In this brief and clearly written monograph, Scott G. Bruce connects Cluniac hagiography with the polemics of Peter the Venerable against Islam. Peter is best known for commissioning the so-called Toledan corpus of texts about Islam translated into Latin. This corpus included the first Latin version of the Qur'an. Bruce argues that Abbot Peter looked back to a preceding head of the monastery at Cluny, Maiolus, when writing his final polemical work. This approach also requires revaluating hagiographic texts, crediting them with a formative intellectual impact on young monks exceeding the bounds of their spiritual development.
The first part of the book focuses on Abbot Maiolus. During the summer of 972 Maiolus and his companions were abducted while crossing the Alps on a return trip from Rome. His captors were Muslim bandits based at La Garde-Freinet or Fraxinetum in Provence. (This colony specialised in collecting ransoms and selling captives not thus redeemed into slavery.) The monks of Cluny ransomed their abbot and his companions. This attack on a revered spiritual leader also mobilised Christian resentment of the Christian leadership in Provence, and led to the elimination of this Muslim enclave. The captivity of Maiolus was commemorated in two versions of his note requesting ransom, which said that he had fallen into the hands of ‘the hordes of Belial’, a name which had become identified with the Devil.
This comparatively modest text became embodied in the hagiography of Cluny's abbots. An anonymous vita of Maiolus soon began to embroider this tale of captivity and ransom. The captivity of the holy abbot became a providential event. This narrative emphasised the cruelty of the captors and the wonders worked by Maiolus to protect his companions. The ‘Saracen’ captors were treated by the author more as barbarians than as followers of a rival religion. The author was affiliated to an Italian monastery affiliated with Cluny. The narrative treats the city of Pavia, the location of these monasteries, as a holy city blessed with the abbot's miracles.
The monks of Cluny soon took control of their abbot's holy reputation. Abbot Odilo commissioned a biography of his predecessor which referred to wonders worked near Pavia. Syrus, the author, emphasised Maiolus’ prowess in preaching, as well as in working wonders. This included preaching the Gospel to his captors in Fraxinetum. The captors’ belief in the prophet Mohammed received an emphasis not seen before in the narrative. Abbot Odilo provided a condensed version of this narrative for a monastic house dependent on Cluny. By the 1040s Rodolphus Glaber provided a version of Syrus’ vita in his history. This version added detail about the refutation of Islam's prophet to the captivity narratives previously composed.
The second part of this volume focuses on Abbot Peter. His reputation as an advocate of religious dialogue has been diminished of late. Certainly it is based on the translation project and a treatise on Islam written late in the abbot's life. Bruce looks more widely, showing that Peter was a critic of heretics, Jews and Muslims in his early writings. He also hoped to inspire Bernard of Clairvaux to write the definitive refutation of Islam. However, the failure of the Second Crusade (1147–9) is credited by Bruce, quite rightly, with inspiring a new approach to Islam. Previous polemics against heretics and Jews had been either diatribes or supposed exchanges between Christian apologists and their foes. Peter's last writing on Islam takes the form of a direct address to the followers of the Prophet. This text is intended to win the souls of Muslims by soft words and reasoned arguments.
It is here that Bruce makes his creative use of Cluniac hagiography. Peter commissioned a new life of Abbot Maiolus, written in a better Latin than that used by Syrus and compiled in strict chronological order. This may have reminded the abbot of the depictions of his predecessor trying to save souls even while held in captivity. This makes good sense. Abbot Peter, as a young monk, must have learned something about Maiolus, including his misadventures in the Alps. Thus Maiolus could serve as a model for an abbot of Cluny reaching out to Muslims to persuade them to convert. This approach was not successful. More typical, as Bruce notes, is the invective against the Qur'an written by Martin of Lausanne condemning the text to being branded with a hot coal. Bruce provides an addition in a brief appendix to the book. Ironically, the condemnation by Martin appears in a fifteenth-century manuscript of the works by Peter the Venerable focused on Islam. Another irony that Bruce notes is the possibility that dialogue with Islam was considered later not just by a few Catholic writers like Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) but by the Protestant theologian Theodore Bibliander (1504–64), who had seen the Ottoman Turks reach the gate of Vienna in his own lifetime.
Scott Bruce has provided us with a useful insight into Cluny and Abbot Peter's writing career. It does not go into depth about Western views of Islam, but the larger picture can be obtained by consulting the works listed in the bibliography.
