The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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our own preoccupations and dilemmas. The first of these events occurred on January 2, when the armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs whose marriage had recently united the old Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, conquered the city-state of Granada. With deep emotion, the crowd watched the Christian banner raised ceremonially upon the city walls and, as the news broke, bells pealed triumphantly all over Europe, for Granada was the last Muslim stronghold in Christendom. The Crusades against Islam in the Middle East had failed, but at least the Muslims had been flushed out of Europe. In 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain were given the option of conversion to Christianity or deportation, after which, for a few centuries, Europe would become Muslim-free. The second event of this momentous year happened on March 31, when Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Edict of Expulsion, designed to rid Spain of its Jews, who were given the choice of baptism or deportation. Many Jews were so attached to “al-Andalus” (as the old Muslim kingdom had been called) that they converted to Christianity and remained in Spain, but about 80,000 Jews crossed the border into Portugal, while 50,000 fled to the new Muslim Ottoman empire, where they were given a warm welcome.1 The third event concerned one of the people who had been present at the Christian occupation of Granada. In August, Christopher Columbus, a protégé of Ferdinand and Isabella, sailed from Spain to find a new trade route to India but discovered the Americas instead.
These events reflect both the glory and the devastation of the early modern period. As the voyage of Columbus showed so powerfully, the people of Europe were on the brink of a new world. Their horizons were broadening, they were entering hitherto uncharted realms, geographically, intellectually, socially, economically, and politically. Their achievements would make them masters of the globe. But modernity had a darker side. Christian Spain was one of the most powerful and advanced kingdoms in Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella were in the process of creating one of the modern centralized states that were also appearing in other parts of Christendom. Such a kingdom could not tolerate the old autonomous, self-governing institutions, such as the guild, the corporation, or the Jewish community, which had characterized the medieval period. The unification of Spain, which was completed by the conquest of Granada, was succeeded by an act of ethnic cleansing, and Jews and Muslims lost their homes. For some people, modernity was empowering, liberating, and enthralling. Others experienced it—and would continue to experience it—as coercive, invasive, and destructive. As Western modernity spread to other parts of the earth, this pattern would continue. The modernizing program was enlightening and would eventually promote humane values, but it was also aggressive. During the twentieth century, some of the people who experienced modernity primarily as an assault would become fundamentalists.
But that was far in the future. In the late fifteenth century, the people of Europe could not have foreseen the enormity of the change they had initiated. In the course of the next three hundred years, Europe would not only transform its society politically and economically, but also achieve an intellectual revolution. Scientific rationalism would become the order of the day, and would gradually oust the older habits of mind and heart. We shall look at the Great Western Transformation, as this period has been called, in more detail in Chapter 3. Before we can appreciate its full implications, however, we must first look at the way that people in the premodern era experienced the world. In the universities of Spain, students and teachers excitedly discussed the new ideas of the Italian Renaissance. The voyage of Columbus would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass or the latest insights in astronomy. By 1492, Western scientific rationalism was becoming spectacularly efficient. People were discovering more fully than ever before the potential of what the Greeks had called logos, which was always reaching out for something fresh. Thanks to modern science, Europeans had discovered a wholly new world and were achieving unprecedented control over the environment. But they had not yet dismissed mythos. Columbus was conversant with science, but he was still at home in the old mythological universe. He seems to have come from a family of converted Jews and to have retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism, but he was a devout Christian, and wanted to win the world for Christ. He hoped that when he arrived in India, he would establish a Christian base there for the military conquest of Jerusalem.2 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but they were not yet fully modern in our sense. For them, the myths of Christianity still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations.
Nevertheless, Christianity was changing. Spaniards would become leaders of the Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which was a modernizing movement that brought the old Catholicism into line with the streamlined efficiency of the new Europe. The Church, like the modern state, became a more centralized body. The Council reinforced the power of the Pope and the bishops; for the first time a catechism was issued to all the faithful, to ensure doctrinal conformity. The clergy were to be educated to a higher standard, so that they could preach more effectively. The liturgy and devotional practices of the laity were rationalized, and rituals that had been meaningful a century earlier but no longer worked in the new era, were jettisoned. Many Spanish Catholics were inspired by the writings of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who wanted to revitalize Christianity by returning to fundamentals. His slogan was Ad fontes: “back to the wellsprings!” Erasmus believed that the authentic Christian faith of the early church had been buried under a mound of lifeless medieval theology. By stripping away these later accretions and going back to the sources—the Bible and the Fathers of the Church—Christians would recover the living kernel of the Gospels and experience new birth.
The chief Spanish contribution to the Counter-Reformation was mystical. The mystics of Iberia became explorers of the spiritual world, in rather the same way as the great navigators were discovering new regions of the physical world. Mysticism belonged to the realm of mythos; it functioned in the domain of the unconscious which was inaccessible to the rational faculty and has to be experienced by means of other techniques. Nevertheless, the mystical reformers of Spain wanted to make this form of spirituality less haphazard, and eccentric, less dependent upon the whims of inadequate advisers. John of the Cross (1552–91) weeded out the more dubious and superstitious devotions, and made the mystical process more systematic. The mystics of the new age should know what to expect when they progressed from one stage to another; they must learn how to deal with pitfalls and dangers of the interior life, and husband their spiritual energies productively.
More modern, however, and a sign of things to come was the Society of Jesus, founded by the former soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1555), which embodied the efficiency and effectiveness that would become the hallmark of the modern West. Ignatius was determined to exploit the power of mythos practically. His Jesuits did not have time for the lengthy contemplative disciplines evolved by John of the Cross. His Spiritual Exercises provided a systematic, time-efficient, thirty-day retreat, which offered every Jesuit a crash course in mysticism. Once the Christian had achieved a full conversion to Christ, he should have his priorities right and be ready for action. This emphasis on method, discipline, and organization was similar to the new science. God was experienced as a dynamic force that propelled Jesuits all over the world, in rather the same way as the explorers. Francis Xavier (1506–52) evangelized Japan, Robert di Nobili (1577–1656) India, and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) China. Religion had not yet been left behind in early modern Spain. It was able to reform itself and exploit the dawning insights of modernity to further its own reach and vision.
Early modern Spain was, therefore, part of the advance guard of modernity. But Ferdinand and Isabella had to contain all this energy. They were trying to unite kingdoms that had hitherto been independent and separate, and had to be welded together. In 1483 the monarchs had established their own Spanish Inquisition to enforce ideological conformity in their unified realm. They were creating a modern, absolute state, but did not yet have the resources to allow their subjects untrammeled intellectual freedom. The state inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their “heresy,” a word whose Greek original meant “to go one’s own way.” The Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone world; it was a modernizing institution, employed by the monarchs to create national unity.3 They knew very well that