"Both Islam and Christianity claim supremacy in terms of truth, authority, and the call to bring the message of faith to the wider world—which means that there will inevitably be dramatic conflict between them, and they will shape the worldviews of the civilizations they produced. That’s why the conflict between the Western World and Islam becomes the primary Western literary leitmotif, the theme that runs all through the literature of the West. Despite the historical inaccuracy—there’s almost nothing in The Song of Roland that’s accurate—despite the fact that it’s based on multiple sources of oral tradition, despite the fact that it’s almost entirely legend and not history, it’s more historically rooted and more influential than any of the facts that we have from that time. Sometimes, fiction is truer than fact. How can that be? Well, the fact is that what happened in The Song of Roland occurred probably some two hundred years prior to the writing of The Song of Roland. So The Song of Roland isn’t actually trying to describe historical events; instead it’s trying to lay the foundation for a new kind of morality, a new kind of ethic that would become the basis of a civilization. It provided a kind of cultural memory, laying the groundwork for cultural cohesion, built around a code of chivalry. The facts don’t matter nearly as much as the ethic that is established. The reality is that, were it not for the rise of Charlemagne and the great conflict with Islam, this vision of a chivalric civilization, rooted in new kind of biblical virtue would not have come into being. That’s why many historians believe that Charlemagne really is the first great figure in Christendom. Not Athanasius, not Augustine, not even Patrick or Cyril or Methodius, not even Alcuin; it was Charlemagne because he set the vision for the flowering of Christian virtue that could actually drive the heart and soul of a whole new civilization. And thus was born Christendom."
-Dr. George Grant
"We’ll have to back up a little bit and recall that as early as 1054, the stage had been set for the great Crusades by the Great Schism. The Great Schism was the final breach between the Byzantine world and the Latin world when the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated each other. That great divide, which has never been fully healed since 1054, separated one of the five patriarchates—remember the five patriarchates were consolidated together and worked together from the time of about the third century all the way to the middle of the eleventh. Those five patriarchates included four in the East: Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, and in the West: Rome. These patriarchates were considered, more or less, the father churches of all the churches of Christendom. Though they each had their own distinctive liturgies and their own distinctive traditions and their own distinctive hierarchical structures, they saw themselves together as God’s earthly Council, answerable to the heavenly Council of the Lord God and his great and glorious throne room. Cooperation among the five patriarchs was sometimes interrupted by theological conflicts, as we saw with the ecumenical councils. Sometimes those conflicts required additional acting ecumenical councils to resolve the theological, political, or interpersonal difficulties but Christendom held together all the way up until the Great Schism.
With the Great Schism, Constantinople and Rome excommunicated one another, and the four patriarchates of the East separated themselves entirely from the patriarchate of the West. This is the first real genuine break in the Christian world. There had been heresies before. The Nestorian churches split away. The Monophysite churches split away. There had been various heresies with the Montanists and others, but now those who confessed the creed together, those who held to the divinity of Christ and the authority of his work were now divided, and it created a political divide as well. It interrupted trade and commerce, interrupted the exchange of ambassadors. It became a kind of iron curtain, splitting the East from the West."-Dr. George Grant
"When the Seljuk Turks began to pressure the Byzantine world, the emperor decided to take matters into his own hands. He began to realize—as the Muslim horde swept across the North African littoral, up into the Iberian Peninsula, threatened the Balkans, and overwhelmed the Anatolian Plateau—that isolated Constantinople could not continue to stand. And if Constantinople could not stand, maybe all of the rest of Christendom would fall, too, so he began to apply for peace. The new pope in Rome, Urban II, heard this plea for peace from Alexis, the new patriarchal envoy, and as a result Urban set up peace talks in July of 1094. And in those peace talks, Alexios —not to be confused with Alexis—Alexis, the emperor of the Byzantine Empire, asked for help in liberating the city of Jerusalem. He recounted for Urban all the horror stories of torture of believers, the destruction of Christian communities, the desecration of Christian sites including the holy sepulcher itself—the place where tradition held Christ had been buried and a beautiful Byzantine church had been erected by Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, in the fourth century."-Dr. George Grant
"Urban (who was a guy not a life style) went to Raymond of Toulouse, and told him these terrible stories of the horror of the Christian lands of the East now being held by the infidels, and the tortures, the desecrations, the destruction, and oh, by the way, there might be great wealth to be had for any knight who went and recovered these lands. Well, Raymond becomes enraptured with the idea. Ah, the adventure of traveling far away to exotic climes and the possibility of winning favor with God and men and obtaining wealth! Ah, this is an adventure that every knight would love to set out upon. So Raymond immediately went and spoke to Ademar, Bishop of Le Puy, and Ademar gave his blessing and, in fact, committed himself to join with Raymond in raising a vast army to traverse the Mediterranean world to recover Jerusalem for the sake of the Cross, for the sake of the culture, and for the sake of the glory and security of Christendom."
-Dr. George Grant
-Dr. George Grant
ALL OF THIS INFO CAME FROM DR. GEORGE GRANT'S CHRISTENDOM KING'S MEADOW CURRICULUM.
