Did Benedict Blow It?

Pope Benedict XVI has been the subject of a media blitz over the past few weeks because he uttered the following words in an academic lecture:

"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 context of this quote is largely obscured in most of the press coverage. Most sources do acknowledge that Benedict was quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor. But these same sources don’t do a good job of explaining how the quote related to the rest of Benedict’s lecture, in which he was arguing for a particular understanding of the relationship between faith and reason.

The lecture begins with Benedict’s reminiscing about his days as a young faculty member at the University of Bonn. The University was proud of its two theological faculties, and it was clear that, “by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the ‘universitas scientiarum’, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole.” The collegial relationship between faith and reason that Benedict describes so nostalgically is in jeopardy in his mind, largely because of a reductionistic understanding of reason that predominates the Western European consciousness. Before Benedict goes on to diagnose the problem in detail, he ventures into the 14th century, referencing a recent work by another German scholar. This brief section of the lecture is the part that contained the quote that has caught the world’s attention.

The work in question that Benedict was referencing is an edited collection of the arguments between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam. The context of the controversial statement is worth quoting in detail:

In the seventh conversation-controversy, 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 threaten. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without decending 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...".

Benedict summarizes the emperor’s argument succinctly: “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” He then goes on to point out how this would be self-evident to the emperor, but not to his esteemed Islamic interlocuter:

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 practise idolatry.

Benedict points to a parallel line of thinking in the Christian tradition, referred to as nominalism. Arising with Duns Scotus, the nominalist tradition holds that we can only know what God has willed, but not so much why God willed it. God could have willed the opposite of everything we know God to have willed. This line of thought is similar to the one described by Ibn Hazn. It’s danger in Benedict’s mind is that it could lead to an image of God as capricious, “not even bound to truth and goodness.” “God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.” In other words, God could really have been (or even may turn out to be) much different than we would surmise based on God’s own self-revelation in and as Jesus Christ. Church tradition has by and large wanted to resist this stream, as Benedict points out:

As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV). God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as “logos” and, as “logos,” has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is “logos.” Consequently, Christian worship is “spiritual” worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

The rest of Benedict’s lecture concerns a reductionstic form of Western reason that excludes questions about God and the moral life, rendering them “unscientific”. Traditionalist Islamic thought with its strong emphasis on God’s utter transcendence and the sort of reductionistic forms of secular reason which Benedict critiques may seem to have very little in common. But Benedict does mean to draw a connection. Traditional Islamic theology and secularized western rationality assert that there is no connection between divine and human reason. Whether this is because God is so transcendent that our intellectual categories are meaningless when considering divine things or because the lack of empirical data for God’s existence renders discussion about divine things non-sensical, the result is the same: human reason guiding and driving ethical decisions absent from divine rationality.

The lecture is well worth reading. I wouldn’t have used the quote that enflamed much of the Islamic world, but the point in question is one fairly put to one with whom you are involved in inter-religious dialogue. Let's be in prayer that the dialogue that seems to be unfolding as a result of Benedict's controversial lecture is a fruitful one marked above all by charity and empathy.