Ostensibly, the title of the work that is translated in this post- Summa Totius Haeresis Saracenorum (“Summary of the Entire Heresy of the Saracens”)- suggests something that is little more than a medieval Christian rant against Islam as a supposed Christian heresy. On the other hand, its author- Peter the Venerable- is a figure of considerable significance in the history of Western study of Islam, because it was through his commission and financing that the first translation of the Qur’an into a Western European language was produced: namely, the Latin translation produced by Robert of Ketton during Peter’s visit in the period 1142-1143 to monasteries Spain that were affiliated with his abbey of Cluny in France.
That translation, to be sure, can be criticised on grounds of tendency to paraphrase (I hope to provide a more detailed assessment of that translation in a forthcoming paper for a journal). However, having the whole Qur’an translated, rather than just select excerpts, represented an important step towards better understanding of Islam, even if the motivation of the project, as made clear in this brief treatise by Peter, was anti-Islamic and polemical, in the sense of trying to provide Christians a better understanding of Islam’s teachings in order to understand how evil they were and come up with ways to refute them. For Peter, the Catholic Church had unfortunately put little serious effort into refuting Islam, and fanciful misconceptions about Islam’s origins and identity abounded in the absence of reading and study. This desire to correct the abundance of outlandishly false information, even if done in the context of polemic against Islam, is commendable.
Peter could not decide definitively whether Muslims should be called heretics or pagans/heathens, but as the title and contents of this summary of Islam demonstrate, he inclines to denouncing Islam as a heresy for its erroneous teachings on Christ. Peter believed that Islam represented a sinister machination of the devil in how it has misled people from the truth of Christianity by saying good things about Christ while denying that he is the Son of God and his divinity. If the old heresy of Arianism represented the origin of the Antichrist in denying that Christ was the true Son of God and asserting that Christ was created, then Muhammad’s teaching represented a mid-way point for the final advent of the Antichrist that will not only deny Christ’s status as divine and the Son of God but will also have nothing good to say about him at all. Through combining good elements (e.g. monotheism and the encouragement to give alms) with bad elements (foremost rejecting Christ’s divinity, but also other beliefs like the materialistic conception of paradise), Satan had succeeded, through Islam, in bringing a great portion of humanity into perdition, but why God has permitted Satan to do so is a mystery that cannot be ascertained by us. It should be noted also that elsewhere in his writings, Peter made it clear that he did not believe Muslims were irredeemable: it was possible and desirable for Christian apologetics and refutations of Islam to be translated into Arabic (for example) in the hope of converting them.
I present my full translation of the Summa Totius Haeresis Saracenorum below, utilising the edition of the Latin text contained in James Kritzeck’s important work Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton University Press, 1964, pp. 204-211). The note annotations, mostly highlighting Biblical references, are largely taken from that edition of the text as well.
This is a summary of the entire heresy and diabolical sect of the Saracens, or Ishmaelites
This error is the first among all and the greatest of them to be despised, because they deny the trinity in the unity of the deity. Thus since they do not believe that there are three persons in the one essence of the divinity and shun that number of three in the unity, and since they do not accept the three-fold origin and end of all forms, and thus do not accept the cause, origin and end of formed things, they do not know God at all even though they profess God by mouth. These deviants and inconstant people profess the origin of variety and difference: that is, only the binary in the unity, which is the divine essence and its soul. Thus, the Qur’an always introduces God speaking in the plural- the Qur’an being the name they give to their law, and the Qur’an is an Arabic term that translates as collection of precepts.
These blind people deny that God the Creator is the Father, because according to them there is no Father without intercourse. And so they do not believe that Christ is the Son of God, although they believe he was conceived from the divine Spirit. Also, they do not believe Christ is God, but rather a good prophet and a very truthful one, immune from all falsehood and sin, the son of Mary, begotten without a father, who never died, because he is not worthy of death, but rather, when the Jews wanted to kill him, he escaped from their hands and ascended to the stars, and there he now lives in the flesh in the presence of the Creator, until the advent of the Antichrist.
When this Antichrist comes, Christ will kill him with the sword of his power, and he will convert the remaining Jews to his law. As for the Christians, who long ago lost his law and Gospel, first because of his departure, then because of the death of his apostles and disciples, he will perfectly teach them his law, in which all Christians, just like his first disciples, will be saved. With them and all creation, while the Seraphim (whom they say is an archangel) is blowing a trumpet, Christ himself will die, later to rise again with the others, lead his people to judgement, and help them and pray for them, but not to judge them in any way. For God alone will judge. But the prophets and each of their ambassadors will be present as intercessors and helpers with their people and on their behalf. For thus were they taught by this very wretched and impious Mahumet, who, denying all the sacraments of Christian piety by which men are very much saved, has now handed almost a third of the human race to the devil and eternal death, doing so through his strange and nonsensical fables- and we do not know by what judgement of God this has occurred.
With regards to Mahumet, it seems necessary to say who he was, and what he taught, for the sake of those who are to read this book, so that they may better understand what they will read, and know how detestable his life and doctrine were. For some think that this Mahumet was Nicholas, one of the first seven deacons,[i] and that the sect of the Nicholites that is named after him and is also condemned in the Apocalypse of John,[ii] is this law of the contemporary Saracens. Others fancifully identify them with others, and just as they are incurious about reading and ignorant of affairs, so they suppose whatever falsehoods they like, as they do in other cases.
As very openly narrated by the chronicle that was translated from Greek into Latin by Anastasius the librarian of the church at Rome,[iii] this Machumet lived in the time of the rule of the Emperor Heraclius, a little after times of the Roman pontiff Gregory the Great (Gregory I), around 550 years ago. He was an Arab by nation, of lowly stock, and at first a worshipper of ancient idols, just as the other Arabs were at that time. He was uneducated, more or less illiterate, energetic in secular matters, and elevated from an ignoble and poor man into a rich and famous man by virtue of his great cunning. This man gradually grew in strength, and utilising ambushes, plundering raids and incursions, he frequently attacked all those next to him and above all his own blood relations. He secretly killed those whom he could kill secretly, and publicly killed those whom he could kill publicly, and augmented the awe of terror about him, and often he was victorious in encounters, and thus he began to aspire to rule his own people.
Since all equally resisted him and despised his ignobility and he saw that he could not achieve what he hoped for in this way, because he could not achieve his goal at the point of the sword, he tried to become king by assuming the veil of religion and the title of a divine prophet. Since he dwelled as a barbarian among barbarians and an idolater among idolaters, and among those whom he knew would be more easily seduced than other peoples owing to the fact that they had no share or knowledge of divine and human law, he began to put effort into this iniquity he had conceived. Since he had heard that prophets of God were great men, he said that he was God’s prophet, and so that he might feign something good, he partly tried to lead people away from idolatry, but not to the true God, but rather to the error of his heresy that he had now begun to bring forth.
In the meantime, with the judgement of the one who is called “fearsome in His plans above the sons of men”[iv] and who “has mercy on whom He wills, and hardens whom He wills,”[v] Satan gave success to this error, and sent across the monk Sergius[vi] to those regions of Arabia. Sergius was a follower of the heretic Nestorius and had been expelled from the church. Satan had the heretical monk join up with the false prophet. And so once Sergius joined up with Mahumet, he supplied Mahumet what the latter lacked, expounding to Mahumet, partly as Sergius wished, the sacred scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments in accordance with the understanding of his master Nestorius, who denied that our Saviour was God. At the same time, he had Mahumet imbibe very fully the fables of apocryphal writers, and made him a Nestorian Christian. And so that the entire fullness of iniquity might flow into Mahumet, and nothing might be lacking for him to bring about his own perdition or that of others, Jews were added to this heretic’s company, and deceptively taking precautions to prevent Mahumet from becoming a true Christian, the Jews did not instil the truth of the scriptures in Mahumet who was eager for revolution, but rather they instilled in him their fables that they expound in abundance even now. Thus, once Mahumet was taught by the best teachers (Jews and heretics), he created his Qur’an, and in that barbarian way of his, he completed and forged this nefarious scripture of his from the Jewish fables and the trifles of the heretics. He lyingly claimed that this scripture had been brought to him gradually in the form of tomes by Gabriel, whose name he had known from the sacred scripture, and with his lethal drink he infected this heathen people ignorant of God. In this way did he besmear that region with the honey of his chalice, and then as the death-bearing poison followed, he (alas!) killed the souls and bodies of that wretched people.
In this way did that impious man openly behave, when he praised both the Christian and Jewish laws, but nonetheless affirmed that neither one should be adhered to, and thus through approbation did this wicked man declare that these laws should be rejected. Thus it is that he affirms that Moses was an excellent prophet, and that the Lord Christ was greater than all, and he preaches that Christ was born to a virgin, and professes that he was a messenger of God, the Word of God and the Spirit of God, but he does not understand or profess the Word that is the Messenger or the Spirit as we do. In fact, he derides that Christ should be called the Son of God or believed to be such. This bovine man compares the eternal nativity of the Son of God with the concept of human begetting, and thus denies and derides as much as he can the notion that God could beget or be begotten. He often repeats and espouses the resurrection of the flesh, and denies that the judgement of all at the end of the world will be exercised by Christ, but he does not deny that it will be exercised by God. He nonetheless madly claims that at that judgement, Christ as the greatest of all beings after God and he himself will be present to protect his people. He describes the torments of hell as it pleased him to do so, and as was befitting for a great false prophet to invent. He did not depict the paradise of the angelic society or divine vision or that greatest good that “has not been seen by the eye, heard by the ear, or ascended into the heart of man,”[vii] but rather he depicted it as that which the flesh and blood, or more accurately the lowest of flesh and blood desired, and just as he wished to be prepared for himself. He promises his followers that there will be consumption of meats and all kinds of fruits in that place, and that there will be rivers of milk, honey and splendid waters in that place, and that there will be the embraces and luxuries of very beautiful women and virgins, with his entire paradise being defined by these things. Amid all this, while spewing forth almost all the forth of the ancient heresies that he had absorbed thanks to the devil imbuing him with them, he denies the Trinity just as Sabellius does, and he rejects Christ’s divinity just as his Nestorius does, and he denies the death of the Lord just as Manicheus does, although he does not deny the Lord’s return to the heavens.
With these teachings and similar teachings, he imbued his people marked not for acquisition of heaven but perdition, and turned them completely away from God, and lest the discourse of the Gospel could have a place anymore among them, as though they knew everything pertaining to the Gospel and Christ, he hardened the approach of their hearts with an iron obstacle of impiety. Moreover, he decreed that circumcision was to be observed, as though it had been taken up from Ishmael (the ancestral father of that people), and in addition to all this, he loosened the restraints for gluttony and libido, so that he could more easily lure the carnal minds of men to his cause. While he himself had 18 wives at once and committed adultery with the wives of many others as though on the basis of the divine response to him, he added a greater number of people doomed to perdition to his company, as though by means of prophetic example.
Lest he should be revealed to be a wholly indecent man, he commended the practice of giving alms and some works of mercy, praised the practice of prayers, and thus monstrous in all regards, as is said, he combines “the neck of a horse, and feathers” of birds with “a human head.”[viii] For he who wholly abandoned idolatry through the persuasion of the earlier mentioned monk and the earlier mentioned Jews, and persuaded those whom he could persuade that idolatry should be abandoned, and he preached that one God should be worshipped while abandoning belief in multiple gods, and he seemed to preach new things to men who were both uncouth and ignorant. Since this preaching of his concorded with their nature, he was initially believed by them to be a prophet of God. Then, as time went on and the error developed, he was elevated by them to become their king, just as he had desired. Thus, mixing good things with bad things, and pouring truths upon falsehoods, he sowed the seeds of error, and partly in his own time, and partly above all after his own time, he produced this wicked crop that is to be burned in eternal fire.
For immediately the Roman Empire became weary, or rather almost fell away, and by the permission of the One “through whom kings reign,”[ix] the empire of the Arabs or Saracens infected with this pest arose, and by armed force it gradually occupied the greatest regions of Asia together with all of Africa and part of Spain, and just as it poured its imperial power upon those subjected to it, so it also poured its error upon them. Although I call these people heretics because they believe in some things with us and dissent from us in more things, it is perhaps more accurate for me to call them pagans or heathens. Because although they say some truths about the Lord, they nonetheless preach more falsehoods, and do not partake in baptism, sacrifice penitence or any Christian sacrament- a course of conduct that no one besides these heretics has followed. But the summary of this heresy is the intent in that Christ the Lord is not believed to be God or the Son of God, even though he is believed to be a great man and beloved by God, and a pure man, and indeed a wise man, and a very great prophet. Indeed these ideas were long ago conceived by the devil’s machination, and first seeded through Arius, and then brought forth through this Satan (namely, Mahumet), but will then be entirely fulfilled, in accordance with the devil’s intention, through the Antichrist. For while the blessed Hilarius says that the origin of the Antichrist lay in Arius[x] since Arius was the one who began to deny that Christ was the true Son of God and said that he was created, the Antichrist is to eventually bring this to completion by asserting that Christ was not God or the Son of God in any way, but also not even a good man. And so it seems to be correct that the very pious Mahumet was foreseen and prepared by the devil as a mid-way point between the two, since he was to become Arius’ supplement in some way, and in the minds of the infidels, a very great nourishment for the Antichrist who is to say worse things.
The fact is that nothing is so contrary to the enemy of the human race as the faith of the incarnate God, through which we are particularly roused to piety. We are renewed by the heavenly sacraments through the work of the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the king and creator, God Himself, came down to our exile from the place from where the enemy of the human race boasted that he had cast us down (namely, the sight of our king and homeland) and mercifully called us back to Him. We expect that he will return again. It is this faith and love of piety and divine dispensation that this enemy has always been contriving to extinguish in the hearts of men from the beginning, and with very cunning subtlety (if it would have then been permitted) he tried to eradicate this faith in the beginning of the still nascent church, and almost in the same way by which he was subsequently permitted to seduce this very unfortunate people.
For the blessed Augustine says that after the philosopher Porphirius miserably apostasised from Christianity, the latter reported- in his books that he published against the Christians- that he consulted the oracles of the gods and asked them about who Christ was. He reported that the response given to him by the demons was that Christ was indeed a good man, but that his disciples gravely sinned, since they ascribed divinity to him and fabricated something that Christ had not said about himself.[xi] This sentiment is very frequently found in these fables, almost in the same words. If anyone wants to understand more completely how great the subtlety of the devil has been, such that he would say something good about Christ, knowing that he would not at all be believed if he had spoken about Christ in an entirely bad way, and not caring about what Christ was thought to be so long as the divinity in him that saves men more than anything should not be believed: let that person read books 18 and 19 of De Civitate Dei by the same church father Augustine, and book 1 of his De Consensu Evangelistarum.[xii] For if that person possesses a good and studious mind, that person will realise for certain both what the devil schemed to do but was not permitted to carry out, and what he eventually accomplished only in this very wretched people after he was given free rein by the permission of a judgement of God that cannot be understood by us.
For in no way would they follow these fables such as they have been written, unless some mortal had been able to contrive them with the devil’s personal cooperation. After many ridiculous and very insane absurdities, it was through these fables that Satan strove in particular to accomplish this goal by all means: that Christ the Lord should not be believed to be the Son of God and true God and the founder and redeemer of the human race. This is indeed what Satan wanted to persuade people of through Porphirius back then, but by God’s mercy, Satan was blown out of the church at that time, which was still fervent with the first-fruits of the Holy Spirit. Eventually, Satan made use of this very wretched man Mahumet (who, as is said by many, was also delirious and epileptic) as though he were a very apt instrument and organ for himself. And alas, Satan managed to take down with him into eternal perdition a very large group of people that can be counted as almost half of the world. Why Satan was allowed to do this is only known by the One to whom no one can say “Why do you do this?” and who said that “of the many who have been called, few have been chosen.”[xiii]
So as I choose more to tremble than argue, I have briefly noted these things by way of preface, so that the one who reads may understand, and if there is such a person who is willing and can write against this entire heresy, that person may recognise with what enemy he is contending. There will still perhaps be the one whose spirit the Lord will raise in order to free God’s church from the great disgrace that it has been suffering, in that whereas the church has refuted all the heresies- whether ancient or modern- up to our times by responding to them, it has not responded to this heresy alone, which, more so than all other heresies, has brought about boundless destruction of the human race in terms of bodies and souls. Not only that, but the church has not bothered to inquire even in a superficial sense as to the nature of this such great pestilence and where it came from. This was the entire reason why I, Peter, the humble abbot of the church of Cluny, had the writings on this entire impious sect and its evil founder’s execrable life translated from Arabic to Latin and laid bare and brought to our attention. I did this through great effort and at great cost while I was staying in the Spanish lands in order to visit our places there. My goal was that it should be made known how spurious and frivolous this heresy is, and that any servant of God should be incited to refute it in writing with the Holy Spirit filling him with zeal to do so. I waited for a long time, because, for shame, almost the entire enthusiasm for holy studies of this sort has become tepid everywhere in the church, and there is no one to undertake it. In addition, there was no one who would open his mouth and move a feather with zeal for holy Christianity and yelp. And so if my great occupations permit me to do so, I at least have intended at some point to tackle the matter through the Lord’s help. Nonetheless I would always consider it welcome for someone else to do this better, rather than my doing it in a worse way.
Here this summary ends.
Notes
[i] Acts 6:5.
[ii] Revelation 2:6 and 2:15.
[iii] The reference here is to Theophanes the Confessor’s Chronicle.
[iv] Psalm 65:5.
[v] Romans 9:18.
[vi] The figure of Sergius/Bahira commonly features in medieval Latin writing about Islam in suggesting that Muhammad had a non-Muslim teacher who instructed him in Biblical matters.
[vii] 1 Corinthians 2:9 cf. Isaiah 64:4.
[viii] Cf. Quintius Horatius Flaccus, Ars Poetica 1:1-2.
[ix] Proverbs 8:15.
[x] Saint Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate 6:46.
[xi] De Civitate Dei 19:23.
[xii] “Concerning the Consensus of the Evangelists.”
[xiii] Matthew 22:14.