t is not enough, at Triablogue, for Mr. John Bugay, the polemical rogue, to blame the Catholic Church for ISIS. No; in the combox of Mr. Bugay’s bespattered post, someone who bravely hides behind the initials “CR”—haply, it may stand for “combox ranter”—blames yet one more bogeyman: the JEW! Saith CR: “James White has documented Islam’s fundamental existence/identity as a denial of Christian truth.”
For we never would have known that without the assistance and documentary prowess of the good Dr.* White, who still has not exegeted Ephesians 4. But I digress. Let us hear more from CR:
It is … a fact of history that as part and parcel of his cultural milieu Muhammed also interacted with Judaism, and Jewish thought.
Although I agree that Romanism demonstrably represents spiritual wickedness on an unprecedented scale, [Lord, save us.] IMO it seems flimsy at best to attempt to root Islam in Rome, especially without reference to Judaism.
Whence this strange need—do you know?—to place the blame for the evil of Islam outside of Islam? I hope that may make sense to you, for it sure makes none to me, though I have tried hard to find out.
But rather than rebuke this sad outburst of anti-Semitism in his combox, the shameless drut Mr. Bugay conceded the point. “You may be right,” he said. But then he gently re-directed CR back to the true focus of evil in the post-classical world. “Rome,” he said, “definitely set the standard.” It is one thing, after all, to blame the JEW! Any one of us can do that; it rolleth blithely off the tongue; it is as easy as lying. But the man of deep thought and wise bearing knows where the truly rotten stink comes from: the PAPIST!
But Mr. Bugay did not stop there. Sooth, dear reader, in the very same combox, and as one who hath no shame (yea, less), he raves on. For that is what he does. And in response to Sean Patrick, who had shown up, rightly, to rebuke, Mr. Bugay’s “dark heart,” the drut had these nice words to say:
These were Roman Catholics crusading at the behest of popes, and with the promise of indulgences. Perhaps you should consider the dark hearts sent forth by the popes of that era. … Interesting how you so willingly excuse all of Rome’s evils—and yet I have a “dark heart” for pointing to the actual historical record. Wait till I pull out some of the specifics of the Inquisition. Then I’ll really be the bad boy.
Now, lest it be forgotten against the gale force of all that wind, Mr. Bugay most surely did not “point to” the “historical record.” He pointed to himself, on his own Facebook page. Pompous jack that he is, he’s that sure of his own wise wisdom and right rightness. His post contained no history whatever, but only a claim, no more—a mere assertion, supported by not one fact, nor footnote, nor reference to one soul who says what Mr. Bugay does. Am I to think that Mr. Bugay’s Facebook page, and his wild leaps into space, now count as the “historical record”?
BLAZING SADDLE BUGAY
Well, it may chance that the polemical rogue knew he had blogged his way into a spot. For lo, in answer to a rather mild put-up-or-shut-up challenge in his combox (it was from one of his own sycophants, who said it with gentilesse), Mr. Bugay has posted this follow-up. In it he tries, with his usual mad pluck and dash, to co-opt a few historians in support of his dumb and quixotic ravings.
He begins by quoting the following passage from Samuel Hugh Moffett. He does not bother to mention the title of the book, still less link to it; like every other sound historian, he sends us on a chase and makes us guess. Possibly it was the first volume of A History of Christianity in Asia
It was a time of social unrest in the Arabian peninsula. Rome and Persia had been slowly but effectively destroying each other in a hundred years of almost incessant war (540–629). As the war continued into the seventh century the exhausted empires were less and less able to protect their Arab client-states on the desert borders, the Ghassanid kings in the northwest who owed allegiance to Rome, and Lakhmid and Yemen in the east and south who looked to Persia. In those kingdoms Christian Arab communities had been planted by Monophysites on Rome’s southern border and by Nestorians nearer Persia.
Okay. Hm. And all this means? What? Mr. Bugay does not tell us. I can only guess at what might be blazing through his shadowy mind here.
Should I conclude that the Church is to blame for today’s severed heads because Rome went to war with Persia in the sixth and seventh centuries? Is that the point? That sounds like a singularly wild leap, even for this man. Is it indeed Mr. Bugay’s view that the most sure way to cause an evil is to fight vociferously against it? But that would mean—would it not?—that Mr. Bugay is to blame for the Catholic Church. He calls it evil; he fights against it; maybe he’s to blame for it. And sooth, if Mr. Bugay is to blame for Rome, and Rome is to blame for ISIS, then perhaps all this present evil has its source in Mr. Bugay’s blog. Maybe he should be tried before The Hague.
So no, I can’t believe that that is what Mr. Bugay has in mind. Maybe ISIS did not, in fact, spring up because Rome planted the seeds of opposition to Persia one cool morning in the spring of 530. Maybe, rather, it was the fact that Monophysites and Nestorians “planted” all those “Christian Arab communities.” While good men were out on the fields laboring by the sword to unseal them from waist to nape, here these Monophysite buggers were, gathering them into towns.
Is that what Mr. Bugay is driving at? The only problem is that the Monophysites and Nestorians were not Catholic. Think with me, Mr. Bugay, though it may be hard. The Monophysites denied the dual nature of Christ and taught that He was divine only. The Nestorians accepted that Christ was both divine and human, but taught that His two natures were separate. That is, they denied that Christ is “consubstantial with the Father.” And not just that, but they opposed the title Theotokos for Mary, arguing (like any good Calvinist, mind) that Mary is the mother of Christ only, not of God. They split Christ from his deity, and thus Mr. Bugay thinks that ISIS is splitting heads from their bodies?
But no. Both are heresies, and were condemned as such by the First Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451)—a full century before the start of Rome’s war with Persia. Let us not err. If the Monophysites and Nestorians provided the Arabs with towns in which they could grow and flourish and rise to evil power, the Catholic Church can no more be blamed for that than John Calvin can be blamed for Joseph Smith.
So I don’t know what Mr. Bugay is trying to prove here. He will have to enlighten us further, perhaps in a future blog post. (It being a known fact that the world anxiously awaits each new missive from Triablogue.)
Next, Mr. Bugay quotes Baylor University professor Philip Jenkins. (Again, he fails to mention the name of the source. That is how good his skills are at this kind of thing. He is always finding new ways to be incompetent. He’s an original.) Anyway, perhaps the book he quotes is The Lost History of Christianity
Most of the Quranic stories about Mary and Jesus find their parallels not in the canonical four Gospels but in Apocryphal texts that circulated widely in the East, such as the Protoevangelium of James and the Arabic Infancy Gospel. The Quran cites the miracle in which the infant Jesus shaped a bird out of clay and then breathed life into it, a tale also found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The Quran also presents the death of Jesus in exactly the language of those heretical Eastern Christians known as Docetists, who saw the event as an illusion rather than a concrete reality: “They did not kill him and they did not crucify him, but it was made to seem so to them.
By this point, I am most confused. Do not forget what Mr. Bugay’s claim is: “Historical Roman Catholicism is the cradle, enabler, and teacher of radical Islam today.” That was the very title of his dumb post. But here he is, citing Prof. Jenkins in support of it, even though Jenkins names, among Islam’s influences, the Protoevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and Docetism. Are any of these Catholic? Does Mr. Bugay have a private revelation he would like to share with us? Come, let us reason together. The Docetists taught that Christ may have seemed to be human, but that he was fully divine. That’s not Catholicism, Mr. Bugay. And as for the infancy narratives, they are no more in our Bible than Wisdom is in yours. Or in your head.
Of course, Mr. Bugay is not going to get very far with the crowd who read him if he were to post an article entitled “Historical Docetism is the cradle, enabler, and teacher of radical Islam today.” I get that; there’s no red meat there. His audience would yawn and click over into Beggars All.
Next, Mr. Bugay quotes a very long passage from Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity (1976). I won’t reproduce the whole thing; you can go read it yourself, if you hath a mind to. But here’s a key part of it:
The success of Islam sprang essentially from the failure of Christian theologians to solve the problem of the Trinity and Christ’s nature [“Christology”]. In Arab territories, Christianity had penetrated heathenism, but usually in Monophysite form—and neither eastern nor western Catholicism could find a compromise with the Monophysites in the sixth and seventh centuries. …
As it was, Mohammed, a Monophysite, conflated the theological and economic problems to evolve a form of Monophysite religion which was simple, remarkably impervious to heresy, and included the doctrine of the sword to accommodate the Arab’s practical needs. It appealed strongly to a huge element within the Christian community. The first big Islamic victory, at the River Yarmuk in 636, was achieved because 12,000 Christian Arabs went over to the enemy. The Christian Monophysites—Copts, Jacobites and so forth—nearly always preferred Moslems to Catholics. Five centuries after the Islamic conquest, the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian, faithfully produced the tradition of his people when he wrote: “The God of Vengeance, who alone is the Almighty … raised from the south the children of Ishmael to deliver us by them from the hands of the Romans. And at the time, a Nestorian chronicler wrote: “The hearts of Christians rejoiced at the domination of the Arabs—may God strengthen it and prosper it.
Now, this starts most awkwardly for Mr. Bugay. It’s a highly dubious claim that Mr. Johnson makes in the first paragraph; but even if we assume the truth of it, Mr. Bugay does not strike me as all that interested in proving that ISIS is slicing off heads in twenty-first century Iraq because the Catholic Church did a bad job of explaining the Trinity to seventh-century Byzantium. Are we to believe that, if only the Church had argued the Monophysites into a stunned silence, such that there was nothing left for them to do but sit and marvel, rather than plant Arab communities, the Twin Towers would still be standing? That can’t be Mr. Bugay’s point. He’s not that strange.
Well, then, why does he quote this passage? How is his claim helped by it? For as Mr. Johnson tells it, Islam won its first major victory, not due to the pope behind the curtain, but because 12,000 Monophysites, celebrated by “a Nestorian chronicler,” joined up with them.
But I don’t see Mr. Bugay writing any blog article entitled “Historical Monophysitism is the cradle, enabler, and teacher of radical Islam today.” No red meat there, either. He’d lose readers again, perhaps to Mr. X this time. X never lets us down.
OF TRAMPOLINES AND TICS
No, his real point is to lay the blame square upon that old bogeyman, the Crusades. That’s the way to raise ye olde blogge traffick! And here too he quotes Paul Johnson:
This episode had a crucial effect in hardening Islamic attitudes to the crusaders. Unfortunately, it was not the only one. When Caesarea was taken in 1101, the troops were given permission to sack it as they pleased, and all the Moslem inhabitants were killed in the Great Mosque; there was a similar massacre at Beirut. Such episodes punctuated the crusades from start to finish. In 1168, during the Frankish campaign in Egypt, there were systematic massacres; those killed included many Christian Copts, and the effect was to unite Egyptians of all religions (and races) against the crusaders.
Yes. Well, this should be looked at. Of course, the first point to make is that Mr. Johnson does not say what Mr. Bugay would like him to. Mr. Bugay’s thesis, recall, is this: “Historical Roman Catholicism is the cradle, enabler, and teacher of radical Islam today” [italics mine]. But Mr. Johnson says nothing of the kind. He has no words to write about radical Islam today; nor does he say anything about the Church. What he says is that the behavior of crusaders hardened the hearts of Muslims against them—men who lived and died a thousand years ago. Now, that’s not an especially shocking claim. I have yet to fall out of my chair; I would be surprised if it were not so. Mr. Johnson does not tell us that the behavior of crusaders hardened the hearts of Muslims a full thousand years later against Christians a full thousand years later. Nor does he raise any fuss about the Church. That’s Mr. Bugay’s point, though one must leap on a trampoline to get from Mr. Johnson’s words to any such conclusion. Watch yourself as you fly off, Mr. Bugay; you’ll crash back down soon enough.
But Mr. Bugay, in fact, is trying to make a tired old shopworn point. It is this: The Crusades represent the Catholic tendency to slaughter heretics, and they taught Muslims to hate Christians and return slaughter for slaughter, even to this day. It’s a cliché. It’s so old you can smell the must.
And there are two things to say about it. The first is that not one of Mr. Bugay’s sources, not even Paul Johnson, comes anywhere close to making such a claim. One simply can not get there from what they say. The second is that the claim itself is flat wrong. I would point Mr. Bugay to an article by Dr. Paul Crawford, published in the Intercollegiate Review in the spring of 2011 and reprinted online here. Dr. Crawford, in case Mr. Bugay does not know, is a professor of medieval history and expert in the Crusades. His article is entitled “Four Myths About the Crusades,” and he wrote it in reponse to a speech in which Bill Clinton made the very same argument that the polemical rogue does. Said Mr. Clinton:
[W]hen the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem [in 1099], they … proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. … [T]his story [is] still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.
Even some textbooks, says Dr. Crawford, are slaves to this myth. But it is wrong. “[E]ven a cursory chronological review,” he says, will tell us that. Here are some facts strangely absent from Mr. Bugay’s post:
In A.D. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. …
By A.D. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula. Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.
Now, what happened in the hundred years between 632 and 732 was that Muslims invaded and conquered every one of those lands. Only now and then did Christians push back against the aggressor. And it did not end in 732. Let us read more:
In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.
The popes were “desperate”; but not so as to slaughter heretics. They were desperate, rather, “to protect victimized Christians.” That’s the history, Mr. Bugay, if you care for real history and not bigotry dressed up as such. It was not until 1095—more than 450 years after all this Muslim plunder of Christian nations began—that Pope Urban II at last called the First Crusade to drive the enemy out of their lands. To which I, for one, can only say: About damn time. To call that evil, and a precursor to ISIS, is only to prove oneself insane—perhaps in need of counseling, or shock therapy, or the twelve steps. I hope you get the help you need, Mr. Bugay. This kind goeth not out except by prayer and fasting.
Dr. Diane Moczar also writes about all this, in her book Seven Lies About Catholic History
Unprovoked Muslim aggression in the seventh century brought parts of the southern Byzantine Empire, including Syria, the Holy Land, and Egypt under Arab rule. Christians who survived the conquests found themselves subject to a special poll tax and discriminated against as an inferior class known as the dhimmi. Often their churches were destroyed and other harsh conditions imposed. For centuries their complaints had been reaching Rome, but Europe was having its own Dark Age of massive invvasion, and nothing could be done to relieve the plight of the eastern Christins.
… By the eleventh century, under the rule of a new Muslim dynasty, conditions worsened. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of the Crucifixion, was destroyed, and Christian pilgrms were massacred. In 1067 a group of seven thousand peaceeful German pilgrims lost two-thirds of their number to Muslim assaults. By this time the popes, including St. Gregory VII, were actively trying to rally support for relief of the eastern Christians, though without success. It was not until the very end of the century, in 1095, that Pope Urban’s address at Clermont in France met with a response.
Oh, but let us not forget the dark hearts of those who fought back after 450 years of all this. I am sure glad Mr. Bugay brought that up, since it is always right to point out how truly evil is the man who fights to free a nation from tyrants and aggressors. I am all broke up about the men who stormed the beach and took the cliffs.
Of course, one point that must be made—for in truth the crusaders were not just in all things—is that a pope can have very little control over how they act in the heat of war. That would up to the commanders, and even they have limits. The pope does not sit behind his desk and move the limbs of Catholics as though they were marionettes that he makes to dance for his own fun. To blame “historical Roman Catholicism” for the free choice of Catholic men in war is an odd sort of reflex, or tic, that anti-Catholics like Mr. Bugay have. He may need to be put on L‑DOPA; I don’t know; I leave that to his general practitioner. But he should get the help he needs.
But Dr. Moczar gives us a few more facts to bear in mind here:
The Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem, from inside and on top of the walls, kept pace with the Christian army as it moved slowly around the city, jeering at and mocking the soldiers. They went further: they took crucifixes and profaned them in full view of the troops. Horrified, outraged, and nearly maddened at the sacriliges, the armed groups stormed the city furiously. Lack of coordination among the several units of the army made for a chaotic situation, with commanders losing track (and often control) of their men.
Brutal the fighting was, as no doubt it is in any city in warfare. But were large numbers really slaughtered unmercifully? Did the horses really wade in blood up to their knees and the men up to their ankles? The answer to both questions is, most probably not. … The troops who were left to defend Jerusalem were there to fight, and they did so. …
As it was, the capture of Jerusalem, although a blot on the crusaders’ record, hardly vitiates the whole crusading enterprise. Yes, the siege should have been better organized so that the individual commanders had better control of their men, which would have prevented whatever indiscriminate killing of non-combatants took place and also caused less physical damage ot the city. We would like it to have been otherwise, but we were not there and we are certainly not obliged to apologize for it: only the guilty themselves can do that, and both they and those who fought the enemy honorably have long since answered to God for their behavior.
Let us not forget what this kind of taunting, blasphemous gesture would have meant to a medieval Catholic already suffering the indignity of having his homeland conquered by Muslims. They were fighting not for their own cause, but for all that the Cross meant to them. Context matters. And one should note, further, that nothing the crusaders did was out of character for the nature of warfare at the time. If they did brutal things in their own right, well, that is what happens. It’s called human nature and the reality of warfare, not a wicked Church that needs to be called out by an odd and bitter man. Men are not dolls with strings to be danced about by the pope. I am not sorry for it and I do not weep.
But what can we say of Muslim attitudes toward the Crusades? Dr. Crawford’s article helps us there too. “Up until quite recently,” he says, “Muslims remembered the crusades [only] as an instance in which they had beaten back a puny western Christian attack.” There was not even an Arabic word for the Crusades until the nineteenth century. In fact, all the histories before that time had been written by Christians, and their attitude toward the Crusades was wholly positive. The first Muslim history of the Crusades would not be written until 1899. That is hardly what one would expect if there had been all this violent anger among them for centuries. In fact, as Dr. Crawford tells it:
What we are paying for is not the First Crusade, but western distortions of the crusades in the nineteenth century which were taught to, and taken up by, an insufficiently critical Muslim world.
Imagine that! The violence among Muslims, directed at Christians today, is a result not of “historical Roman Catholicism,” but rather of historical anti-Catholicism!
I would not want to push that claim too far. Islam is an inherently violent and murderous ideology. It has been from the start. Just because some Calvinists like to stir that pot and incite hatred against other Christians does not mean that I am going to blame John Calvin, or John Bugay, for Osama bin Laden. It makes no more sense to blame those who took up arms to defend themselves (after 450 years) than it makes sense to blame America for all the atrocities that take place across the globe just because we sent an army to Afghanistan after 9/11.
And if radical Islam, in groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, is rising up and getting out of control once more, then perhaps—rather than railing against the Crusades as some sort of exemplar of Catholic Evil—we should have another one.
With all that we are reading on the front page, it would be about damn time. And I would be no more sorry now than I would have been then.
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