Conversion and Narrative

Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

Ryan Szpiech

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812207613
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness.In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith.Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.

CHAPTER 1

From Peripety to Prose

Tracing the Pauline and Augustinian Paradigms

Convert and converter will have to live on united in one and the same person, like two movements of our respiration, like a constant dying and coming to life again of our faith.

—EUGEN ROSENSTOOK-HUESSY, The Christian Future

In medieval Christian sources, conversion very often takes the form of a narrative, in particular a narrative derived from biblical, largely New Testament, models. Conversion itself, as a textual drama of transformation, might be considered a Judeo-Christian invention of the late Second Temple period, a fusion of Hebrew tropes and Greek vocabulary. Although abundant images of religious change can be found in many religious traditions, both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, early Christian renditions marked a decisive shift in the meaning and representation of conversion. In Greece, what first emerged as a distinctive notion of cultic exclusiveness within mystery religions and Orphism was partly fused in Hellenistic culture with a notion of personal commitment to the philosophical pursuit of truth and a stoic turn from passion and illusion to self-mastery. Similarly, an Israelite notion of monotheistic exclusivity and the prophetic call to return to God came to be expressed in new terms within the Hellenistic Jewish world. Upon the emergence of Christianity, traditional biblical tropes of the renewal of faith, a return to an exclusive monotheistic piety, and the call to prophecy began to merge with classical philosophical notions of a commitment to truth and of religious change as a process of turning from one faith to another and one identity to another. In a number of late antique fictions, these tropes came together and took on a distinctively narrative form, but it was the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament, written at the end of the first century or the dawn of the second, that would be best known among medieval readers and would come to serve as a definitive model for future representations.

It was not uncommon in ancient literature to depict personal change in a narrative guise. But unlike ancient fictions of change or of calling such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the transformation of Lucius in Apuleius’s Golden Ass—or even more ancient fictions such as, to take just one extreme example, the commission narrative of Rekhmire, vizier of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II (fifteenth century B.c.)—some Jewish and Christian stories situated an account of personal change, both inner and outer, within the social context of religious exclusivity. The Acts of the Apostles was only one of a number of texts, which included various apocryphal scriptures and ancient fictions, aiming to define both institutional and spiritual or philosophical identity. But, unlike similar contemporary documents, the Acts of the Apostles was canonized as Scripture and disseminated on a vast scale.¹ The canonical Acts, like some of its less famous apocryphal cousins and fictional contemporaries, fused the process of spiritual transformation and repentance with the image of an equally decisive change in social and “religious” affiliation, mapping both onto the structure of a narrative climax and resolution.² In such formulations, conversion’s sudden epistrophē, or inner turning of mind—Plato’s “conversion of the soul,” Plotinus’s “return” of the soul to its one source—becomes at the same time a repentance and a sudden change in outer social identity.³ The old self disappears and gives way to the converted self, just as the former religion cedes to and is replaced by a new faith. Conversion came to signify a simultaneous turning of mind and turning of identity only when it came to be structured as a narrative in which the individual’s transformation reflected the transformation of society.

This process of fitting Old Testament and Hellenistic images into the mold of a narrative of the origins of the Church, however, was not smooth or easy. The images recast in the book of Acts, especially in their depiction of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus into Paul the Apostle, did not immediately cohere as a unified concept in Christian tradition but instead gave way to a variety of disparate and competing ideas about the meaning of faith and its relation to the Jewish past. The attempt to resolve these debates and answer these challenges by the fourth-century theologian and bishop Augustine of Hippo—one of various late classical writers to attempt to do so—proved to be decisive for subsequent medieval thinking, both in the imagery and conceptualization of conversion and also in the attitudes and policies of medieval Christians toward Jews and Jewish history. In other words, Augustinian ideas about conversion, viewed above all through the narrative lens provided first by the canonical Acts, were formed and expressed together with Augustine’s understanding of Saul/Paul’s message and with Augustine’s broader theological conception of time, history, and salvation.

The reach of these decisive Augustinian formulations stretches all the way to the end of the medieval period and beyond, but their precise role within medieval thought is difficult to distinguish from that of the biblical language and imagery they are based on. It is especially challenging to discriminate the impact of Augustine’s understanding of conversion from that of the Pauline tradition in Acts and also from that of Saul/Paul’s words in his various New Testament Epistles. In order to separate the tangled strands of the Pauline and Augustinian paradigms as they were understood in later medieval sources, it is perhaps best—following the contours of a system of thought in which “the last shall be first”—to begin at the end, in the late medieval readings of Saul/Paul and Augustine. The reception of the foundational models of conversion narratives in the later Middle Ages comes sharply into view in the light of two fifteenth-century examples, that of the Xàtivan convert from Islam Juan Andrés and that of the bishop of Burgos, Solomon Halevi/Pablo de Santa María.

As the account of Juan’s conversion story shows us, the Pauline paradigm of conversion was, even in his time, a central model for describing many sorts of religious change. Because Juan’s text used this paradigm to discuss his conversion from Islam rather than Judaism, however, it is able to avoid the theological tensions inherent in defining the value of the Jewish past in Christian belief that provided ongoing challenges for theologians. His narrative thus provides an illuminating counterpoint to that of Bishop Solomon Halevi/Pablo de Santa María, who, by virtue of his anti-Jewish stance, could not avoid such theological issues. While Juan’s account is content to draw from a Pauline model without the help of any later Christian theological apparatus, Solomon/Pablo depends heavily on Augustine’s reworking of the Pauline paradigm in which the Jewish past is assigned a clear historical and narrational value. By considering Juan’s and Solomon/Pablo’s different uses of Pauline and Augustinian models, we can appreciate how the intimate connection between the narrative structure of conversion and Augustine’s conception of Christian history proved to be decisive in later anti-Jewish Christian thought even a millennium after Augustine wrote.

TURNING FROM A FATHER’S LAW: THE CONVERSION NARRATIVE OF JUAN ANDRÉS

In 1487, a Muslim faqīh, or religious jurist, from the Spanish city of Xàtiva was visiting the nearby city of Valencia. This Muslim was the son of another Xàtivan faqīh named ‘Abd Allāh, who had died some years earlier. After the death of the father, the son had lost the true path, until by chance he found himself in the cathedral where he heard a sermon marking the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (August 15). What he heard had a profound, catalyzing effect on him, opening his eyes to the truth he felt he was missing and leading him to seek conversion to Christianity. The story is told in what seems like his own first-person voice in the opening to the anti-Muslim Confusion or Confutation of the Muhammadan Sect and of the Qur’ān (Confusión o confutatión de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán), written almost thirty years later:

[I was from] the city of Xàtiva, where many years before I was born and instructed and taught in the sect of Muhammad by ‘Abd Allāh, my biological father [natural padre], who was a faqīh for the same city. After his death I succeeded him in his office of faqīh, in which I was lost for a long time and had veered off the path of truth, until the year of 1487, when I found myself present in the main church of the illustrious city of Valencia on the day of Our Lady in August, when the very reverend and no less learned man Master Marqués was preaching. Suddenly, the shining rays of divine light…removed and cleared the shadows of my understanding, and then opened the eyes of my soul. Because of the understanding I had of the sect of Muhammad, I clearly recognized that the goal of salvation for which men were created was not by that perverse and evil [law] but through the holy law of Christ.⁴

The alleged author of this anecdote, known after his conversion, according to the text, as Juan Andrés, claims he was sent to Granada by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel to preach and try to convert Muslims remaining there after the conquest of 1492, and was again dispatched for a similar purpose by the inquisitor Martín Garcia, later bishop of Barcelona. While the name Juan Andrés appears in a list of canons of the Cathedral of Granada from around 1516, no other testimonies of the author’s life and existence are known. Gerard Wiegers, who considers the issue of authorship to be “crucial” for the interpretation of the work, has raised the vexing question of whether the Juan Andrés who claims to be the author of the Confusión could actually be shown by any other means to be a real person.⁵ In what follows, I aim to distance myself from this question of true authorship, not because I consider it unimportant from a historical point of view but because I believe that the function of a conversion story in a polemical treatise is not biographical but rhetorical, serving as a device to establish the authority of the voice of the author as an authentic witness to the tradition it aims to reject. My goal in the first half of this chapter is thus not to approach Juan’s narrative in order to evaluate its truth-value. (For simplicity, I will call the first-person authorial voice “Juan,” since he is called thus in the text.) It makes no essential difference to my conclusions if Juan is real or was simply invented to look real. Instead, I will approach his story according to its strategic function as a tool of anti-Muslim discourse.

Juan concludes his opening story by attributing his decision to compose his attack on Islam to his conversion experience. Comparing conversion to translation, he claims, “I turned to [me convertí, lit. ‘I converted myself (to the task of)’] translating from Arabic into the Aragonese language the entire law of the Moors, called the Qur’ān, with its glosses and the seven [sic] books of the Sunna.”⁶ On the basis of these translations, he undertook his denunciation of Islam, the very denunciation introduced and framed by his conversion narrative: “I decided to compose the present work in order to gather together in it some of the fabulous fictions, deceptions, tricks, puerilities, bestialities, follies, filth, infelicities, impossibilities, lies, and contradictions that the perverse and evil Muhammad, in order to deceive simple people, left planted through the books of his sect, especially the Qur’ān.”⁷ The vitriol that follows continues the inherent language of opposition between Christianity and Islam that he had already built into his first-person account. His conversion consists of an abrupt transformation of understanding and insight that rapidly inverts his identity and his faith. “Suddenly,” he says, what he saw “removed the shadows of my understanding.” His former faith suddenly became “a perverse and evil” law; Christianity suddenly is a “holy law.”

Despite the sources used in his treatment of Islam later in the book—drawn primarily from Islamic texts such as the Qur’ān and biographies of the prophet Muhammad—the language and imagery of his narrative are unmistakably biblical, not Qur’inic. By mentioning how “suddenly the shining rays of divine light…opened the eyes of my soul,” Juan directly evokes the New Testament model of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, recorded in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, in which “a great light from heaven suddenly shone about” Saul (Acts 22:6), blinding him, until “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored” (Acts 9:18). Juan, in fact, names Saul/Paul directly as one of his models as he explains the New Testament origins of his name: “I then asked for baptism, and remembering the glorious summoning [convocación], which I had heard about, by Christ of John [Juan] and Andrew [Andrés] and the other fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, I had them call me Juan Andrés. When I had received holy orders, being made from a faqīh and slave of Lucifer into a priest and minister of Christ, I began like Saint Paul to preach anew [repredicar] and profess the opposite of what I falsely believed and affirmed before. And with the help of the high God, first I converted in this kingdom of Valencia and then guided back to salvation many souls of infidel Moors who were lost to the power of Lucifer and on their way to hell.”⁸ Juan’s use of Saul/Paul here is evident in more than name. His allusion to his former post as alfaquí, inherited from his father, evokes again the image of Saul/Paul as “educated strictly according to our ancestral law” (Acts 22:3). Indeed, Saul/Paul’s extensive discussion of the law and its role in salvation after the resurrection of Jesus clearly stands in the background of Juan’s description of Christianity and Islam as holy and evil “laws,” respectively. Likewise, Juan’s sudden ministry, in which he “guided back…many souls,” evokes the language with which God sends Saul/Paul to preach to the Gentiles and unbelievers in order “to open their eyes so they might turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18). Like Saul/Paul, Juan also stresses his firsthand knowledge of his former religion. It was “because of the understanding I had of the sect of Muhammad” that he “clearly recognized” the superiority of Christianity, just as Saul/Paul claims that before he saw God’s revelation, he had “advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people” (Galatians 1:14), only later to suffer “the loss of all things” and to “regard them as rubbish” (Philippians 3:8). Juan’s argumentative authority, based directly on his converted persona established in the opening narrative, sets out to “confuse” and “confute” his old law, just as Saul/Paul claims God “has made foolish the wisdom of the world” through “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:20, 23). Although the model represented by Saul/Paul is that of the transformation of Jew into Christian, it came to serve as the guiding paradigm for virtually all Christian depictions of conversion, including those of late medieval Muslims like Juan.

This Pauline language is premised on an image of conversion as the dawning of a new self, a beginning that breaks with the old and even inverts it. Saul’s transformation into Paul, an example of conversion as the transformation of one thing into its opposite (what Jung terms an “enantiodromia”), is reprised in Juan’s total inversion. He is “made” from a faqīh into what he posits as its opposite, “a minister of Christ.” Similarly, he then “began” to speak differently, to “preach anew” (repredicar) and to “profess the opposite” (pregonar el contrario) of his past beliefs. What “before” he had “believed and affirmed” he now considers “false.” Like Saul/Paul, he considers himself a “minister of Christ Jesus” (Romans 15:16) where he was previously “enslaved to sin” (6:6). These dichotomies (faqīh/priest, true/false, slave to sin/minister of Christ, holy law/evil law, etc.) are deeply Pauline in their logic and imagery and simply repeat in a new key the images of Jew/Greek, flesh/spirit, and inner man/outer man that permeate Saul/Paul’s Epistles.

A closer look at Juan’s account, however, allows us to distinguish the individual strands of his biblical thinking and imagery and suggests that the biblical tradition of conversion he evokes is, for him, made up of distinct, even disparate parts. Juan mixes his direct reference to Saul/Paul with that of the Gospels, and the language he uses to characterize each shows subtle variations. His adoption of the names of the apostles John and Andrew recalls their “summoning” (convocación), a word that directly hearkens back to Christ’s “call” to them in Matthew 4:21. This passage, moreover, follows the verse describing when Jesus “began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (4:17), a classic moment of conversion in the New Testament that evokes an image of “turning” back to a former way of thinking. He claims to have “veered off the path of truth,” implying his conversion is a return to what he formerly knew to be true, even as it is also an inversion of what he “affirmed before.” Juan also uses images of “turning” when he explicitly claims that he “converted” (convertí) and then “guid[ed] back” infidel Muslims to salvation (reduxe a la fin de la salvación), implying that they too had “veered” and would “return” through conversion. He claims to proceed by “re-collecting” (recollegir) the textual proofs from Islam with which he is so familiar. Within Juan’s description of his conversion, there are strong images of return and reform that are drawn directly from the image of apostleship and conversion in the Gospels. Such language contrasts sharply with his Pauline imagery, giving the impression that his conversion was a mixture of elements, both a turning back in response to Christ’s call and a rupture with the past in which the law was inverted and his old belief was confused. One can see this double image most clearly in the claim that his conversion happened both “suddenly” and after “a long time.”

This double-sided language in Juan’s short but dense narrative derives from the disparate images of conversion found in his models. The Hebrew Bible itself presents a variety of paradigms to express what later came to be seen in a Christian context as conversion: conversion as a return to a former way of thinking or acting (a turning back), conversion as a rupture with the past that marks the beginning of a new identity (a turning away), conversion as the affiliation with a new community (a turning into), among other images, all in some way in reference to a climactic moment of change. Among these images, one that came to be extremely influential in the Middle Age...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Note on Names, Titles, Citations, and Transliteration
• Introduction: Conversion and History
• 1. From Peripety to Prose: Tracing the Pauline and Augustinian Paradigms
• 2. Alterity and Auctoritas: Reason and the Twelfth-Century Expansion of Authority
• 3. In the Shadow of the Khazars: Narrating Conversion to Judaism
• 4. A War of Words: Translating Authority in Thirteenth-Century Polemic
• 5. The Jargon of Authenticity: Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid and the Paradox of Testimony
• 6. The Supersessionist Imperative: Islam and the Historical Drama of Revelation
• Conclusion: Polemic as Narrative
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments