Benedict XVI on Faith, Reason, Violence and Religion.
2nd October 2006
Newman House Series on Ethics and Public Life
Does Islam need the pope? The question is curious, I concede. Islam has its own method of interpreting divine revelation, and the visible head of the Roman Catholic Church has no role in that. Yet I believe that this particular pope, Benedict XVI, has something important to offer Islam, something which, in fact, Islam needs at this moment in history.
The question – Does Islam need the pope? – presumes a prior premise, which is that Islam faces a challenge in which the pope is well-suited to provide assistance. My contention is that Islam does today face such a challenge and is in need of all possible assistance. A further contention is that the challenge is not for Islam alone, but for all who profess belief in the God of Abraham.
The challenge is well-known, and is generally described as the problem of violence in the name of Islam. It does not consist simply of violence by Muslims, as every culture has its own violent people, but rather violence which is justified and motivated on specifically Islamic grounds. Usually the term “Islamist†is used as the adjective, rather than “Islamicâ€, to suggest that such violence is a corruption of Islamic doctrine, not its authentic expression.
Islamist violence takes two forms which can be further specified: terrorism and religious persecution. Islamist terrorism consists of acts of terror – violence against civilian populations justified in the minds of the terrorists and their supporters by Islamic doctrine. Religious persecution is the violation of religious liberty by state authorities or private actors in Muslim-majority countries. Such persecution ranges from harassment to killing. Islamist terrorism and religious persecution are a grave threat to peace and security both for the world in general, and the Islamic world in particular.
This is not only a problem for non-Muslims that Muslims need to solve. The first victims of Islamist violence are Muslims themselves. While Western victims of Islamist terrorism number in the thousands, Muslim victims of terror number in the tens of thousands. Moreover, the challenge of Islamist violence constitutes a major threat to political order, peace and stability throughout the Islamic world. There are several regimes in the Islamic world that face real challenges of legitimacy and authority by Islamist movements. So it is not the case that this is a matter of Christians as a whole being against Muslims as a whole, but rather both Christians and Muslims confronting a common Islamist threat.
It is in this context that one can speak of Pope Benedict helping Islam confront this challenge. If the perpetrators of Islamist violence claim that they are acting in the name of God, then there needs to be an argument about the nature of God. Is God such a person that He could command such violence? Or be pleased by it? Indeed, if the subject is the nature of the God of Abraham, the Catholic Pope certainly has something to contribute to an argument that must be had within the Islamic world itself, but also between Jews, Christians and Muslims – all the children of Abraham.
There is a theological component to the challenge of Islamist violence. It is not the only component of course, but it is fundamental. Soon after 9/11 Western leaders met with Muslin leaders and visited mosques to declare that Islam is a “religion of peaceâ€. It does not belong to political leaders to make theological claims, but their gestures indicated a correct intuition that there must be a religious response to problem with, in large part, religious roots. In this regard, the Canadian response was particularly foolish. You will recall the great 9/11 memorial on Parliament Hill, at which Prime Minister Jean Chretien decreed that there would be no prayer whatsoever by anyone. Later, he would bizarrely describe this decision as the best he had ever made. It is exactly the wrong response. Aggressive secularism has very little to contribute when confronting aggressive religious violence. Bad religious ideas need to be corrected by good religious ideas, not anti-religious ideas. That is the task of theology, which is the application of reason to the things of God.
The Reasonableness of God
All of which serves as background to the lecture that Pope Benedict XVI gave at the University of Regensburg on September 12. The address was primarily about the relationship of faith and reason, but it was the remarks concerning Islam that were met with protests – often violent – in many parts of the Islamic world.
The Pope quoted the penultimate Byzantine emperor of Constantinople, Manuel II Palaeologus, who expressed a negative judgment on the history of Islam, making the accusation that Islam was spread by the sword. We shall return to the quotation later, but Pope Benedict was more interested in the argument that the emperor developed after expressing that judgment.
The pope said: “The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, 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’, he says, ‘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…’.â€
Benedict arrives here at a central point of his lecture, namely that God by nature is reasonable, and so that which is contrary to reason is contrary to God Himself. In particular, to coerce the soul by means of violence to the body is contrary to reason, and so cannot be compatible with God’s will, which is always reasonable.
Benedict further makes the claim that the conception of God as reasonable belongs to Christian faith in its origins. The Gospel of John begins, as the Pope indicates, “In the beginning was the Word.†The Greek word employed there is “logosâ€, which means both “word†and “reasonâ€. The Christian faith understands God not only as the One who reveals Himself as love – “God is Love†is the title of Benedict’s first encyclical – but also as the One who is reasonable by nature. Man, created in the image of God, is rational, and human reason corresponds to the rationality of God. Finite human reason is not coextensive with God of course, but human reason participates in divine rationality. What is contrary to human reason then cannot be commanded by God or required by faith.
This is of primary importance given the challenge facing Islam today. Benedict’s address encourages Islam to reflect precisely on this point about the nature of God, providing Islamic scholars with a potentially fruitful theological point of departure in the argument with the advocates of Islamist violence. This is potentially helpful for Islam in two respects.
First, Islam has a different understanding of the Sacred Scriptures than exists in the Catholic world. In Islam, the sacred text of the Quran was, for the most part, transmitted directly to the Prophet Mohammed and therefore is independent of Mohammed’s creative human agency. Catholics understand the Bible to have been divinely inspired, but that divine inspiration worked through the human instruments, who were also real authors. The result is that the Catholic scriptures are interpreted against the whole of the Catholic faith, which includes, as we have seen, human reason. For Muslims debating the authentic interpretation of the Quran, it might help to have such an extra-scriptural point of reference with which to escape from the dead end of different interpreters citing different Quranic verses to different effects – a problem which can afflict Christian scriptural exegesis as well. Reason can purify and clarify sacred texts without in any way diminishing their authority as sources of divine revelation.
Second, Islam has a conception of God that, in comparison to Christianity, emphasizes the majesty of God. Of course, for both Christian and Muslim, God is God, above whom there is no other. For Christians though, the Incarnation means that a human intellect and human will are united in one Person with the divine, providing a default position, as it were, in favour of human reason. If God could contradict human reason, the Person of Jesus Christ would be at odds with Himself.
Islam, while honoring Jesus Christ as a prophet, does not accept Him as divine. Without the Incarnation, Islam does not have such a default position in favour of human reason. This does not mean that human reason is alien to faith absent the Incarnation. Yet it can be the case that faith in a God who remains wholly other can put God above human categories altogether.
Is such a God beyond even the category of human reason? Does human reason participate truthfully in the rationality of God? Or is the nature of God so completely transcendent that even the categories of human reason are confounded by it? If the answers to these questions are the same for Muslims as they are for Catholics, then Muslim leaders have arguments in addition to scriptural ones to meet the challenge of Islamist violence.
The alternative – the Islamist alternative? – is a God of pure will, a remote lawgiver who can command anything – even those things which reason would conclude is contrary to His nature. This argument has long been confronted in the Catholic tradition, and Pope Benedict even criticized a Catholic philosopher (John Duns Scotus) for taking steps in that direction. The fruit of that long reflection in the Catholic tradition is not for Catholics alone; if it is true, it is true for all believers. To draw attention to that tradition is an important service that the Catholic Pope can offer to his Muslim listeners.
Violence Past and Present
The specific question then arises about why Pope Benedict chose to address his listeners in the way that he did. Here is how he introduced the discussion:
“[The emperor] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘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’.â€
In response, the reaction in some parts of the Islamic world is by now well known. Benedict clarified later that the quotation was just that, a quotation, and did not reflect his own considered judgment of Islam. He was obviously quite pained by the belligerent and violent reaction, and expressed his sorrow at those reactions. Yet anyone who has followed Benedict’s long public life knows that he considers his words very carefully. It was he, after all, on the morning of the conclave which elected him pope, chose to introduce the world to a pithy expression: “the dictatorship of relativismâ€.
I am confident that Benedict was surprised at the extreme reaction in some quarters, but I am also confident that he chose that quotation deliberately. Why might he have done so, given that he himself characterized the quotation as revealing a “brusqueness that leaves us astounded� I suggest that Benedict wanted to indicate two related points in a rather elliptical fashion.
The first is that violent conflicts between Christians and Muslims have been with us a very long time. That conflict has meant that many former Christian lands are now Islamic countries. Indeed, Benedict is going to visit Istanbul next month. Constantinople was one of the great Christian cities of the world; it did not become Istanbul by some mysterious accident. It was conquered by the Ottomans and the great Haggia Sophia was converted to a mosque.
But why not leave history in the past? Partly because many people today think that the long history of Christian-Muslim relations is principally one of rapacious Christian armies setting upon irenic Muslim peoples. That Christians have sinned against Muslims is not disputed, certainly not by Pope Benedict, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger participated in the historic “day of forgiveness†that marked the Jubilee Year of 2000. This is the prayer he made in St. Peter’s Basilica – the Haggia Sophia of the West – on the First Sunday of Lent that year, in the presence of Pope John Paul II:
“Let us pray that each one of us,
looking to the Lord Jesus, meek and humble of heart,
will recognize that even men of the Church,
in the name of faith and morals,
have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel
in the solemn duty of defending the truth.â€
But a one-sided view of history is simply false – and dangerous. It is false because it blinds us to the fact that many Christians were driven out of their historic lands by Islamic conquerors. It is dangerous because it blinds us to fact that there are many places in the Islamic world where the Christian presence is dwindling today. That is the link between a historic quotation and contemporary reality. In Iraq, for example, where Christians and Muslims have lived together for more than a millennium, the Christian communities are disappearing. The same is true in Egypt, where Coptic Christians have been present since ancient times. And it is true most dramatically in the Palestinian Territories, where the birthplace of Jesus Christ is no longer a Christian city. There are now more Christians born in Bethlehem living in South America than remain in Bethlehem itself.
Violence against Christians by Muslims is a daily reality across the Islamic world. That is why it was strange to hear critics complain that Benedict’s lecture would harm Christian-Muslim relations. When Christians are daily persecuted and harassed, when their churches are bombed and their families afraid, when they lack the basic right to religious liberty, when monks and nuns are martyred – then one might fairly conclude that Christian-Muslim relations are already in a very dire state indeed. Far from damaging such relations, the Regensburg lecture may well have been a clarifying moment in illustrating just where such relations stand.
A second purpose behind the “brusque†quotation is more hopeful. Given the historical circumstances of a Christian emperor under siege from Muslim armies, it is impressive that this Christian-Muslim dialogue even took place, examining as it does the nature of God and the consequences of that for how we live together. Given the times, that is a sign of hope itself. Our times too could use such signs of hope.
The Regensburg Moment
When Benedict first went to Germany in August 2005 for the World Youth Day, he added to the program a special meeting with Muslim leaders. That meeting, in which he expressed his esteem for Islam and thanked the leaders present for taking a leadership role in condemning religious violence, was widely reported at the time. The Regensburg lecture must be seen in continuity with that first meeting.
Benedict clearly wants to deepen a dialogue with the Islamic world. It is his assessment that the Islamic world has a great challenge, and challenge in which Catholics can be of help. Consider that there are some 1 billion Muslims in the world. What if only 1% were sympathetic to the Islamist cause? That would be 10 million. What if it were 10%? That would be 100 million. This is not only a speculative question; it have very tangible consequences.
Benedict’s view is not that every Christian or Jew should fear every Muslim, but rather that Christians, Jews and Muslims are together facing a threat from an Islamist movement which, though only a minority, constitutes a powerful and lethal threat. The Regensburg moment clarified that in a remarkable way, juxtaposing as it did an academic lecture by an erudite scholar and enraged mobs burning the same man in effigy.
The Regensburg moment should also be welcomed by faithful Muslims for what Benedict said to the elite culture of the West – at whom the lecture was principally directed. Benedict had this to say about the state of the modern university:
“First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned. …
…if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science’, so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective ‘conscience’ becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.â€
Benedict delivered a broadside against much of what passes for intellectual inquiry, whether at the University of Regensburg or at Queen’s University, for that matter. The modern materialist, rationalist mind has systematically excluded more and more of human experience from the field of scientific study, so that the most fundamental questions are left out. In my own (former) discipline of economics, this reality is a source of frustration for many students, and has too often made of economics a cramped and narrow field of technical expertise, not a human science.
Benedict’s point is that Western culture cannot expect to have a true dialogue with the world of religion, especially the world of Islam, if its own premises exclude from the beginning fundamental questions of origin and destiny, and the role of religion. A dialogue is an exchange which makes demands on both parties. That is an argument that would not be heard at Regensburg if an Islamic cleric were to make it. It is an argument that is heard when made by the pope, especially a pope such as Benedict, who belongs to the first rank of scholars of his generation. Those Muslims who wish a dialogue which takes seriously their faith have an ally in Pope Benedict.
So does Islam need this pope? Islam has demonstrated throughout history that it is capable of great achievements in culture and civilization. Indeed, the legacy of Greek rationality that Benedict spoke about at Regensburg was for many centuries kept alive in the Islamic world when it had been lost to the Christian world. It was St. Thomas Aquinas who drew upon Averroes in part as a bridge to Aristolelian philosophy.
That was the 13th century, and in re-establishing a great Christian synthesis of faith and reason, St. Thomas and the other Scholastic philosophers were open to taking help from whichever quarter they could find it. Eight hundred years later, there is a need today for Islam to re-propose its own synthesis of faith and reason, and it is again necessary to look for assistance in this enormous task from whatever quarter it may be available – even from the pope.