*gasp*
I think I have FINALLY found a first source reference to Abelard opposing the Crusades....sort of. Kind of. In lyrical form.
After hearing some imaginary voice in my head harshly whisper, "To the psalter, you dummy!" I located, in his most famous hymn Quanta Qualia of all places:
Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas,
Cuius pax iugis est, summa iucunditas.
"The real city of Jerusalem is the city,
Whose peace is its greatest joy." (Italics mine)
These lyrics combined with Abelard's very sympathetic take on both Jews, and Muslims (then known as Saracens) conveyed in his "Dialogues Between Christian, a Philosopher and Jew"* --combined with his questioning whether or not it was moral of Christians to kill people for any reason, period-- would have made him seem "anti-Crusades"; even if in his poem, he was in all likelihood just referring to the "new Israel" in Revelation (or at least, ever concerned with multiple meanings for identical passages, that would have been his loophole!).
He had a way of pulling things from the Bible and twisting it all up to make it humanist. Considering he was from a secular background and he got into religion off of a sort of joke / dare to interpret Ezekiel on the spot from his compatriots in philosophy class as what we would call today "an undergraduate" ... I don't think he really, probably, had a very good idea of what all he was going up against, structurally, in the Church, at the time.
It's curious to see that the second crusade didn't happen until almost directly after he died, and was basically instigated by the same guy who was instrumental in destroying him. (Good old B of C!)
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*ironically, or maybe not ironically, both the Muslims and Jews were being persecuted by the Christians during the Crusades at this time, while in much of Moorish "Andalusian" Spain, Christians, Jews and Saracens cohabitated more or less in peace. I've read "The Myth of Andalusian Spain", by the way, and it is not a successful take down. All the rather trashy book manages to suggest is that forward thinking in the past is not the same thing as forward thinking today, and that Andalusian Spain was "backwards" in about the same ways Greece was "backwards"; in other words, progressive for its day.
I think I have FINALLY found a first source reference to Abelard opposing the Crusades....sort of. Kind of. In lyrical form.
After hearing some imaginary voice in my head harshly whisper, "To the psalter, you dummy!" I located, in his most famous hymn Quanta Qualia of all places:
Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas,
Cuius pax iugis est, summa iucunditas.
"The real city of Jerusalem is the city,
Whose peace is its greatest joy." (Italics mine)
These lyrics combined with Abelard's very sympathetic take on both Jews, and Muslims (then known as Saracens) conveyed in his "Dialogues Between Christian, a Philosopher and Jew"* --combined with his questioning whether or not it was moral of Christians to kill people for any reason, period-- would have made him seem "anti-Crusades"; even if in his poem, he was in all likelihood just referring to the "new Israel" in Revelation (or at least, ever concerned with multiple meanings for identical passages, that would have been his loophole!).
He had a way of pulling things from the Bible and twisting it all up to make it humanist. Considering he was from a secular background and he got into religion off of a sort of joke / dare to interpret Ezekiel on the spot from his compatriots in philosophy class as what we would call today "an undergraduate" ... I don't think he really, probably, had a very good idea of what all he was going up against, structurally, in the Church, at the time.
It's curious to see that the second crusade didn't happen until almost directly after he died, and was basically instigated by the same guy who was instrumental in destroying him. (Good old B of C!)
--------------------------------------------------------
*ironically, or maybe not ironically, both the Muslims and Jews were being persecuted by the Christians during the Crusades at this time, while in much of Moorish "Andalusian" Spain, Christians, Jews and Saracens cohabitated more or less in peace. I've read "The Myth of Andalusian Spain", by the way, and it is not a successful take down. All the rather trashy book manages to suggest is that forward thinking in the past is not the same thing as forward thinking today, and that Andalusian Spain was "backwards" in about the same ways Greece was "backwards"; in other words, progressive for its day.
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