The Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict XVI

Much media attention has lately been given to protests in Muslim countries over remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI in an academic address at Regensburg University (12 September 2006). The Muslim Council of Britain has also demanded an apology and clarification (MCB Press Release).

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Update 18 Sep 2006. From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

The Muslim Council of Britain said the Pope's expression of regret was "exactly the reassurance many Muslims were looking for that, although he quoted them, he himself did not agree with the opinions of that Christian emperor."

In India, the powerful All India Muslim Personal Law Board called for an end to protests.

The head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith said the pontiff's apology showed "good faith and a desire for peace."

In Germany, the Central Council of Muslims said: "The statement was, in our view, the important step towards calming the unrest of the past days in many parts of the world

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Having now read the complete text of the address as published by the Vatican, it seems to me that media coverage of the remarks has been inadequate and perhaps deliberately sensational. What follows below is my attempt to understand the pope's admittedly difficult language and to show that the outrage that has met the media reports of his address is not warranted in view of the text itself.

The Vatican's official response to the protests is useful, and an essay by Egyptian Jesuit Samir Khalil Samir also offers a helpful analysis of the address and its import for Christianity and Islam in the secular West.

The argument presented in the address can be summarized as follows:

1) In its beginnings, as the first texts of the New Testament were being written, Christianity was influenced by 'pagan' Greek philosophical ideas about the nature of the divine, and how Reason as a human faculty flows from the nature of God. Despite Christianity's Jewish origins, all its foundation texts are written in Greek and imbued with Greek thought. During the first millennium of Christianity, it was felt that Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had been able to grasp much of the nature of God through reason, even though they had not been privileged with the revelation offered by the Hebrew scriptures.

2) Beginning with the Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Christians came to be suspicious of their religion's use of philosophical discourse, and sought to expound a belief system based on faith in God as he is revealed in the scriptures. This led to the articulation of the Lutheran dogma sola fide, sola scriptura: by faith alone, by the scripture alone.

3) As Reformation theologians had been suspicious of philosophy, so the thinkers of the 'Enlightenment' movement of the eighteenth century began to distance themselves from religion. They felt that religion and faith could have no place in a rational system of thought in which objectivity was essential. Hence Kant's remark, quoted by the pope, that he 'needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith'. Faith had no standing in Enlightenment thought.

4) In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, faith and reason had become so separate that attempts to reconcile them necessarily involved the denial of the divine element in Christian teachings, and making the original message of Jesus purely 'humanitarian'. Meanwhile, the development of scientific thought -- that is, a system of inquiry into all subjects of human interest, including what may be loosely termed 'technology' -- has flourished. Against such a successful scientific interpretation of matter and thought, the question of God comes to appear, as the pope puts it, 'an unscientific or pre-scientific question'.

5) This historical exposition shows that it is not only that pure reason and scientific thought have rejected faith and religion, but also that faith and religion have rejected reason and science. This latter rejection is what the pope wishes to argue against. The Greek unification of reason and the divine, he argues, was the correct one. The search by every person of faith to know and obey the 'will of God' cannot be divorced from reason, which emanates from the essence of God himself.

6) Here now may be considered the quotation of Manuel II Paleologus that has caused such outrage:

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. ... 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 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.

Having just quoted this passage, the pope goes on to say, 'The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.

It seems obvious, given the overall structure of the address as outlined in points 1 to 5 above, that the pope is not concerned with the question of whether Muhammad's teachings added anything new to humanity's understanding of God apart from violence. It would be a provocative question to address, not least because Muhammad himself was adamant that his teaching was, in a certain sense, redundant: the revelation of the Qur'an was a restoration of the monotheism of Abraham (Qur'an 3:65-71), the last in a series of revelations. Had the Jews persisted in following the Torah and the Christians the 'Injil' (the Gospel), no further revelation would have been necessary (see Qur'an 5:44-50 and 48:29; though of course the Qur'an could not be said to be entirely 'derivative'). But to suggest that violence is the defining hallmark of Islam would be very narrow. One has only to turn to the poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz to see that Islam is full of insight and beauty. Hafiz died in 1389, and so was a contemporary of Manuel II Paleologus. His lyrics would certainly have been known to the emperor's 'Persian interlocutor', unnamed in the pope's address and perhaps also in the original text. I have not had a chance to consult Theodore Khoury's edition and translation of the dialogue from which the pope quoted, so I don't know how the Persian disputant responded to Manuel II's assertion.

On the issue of violence, it cannot be denied that the original founders of Islam and Christianity seem to have differed fundamentally in their approach to the relationship between faith and politics and about whether force has a role to play in bringing about the ideal society. From a theological standpoint, the concept of jihad, 'struggle', whether interpreted as an outward battle (as fundamentalists tend to view it) or as an interior wrestling against evil (as seems to me to be the mainstream view), has no direct parallel in Christianity (whose closest image is probably 'taking up the cross' to become a disciple). And historically, it would be hard to reconcile Jesus's command not to react to violence with violence (Matthew 5:39 and 26:42) with the history of Islam's expansion through military conquest. Of course, this phase of Islam's development is poorly understood by Christians (not least by me), and Muhammad, as a political leader, cannot be compared directly to Jesus, who was never a 'head of state' -- indeed he refused such a role (John 6:15) -- and so never had to grapple with the question of a 'just war'. Students of Islamic history inform me that, as conquerors, the Muslim Caliphs were very benign and benevolent. If you had to be conquered, it was probably better to be conquered by a Muslim army than by a Christian one. Moreover, it could be argued that Jesus never renounced the use of force altogether, considering his scourging of the temple money changers with a whip (John 2:13-17), his enigmatic statement that he had 'not come to bring peace, but a sword' (Matthew 10:34), and St Paul's opinion that the use of coercive force by temporal rulers was part of the divine order (Romans 13:4). Such debates are in a way immaterial, because as soon as Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, coercion became more and more prevalent in Christian governance. The Reformation and its aftermath formed a particularly terrifying period in the history of Christianity, and the conquest of South America included major forced conversions, especially if our understanding of coercion is broadened to acknowledge oblique economic and social pressures. Manuel II ruled the Eastern Empire towards the end of two and a half centuries of crusader activities, and so he could not have argued that Christianity was blameless when it came to 'holy war' (though he may have rationalized his opinion by laying the blame on the Western Church, with which Eastern Orthodoxy had been in schism since 1054), even if the crusades were not about conversion per se.

The pope, as a scholar and theologian of great erudition, will have been aware of the context surrounding the dramatic quotation included in his speech. So will his audience, a gathering of scholars who could be relied upon to interpret this quotation in terms of the theme of the address, and not as evidence for the pope's thinking on an unrelated topic. The claim I have encountered in certain objections to the address that the pope is 'ignorant of Islam' is simply not credible. That he used this particular quotation in a lecture about the relationship between faith and reason says nothing about what the pope thinks about Islam (he has personally denied that Manuel II's words represent his thoughts) -- though it may show that he has not yet grown accustomed to the scrutiny that his words are bound to receive, no matter what the context.

The point of the anecdote is to highlight the contrast between a religion that views reason as a reliable guide to the nature of God and a religion that mistrusts rational inquiry as misguided, potentially hubristic, and possibly blasphemous. If the pope's choice of this anecdote to illustrate his point were to be criticized, two objections could be raised: (a) This quotation is not directly relevant to his argument. The point of the lecture is to illustrate the historical process whereby faith and reason were divorced from each other in Western thought. It makes no attempt to declare 'Christianity' as a single monolithic element to be superior to any other religion, including Islam. It is concerned instead with the rejection of reason within Christianity itself. (b) By contrast, Greek philosophical thought was studied and preserved in the medieval Islamic world at the same time that it was largely forgotten in the West outside monasteries and the fledgling universities, and even in these places it was regarded with some suspicion as 'pagan'. It is not immediately obvious, therefore, that all Islamic thought considers God entirely to transcend human rational constructions, as Benedict argues in the fourth paragraph of his address. The pope cites the opinion of Ibn Hazm (the prolific Islamic theologian who lived from 994 to 1059) that God would not even be bound by his own word. I do not know how much currency this opinion had in the whole spectrum of Islamic theological thought in the fourteenth century, or has now in the twenty-first, or whether the Greek vs. Islamic antithesis that the pope proposes is broadly applicable. But neither of these criticisms suggests that the use of this quotation is 'anti-Islamic'. They merely raise questions that are not directly addressed in the text of the lecture (but which may be addressed in the footnotes of the lecture when it is put into final published form, as promised).

While this quotation could be said to be tangential to the pope's main argument, it does serve as a striking rhetorical illustration of the point he tries to make. If Muslims were to object to the illustration's use, it would properly be to point out what I have labelled Objection (b), rather than to demand an apology for quoting a historical figure who was out of sympathy with Islam as he understood it. Was Manuel II Paleologus wrong about Islam? Most would of course agree that he was, or at least that he made this exaggerated statement for rhetorical effect in the heat of the argument. Is Christianity guiltless when it comes to violence in matters of faith? Of course it is not. How important it is, then, that the leader of Western Christianity has offered an argument that violence has no place in religion. A call for religion to embrace reason once again is most timely, because the phenomenon of fundamentalism, now appearing in most of the major world religions, is founded on the belief that reason has no place in faith, that God's will transcends human reason. This approach is especially dangerous not just within Islam, but within Christianity as well, where those who would interpret scripture literally are gaining more and more influence, particularly in the United States. The belief in the inerrancy of a particular interpretation of scripture almost inevitably results in the justification of violence against those who would oppose that interpretation (for example, the murdering of physicians believed to have performed abortions). The pope's address represents a plea, admittedly offered in obscure academic language, for the use of reason in discerning the will of God, and an argument that reasonable behaviour will always exclude violence.

Ultimately, however, the significance of Pope Benedict's remarks for the relationship between Christianity and Islam is entirely secondary to his main goal. The title of the address, 'Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections', and his reminiscences about his time as a student at Regensburg, have to do with his thesis that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive, and that the study of theology merits a place in any university. The address is a challenge to the secular world to consider that reason may not exclude the divine after all. This pope has shown his chief mission to be to his native Europe, which has largely abandoned religion (a mission declared in his choice of name, for Benedict is the patron saint of Europe). These remarks are not directed towards Islam at all, but to the lapsed Christian heritage of the West, a point not lost on the editors of The Times. Certain commentators have suggested that the pope 'ought to criticize Christianity's violent past before criticizing other religions'. Had they read the text carefully, they would have seen that this is precisely what he has done.

Meanwhile, because of the irresponsible use of media headlines by opportunistic politicians in countries with predominantly Muslim populations, churches in Palestine have been firebombed and sprayed with bullets, and a 65-year-old nun has been shot dead in Somalia. Who really has just cause for outrage here?