More than a week has passed and rivers of ink have flowed, but the impact of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech before an audience at the University of Regensburg continues to reverberate throughout the world. A nun in Somalia was gunned down and effigies of the Pope burn throughout the Muslim world. Death threats continue to pour into a nervous Vatican. But there’s more to the story.
Benedict is far more of a product of academia than his predecessor. Prior to arriving at the Vatican, the former Cardinal Ratzinger taught in universities, including Regensburg, and his worldview reflects his academic background. Catholic teaching has always stressed the need for both faith and reason as necessary precursors to belief. We use our ability to reason, which is the essence of what makes us human, to help us understand God. Faith flows from our ability to reason. Benedict sought to remind his audience of this home truth.
But here’s a question. What if a home truth is not a home truth? What if your worldview doesn’t comport with something as fundamental (to Western thinking, at least) as the role of reason? Where do you go then? And is dialogue even possible?
I have used the term existential frequently in discussing what’s going on right now. We are, however unwillingly, in the territory of Hamlet’s soliloquy. While it’s pretty evident that the Western world is sharply divided on matters of faith and religion, it’s also quite clear that the Islamic world has similar divisions. From what I can understand of it, some Muslims believe that Allah is beyond human understanding and Allah’s ministrations cannot be understood through human reason. And that’s a problem, because it means that, for those who have this understanding, they are not independent actors. They are compelled to submit to Allah’s will as they come to understand it. And if Allah’s will requires jihad, then you are pretty much duty-bound to take up arms against the infidels (i.e., the West). All the things that come with daily life – home, family, livelihood – are necessarily less important than jihad.
Benedict understands all this and it clearly concerns him greatly. We have a history going back well over 1,000 years with Islam and he quite purposely quoted obscure Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus’s challenge to a “learned Persian” correspondent. Here is the key portion of Benedict’s address:
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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 threat.
But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending 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.
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 practice idolatry
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We are, if all this is true, way beyond the old “what we have here is failure to communicate” issue. We face something a lot more dire – the impossibility of communication in any way that does not, in the end, require atavistic means. Or, to be less fancy, words won’t work and the sword trumps the diplomat. All this is disquieting to the Western mind.
Next – Peggy Lee and the idolatry of the West
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