Lewis, God's Crucible

A book review of David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

In spite of the subtitle, Lewis' history of Muslim Spain (al Andalus) and Catholic Frankland (later Francia and still later France) is about an epic clash of civilizations—or, better, the clash of Islamic civilization with European barbarism.  It is an old-fahioned history that chronicles the rise and fall of dynasties and kingdoms and the many battles and wars that liter the history of both Islam and Europe.  Only in passing does Lewis point to the profound influence that Andalusian Islamic culture had on the development of Western Europe, and the reader who wants to discover what Europe learned from the Muslim East through Spain should look elsewhere.

In fact, God's Crucible is two histories, Islamic Spain and Christian Europe, that are united only by the immense episodic dislocations caused by their rubbing against each other like two gigantic, restless tectonic plates.  The Muslim East, including a variety of tribes from West Asia and North Africa, and Catholic Europe, also including a variety of peoples, pushed and shoved against each other from the invasion of Spain in 711 until the final eviction of Islam from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492.  Lewis concentrates on the first three centuries or so of the struggle, and makes a number of important observations in the midst of his chronicle.  He makes it clear, for example, that the Jews were a third presence in this history and, although much smaller in numbers, important actors in their own right.

God's Crucible is also an old-fashioned book in the attitudes it contains about Europe in the era after the fall of Rome.  While revisionist historians have discovered in early medieval Europe a dynamic world that made many advances in learning and technology, for Lewis post-Roman Europe was what previous generations of commentators believed it to be: a barbaric world trapped in the Dark Ages.  He emphasizes repeatedly that in comparison with Andalusian civilization with its great wealth and grand urban centers, Europe east of the Pyrenees was a cultural wasteland, ignorant and violent.  Almost never in this book do the Europeans come out looking good by comparison to the Arabs and other Islamic peoples on the western side of the mountains.  Most notable is the contrast between the way in which Andalusian Muslims and Catholic Europeans treated people of other faiths.  By-and-large, the Muslims were relatively tolerant of at least Judaism and Christianity and left Jews and Catholics to their faith so long as they paid their taxes and remained loyal to their rulers.  Euorpean Catholics behaved in the opposite manner with respect to Islam.  More largely, the Christians contributed little to Andalusia other than their skills at and penchant for war while Muslim Spain made important contributions to the development of Catholic Europe.  Whether or not one wants to go so far as to charge Lewis with harboring a bias that distorts the realities of the past, he certainly leans strongly in the direction of Islamic Spain and away from Catholic Frankland.

Given his pro-Andalusian perspective, Lewis argues that the Christian victory at the famous Battle of Poitiers (732), in fact, did not save Europe from Islam.  Rather it was developments in the Islamic world that conspired to halt the Arab advance into Europe.  He agrees, that is, with Muslim historians of the time who he says rightly blamed "their own internecine preoccupations as the real reason for Christian Europe's survival." (p. 178)  He also speculates that Europe was actually worse off for its victories over its Muslim invaders and their failure to conquer the continent.  Lewis writes, for example, "An ironic intelligence from another planet might have observed that if Carolingian Europeans believed that Charles the Hammer's victory at Poitiers made their world possible, then it was a fair question to ask whether or not defeat might have been preferable."  He continues, "The European shape of things to come was set for dismal centuries following one upon the other until the Commercial Revolution and the Enlightenment molded new contours." (p. 286)

That being said, for the general reader who exercises a healthy caution concerning Lewis' interpretation of past events, God's Crucible is still a helpful book—never mind all of the names, which can become a jumble at times.  He captures the complexity of the events he recounts and shows how various factions on both sides of the Pyrenees played off of each other.  The Muslim invaders of Spain, in particular, turned out to be a patchwork of ethnicities and social groups.  To a degree, he makes the case that Islamic rule of Spain was generally enlightened by the standards of the day, more humane than that later imposed on it after the reconquista by Christian forces.  Charlemagne also comes across well in Lewis' account of events.  But he seems to have been more of an anomaly than anything else, a brief interlude in the darkness as it were.

If not a great book, this is certainly not a "bad" book either.  There are a few nuggets scattered through it as well.  Lewis, for example, describes the work historians as that of being "prophets in reverse" (p. 314) by which he means that historians are able to see the budding of the future in events that the participants in those events simply did not see.  Thus, what was a period of prosperity still contained the seeds of future calamity, a fact clear only with the hindsight of a "reverse prophet."  The point here is that historians benefit from hindsight only to the extent that they carry out their research with due diligence and insightfully.  What they discover is often not obvious even to others in their own time, let alone to those in the era under study.  The true prophet is inspired to see what others do not see, which is not a bad description of the historian's craft at all.

As old-fashioned political and military chronicles of the past go, in sum, God's Crucible is a reasonably good read.  It contains some interesting insights.  It does the historian's task of revising previous accounts.  It exposes the main contours of the past.  And to the degree it is a one-sided account, its bias is reasonably clear and consistent.  It also contributes to an understanding of the history of European learning and science by placing post-Roman Empire cultural developments into their larger regional history.  In that context, the Byzantine Empire lurks on the fringes appearing from time to time as events unfold and trends develop.  This is not a great book, but it is also not a bad one.

Kugel's How to Read the Bible

A book review of James L.Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007).

Have you ever had the privilege of walking along a forest path with a naturalist?  As you walk, the naturalist will point out fascinating plants, evidence of animal life, and many small details that the uninitiated simply don't see.  More than that, the naturalist will see and describe the relationships between living things that make the forest a unique and amazing ecological system, a biosphere.  Kugel is that naturalist.  The Hebrew Bible is his forest, and How to Read the Bible is the path he takes the reader along through the forest.  It is a long path, amounting to 689 pages of text plus 82 pages of endnotes.  It is also a winding one that sometimes almost disappears into the  forest as Kugel regales the reader with interesting little tidbits that don't connect very readily to any larger thread (to mix metaphors).

There is, however, a larger thread, and Kugel takes us into the forest with a larger goal in mind, namely to ask fundamental questions about the meaning and purpose of the forest itself.  Modern biblical scholarship has radically transformed our understanding of the Hebrew Bible, which raises painfully complex questions for those who read it as people of faith.  To be sure, Kugel raises these questions only in fits and starts and often enough raises them and then blithely takes up again with  the tour of the forest only many chapters later to suddenly return to those questions.  But he does return to them.  The questions themselves are important ones for Kugel.  He asks them as a practicing Jew for whom the Bible has become problematic.  Where is God, most importantly, in the scriptures if they are "merely" the product of an elaborate, centuries-long, and very human process of editing?

Kugel begins with the observation that over the centuries there have been three layers of interpretation of the Bible (by "Bible," he always means the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament).  They are: (1) the original intent of the stories and other contents of the Bible; (2) later centuries of interpretation that arose partly because original intent was eventually forgotten; and (3) modern scholarly reconstructions of original intent.  Well into his journey through the Bible, it turns out that level one is considerably more complex than we were led to believe at the beginning.  The Hebrew Bible is a patchwork of pieces of text assembled over many centuries by generations of editors who mixed, matched, added to, remixed, rematched, and added still more.  As we go through the book, moreover, we are aware of the fact that in ancient times there were variant readings, which also changed over time.  Kuegel places, for example, all Christian readings of the Old Testament into level two and, at times, shows how they were similar to and differed from Jewish readings.  In modern times, he points out we inherited level two readings as being the right way to read the Bible.

With this framework, Kugel walks us through the Hebrew Bible beginning at one end and going to the other.  Frequently, he introduces the reader to level two (traditional) readings of the text and then goes on to describe level three excavations (scholarly) of the same text.  Sometimes he doesn't.  The fact is that Kugel has assembled a book that displays some of the characteristics of the Bible itself.  He frequently introduces a portion of the Bible, talks about it a bit, and then blithely walks on without a conclusion or any clue as to the importance of that particular portion.  He simply sees a pretty little leaf, stops to admire it, and then off he goes again.  The book is also filled with lengthy quotations from the Bible put there evidently on the assumption that readers are too lazy to go and read the Bible for themselves (he is probably right).  These frequent and lengthy quotations only serve to add to the sense that the book is disjointed and itself "compiled" from many fragments.  Often enough, furthermore, Kugel ignores the title of the book and fails to tell us how to read the individual texts he is talking about.  At other points, however, he illuminates the Bible and provides helpful commentary on both the traditional and scholarly readings of key biblical texts.  He helps Christian readers to understand where their inherited interpretations of the Old Testament stand in relationship to the text and to later Jewish interpretations.

The central thesis of the book is that the traditional assumptions we have inherited concerning the meaning of the Hebrew Bible and the assumptions that scholars bring to that reading are in conflict.  He states, "These assumptions have essentially created two different Bibles, the ancients' and the moderns'." (p. 134)  The "central question of this book" is, "Which way of reading is the right one?" (p. 161)  Thus, the original "etiological narratives" of the Pentateuch, for example, were radically transformed by later generations of interpreters in ancient times.  Those narratives became "moral exampla" and "up-to-date guide[s] for daily life." (p. 362)  Kugel observes that, "the anonymous interpreters of the third and second and first centuries BCE changed utterly the whole character of the Pentateuch...No less formidable however, has been the activity of modern biblical scholars over the last two centuries." (p. 363) The scholars have undone the work of the ancient interpreters and once again made the Pentateuch into a collection of fragments.

In the course of his walk through the Hebrew Bible, Kugel pays particular attention to clues as to how the generations of editors assembled and reassembled the text until it reached its final form.  He also points to insights on various related matters, such as how the ancient Hebrews' understanding of God changed over time, the relationship of the Hebrew text to other ancient texts, the Christian understanding of the Old Testament, and even why Christians retained the Old Testament as a part of their scriptures.

Kugel, in a sense, saves the best to last.  His final chapter, "After Such Knowledge..." (pp. 662-689) brings together his questions and concerns about the impact of modern biblical scholarship on our understanding of the Bible—on his understanding of the Bible.  Modern scholarship has shown that the Bible is fragmented, self-contradictory, and a thoroughly human enterprise.  Modern scholars have "stripped the Bible of much of its special status." (p. 667)  He then comes to a crucial insight, namely that "what makes the Bible biblical is not inherent in its texts, but emerges only when one reads them in a certain way, a way that came into full flower in the closing centuries BCE." (p. 668, italics in the original)  At that time, the Bible began to be treated as wisdom literature, a compendium of divine truths, which in fact is the "real" Bible.  The real Bible, that is, is not found in the original fragments and snippets of which it has been woven.  The real Bible, the canon, is the body of interpretations with which it was read in ancient times long after it had been assembled.  The canon is text and interpretation, not just text.  Kugel closes with observations on what all of this means for Christian fundamentalists, Christian liberals, and Judaism, and at the very end of his reflections he concludes, apparently, that  in spite of the impact of modern scholarship on our understanding of the Bible, he must continue in faith to serve and have faith in the One served.  Those are my words, not his, but they capture I trust the sense he intended.  He admits that he brings us to the end of the tour with more of a whimper than a bang, but there it is, a Jewish biblical scholar's attempt to make the best of the realities of scripture as exposed by modern biblical scholarship.

For those who want to understand the Bible today and/or the challenges the world of science poses for people of faith, this is an excellent book.  Be patient with it.  Enjoy the way it wanders around.  Wait for the important insights.  Your time and patience will be rewarded.