A Pope and a Patriarch Make Peace

James Carroll is a novelist and journalist who lives in Boston. This reflection appeared first in the Boston Globe, 5/11/99.

Against the backdrop of the intractable Balkans war, images of the two old men in white crossed our screens like ghosts of the millennium. When Pope John Paul II and Romanian Patriarch Teoctist prayed together in Bucharest, the religious leaders poignantly embodied two of the three great cultural divisions that underlie the reignited enmity. That the occasion of their meeting was the first visit by a pope to a mainly Orthodox country in nearly a thousand years is a stark reminder that events of the deep past continue to impact the present.

The East-West schism that occurred in 1054 resulted from what can seem to us like an arcane dispute over the theological abstractions - at issue were conflicting definitions of the Trinity - but what made the schism the wound it remains was a war waged in the name of God.

In November 1095, Pope Urban II, with the cry "God wills it!" launched a military campaign in part to free Byzantine Christians from the domination of Seljuk Turks. The stated goal was to free the Holy Land, but the Crusades served other purposes as well. A heretofore fratricidal collection of European barons and princes stopped killing one another to unite behind the project of killing a common external enemy. For the first time in Christian history, an act of violence was defined as a source of salvation. A hundred thousand people dropped everything to "take the Cross." Adjusted for population, an equivalent response today would involve more than a million people.

By June 1096, Crusaders savagely stormed Jerusalem, conquering the "infidels." But Muslims and Jews would not be the only victims of this war. At the turn of the next century, the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) would climax with the Latin Christian assault on the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The war launched by a pope to defend Eastern Christians ended up by attacking them. And that is why, until last week, no pope had since visited a mainly Orthodox country.

It is commonly said about the Balkans conflict that the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are at the mercy of ancient grievances, as if their attachment to grudges that go back, in fact, to the Crusades makes them unusually primitive. Yet the Crusades shaped the soul of the West, and the spirit of holy war never died. The definitions of medieval theology created a European sense of superiority over infidels, heretics, and pagans, but in the Colonial Age, too, European adventurers and conquistadors were motivated by the same sense of religious mission and cultural hegemony. Urban II's Jerusalem became John Winthrop's "City on a Hill." After the Enlightenment, secular modernity rejected the religious motive, but not the entitlement or sense of election that had made the Crusaders so formidable. Now holy violence against inferior people was justified not by theology, but by the pseudo-science of a Darwinian order of racial ranking.

In the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia, Europeans carried on their crusade with a sure sense of themselves as a civilizing force. Inferior races, like inferior religions before them, could only yield or disappear.

Slobodan Milosevic is the masterpiece vestige of such racial hatred. His assumption that Serbian superiority justifies the violent elimination of "inferior" peoples like Albanian Muslims is an entirely overt recapitulation of the crusading impulse. It is even possible to imagine his thugs using the decapitated heads of enemies as missiles. NATO's determination to stop such violence is entirely proper, but NATO's air war is another version of it. The air war reveals that the Western alliance, too, remains at the mercy of the ancient dynamic.

The lessons of the Crusades are still unlearned: Unexamined assumptions of moral superiority become deadly when combined with hyper violence defined as an act of virtue; the belligerence of a warrior class has its most savage impact not on warriors but on the defenseless civilians who get in their way; because war has its own momentum, the one you set out to protect can easily become the one you hurt.

Even if a pope set such forces in motion 900 years ago, there is little a pope can do today to stop them. Yet John Paul II's journey to Romania last week was a sacrament of such a hope. The wound of the Balkans can seem unbindable, and the breach in the soul of the West can seem bottomless. Yet there is nothing in today's Balkan violence that justifies yesterday's mantra, "God wills it." A pope and a patriarch plead for peace together, confessing responsibility "for the suffering, the madness, and the mistakes" that preceded the suffering, madness, and mistakes of today.

They speak to all white people at the deepest level of cultural memory. The age of religious, moral, and racial superiority is past, and so is the age of holy violence. God wills none of it!