The following originally appeared at MACLEANS.ca on September 29, 2006.
The assumption is that Pope Benedict XVI made a mistake.
In the world of politics or business, remarks that set off a firestorm of criticism are considered to be a gaffe, quickly to be withdrawn and hopefully forgotten – even if, or especially if, they are true.
The Pope takes a rather different view. There are issues he wishes to raise that many would otherwise ignore, and one of them is the status of violence in Islamic theology. His Regensburg address was aimed at speaking some difficult truths, in the conviction that speaking the truth is the first obligation of the Christian preacher.
What he said, and how he said it, was no accident. Those who have followed Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s long public career know that the man expresses himself with great clarity and precision. He does this off-the-cuff in his third and fourth languages. It is implausible that a formal academic lecture at his old university in his native language would be carelessly assembled. Indeed, the original transcripts of the lecture indicated that the Pope intended to refine the text with academic footnotes and subsequently publish a more complete version. Beforehand, senior Vatican officials were billing the lecture as a “defining” address of Benedict’s papal program. So this was no mistake. Benedict said what he wanted to say in the way he wanted to say it.
No doubt he was surprised at the frenzied reaction in the Muslim world, and he subsequently apologized for the reactions to his speech. That was necessitated as much by diplomacy as by pastoral concern; Benedict is not too proud to refuse an apology when Islamist fanatics are bombing Christian churches. He did not withdraw the main point, of course, because the firebombers and the rioters were raising, in their own way, the very questions he was asking about faith and reason, violence and religion.
The main point of the Regensburg address was that faith and reason need each other as paths to truth. Benedict defended this as an essential part of Christian belief because the God who reveals himself (faith) is also the author of the natural order and the human capacity to understand it (reason). The Pope highlighted that the prologue of John’s Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the word (logos),” and logos is the Greek word for reason. God is reasonable, and so to act contrary to reason is to act contrary to God.
Benedict asks if Islam conceives of God in the same way. Does Islam have an equivalent to the divine logos? Benedict raised the question of whether the Islamic conception of God as utterly transcendent, beyond all human categories, means that God is beyond reason itself. The suggestion is not that God is crazy or insane, but rather that he is not bound by a reason accessible to human beings.
Faith without reason gives rises to fundamentalism. Reason without faith produces a secularism that cannot address the most fundamental of human questions about origin, destiny and meaning. The bulk of Benedict’s address was directed against the latter phenomenon, criticizing a modern secularism that has nothing to say to people of faith, and nothing to say about the foundations of human culture. In criticizing the neglect of reason in favour of faith alone, Benedict criticized a major figure in the history of Christian philosophy (John Duns Scotus), who he considered to have made this mistake.
So why, if that was Benedict’s main point, get into Islam at all? Why the incendiary quotation from Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus on the evil of Islam, spreading faith by the sword?
One of the potential consequences of a faith-only fundamentalism is violence. Violent force — which by its nature does not seek to persuade — can grow out of a zeal to convert without recourse to reason. It is simply a fact that Islamic violence is a growing problem around the world. Muslims themselves are the first victims of it, but Christians in Islamic countries regularly face harassment and persecution. Benedict wants to clarify that the roots of this violence lie in a perversion of Islam, not its authentic theology. That’s a task only Muslims can accomplish, but the Pope has a pulpit sufficient to draw attention to the issue.
Benedict likely chose the dialogue between Manuel II and his Persian interlocutor because it deals directly with this question in a historically suggestive setting. Manuel II was one of the last Byzantine emperors; some 60 years after this dialogue, Constantinople would fall to the Ottomans and the great Haggia Sophia would become a mosque. At the time, Manuel II was an emperor under siege from Muslim armies – not only Muslim armies, as he was threatened at times by Christians too, but nevertheless with a concrete experience of the sword of Islam.
“The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable,” said Benedict, in the key passage that immediately followed the words that got all the attention. “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.”
He then quotes Manuel II on the key point: “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 . . . ”
That is the point Benedict wants to raise in relation to Islam, because, daily, Christians are faced with the consequences of its opposite. And in relation to the supposed damage to Christian-Muslim relations, contrary to the professional dialoguers, Benedict likely judges that Christian-Muslim relations are already in a dire state when Christians are persecuted throughout the Islamic world.
In November, Benedict will travel to Turkey, and he has now set the stage for an important encounter with Islam. Last Feb. 5, in the midst of the Danish cartoon crisis, Italian missionary Father Andrea Santoro was shot twice while praying in Trabzon, Turkey, by a 16-year-old Turk shouting “Allahu akbar.” Benedict now has entered that same fray, and no doubt there are some who would like to pump a few bullets into him. It’s precisely because of that, not to avoid that, that Benedict said what he did. Authentic dialogue has to begin with difficult questions asked, and difficult truths spoken. The speech at Regensburg was not a mistake. The aftermath was a great clarifying moment.