  We compare the low-lying spectrum of the staggered Dirac operator in the
confining phase of compact U(1) gauge theory on the lattice to predictions of
chiral random matrix theory. The small eigenvalues contribute to the chiral
condensate similar as for the SU(2) and SU(3) gauge groups. Agreement with the
chiral unitary ensemble is observed below the Thouless energy, which is
extracted from the data and found to scale with the lattice size according to
theoretical predictions.
