What Did the Pope Think He Was Doing?
Maggie Gallagher
Just what in the world did the pope think he was
doing?
For a Catholic like me this last week has been deeply
trying to the soul. Pope Benedict cannot apologize
for defaming Islam, be*cause he didn't. But he did
apologize for the distress of the Muslim faithful, and
clarify that the words of the 14th-century Byzantine
emperor (issued before the final Islamic conquest of
Constantinople) suggesting Islam's innovations
were "evil and inhuman" did not represent his opinion.
Like many ordinary Catholics, I find this surprisingly
galling. I have sudden new sympathy for Peter's
position in the garden of Gethsemane: Jesus is
surrounded by soldiers, and Peter naturally wants to
do something about this to prove his courage and his
faithfulness, in spite of the clearly overwhelming
odds. So Peter pulls out his sword and chops off the
nearest guy's ear.
"Put your sword back into your sheath," Jesus
orders.
Harrumph. Pope Benedict -- a better
Christian than me? Who would have thunk it?
But if a mere speech is worth conducting a worldwide
day of anger over (this Friday), passing parliamentary
resolutions (Pakistan), making death threats (Great
Britain), burning churches (Palestine), issuing
supercilious and deeply offensive orders to the pope
to apologize for Catholic theology (New York Times
editorial board) and slaughtering a nun (Somalia),
perhaps it is also worth actually reading and thinking
about.
The New York Times in a news story this week (to
give credit where it is due) tried to point out that
the pope's point was not attacking Islam at all: "The
speech was largely a scholarly address criticizing the
West for submitting itself too much to reason."
Oh, dear. Wrong again. What Pope Benedict was
trying to say was the exact opposite thought: that
in restricting reason to "science" (or that which can
be empirically verified through the scientific method),
the West risks reducing the "radius of reason" in
ways that are dangerous. Why? Because (among
other things) we risk relegating almost all the great
important questions about human beings to the realm
of unreason:
"If science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is
man himself who ends up being reduced, for the
specifically human questions about our origin and
destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics,
then have no place within the purview of collective
reason as defined by 'science,' so understood, and
must thus be relegated to the realm of the
subjective."
What are the consequences? Ethics and religion
become "a completely personal matter," losing "their
power to create a community" and ending the very
possibility of dialogue between different cultures: "A
reason which is deaf to the divine and which
relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is
incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."
(Postmodernism suffers from the same deficit: If
truth is impossible because reality is entirely
subjective, what is the point in speaking to one
another at all?)
The Byzantine Emperor Manual II (whom Benedict
cited) argued: "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."
At the heart of Christianity, drawn by John from the
book of Genesis, lies the insistence that God
is "logos," or creative reason capable of being
communicated. One cannot "dehellenize" Christianity,
says Pope Benedict, without doing violence to the
faith. The meeting of Jerusalem and Athens was no
historical accident: "... they are developments
consonant with the nature of faith itself."
The alternative to a new synthesis of faith and
reason, points out Benedict, is to remove reason
from the most urgent questions human beings face,
including this one: How do we live together in peace?
Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at
[email protected].)
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Some MOJ-readers will be interested in this article by Louis M. Guenin, a member of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School: The Nonindividuation Argument Against Personhood, Philosophy, 81 (2006), 463-502. Here is the abstract:
I consider the argument, thought to clinch the moral case for use of
a human embryo solely as a means, that (i) only a human individual can
be a person, (ii) because it can happen at any time before formation of
the primitive streak that an embryo splits into monozygotic twins, no
embryo in which the primitive streak has not formed is a human
individual, and therefore (iii) no embryo in which the primitive streak
has not formed is a person. I explore the following proffered arguments
for (ii): (a) indivisibility is a necessary condition of individuality,
(b) nonidentity of an embryo with successor twins impugns the embryo’s
individuality, and (c) totipotency of an embryo’s constituents is
inconsistent with the embryo’s being a human individual. These
arguments are tested and found wanting; so too is an alternative to
(a), the argument that indivisibility is intrinsic to personhood.
Whereupon (ii) is unsustained. In search of ways to rehabilitate the
nonindividuation argument, I canvass alternative metaphysical views and
inquire further into biological individuality, but find that the
argument cannot be saved. I conclude by analyzing where this leaves
matters concerning the morality of embryo use.
In the article, Professor Guenin explains at length and with rigor
why the argument at issue (NA) does not work. "If you and I are human individuals, so too are early embryos." (P. 501.) This is a conclusion in which Robby George and many others will concur.
The final paragraph of Guenin's essay, however, will be less welcome:
If NA slays no dragons, neither does its defeat win the day for zygotic personhood. Proponents of zygotic personhood must yet make their case. They are apt to mention that we must show respect for the sacred divine gift of human life by refraining from killing any developmental stage of a human organism, that we should adopt zygotic personhood because we cannot identtify any plausible prenatal personhood-conferring event other than conception, and that because fertilization creates a new genome, fertilization creates a person. Arrayed against zygotic personhood stand accounts that demand one or another cerebral attribute for personhood. My own account contends that upon a woman's and coprogenitor's morally permissible exercise of the discretion to decline intrauterine transfer of an embryo lying outside them, the developmental potential of that embryo is so bounded that it cannot mature, and hence that neither does there correspond to that embryo a nomologically possible person into which the embryo is then capable of developing and that could be harmed, nor could anyone gain anything for any being by treating the embryo itself as a person rather than by using it in humanitarian research. We are back to the debate that raged before twinnability entered. Our NA excursion has resembled the journey of Wagner's audience, as whimsically depicted by Anna Russell, as of the moment in Gotterdammerung when the ring falls to the bottom of the Rhine--the place where it lay when the story began. "You could have skipped the first three nights and be as far ahead as you are now without sitting through this ordeal--and at these prices!" [Pp. 502-03.]
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[Given some of the posts in the last twenty-four hours, I thought that this excerpt from an e-mail message I received this morning, from a dear friend and MOJ-reader, would be of interest to some other MOJ-readers:]
I have to say that -- to put this judiciously -- I don't really think that [Karen] Armstrong is a reputable source. Of course, you're right that she's forgotten more about this than I'll even know ... but ... the bit I think I know just doesn't jibe with some things she says -- things that seem not only false, but hard to square with minimal acquaintance with relevant facts. (Some historians I trust much think she's got an ax to grind and that compromises her work.)
Here's a concrete case to think about. She says, in the paper you quote, "Our Islamophobia dates back to the time of the Crusades." And then there's this from the massively erudite historian of the Byzantine Empire, George Ostrogorsky, in whose magnum opus one finds: "At the same time, these great [10th century] conquests must be regarded as evidence of the powerful religious enthusiasm which inspired the Byzantines in their struggle against the infidel. Nicephorus Phocas was entirely possessed by this enthusiasm. For him, the war with Islam was a kind of sacred mission. He even claimed that those who fell in fighting the infidel should be declared martyrs. This claim expressed with curious intensity the Byzantine feeling that the war with the Muslims was a Holy War..." (History of the Byzantine State, p. 288). As Ostrogorsky makes clear elsewhere, the feeling of Holy War was more than reciprocated.
For a historian to claim that Christian Islamophobia began with the Crusadesis to forget the 400 years of history that preceded the Crusades -- lots of bad blood and mutual vilification between Christians and Muslims. And of course, it is also to forget the Christianophobia of the Muslims who were in a civilizational conflict with the Byzantines that whole time. There's just a lot of bad blood....
[Post 9/11, ] it can't hurt for us to become a lot more familiar with the history of the conflict between our faiths -- to learn more about it than superficial stuff about the Crusades. It's an ugly history, I've found. On all sides. Pretty much without exception.
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mp
Monday, September 18, 2006
Mark, in his post this evening (here), calls Karen Armstrong's most recent book "a hopeless mish-mosh ..." Maybe so. But for another view, here's what the reviewer had to say last spring in the New York Times Book Review (here):
Moving back and forth from one culture to another, Ms. Armstrong, the
author of "A History of God" and histories of Buddhism and Islam,
provides a lucid, highly readable account of complex developments
occurring over many centuries. For the general reader "The Great
Transformation" is an ideal starting point for understanding how the
crowded heaven of warring gods, worshiped in violent rites, lost its
grip on the human imagination, which increasingly looked inward rather
than upward for enlightenment and transcendence.
In his final paragraph, the reviewer writes that Armstrong's volume is "a splendid book".
Now, I didn't set out to defend Karen Armstrong. I'm not competent to do that. In any event, I'm not interested in Karen Armstrong. I am interested in what she has to say in her comment on Benedict on Islam. Just as I am interested in what many others have to say--Juan Cole, Robert Miller, Martin Marty, not to mention several MOJ-bloggers--about Benedict on Islam. I don't think Mark is suggesting that we shouldn't be interested in what Karen Armstrong has to say--even if, after hearing it, we disagree with it, or think it incomplete. After all, she has doubtless forgotten more about Islam--and about Christianity's relation to Islam--than most of us will ever know. Her books include: Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1993); Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (2001); Islam: A Short History (2002).
Who, you ask, is Karen Armstrong. The most popular--and the most accessible--of contemporary historians of religion. And a former nun. This is her most recent book.
Click here to read KA's undeniably provocative commentary on Benedict on Islam--and, more generally, on Christianity on Islam.
Maybe we Christians--including we RC Christians--should take a deep breath and, as we do so, reflect on some unpleasant facts about our own history--facts that helpfully contextualize some Muslims' response to Benedict. KA's commentary reminds us of those unpleasant facts.
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Sightings 9/18/06
The Pope and
Islam
-- Martin E. Marty
Pope Benedict XVI has had a free ride so
far. Back when there were still Protestant anti-Catholics, some would have
found much fault with him, but most appreciated his encyclical on divine and
human love, and said so. Many Catholics and non-Catholics whose friends
suffered under him as Cardinal Ratzinger now empathically choose to help the
wounded nurse their bruises. Some among the Catholic right even think he
should be more of a hardliner.
For all those reasons, it is regrettable that in the
midst of a well worked out (of course) formal speech at Regensburg, his old
academic turf, the pope lapsed for a moment and did what we tenured folk
sometimes do -- and remember, the pope has lifetime tenure: We come up with an
allusion that gets us in trouble, let a side point take center stage, or fail to
count the cost of a remark. So it was that almost inexplicably the pope
began his talk in Regensburg with inflaming words from an obscure
fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor to show that jihad as holy war is
bad. That emperor through this pope said that what Muhammad brought to the
world was "only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the
faith he preached." Like Christians often did? The pope did not
mention that.
His Holiness must have underestimated how useful such words
would be to extreme fight-picking Muslim clerics and right-wing American talk
show folk. His people now stress that he did not intend to offend Muslims,
but his plea for "genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed
today" will be set back and out-shouted by those clerics and rightists.
What sounds at least half appropriate in a history-and-theology classroom sounds
different when spread to a billion Christians and a billion Muslims, as words
such as these will be. The only thing that will be remembered from the
pope's new call for reason and dialogue is the unreasonable and monological
citation that Muhammad contributed only "evil and inhuman" speech and action in
human history.
I know I'll get hit for suggesting "equivalencies" here,
though I am always clear in stating that there is no equivalency between today's
radical and extreme Muslims and today's ordinary Christians. But it must
also be said that Christians, from the fourth to the eighteenth century, can
match the Muslims one-for-one when it comes to having spread the faith with the
sword. Read the history of the Christianization of Europe and you have to
go hunting for that minority of the faithful who spread the faith without the
sword, merely by witness and works.
We live today not in the time of
Christian Crusades and Inquisitions, but in a time when the pope is needed as a
bridge-builder, a link-maker. Having quoted claims seven centuries old
that only "evil and inhuman" things were new in the program of the Prophet and
in the name of Islam, it will be harder for the pope to have dialogue with the
Muslims who do good and human things. Some on the Muslim and American
right seem to be craving a war of civilizations, a war about which we know only
one thing: Both sides (or the many sides) would lose.
Rather than point to the "evil and inhuman" nature of
Islam's, Judaism's, Christianity's, Hinduism's, Buddhism's, and other holy wars,
the pope will serve better if he can still find dialogue partners in search of
the good and human. All is not lost. Yet.
[Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.]
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Sunday, September 17, 2006
[This is from Joan Cole's blog, Informed Consent. Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. Thought that MOJ-readers would be intrested. To see all the comments on Cole's post, click here.]
Pope Gets it Wrong on Islam
Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg University, which mentioned Islam and jihad, has provoked a firestorm of controversy.
The
address is more complex and subtle than the press on it represents. But
let me just signal that what is most troubling of all is that the Pope
gets several things about Islam wrong, just as a matter of fact.
He
notes that the text he discusses, a polemic against Islam by a
Byzantine emperor, cites Qur'an 2:256: "There is no compulsion in
religion." Benedict maintains that this is an early verse, when
Muhammad was without power.
His allegation is incorrect. Surah 2
is a Medinan surah revealed when Muhammad was already established as
the leader of the city of Yathrib (later known as Medina or "the city"
of the Prophet). The pope imagines that a young Muhammad in Mecca
before 622 (lacking power) permitted freedom of conscience, but later
in life ordered that his religion be spread by the sword. But since
Surah 2 is in fact from the Medina period when Muhammad was in power,
that theory does not hold water.
In fact, the Qur'an at no point
urges that religious faith be imposed on anyone by force. This is what
it says about the religions:
' [2:62] Those who
believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures),
and the Christians and the Sabians-- any who believe in God and the
Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their
Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. '
See my comments On the Quran and peace.
The
idea of holy war or jihad (which is about defending the community or at
most about establishing rule by Muslims, not about imposing the faith
on individuals by force) is also not a Quranic doctrine. The doctrine
was elaborated much later, on the Umayyad-Byzantine frontier, long
after the Prophet's death. In fact, in early Islam it was hard to join,
and Christians who asked to become Muslim were routinely turned away.
The tyrannical governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, was notorious for this
rejection of applicants, because he got higher taxes on non-Muslims.
Arab Muslims had conquered Iraq, which was then largely pagan,
Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish. But they weren't seeking converts
and certainly weren't imposing their religion.
The pope was
trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible
with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive
demand for unreasoned faith.
But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.
In
fact, the Quran also urges reasoned faith and also forbids coercion in
religion. The only violence urged in the Quran is in self-defense of
the Muslim community against the attempts of the pagan Meccans to wipe
it out.
The pope says that in Islam, God is so transcendant that
he is beyond reason and therefore cannot be expected to act reasonably.
He contrasts this conception of God with that of the Gospel of John,
where God is the Logos, the Reason inherent in the universe.
But
there have been many schools of Islamic theology and philosophy. The
Mu'tazilite school maintained exactly what the Pope is saying, that God
must act in accordance with reason and the good as humans know
them. The Mu'tazilite approach is still popular in Zaidism and in
Twelver Shiism of the Iraqi and Iranian sort. The Ash'ari school, in
contrast, insisted that God was beyond human reason and therefore could
not be judged rationally. (I think the Pope would find that Tertullian
and perhaps also John Calvin would be more sympathetic to this view
within Christianity than he is).
As for the Quran, it constantly
appeals to reason in knowing God, and in refuting idolatry and
paganism, and asks, "do you not reason?" "do you not understand?" (a
fala ta`qilun?)
Of course, Christianity itself has a long
history of imposing coerced faith on people, including on pagans in the
late Roman Empire, who were forcibly converted. And then there were the
episodes of the Crusades.
Another irony is that reasoned,
scholastic Christianity has an important heritage drom Islam itself. In
the 10th century, there was little scholasticism in Christian theology.
The influence of Muslim thinkers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) reemphasized the use of Aristotle and Plato in
Christian theology. Indeed, there was a point where Christian
theologians in Paris had divided into partisans of Averroes or of
Avicenna, and they conducted vigorous polemics with one another.
Finally, that Byzantine emperor that the Pope quoted, Manuel II? The Byzantines had been weakened by Latin predations during the fourth Crusade, so it was in a way Rome that had sought coercion first. And, he ended his days as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.
The Pope was wrong on the facts. He should apologize to the Muslims and get better advisers on Christian-Muslim relations.
posted by Juan @ 9/15/2006 06:24:00 AM
