Catholicism vs. Islam on Violence, Part 3

This is a continuation of a series, which (as a reminder) has the following planned outline:

1. First, dealing with Catholicism:
1. Catholicism from its very beginning was a spiritual religion that did not wish for worldly domination.
1. Evidence for this from Scripture
2. Evidence for this from the early Church Fathers
2. Catholicism has had a troubled relationship with Catholic rulers over the centuries, so that actions of Catholic rulers are often not fairly ascribable to the Catholic religion.
1. The historical origin of the Church's temporal power is accidental to essential Catholicism
2. Political powers have frequently sought to use the Church for their own ends throughout history
3. The specific history of the Age of Exploration is complicated, and not all actions of Eurpoean kingdoms of the time that are condemned nowadays necessarily deserve condemnation.  Nor are all actions of Popes in that time period indicative of essential Catholicism (unfortunately).
4. Catholic theology of the time actually had the correct view on the relationship between religion and force.
2. Then, dealing with Islam:
1. Islam from its very beginning endorsed the spread of religion by force and the domination of the political sphere by the religious.
1. Evidence for this from the Quran.
2. Evidence for this from early authoritative supplements to the Quran.
2. Modern fundamentalist Islam draws inspiration and justification from these early principles and ideas.

1.2.1 Given that Catholicism is by essence and foundation a spiritual religion without worldly ambitions, how did it manage to acquire so much worldly power and prestige later on in its history?  The shortest answer to this question is "by accident (or Providence, if you will)", but there is a lot of history behind this.  I want to summarize this history by focusing on just a few pivotal historical figures.  (For this section, I should acknowledge my debt to Eamon Duffy's "Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes". It's a great "birds-eye" view of the history of the Papacy).

1. Constantine (272-337).  Emperor Constantine's conversion was a bolt from the blue.  Christianity was already a widely spread and practiced religion before he converted, but after he converted he poured money and property into the Church.  Religion had always been part of the traditional way Rome had cemented its civic unity (as the Christians who had been compelled to sacrifice to the official gods or suffer martyrdom had experienced!), and it seems clear that Constantine intended for Christianity to take over this role in his empire.  While he did not *mandate* Christianity, he promoted it as heavily as was politically possible for him to do.  Because of Constantine, almost overnight the Church had wealth and proximity to the emperor, both of which meant power and influence. 

More intangibly (but in some way even more importantly), because of Constantine the Catholic Church came to become globally associated with the *idea* of Rome, which for centuries past had been and for centuries still to come would be a symbol of empire and global order.  Even after the actual power of the Roman empire to govern most of the known world was long gone, the idea of Rome as a governing body for all the nations of the world was durable--so durable that the many barbarian kings who were to conquer Rome later typically preferred to give up their own cultural identities and become (essentially) the new "Romans" after their conquest, in order to legitimize their dominion.  For good *and* for bad, after Constantine the Church was associated with this vision the world over.

2. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604).  The next important step in the "entanglement" (if you will) of the Catholic Church with political power once again came about by historical accident.  Pope Gregory lived in time of devastation for Rome and for Italy.  The Emperor had gone to Constantinople and had left a void behind.  Rome was in shambles, and in fact all of Italy was crumbling in the face of plagues, famine, poverty and devastating wars.

Into this gaping hole came Pope Gregory.  A monastic man with zero worldly ambition himself, he responded to the great needs of his time with incredible energy and efficiency.  With no will or ability on the part of the empire in the East to negotiate peace with the invading Lombards, Gregory took on the role of ambasador and politician and did it himself.  With no one else to help the poor and the myriads of war refugees, Pope Gregory mobilized all the resources of the Church in Rome into a massive relief campaign.  The end result of Gregory's pontificate was that the Papacy became the de facto political power in Italy.  As the wikipedia article on Gregory's life concludes,

These and other good deeds and charitable frame of mind completely won the hearts and minds of the Roman people. They now looked to the papacy for government, ignoring the rump state at Constantinople, which had only disrespect for Gregory, calling him a fool for his pacifist dealings with the Lombards. The office of urban prefect went without candidates. From the time of Gregory the Great to the rise of Italian nationalism the papacy was most influential in ruling Italy.

In seed form (though not in actuality yet), this was the beginning of the Papal States: the political rule of the Popes over large portions of the Italian penninsula.  It began from the very noblest of intentions, from compassion and from dire necessity.  It brought many good things into being as well . . . but at a cost.  After this point, the papacy was a ripe target for the power hungry in Italy, and when later you begin seeing Popes in the pocket of powerful Italian families, you have to look back to this point as a seminal cause.

3. Pope Hadrian (700-795).  This is really the coda to the previous point.  Again out of necessity, (in this case to protect Italy from Lombard invaders), Pope Hadrian formed an alliance with Charlemagne.  Once victorious in Italy and elsewhere,  Charlemagne then codified the extent and borders of the Papal States (making official what had been de facto the case) and was in turn crowned by the Pope (actually Hadrian's successor) as the new Holy Roman Emperor.  The break with the old empire in the East was completed, and new life was breathed into the old ideal of Rome as the trans-national arbiter of nations.  In the eyes of Christians in the West (including himself), Charlemagne was the new Constantine.  So after this point, in the centuries to follow, the political history of the Papacy has a tripartite character, because the Pope had three often conflicting roles:

1. Spiritual ruler and father to all of Christendom
2. Prince of the Papal States
3. Source of spiritual legitimacy for the Holy Roman Empire

The full history of the rise of the political power of the Church, and the Papacy in particular, is a complicated and fascinating story of which these are just a few important points.  The point to be taken home here is that political power came to the Church primarily through historical accident.  This is why when, much later, the Church came to become stripped of temporal power through *other* historical accidents, it adjusted relatively well (with just a relatively brief Papal temper tantrum)--such a thing was not a fundamental crisis for Catholicism as a religion.  As we will see later, Islam has a much more fundamental religious connection to temporal power and is not similarly able to transition to a moral-authority-only model without a genuine crisis of identity.