Crusades

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the Crusades appear not as a discrete historical episode but as a recurring point of reference in the novel's sustained meditation on the relationship between religion and power. The medieval wars of the cross are invoked again and again as the emblematic case of Christianity's entanglement with political violence, the moment when the faith of Jesus became, in the novel's telling, a political creation with a political history. From Pem's sermons to his remarks before the bishop's examiners, from Sarah Blumenthal's address to a conference of religious scholars to Pem's own wedding prayer, the Crusades function as the historical proof-text for the novel's most urgent questions: Is God a story? Can faith be separated from the institutions that have wielded it? And what does it mean to belong to a tradition whose history is written in blood?

The Crusades as Political History

The novel's most sustained treatment of the Crusades comes in Pem's remarks to the bishop's examiners, where he argues that Christianity, with all its resonance as a belief and a rich and complex culture, is a political creation with a political history. Tracing the perpetuation of Jesus's authority through the Reformation and the creation of Protestant sects, Pem describes a faith that has been politically triumphant since the emperor Constantine's conversion in the fourth century. The Crusades stand at the center of this account, named alongside the Inquisition and the Church's contests and alliances with kings and emperors as evidence that Christianity has always been actively engaged, in all its forms, in the wars among states and the rule of populations. For Pem, the Crusades are not an aberration but the clearest expression of what Christianity became once it was fused with imperial power. The higher criticism, he notes, has gone on for a hundred and fifty years, and the weight of this history is something he feels acutely as he stands before his examiners, a priest of his generation who has brought the 1960s along with him.

The Cross and Its History

The Crusades are also present, implicitly, in the novel's central mystery: the theft of the eight-foot hollow brass cross of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church and its appearance on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. When Pem first discovers the cross is missing, he finds behind the altar only a shadow of the crucifix in the unfaded paint of his predecessor's poor taste. The cross itself, tarnished and shining in the autumn sun as it lies flat on the black tarred roof of the synagogue, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, is the novel's most potent symbol of the entanglement of Christian history with violence. The detective's assessment that the cross has no street value, that it is nothing but scrap metal, only underscores the gap between the object's material worth and its symbolic weight. The Crusades are the historical name for what that symbol has been made to do: the cross carried into battle, the cross as a license to kill. Pem's investigation of the theft becomes, in this light, an investigation of what the cross has meant and what it could mean, a question that leads him away from the certainties of his own tradition.

Doubt, Belief, and the Civilizing Century

Sarah Blumenthal's address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion in Washington, D.C., extends the novel's argument about the Crusades into a broader claim about the twentieth century. She observes that the great civilizer on earth in the century about to end seems to have been doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism. It is doubt, she argues, that has held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, is a religious impulse. In the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. The Crusades are the medieval instance of this license; the genocides of the twentieth century are its modern continuation. Sarah's address thus places the Crusades in a continuum of religious violence that extends to her own time, and it is this continuum that Pem invokes in his wedding prayer, when he speaks of the monstrously evil mortifiers of humanity in the historic generations of every adult in the room, of the enslavement and horrible death of many tens of millions of human beings, of the exponential murder of souls in wars and genocides, with the masses of the violently dead consigned by their very numbers to the lists of anonymous oblivion.

The Unremarked God and the City

The novel's final meditation on the Crusades comes in its vision of the city as the creation of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history. The modern city, built from the disparate intentions of generations of men, is described as a great historically amassed communal creation, a jeweled wonder of the universe floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness. But the novel also imagines the city's decline, when the sustaining rituals of society break down, when prophets arise in their clerical robes to speak of evil and announce that the wrath of God has come down on the city of unnatural pride, the earthly city. The Crusades are the historical precedent for this apocalyptic vision: the moment when the earthly city and the city of God became indistinguishable, when religious fervor was harnessed to political conquest. Pem's own trajectory, from Anglican priest to convert to Judaism, is a flight from this history. He says, studying to be a Jew, that he has never felt as completely, wholly Christian in his life as he does now, a remark that Sarah gently warns him not to repeat to anyone else. The Crusades are the reason such a remark is dangerous: they are the proof that Christianity has been defined by its political history, and that to be wholly Christian is to be entangled in that history. Pem's conversion is an attempt to escape the Crusades, to find a faith that is not a license to kill, even as he acknowledges, picking up his old paperback Augustine with every page almost totally underlined, that he is still attached to some of the words. The Crusades thus haunt the novel as the name for what Pem is leaving behind, and as the historical warning that the city of God, built by human hands, can always become the earthly city again.