Late last year, my essay “Between hermits and heretics: Maronite religious renewal and the Turk in Catholic travel accounts of Lebanon after the Council of Trent” appeared in the volume Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World, edited by Gábor Gelléri and Rachel Willie.
This project’s genesis was a conference in 2015 at the University of Bangor in Wales. It was a great trip. Not only did I get to share my work with scholars and make new friends, but I was able to spend some time in Cardiff with an old Rome friend for a bit.
In the essay, I explored how European Catholic visitors to Lebanon viewed the religious lives of a local Christian community known as the Syriac Maronite Catholic Church of Antioch and used them as a lens to probe deeper into what it meant to be Catholic in an increasingly plural religious landscape.
The European visitors—one Spanish, the other Italian—used the Maronites to work out their own anxieties about religious change, fears of Islam, and the challenges that Catholicism faced in a world marked by increased interest in global exchange, commercial cosmopolitanism, and cross-cultural interaction.
For these two visitors, the Maronites were two things that were ostensibly incompatible. On one hand, they were what one of the visitors called “relics of the ancient hermits”: their poverty, piety, and dedication to a simple Christian life suggested that they practiced a form of Christianity that had somehow survived for a millennium tucked away in the mountains of Lebanon. On the other hand, their cultural practices—such as wearing turbans, divorce, the lack of silverware and chairs at meals—suggested that they had succumbed to the pressures of Islam. While they were still technically Christians, they spent far too much time with Muslims for the visitors’ liking.
The result is a community that both served as a model for Catholic piety and as a warning for what happens when Christians get too close to non-Christians. Such a sliding scale between deep faith and moral depravity shows that being Catholic was never as secure as it might seem in everyday life. Something as simple as eating with one’s hands or drinking coffee could be a mark of heresy, schism, and moral bankruptcy.
To our ears, this all sounds a bit absurd. But in 16th-century Europe, these were very real concerns. Turning Turk, being captured by pirates, and falling prey to the allure of the Other were all very real. One day, you’re a God-fearing Christian, the next you’re a morally base renegade living it up in Algiers. This is both appealing and revolting. Such were the contradictions of the early modern world.
Europeans were so focused on themselves that how they saw the Maronites had little to do with the Maronites’ actual religious and cultural practices and everything to do with Europeans’ fears, anxieties, and doubts about themselves. It’s an important message: How we view others often tells us far more about us than it does them.
If you’d like to hear more about my essay and the collection as a whole, check out this crowdcast that a few other contributors and I put together this week. It was such a pleasure to get to know these scholars over the past few years. While the Travel and Conflict project may be behind us, we’ll be sharing ideas for years to come.
Robert Clines, Ph.D. 