Pope
Benedict is not naive.
It
is our liberal, theologically illiterate politicians who are naive.
He sees the conflict between
Islam and the West as the most serious issue of our time.
BY
DANIEL JOHNSON
September
18, 2006
Many
people, Catholics no less than non-Catholics, are bewildered and dismayed by
the sudden firestorm of Muslim hostility that has overtaken Pope Benedict XVI
since his lecture in Regensburg last Tuesday.
The
most charitable interpretation, said one BBC correspondent, is that he is
culpably naïve ‹ that he simply forgot that he was speaking not as a scholar to
his peers, but as pope. Even his defenders have suggested that it was a faux
pas to quote a 14th-century Byzantine emperor on the subject of Muhammad.
Surely, they say, it was an aberration for the spiritual leader of more than a
billion Catholics to use words such as "evil and inhuman" to describe
the prophet of more than a billion Muslims. Was it not inconsistent, to say the
least, to preach tolerance while accusing Islam of intolerance?
Well,
no: The passage that has aroused the ire of the ayatollahs was not a faux pas,
still less an aberration. And Benedict is nothing if not consistent. From his
earliest days, he has been true to his vocation as a priest and as an
intellectual. In the words of Milton's "Paradise Lost," he set out to
justify the ways of God to men, and he realized from the outset that he could
do this only by appealing to reason.
Günter
Grass, in his memoirs, recalls an encounter with the young Joseph Ratzinger
while both were held in an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. The young
Grass, a Nazi who had been proud to serve in the Waffen-SS, was taken aback by
this soft-spoken, gentle young Catholic. Unlike God, the future pope played
dice, quoting St. Augustine in the original while he did so; he even dreamt in
Latin. His only desire was to return to the seminary from which he had been
drafted. "I said, there are many truths," wrote Grass. "He said,
there is only one."
Sixty
years later, just before the conclave that elected him pope, Ratzinger proved
that he had never changed. The then prefect of the Congregation of the Faith ‹
in effect, the church's theological backstop ‹ preached a sermon to the
assembled cardinals in which he denounced the "dictatorship of
relativism." From that moment on, there was no other serious candidate.
This
is not the kind of Christian who fudges issues or asks, like Pontius Pilate:
"What is truth?" On the contrary, Benedict is secure enough in his
beliefs and intellectually confident enough to be able to engage in lively
debate with such hostile interlocutors as the postmodernist philosopher Jürgen
Habermas.
Benedict
believes passionately that people of faith in general, and Catholics in
particular, must either fight for their corner in the intellectual arena or
shut up shop. Jewish or Christian morality and theology deserve a prominent
place in the public square, not merely in private life.
He
is, of course, the first pope to be elected since September 11, and he sees the
conflict between Islam and the West as the most serious issue of our time.
Though his public statements about Islam are few, the line is a firm one. The
Benedict watchword is reciprocity ‹ Muslims must accord other believers the
same religious freedoms that they themselves enjoy in liberal democracies.
Just
as John Paul II was not afraid to take on the godless ideology of communism, so
Benedict XVI is not afraid to denounce the fanaticism of Islamo-fascism.
Yesterday he called for a "frank dialogue, with mutual respect."
Though he was at pains to remove misunderstandings, there was no hint of a
retraction.
It
is not that the pope believes himself to be infallible ‹ a concept that applies
only when pontiffs speak ex cathedra with the full authority of the church,
past as well as present. Here, Benedict refuses to back down because he cannot
tell a lie.
So
what was the pope really saying in that lecture he gave in Regensburg, his old
stamping ground in Bavaria? It was a rich and elegant reflection on the
rationality of faith, couched in the erudite language of a very German
philosophical discourse.
But
the message was, at heart, a straightforward one. The Jewish or Christian God
acts in accordance with reason: In the beginning was the Word, the Logos.
Benedict emphasizes that this new, logocentric understanding of God is already
present in the Hebrew Bible, long before the fusion of Jerusalem and Athens in
the New Testament. Our knowledge of God ‹ the God of Israel or the God of
Christianity ‹ emerges in the unfolding of the encounter between faith and
reason.
The
contribution of Hellenic thought to this gradual enlightenment is, for
Benedict, essential. He laments the "dehellenization" of Christianity
since the Reformation. Its effect, he thinks, has been to "relegate
religion to the realm of subcultures" and to treat scientific rationality
as if it had nothing whatever to do with faith. "The West has long been
endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its
rationality," he warns. If the West ignores this theological perspective,
it "can only suffer great harm."
But
the Pope was saying that there is an alternative to the Jewish or Christian
God: the God of medieval Islam. Allah is "absolutely transcendent,"
above even rationality. Benedict cites a Muslim authority to the effect that
"God is not bound even by his own word."
It
is in this context that the pope invokes the Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, who
recorded his dialogue with a learned Persian Muslim about the year 1400.
Byzantium would finally succumb to Turkish conquest only half a century later,
and Manuel wants to know how the doctrine of jihad can be justified, given that
it is incompatible with God as Logos. For this Hellenic Christian, Muhammad's
command to spread Islam by the sword must indeed be "evil and
inhuman."
Yesterday,
the pope insisted that he did not agree with Manuel. But it is clear that he
sympathized with this monarch of a doomed Christian civilization enough to use
him as a mouthpiece through which he could pose his own implicit questions to
Islam. Does the Muslim understanding of Allah allow rational debate about the
morality of violence, given that the doctrine of jihad is a central pillar of
Islam? If Allah is above reason, might violent jihad, including terrorism, be
not merely justifiable but obligatory, as many Muslim scholars argue?
By
now, the answer to these questions is clear: churches firebombed in the West
Bank and Gaza, a nun murdered in Somalia. Such persecution is, alas, routine in
many Muslim lands, and Catholics are not the only victims. But it is clear that
Muslim leaders ‹ even those of "pro-Western" countries such as Turkey
or Pakistan ‹ are not yet ready for the "frank" dialogue proposed by
the pope. By pointing out that violence is a part of medieval Islam, not a
"distortion," as Western liberals like to think, Benedict has touched
a raw nerve.
No,
this pope is not naive.
It
is our liberal, theologically illiterate politicians who are naive.
We
are already at war ‹ a holy war, which we may lose.
Nor
is he inconsistent. The Ratzinger of old, his skill in disputation honed over
many years of patiently defending Catholic orthodoxy against liberal or secular
opponents, was never going to duck the long-postponed doctrinal confrontation
with Islam. In his subtle, scholarly way, he is urging the rest of us to face
the fact that if we have no faith, we cannot hope to withstand the onslaught of
a resurgent Islam.
Benedict is
well aware of the risks, not least to his own life, of speaking out. Like his
great Polish predecessor, this *German shepherd * has the courage of his
convictions. Thank God he does: Without convictions, our courage will surely
fail us.
URL:
http://www.nysun.com/article/39849