Piers Paul Read says that the controversial nature of the Pope’s address has been missed in the furore over Muslim sensitivities: he was daring to equate Europe and Christendom
When he delivered his lecture on ‘Faith, Reason and the University’ in Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI said some provocative and contentious things. His comment on Islam was only one of them, and was by no means the most significant; but quoting the judgment of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus that certain aspects of Islam were ‘evil and inhuman’ was the most arresting and has caused a worldwide furore.
Some have criticised Pope Benedict for being tactless; others on the grounds that what the emperor Manuel II said is not true. The Pope himself has said that he does not share the emperor’s view of Islam, but there can be no doubt about the facts of the matter: Islam, for all its many admirable qualities, was a religion that proselytised with the sword. Mohammed promised paradise for those who died in battle and booty for those who did not. The promise, apparently, still stands: ‘We tell the worshipper of the Cross that you and the West will be defeated,’ the Mujahedin Shura Council of Sunni Muslims of Iraq said in response to the Pope’s lecture. ‘May God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahedin’ (Times, 19 September).
Such sentiments may not be shared by most Muslims, but the growth of Islamic fanaticism has driven many Christians out of Iraq. The Christian community there, which dates from the 1st century, has halved since the fall of Saddam Hussein and, with the prospect of democracy leading to a Shia theocracy and Sharia law, it may not survive.
Nor is such Islamic intolerance confined to Iraq. In the same week that Pope Benedict gave his lecture in Regensburg, a Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, published a report on the oppression of Christians over the past two years — in communist countries such as China and Cuba; in Hindu countries such as India and Sri Lanka, but above all in Islamic lands such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Palestine, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey and Pakistan.
Ironically, this increase in the oppression of Christians in Muslim countries follows the well-publicised attempts of Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, to seek reconciliation with Islam. To the dismay of the Vatican’s own historians, Pope John Paul II made his historical ‘apology’ for the sins of the Crusades. This has not been reciprocated by any Muslim apology for the centuries of jihad that took Muslim armies as far as Poitiers in 732 and to the gates of Vienna in 1683; and there are signs that Pope Benedict has had enough of these double standards. Archbishop Fitzgerald, the Curial Cardinal responsible for relations with Islam, has been sent off as Papal Nuncio in Cairo.
Yet those who read the full text of Pope Benedict’s lecture will see that it was not primarily about Islam. Addressed to an audience of academics, it was also crafted for delivery in Regensburg, a city at the very heart of Europe, once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and a command post of the Counter-Reformation. Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Prefect of the Holy Office, had kept alive the concept of a Church militant in the face of the relativism of the modern world. Now as supreme commander of a spiritual army he is waging war on two fronts — in the West against scientific materialists and in the East against religious fundamentalists — the first holding that the very idea of God is a nonsense, and the second that God transcends reason and can therefore be known only through what has been revealed in the Bible or the Koran.
Pope Benedict XVI takes both to task. How can the world arrive at shared values if materialists exclude faith and believers exclude reason? Secularists deny the divine, while to Muslims ‘God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.’ It is in this context that Pope Benedict mentioned the exchange between Manuel II and an ‘educated Persian’ at the turn of the 14th century. ‘God is not pleased by blood,’ the emperor insisted, ‘and not acting reasonably (syn logo) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the abil-ity to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.’
The Pope himself describes the emperor’s comments as ‘somewhat brusque’ — understandable, perhaps, in that he was at the time besieged in Constantinople by the Islamic armies of the Ottoman Turks. Osama bin Laden may also preach jihad but his sanguineous stunts are unlikely to bring down empires. However, what was important in this exchange to Pope Benedict was not the harsh words about Islam but the emperor’s contention that God is a reasonable being. ‘Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea,’ asked the Pope, ‘or is it always and intrinsically true?’
Here Pope Benedict enters into deep theological waters where his adversaries are not Muslims but other theologians who would ‘de-Hellenise’ the Christian religion — viz. remove from Christian doctrine what is derived from Greek thinkers such as Plato. First come the German Reformers like Luther and Calvin with their ‘sola scriptura’ (and by implication their evangelical Protestant disciples such as President Bush); then 19th-century scholars such as Adolf von Harnack; and finally — the third stage of de-Hellenisation — those who now claim ‘that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures’.
No no, says Pope Benedict. ‘This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision.’ (Enter rioting Third World theologians....) Broadly speaking, the moment chosen in the intellectual development of mankind for the Incarnation was not fortuitous. The truth is revealed in the fusion of Jewish prophecy and Hellenic reason, and only if we recognise this ‘do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today’.
Far from blaming the fundamentalist Muslims for the impasse, Pope Benedict criticised those in the Western world who hold ‘that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. The world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.’
Here he is not talking de haut en bas about devout Muslims and Hindus in the Third World. Quite to the contrary, he is talking of his native Bavaria which, together with the provinces of the former Austro–Hungarian empire, remains one of the world’s ‘profoundly religious cultures’. To Pope Benedict, as to Pope John Paul II, also a Central European, Christianity, with its fusion of faith and reason, cannot be abstracted from its genesis in Europe. ‘Christianity,’ he told his audience, ‘finally took on its decisive character in Europe. We can also express it the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.’
Thus to Pope Benedict, though the Catholic Church is universal, its roots are in Europe and Europe is its home base. This is why an Islamic nation like Turkey should not be admitted to the European Union, and why the spiritual renewal of ‘old’ Europe is the most urgent task at hand. When it sinks in, this equation of Europe and Christianity may prove more co ntentious than his use of the brusque words of a Byzantine emperor about Islam.