Shrewd Pope
by Donald Devine

Professor Joseph Ratzinger wrote a deeply intellectual and profoundly original book about reason and belief in 2003 titled Truth and Tolerance and called for a worldwide dialogue on these matters so important for peace between civilizations in our time. Not surprisingly for such a wonderfully rational work, its argument fell on deaf ears.

On September 12th of this year, he tried again, now as Pope Benedict, at his “old University” of Regensburg. This time the whole world listened—at least to some of what he had to say. The immediate reaction, however, was far from dialogue, as the Muslim world objected vigorously to his use of a quotation from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus: “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."

Leadership in literally every Muslim state objected to what they considered as blasphemy against the Prophet. Reactions went from Morocco’s recalling its ambassador to the Vatican, to demands for an apology from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, to attacks by Palestinians and others on Catholic churches in the Middle East, to the murder of an Italian nun, Sr. Leonella Sgorbati, in Mogadishu.

Pope Benedict quickly replied that he was “deeply sorry” for the anger in reaction to his remarks and explained that the emperor’s statements did not reflect his own views. He was, he emphasized, actually trying to speak in favor of tolerance of other views and desired to provoke discussion rather than anger. But he did not retreat on the substance of his remarks. Instead, he used the occasion to argue again for mutual understanding and serious consideration of basic issues among different worldviews.

What did he actually say and in what context? The offending quote came several paragraphs after the subject was first introduced, which the professor expounded was raised by a book. “I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on--perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara--by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.”

It is clear that Manuel knew that Islam’s “Surah 2, 256 reads: ‘There is no compulsion in religion” but he offered his comments in the offending passage as a counter. The pope continued by noting there was a reason for its bluntness:

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...

Ratzinger stressed that Manuel’s main point was that violent conversion is contrary to reason and “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” Khoury interjected that for an emperor shaped by Greek philosophy, this is self-evident. “But for Muslim teaching,” Benedict continued, “God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quoted 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.”

“Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true,” asked Benedict?

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, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the Word". 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.

Pope Benedict raises a most fundamental question, one that goes to the deepest differences between Christianity and Islam. This is not name-calling or an attack upon Mohammed but raises profound differences between the two major world religions and the civilizations that emerged from them, ones that must be engaged as an alternative to violence. Benedict is concerned with a way of thinking, not Islam directly. Indeed, he criticizes some forms of Reformation thinking for similar but vaguer monism in its thinking—although he is clear this does not become disabling until brought to its extremes under Immanuel Kant. He is perhaps most critical of the Catholic philosopher and priest Duns Scotus who brought monist, either/or thinking into his own church. Of course, the media treatment misses this Christian critique entirely, as did most Muslims. The public discussion even failed to consider that Manuel offered his intemperate evaluation under the guns of an attacking Muslim army!

Actually, the riots should have been staged by those the philosopher F.A. Hayek called naïve rationalists, as opposed to critical rationalists, those monist believers in reason who were actually the main target of the speech and the book. Benedict’s main guns were trained at the narrow thinking of naïve rationalism that sees all reality composed of simple matter, with no role for the spirit, rejecting out of hand not only morality and philosophy but, logically, even a real status for “non-sense” like logic and mathematics. While he specifically praised the Enlightenment and said we cannot reject its gains, Benedict argued that fully abstract reason and purely empiricist science were not enough.

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. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Is this the reflection of just some priest? The Pope need have gone no further than his January 19, 2004 meeting with the leader of the prestigious Frankfurt School, whose rationalist thought provided the intellectual underpinning for much of today’s world, Jurgen Habermas. While the two were by no means in perfect accord, Habermas agreed with Ratzinger’s main point. Modernism is “going off the rails,” he said, and the “theory that a religious structure with transcendental references is the only thing which can help a contrite modernism out of the dead-end it currently finds itself in, is becoming popular again. It is in the interests of the constitutional state to deal compassionately with all of the cultural sources which can be used to feed our citizens’ awareness of norms and solidarity.”

The whole purpose of book and speech was to begin the necessary debate over reason-only or faith-only as in modernism and Islam, and the synthesis of faith and reason that has been Western civilization, at least until recently.  Benedict took advantage of the controversy he had raised to immediately call a meeting with the Muslim ambassadors to the Vatican and Italy and Muslim religious leaders from Europe and the Islamic world. “Christians and Muslims must learn to work together…in order to guard against all forms of intolerance and to oppose all manifestations of violence,” Benedict pleaded to the assembled group. The result? Mario Scialoja, an adviser to the Italian section of the Muslim World League, said the Pope gave a "very good and warm speech. He recalled the differences but expressed his willingness to continue in a cordial and fruitful dialogue.”

Khalil Altoubat, a member of the Italian Muslim community's government liaison group said: "I think this meeting has resolved many problems. We can close this controversy."  Iraq's envoy to the Vatican, Albert Edward Ismail Yelda, saying he was satisfied with the speech, added: "I pray to almighty God the crisis will be behind us. We need to sit together -- Muslims, Christians, Jews and the rest of the world, the rest of religions--in order to find common ground for peaceful coexistence."

Mission accomplished.

In one of those ironic missteps journalists invariably face, my good friend and learned tutor, Tom Bethel, had just written about the lack of courage shown by Christian leaders to face the real issues radical Islam raises and to debate and resolve them directly. It may have taken a shrewd use of some inflammatory words to do it but a man of great courage and intelligence did speak up and the debate so needed between civilizations has begun. At least one must admit his strategy was more effective than just writing a book.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University