September 12 marked the 10th anniversary of perhaps the
most controversial papal speech of the last half-century, an address
given by emeritus Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg, Germany, in 2006,
which sparked a firestorm of protest across the Islamic world.
In the opening section of the speech, Benedict cited a
14th-Century dialogue between a Byzantine emperor and a Persian, in
which the emperor said provocatively: “Show me just what Mohammad
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.”
Taken in tandem with Benedict’s pre-existing image as an
arch-conservative and cultural warrior, the citation was shot out of a
media cannon with deadly consequences.
An Italian nun was shot to death
in Somalia, churches were firebombed on the Gaza strip and the Pontiff
was burned in effigy in the streets of Ankara.
Friendship
When he travelled to Turkey just two months later, he was
constrained to send signals of friendship with Muslims at every turn,
and his spokesmen were almost desperate to insist the Pontiff did not
intend to launch a new crusade.
Among Vatican-watchers, the speech was taken as a massive
stumble, perhaps indicative of a traditionalist Pope out of touch with
the ethos of inter-religious respect that had already become official
Catholic teaching.
Ten years later, there’s a mounting sense that perhaps the
world owes Benedict an apology.
The rise of the Islamic State,
Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and other extremist Islamic movements, and the
continual waves of terror and barbarism they generate, has created a
sense that perhaps it wasn’t Benedict who stumbled by pointing out that
Islam has a problem – perhaps it’s Muslims who haven’t responded to the
problem adequately.
Lost in the noise, however, is the central thing to know
about the Regensburg speech, to wit: It’s not really about Islam at all.
In the 4,500-word address, Benedict devoted barely three
paragraphs to the remark quoted above from Manuel II Paeologus, which he
used to set up his reflections on the topic, which was “Faith, Reason
and the University.”
He was trying to make a point about the importance of
religion never parting company with reason, and could just as easily
have taken his cautionary tale from Hinduism, Buddhism or, for that
matter, Christianity.
Benedict’s real target in the speech is the West,
identifying two worrying trends he saw (and no doubt still sees) in
Western thought – one inside the Christian Church, and the other in
the broader culture.
He devoted a significant chunk of the Regensburg speech to
tracing the history of efforts at “dehellenisation”, meaning to suggest
that the use of ancient Greek concepts of reason in the early Church
was really just an historical accident, and there’s nothing essential
about them to the Christian faith.
Benedict insists that salvation history doesn’t work that
way, and that it was providential that the biblical faith and Greek
thought intersected. It marked a fundamental choice by Christianity, he
believes, to recognise that reason is intrinsic to God’s nature, and
that to act irrationally is therefore to break with God’s will.
Benedict was even more critical of trends in Western
culture to regard only the so-called ‘hard sciences’ as truly rational,
meaning objective, and to relegate everything else - including morality -
to the realm of personal preference and choice.
That’s a disaster, he argued, because it leaves no basis
for moral consensus on anything, and thus makes building a real
community impossible. If there’s no objective good, then what’s to stop
the powerful from abusing the weak, what’s to stop a tyrannical majority
from oppressing a minority, and on and on?
He also, by the way, argues that the exclusion of ethics
and faith from the realm of reason also damages inter-religious
dialogue, because “the world’s most profoundly religious cultures see
this exclusion…as an attack on their most profound convictions.”
That, surely, is not the rhetoric of a crusader.
Structure
Finally, Benedict argues that there are certain points
empirical science presuppose, such as the rational mathematical
structure of the universe, that it can’t explain by itself, and it’s not
irrational to ask how things got that way in the first place.
“The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the
questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great
harm thereby,” he said, calling for the “courage to engage the whole
breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur.”
Put as simply as possible, Benedict was arguing at that
the choice for faith is not irrational, and that currents in the West
that style it as such are the real enemies of enlightenment and
progress.
One can dismiss that argument out of hand, challenge
it on certain points, or decide it needs more reflection. What you
can’t do, however, is present it as a treatise on Islam and its
discontents, because the discontents Benedict was worried about are
percolating in a very different part of the world and a different
cultural milieu.
On this 10th anniversary of the
Regensburg speech, much of the world may indeed owe Benedict an apology,
but it’s not for disagreeing with his argument a decade ago…it’s for
missing his point entirely.