The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

medievalism and secularism 149

the implicit understanding that religion amounts to blind adherence to

community, then interaction can only provide evidence of transgression

and resistance.^46

To be clear, my argument is not that this reading of religious interac-

tion is wrong. Rather, cultural theory underdescribes the possibilities of

encounter because it is essentially a moral tale.^47 However well- intending,

the scholar who says that when Muslims and Christians interact they dem-

onstrate an ability to act freely and rationally, comes dangerously close to

the polemicist, who asserts that religion inhibits freedom and reason, that

religion is inherently violent and intolerant.^48 But why couldn’t religious

beliefs have motivated pacific interactions? To ignore this possibility not

only paints belief in a dull grisaille, in shades of black and white; it also

reduces history to the terms and trajectory of a moral narrative of moder-

nity that can only see the Middle Ages as a period of either serene faith

or frustrated secularism.^49

History from Theology

If this secular bias threatens to narrow the possibilities of medievalism,

then medievalists have also been and remain best placed to challenge it.

Sitting in the audience at the debate between Heidegger and Cassirer in

Davos — the quintessential moment of the “crisis of culture”— Hans Blu-

menberg wrote perhaps facetiously that this was a reprisal of the debate

at Marburg 400 years earlier between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli

over the nature of the Eucharist.^50 The connection is more than fanciful.

Rather than a parochial discourse, theology was and remains an impor-

tant source of philosophical and political commentary.^51 To see these de-

bates as a continuation of theological ones helps to give us a grasp of the

secular distinction between religion and politics that underwrites these

competing perspectives on interaction.^52

As Philippe Buc has argued, both liberal and conservative accounts

of religion were heirs of the theological tradition.^53 Both perspectives

developed as responses to the nineteenth- century Protestant- liberal syn-

thesis — an attempt to reconcile religious belief with the liberal Enlight-

enment. For Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834 ), religion and politics,

belief and reason, were fully compatible because they were also radically

different.^54 While belief was grounded in man’s subjective, emotional, and

nonrational experience of a transcendent divinity, politics was the public