Rome has spoken. Once, that meant the question was
settled. Now that means the question has been inflamed. In this case, the
question is whether to accept Osama bin Laden’s invitation to the clash of
civilisations. Sure, why not?
Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the fifth anniversary of 9/11
by citing, on the next day, a 14th century slur that Muhammad brought
"things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword
the faith he preached".
The patently false characterisation of Muhammad’s
teaching, displaying an ignorance of the Koran, of the magnificence of
Islamic devotion and of history, was offered almost as an aside in the
pope’s otherwise esoteric lecture about reason and faith. After Muslim
uproar, the pope, while not really apologising, insisted he had meant no
harm.
President George W. Bush famously used the word
"crusade", then backed away from it. But playing by bin Laden’s script,
Bush launched a catastrophic war that has become a crusade in all but
name. Now Benedict has supplied a religious underpinning for that crusade.
Claiming to defend rationality and non-violence in religion, the pope has
made irrationality and violence more likely, not less. Bush and Benedict
are in sync and bin Laden is grinning.
Even abstracting from the offending citation, the pope’s
lecture reveals a deeper and insulting problem. Benedict properly affirms
the rationality of faith and the corollary that faith should be spread by
reasoned argument and not by violent coercion. But he does so as a way of
positing Christian superiority to other faiths.
That was the point of the passing comparison with Islam –
which, supposedly, is irrational and therefore intrinsically violent,
unlike Christianity, which is rational and intrinsically eschews coercion.
But this ignores history: Christianity, beginning with
Constantine and continuing through the Crusades up until the
Enlightenment, routinely "spread by the sword the faith" it preached;
Islam sponsored rare religious amity among Jews, Christians and Muslims in
the very period from which the insulting quote comes.
More significant though, for any discussion of reason and
faith, is the fact that Christian theology’s breakthrough embrace of the
rational method, typified by St Thomas Aquinas’s appropriation of
Aristotle and summarised by Benedict as "this inner rapprochement between
Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry", was made possible by such
Islamic scholars as Averroes, whose translations of Aristotle rescued that
precious tradition for the Latin West.
Benedict makes no mention of this Islamic provenance of
European and Christian culture. Indeed, he cannot, because his main
purpose in this lecture is to emphasise the exclusively Christian
character of that culture. The "convergence" of Greek philosophy and
Biblical faith, "with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage,
created Europe and remains the foundation of what can be rightly called
Europe".
Europe remains Christian. That is why the pope, as
Cardinal Ratzinger, opposed the admission of Muslim Turkey to the European
Union.
Benedict seems to have forgotten that the European
rejection of violent coercion in religion came about not through religion
but through the secular impulses of the Enlightenment.
The separation of church and state, in defence of the
primacy of individual conscience, was the sine qua non of that rejection
of religious coercion – an idea that the Catholic church fought into the
20th century. Even now Benedict campaigns against basic tenets of
Enlightenment politics, condemning pluralism, for example, and what he
calls the "dictatorship of relativism".
The pope’s refusal to reckon with historical facts that
contradict Catholic moral primacy has been particularly disturbing in
relation to the church’s past with Jews. Last year he said Nazi
anti-Semitism was "born of neo-paganism", as if Christian anti-Judaism was
not central. This year, at Auschwitz, he blamed the Holocaust on a "ring
of criminals", exonerating the German nation. By exterminating Jews, the
Nazis were "ultimately" attacking the church. He decried god’s silence,
not his predecessors’. A pattern begins to show itself. Forget church
offences against Jews. Denigrate Islam. Caricature modernity and dismiss
it.
In all of this, Benedict is defending a hierarchy of
truth. Faith is superior to reason. Christian faith is superior to other
faiths (especially Islam). Roman Catholicism is superior to other
Christian faiths. And the pope is supreme among Catholics. He does not
mean to insult when he defends this schema yet seems ignorant of how
inevitably insulting it is. Nor does the pope understand that today such
narcissism of power comes attached to a fuse.