What did Benedict say?

The Muslim reaction to Benedict's speech has been the main story, given its extreme bellicosity. If Benedict had outright called Islam evil, it still wouldn't have merited the insane response we've seen. I do believe, though, that Benedict was needlessly unclear in his initial remarks about the emperor. If it's true that the Emperor's views are not his own, given the hysterical sensitivity of the world's Muslims, he ought to have either chosen a different example or taken pains to be more clear in his speech. Let me underscore: nothing justifies the Islamic response. But really, it's not as easy to figure out why Benedict said what he said the way he said it.

Here's an English translation of his original speech. And here's the key part. This is long, but I need to get it all out here:

The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. 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. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: It had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: This, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) 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 was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the "three Laws": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran.

In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point -- itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself -- which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason," I found interesting and which can serve as the starting point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation ("diálesis" -- controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 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 [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.

Without descending 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 ("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 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...."

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. 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 practice idolatry.

As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

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, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the 'logos.'"

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. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.

What an extremely important point for Benedict to have made! And what a shame that by choosing to introduce it with a provocative quote from the Emperor, that the Pope assured the profundity and delicacy of his main point would be obscured. This is a tragedy. I say that as a writer and an editor who every day works with writers to clarify their writing to avoid misunderstanding. Just last Friday I was going back and forth with a brilliant contributor to hone his essay so a general audience of newspaper readers could fully grasp his point. Had Benedict let someone else read his speech, they probably would have seen at once that quoting the Emperor's words would be needlessly inflammatory.

I almost hate to say this, because I don't think the Pope has anything to apologize for, and I think that it's outrageous that anybody in the West should think he should go groveling to the fanatics braying for his blood. But Benedict himself has said that the Emperor's views were not his own. Had he simply cut that one line, there would almost certainly have been no protest.

The Pope's remarks concerning faith and reason, insofar as they touch on Islam, are actually quite radical in the sense that they address the root of the conflict between Islam and the West. It is, at its core, a theological conflict. Christianity has made many, many mistakes in its history, but it is informed by the spirit of Greek philosophy, and sees rationality as an aspect of the divine. The universe is made to be known, both by the mind and the spirit. Islam, says the pope, has no corresponding sense of the role of rationality. If we are to have a fruitful dialogue with Islam, it must be on the basis of rationality. We non-Muslims have nothing to say to them if the only thing they can bring conceptually to the dialogue is a conviction that we must accept their faith as true, or else. Absent a rational ground for discussion, we're just wasting our time and theirs.

I have long said that we Americans are foolishly eager to think that Muslims are merely Episcopalians in hijabs. Benedict invites us to consider the West vs. Islam conflict as rooted in rival conceptions of God, and in turn the nature of truth itself. To put a finer point on it, here's the inimitable Spengler:

But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig explained the matter more colorfully than did the pope, as I reported three years ago in the cited review:

The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism.

That's Spengler, quoting Rosenzweig. This stuff sounds abstruse, I know, but it's really important. If there is no deeper sense of law and purpose governing the universe, a purpose that is knowable in part through reason, and instead reality is governed only the capricious will of a divine despot -- well, then rational dialogue is barely possible. It all comes down to will to power. If -- if -- that is the situation that we face, then we'd better get that straight in our minds now.