UPDATE: The press seems to be having a field day with this. What is notable about the entire ordeal is that Pope Benedict XVI was proven as right: Violence has been the reaction of the fringe of the Muslim world, while reason seems to be lost on those burning the Holy Father in effigy…
Much is being said of the Holy Father’s lecture at the University of Regensburg on 12 September, as the BBC points out:
A senior Pakistani Islamic scholar, Javed Ahmed Gamdi, said jihad was not about spreading Islam with the sword.
Turkey’s top religious official asked for an apology for the “hostile” words.
In Indian-administered Kashmir, police seized copies of newspapers which reported the Pope’s comments to prevent any tension.
A Vatican spokesman, Father Frederico Lombardi, said he did not believe the Pope’s comments were meant as a harsh criticism of Islam.
To let Benedict XVI’s comments slip away into the ether because of some criticism would do the remarks a great disservice, because what he wrote was a truly magnificent argument for the place of reason within faith; faith within reason.
Pope Benedict XVI sets the argument forward, describing a conversation between “an educated Persian” and Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus in the cold winter barracks near Ankara in 1391. Imaginably, as they huddled inside a tent with several fires crackling, the conversation is drawn towards the role of reason within both Islam and Christianity. Pope Benedict XVI tells the tale:
In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threaten.
But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war.
Without decending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.
There is the quote that many Muslims are pointing towards as the offending line, but clearly Pope Benedict XVI is telling the story, and the Emperor is asking a question of his Persian friend. How does he explain this?
In a movie theatre if someone interrupted this story, you would understandably raise your finger to your lips and press, “shhhhhh…”
The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.
Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.
The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes:For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.
This contrast between reason as a part of God’s will in the Christian tradition is sharply contrasted by the Emperor against the Islamic idea of the transcendence of God.
Understand it this way. A rock slips from your hand and a devout Christian and devout Muslim watch it fall — up.
The Christian would be amazed. This is not supposed to happen! The Muslim on the other hand could shrug. God wills it, so it happens, even if it breaks the conventions of reason.
Here the different emphasis that escapes most observers. God to the Muslim is Power, not in the sense of greed or money or things, but raw transcendent power that knows and sees all things. To the Christian, God is Love, a very intimate and loving being. This is not to argue the two are mutually exclusive — both Christians and Muslims would attribute power and love to their ideas of God — but the emphasis is clear.
Here’s where it gets good:
As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?
I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the logos. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos.
Logos means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.
The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” (cf. Acts 16:6-10) – this vision can be interpreted as a “distillation” of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.
When I first read this, it was here that I set the paper down.
Pretty cool stuff, eh?
Jumping ahead a bit, Benedict XVI goes on to say:
A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God’s nature.
Pretty profound, from the Christian perspective. But why is this so important? Because it is something the Christian West has forgotten, and only recently recovered:
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit.
In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata.
Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.
God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.
As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV).
God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is logos. Consequently, Christian worship is 8@(46¬ 8″JD,\” – worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
Benedict goes on to question whether the “dehellenization” of Europe has been a positive or negative influence, citing three specific movements:
(1) The Reformation (seeking to free Christianity from philosophy)
(2) 19th century modernists (seeking to free Christianity from theology)
(3) The effects of pluralism (seeking to free Christianity from culture)
Benedict XVI argues this position as false, if for one reason that Christianity matured in Greek culture, came to fruition within Greek culture, and is profoundly impacted by a Greek worldview, as Benedict XVI explains:
This thesis (vivisecting Greek culture from Christianity) is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision.
The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.
A perfect argument against cultural pluralism’s effects on faith.
Pope Benedict XVI now gets to the meat (!) of his lecture:
And so I come to my conclusion.
This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age.
The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.
The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application.
While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.
In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
The rest, I will leave to those who have ears to hear:
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid.
Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.
At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology.
For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.
Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”.
The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby.
The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
Given the amount of controversy in the Muslim world about this contrast between the Christian identity with logos contrasted with an Islamic counterclaim that God’s transcendence is stronger than reason, one immediately questions whether the critics had any point at all, other than to take a free shot at Pope Benedict XVI?
It’s been interesting to read some of the criticisms of Pope Benedict’s lecture as being too cerebral, but I disagree. These are topics for the highly intelligent, and discussed by those concerned with the topic.
No question remains that there is and remains the criticism in the secular West that faith and reason are incompatible, even opposed. That the additional viewpoint from our 14th century Muslim friend is added – faith transcending reason – shouldn’t be cause for alarm. Rather, Pope Benedict’s salient point regarding the role of logos within the Christian tradition (and faith’s role within reason) remains a point for academics to concede, and natural law proponents to affirm.