Christendom. They suffered the horrors of the crusade to fulfill an intimate and ultimately self-serving need: to overcome their desperate fear of damnation and emerge, purified, at the gates of heaven.”


And he notes how the crusade’s ragged but ultimate success seemed to confirm God’s support for the notion of “sanctified violence” and how over the next century “a crusading `movement’ gradually emerged, transforming European history.”

Asbridge is also first-rate in examining how the crusading message _ Pope Urban II instigated the crusade and “harnessed society’s inclination to define itself in contrast to an alien `other”’ _ unleashed a flood of anti-Semitism as the crusaders made their way through central and eastern Europe in what has been called “the first holocaust” and what Asbridge describes as “one of the blackest, most bloodthirsty episodes in all medieval history.”

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“The Poems of Rowan Williams,” by Rowan Williams (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., paperback, 111 pages, $12)

Before he became archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, the Rev. Rowan Williams, Welsh theologian (“On Christian Theology”) and commentator on contemporary spiritual issues (“Writing in the Dust: After Sept. 11”), was also a poet _ and quite a good one at that.

Now, Wm. B. Eerdmans has gathered the poems from Williams’ two previous slim volumes, the 1994 “After Silent Centuries” and the 2001 “Remembering Jerusalem,” along with a handful of more recent poems and translations from Raina Maria Rilke and three Welsh poets. Williams is not an easy poet and these 65 spare but eloquent works do not yield easily, if at all, to paraphrase. But the imagery, stark and startling, like that of his fellow Welsh divine, R.S. Thomas, resonates and remains in the consciousness long after the book is laid aside.

The subject matter ranges broadly _ from a visit to the Holy Land to Thomas Merton, Bach and Bosnia to the paintings of Gwen Johns, natural landscapes and Russian icons, among others. The stress is often on looking outside oneself _ in sharp contrast not only to much contemporary poetry but also much contemporary spirituality.


“Finding words and images to convey the effect of something not ourselves expands our capacity to understand and empathize with others, human and otherwise,” writes Phoebe Pettingell in a useful introduction.

Human _ and divine _ suffering is a key theme as these two stanzas from “Twelfth Night” about the Magi’s visit to the Christ child make clear:

Behind the stars no happy end,

no dissolution of our scars,

no garden plot, no spilling grass:

the cot is empty.

Where has the child gone, to what fire,

what rubbish bin, what coins were laid

to close his eyes? Give us at least

the choice to send flowers.

His poetry is studded with memorable images. In “Advent Calendar,” he can write, “He will come like last leaf’s fall” and, in “Penhys,” about a low-income housing estate, of “the bloody stubbornness of getting someone born.” In “Murchison Falls,” he writes of how “The mica/shines in the rock as though the spray/has petrified.”

Poetry, says Pettingell, is a kind of incarnation _ the word made flesh. And like the Incarnation, where the difficulty of grasping the totality of the concept is hidden in the simple figure of a baby in a manger, the challenge of the best poetry is often equally difficult. Williams’ slim volume is not easy going, but the rewards are worth the effort.

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“Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season,” edited by Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch, illustrations by Mary Azarian (SkyLight Paths Publishing, 299 pages, $22.99)

“Autumn, A Spiritual Biography of the Season” is the second installment of SkyLight Path’s explorations of the seasons, following last year’s volume on winter.


The writers included in this wide-ranging anthology span a spectrum from the biblical Book of Ruth, which opens each of the book’s five sections (Change, Endings, Work, Harvest and Thanksgiving), to Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, to mystery writer P.D. James and poet May Sarton. More expectedly, there are Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry.

It is a cliche to say that such gatherings are always uneven, but the larger truth here is that a particular selection may not always resonate with the reader’s mood. Yet that is one of the strengths of such collections _ to offer some challenges, a fresh angle of vision. As Thoreau writes, “Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills.”

One of the more interesting _ and unexpected _ sections is a gathering of poems by poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the literary and artistic flowering of African-American creativity in the mid-1920s: “Change me, oh God,” Esther Popel writes in her “October Prayer,” “Into a tree in autumn/And let my dying/Be a blaze of glory.”

“Autumn,” the editors write in the preface, “is that season in between: not summer, though still somewhat like summer, and not winter, though still somewhat like winter. It is the season that does not seem to progress _ like spring _ as much as it juggles blazing opposites in a great circle.”

This collection is a fine harvest of some of the best that has been written about the season and will be a fine source for reflection and contemplation _ in season and out.

MO/PH END DEA

(David E. Anderson is the senior editor of Religion News Service)

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