aith,
Reason, and the University: Memories and Reflections"--the title seems
an unlikely one for a papal speech that has triggered protests, even
violence, across large parts of the Muslim world. Benedict XVI's
remarks, made on September 12 at the University of Regensburg, where he
was once a professor, have been denounced by the parliament of
Pakistan, protesters in India, Iraq's Sunni leadership, the top Shiite
cleric of Lebanon, the prime minister of Malaysia, and the president of
Indonesia, among many others. Less verbal critics (that is putting it
much too politely) have thrown firebombs at churches in the West Bank
and murdered a nun in Somalia. In Turkey, where the pope is scheduled
to visit in November, the deputy leader of the governing Islamic party
characterized Benedict's thinking as dark and medieval, the result of a
Crusader mentality that "has not benefited from the spirit of reform in
the Christian world," and predicted that "he is going down in history
in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini."
It is the rare homily, and certainly the rare academic talk, that
triggers firebombs and comparisons to Hitler. So what did the pope
actually say? At the center of the storm are a few lines of his
remarks, quoted from the "dialogue with a Muslim" that the Byzantine
emperor Manuel II Paleologus claimed to have had in the winter of
1391-1392:
Show me just what Muhammad 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.... God is not pleased by
blood.... Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead
someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and reason properly,
without violence and threats. ... To convince a reasonable soul, one
does not need a strong arm, or weapons, or any other means of
threatening a person with death.
Muslim anger has concentrated on the first words of the papal
citation, about Muhammad's essential inhumanity. In response to this
anger, the papal palace duly announced that His Holiness's respect for
Islam as a religion remains undiminished. Vatican spokesmen insisted
that the offending line was incidental to the pope's broader message,
and that he was not endorsing the medieval emperor's views, but simply
quoting a historical text to make a historical point. In his
extraordinary expression of regret on September 17, the pope himself
adopted this position, declaring that "these were in fact quotations
from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal
thought." "The true meaning of my address in its totality," Benedict
continued, "was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue,
with great mutual respect." Many in the First World will be inclined to
accept the pope's clarification. Though few of them will say it openly
(except perhaps Silvio Berlusconi), the violence following Benedict's
comment will only confirm for them the legitimacy of his portrait of
Islam. Hasyim Muzadi, the head of Indonesia's largest Muslim
organization, was right to warn his coreligionists that a violent
response to Benedict's words would only have the effect of vindicating
them.
Still, we need to ask why, if the medieval text is so incidental to
Benedict's argument and he does not endorse its meaning, he cited it at
all. It was certainly not owing to the text's originality. The
emperor's attack on Muhammad as a prophet of violence is among the
oldest of Christian complaints (we might even say stereotypes) about
Islam and its founder. Already during Islam's early conquests in the
seventh century, Christians were suggesting that its spread by the
sword was sufficient proof that Muhammad was a false prophet. Of course
we cannot blame medieval Christians conquered by Islam for
characterizing it as a violent religion, any more than we can blame
medieval Muslims for later failing to appreciate the claims of
Christian crusaders that their breaking of Muslim heads was an act of
love. The history of the alliance of monotheism with physical force is
both venerable and ecumenical. The question is, why in our troubled
times did Benedict choose to bring the world's attention to the
unoriginal words of this Byzantine emperor?
One answer is that Turkey has long been on the pontiff's mind. Readers may recall then-Cardinal Ratzinger's interview with Le Figaro
in 2004 in which he commented that Turkey should not be admitted to the
European Union "on the grounds that it is a Muslim nation" and
historically has always been contrary to Europe. 
Like
Ratzinger, Manuel II Paleologus also worried about keeping the Turks
out of Europe. As the antepenultimate emperor of Byzantium and the last
effective one (he ruled from 1391 to 1425; Byzantium fell in 1453), he
spent his life fighting--sometimes in the Muslim armies, but mostly
against them--in the final great effort to keep Constantinople from
becoming Istanbul. He traveled across Europe as far as London in a vain
attempt to awaken the Latin West to the growing threat to European
Christendom in the East. And he wrote letters and treatises (such as
his Dialogue With a Muslim) against Islam, rehearsing for his
beleaguered subjects all the arguments against the religion of their
enemies. For all these reasons, history remembers the emperor Manuel as
an exemplary defender of Christian Europe against Islam. In 2003, in
fact, there appeared a German translation of Dialogue With a Muslim,
and the book's editor states in his preface that the work is being
published in order to remind today's readers of the dangers that Turkey
poses to the European Union. The pope may have been making a similar
point.
The emperor may serve the pope as a historical allegory, but the
specific meaning of his words is useful as well. It is true that
Manuel's sentence about Muhammad's inhumanity is incidental to
Benedict's arguments. It was doubtless included for the simple reason
that it opened the portion of the text that Benedict wanted to use.
(Fortunately, he did not quote the preceding paragraphs of Manuel's
treatise, which present Muhammad's teachings as plagiarisms and
perversions of Jewish law.) But the medieval emperor's claim that Islam
is not a rational religion--"To convince a reasonable soul, one does
not need a strong arm"--lies at the heart of the pope's lecture, and of
his vision of the world. That vision should be a disturbing one, not
only for Muslims but for adherents of other religions as well.
In order to understand why, we need to unpack the pope's learned
thesis, which will be immediately intelligible to connoisseurs of
German academic theology and to almost no one else. (The pope's website
promises that footnotes are forthcoming.) Simply put, the theological
argument is this: Catholic Christianity is the only successful blend of
"Jewish" obedience to God (faith) with Greek philosophy (reason). This
marriage of faith and reason, body and spirit, is what Benedict,
following a long Christian tradition, calls the "logos," the "word of
God."
The pope chose to make his point about the special greatness of his
own faith through the negative example of Islam, which he claims has
not achieved the necessary synthesis. Like Judaism, Islam in his view
has always been too concerned with absolute submission to God's law,
neglecting reason. It was to make this point that Benedict invoked his
reading of Manuel II Paleologus, which he supplemented with an allusion
to the claim by Ibn Hazm (systematically misspelled by the Vatican as
Hazn) that an omnipotent God is not bound by reason. Like Manuel, Ibn
Hazm (994-1064) is an interesting authority for Benedict to have
chosen. He, too, lived through the collapse of his civilization, in his
case the Muslim Caliphate of Cordoba. He, too, produced a defense of
his faith against its rising foes, though his took the form not of a
dialogue but of a massive history of religions, charting the eternal
struggle of the godly against the evils of Judaism and Christianity.
This view of history, together with his adherence to a Zahiri sect of
Islam that emphasized obedience to the literal meaning of the Koran,
have led some contemporary commentators to see in Ibn Hazm a precursor
to modern Islamism. He thus serves the pope particularly well as an
example, but he can scarcely be called representative of medieval
Islam.
The role of Islam in Benedict's argument is important, but it is
worth noting that it is not the only religion the pope finds deficient
in reason. Even within Christianity, the marriage of faith and reason
has often been strained by attempts at what Benedict calls
"de-Hellenization," or de-Greeking. Luther's move toward faith, for
example, occasioned his attack on the Catholic philosophical movement
known as Scholasticism. This meant that much of Protestant Christianity
became unbalanced, inclining too far away from "Greek" reason and
toward "Jewish" faith, while the Catholic Church strove to safeguard
the proper balance. And of course there have been movements inclining
too far in the opposite direction, the most important of these being
the triumphant "scientific" or "practical" reason of modernity.
All these systems of thought fail to make sense of man's place in
the world insofar as they fail to achieve the necessary balance between
faith and reason. That balance, Benedict explains, was born in the New
Testament, which "bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had
already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed." It was
disseminated and preserved over the centuries through the Catholic
Church in western Europe. Indeed, for Benedict, the "inner
rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry"
is really a European phenomenon: "Christianity, despite its origins and
some significant developments in the East, finally took on its
historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the
other way around: this convergence ... created Europe and remains the
foundation of what can rightly be called Europe." The pope concedes
that not all aspects of the Christian synthesis, brokered in the
particular culture of Greco-Roman Palestine and consummated in that of
Catholic Europe, need to be "integrated into all cultures." But the
marriage of faith and reason does, for it is now universal, fundamental
to "the nature of faith itself."
n
sum, the pope's essay is a declaration of the ongoing and universal
truth of Catholic dogma: exactly what we should expect from the vicar
of St. Peter. What we should not do, however, is confuse this
declaration for an adequate description of Islam, medieval or modern.
Any Islamic historian, any historian of religion, could easily object
that Benedict has his history wrong. It is easy to show that Islam,
too, was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy: indeed, the Catholic
West would not have known much of that philosophy without the Islamic
transmission of the ancient texts in Arabic translation. Aquinas
learned his Aristotle from Muslim philosophers such as Averroës and
Avicenna (as did Maimonides). And what kind of historian, what kind of
serious intellectual, pretends to characterize a religion as vast and
diverse as Islam with a single quotation from an embattled medieval
Christian polemicizing against it? Insofar as the pope's job
description is not that of historian but defender of the Catholic
faith, such objections are to some extent beside the point. Still, we
might have hoped for more from a learned leader at a time when the
Western world is desperately in need of greater knowledge about Islam
and its history.
There is another problem. Benedict's plea for Hellenization draws on a German philosophical tradition--stretching from Hegel's The Spirit of Christianity
through Weber's sociology of religions to the post-World War II
writings of Heidegger--whose confrontations of Hebraism with Hellenism
contributed to, rather than prevented, violence against non-Christians
on a scale unheard of in the Muslim world. We may grant that such an
intellectual dependence is hard to avoid, given the deep and abiding
influence of this theological and philosophical tradition on the modern
humanities and social sciences. From a Eurocentric point of view, we
might even concede the pope's well-worn claim that, as Heine put it in
1841, the "harmonious fusion of the two elements," the Hebraic and the
Hellenic, was "the task of all European civilization."
What we cannot accept without contradiction or hypocrisy is the
pope's presentation of the speech as an invitation to dialogue. It is
true that the talk concludes with an invitation: "It is to this great
logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the
dialogue of cultures." But it also concludes with the claim that "only
through [rationality of faith] do we become capable of that genuine
dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today." The bulk
of "Faith, Reason, and the University" is explicitly dedicated to the
thesis that European Catholicism has effectively mixed faith and reason
in the logos, and that other religions, specifically Islam, have not.
Forget for a moment the historical inaccuracies (not just about Islam,
but about other religions as well) in such a statement, and focus only
on the logic. What kind of invitation begins by denying its guests the
qualifications for attendance at the party? The pope's "invitation" at
Regensburg was not to a "dialogue of cultures" at all. What he was
advocating was a kind of conversion, or at least a convergence of all
religions and cultures toward a logos that is explicitly characterized
as Catholic and European.
Just like Manuel's medieval "dialogos" with a Muslim (the Greek
title of the emperor's treatise means "controversy" or "debate" rather
than "dialogue" in our modern sense), Benedict's lecture was a polemic
posing as a dialogue. Some among the faithful will rejoice that
Benedict, once known as "the Rottweiler" for his dogged defense of
doctrine as a cardinal, has bared his teeth as pope. But his speech
must not be mistaken for something more noble or more ecumenical than
the articulation of Catholic dogma that it was, even if the extreme
response in certain quarters of the Muslim world casts it in a more
sympathetic light. There are no champions of dialogue in this story. In
the harsh universe of religious polemic, there rarely are.
