(RNS) — The late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is portrayed by my colleague Tom Reese in a scathing eulogy as the prototypical German professor, a great theologian "who was not interested in hearing to individuals who had other opinions." I couldn't agree more, and as Reese notes, few instances from his pontificate demonstrate that more than the uproar Benedict caused by criticizing Islam in the faith and reason address he gave at the University of Regensburg in 2006.
Here is an updated version of how I looked at Benedict's mistake back then.
It is difficult to avoid using the uproar caused by Pope Benedict XVI's remarks as an illustration of the dangers of placing scholars in positions of authority. A pontiff who was returning to the academic podium where, 35 years earlier, he delivered a theological lecture to all comers would appear to have succumbed to the temptation to value provocation over discretion, to wing it on topics outside of your proper ken, and to prove that you're the smartest guy in the room.
When Manuel II Paleologus, a knowledgeable Byzantine emperor, debated a Persian professor about the respective advantages of Christianity and Islam at the tail end of the 14th century, he delivered a harsh criticism of Islam that Benedict quoted. But even before bringing up the quotation, the pope attacked the key text cited today as evidence that Islam is dedicated to religious tolerance.
There must not be any coercion in religion, the Koranic passage (Sura 2.256) declares, and Benedict reasoned that Manuel must be aware of this. "According to academics, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Muhammad was still powerless and under threat," the pope explains.
Snap!
In reality, the pope's own scientist begged to differ. Kevin Madigan, S.J., president of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, stated in an interview with "Commonweal Magazine" that Sura 2 is from the Medinah period, when Muhammad had rising governmental influence.
"Show me just what Muhammad contributed that was new, and there you will find things only terrible and horrible, such as his mandate to propagate by the sword the faith he preached," was the emperor's now-famous retort.
Benedict claimed that this has a "brusqueness that leaves us astounded," but he made no assertions about its truth. It is not incorrect, but one could be excused for thinking that he thought it was extremely impolite by our standards.(To be sure, following the uproar, the pope clarified that the emperor's words he had repeated did not "in any way indicate my personal view. Additionally, Manuel II's speech's official text was changed on October 9 to reflect that he had talked in a "brusqueness that we find unacceptable."
In the discussion, Manuel continues by saying that holy war is ungodly since it goes against reason (logos), and "not to act with reason is alien to God."
Now, the fact that Manuel wrote up the debate several years after the fact, during a protracted Turkish siege of Constantinople, may have strengthened his commitment to the cause of reason. However, the current editor of the book, Théodore Khoury, claims in a footnote that the attitude naturally flowed to him because he was brought up with Greek philosophy. The Persian professor, on the other hand, would have subscribed to the Muslim belief that God "is utterly transcendent, his will is not restricted by any of our categories, even those of reason."
Benedict found this to be sufficient, and he launched into a lengthy riff praising the Christian intellectual tradition for integrating biblical faith with the rationalist categories of Greek philosophy. This dedication to a logical approach to faith, which is exemplified in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas' writings, comes, in the pontiff's opinion, from the opening words of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the logos…" He suggests that the Muslim notion of jihad is a result of the lack of such devotion.
Benedict did acknowledge that certain early Christian theologians agreed with the notion that God is above the limitations of human understanding. But he moved right into a critique of what he saw as a progressive de-Hellenization of Western thought, starting with the Protestant Reformation and concluding with modern secularism, in the post-medieval period. His polemical goal was to demonstrate that only traditional Christian philosophy can navigate safely between the atheist Charybdis of secular rationalists and the fideist Scylla of Muslims.
Let's ignore the pope's de-Hellenization theory and concentrate on the criticism of Islam that started the whole uproar. First off, a reading of Manuel's argument reveals that, far from rejecting a logical approach to faith, the Persian professor makes a point of demonstrating that Christianity, not Islam, is illogical. For instance, he claims that Christianity's preference for celibacy is "contrary to reason" since it contradicts what God intended for men and women.
More importantly, the blatant assertion that Islam is subservient to a conception of God that is wholly outside of our grasp of reason misrepresents a wide range of religious traditions. The Shiite theological tradition that developed in medieval Iran—the tradition of Manuel's Persian interlocutor—came to be characterized by precisely the opposite point of view.
The Shiah generally believed that human ways of reasoning were not fundamentally different from God's ways of reasoning and that humans could, therefore, decode much of the reasoning behind the construction of the natural and moral world, as Roy Mottahedeh emphasizes in his widely acclaimed book on Shiism in contemporary Iran, "The Mantle of the Prophet."
The knowledge that the mullahs and ayatollahs of modern Iran are educated in the same Hellenism that once dominated the entire Abrahamic intellectual world is what actually inspired Mottahedeh, a scholar of medieval Islam, to write his book. He claims that this was a "live example of the kind of education" that had given rise to philosophers like Maimonides and Averroes among the Jews and the saintly and brilliant theologian Thomas Aquinas in the East and Averroes among the Muslims in the West.
Without getting too picky, Pope Benedict would have done well to pay a visit to Qom, the center of Shiite education in Iran, to observe the kind of intellectual formation he hailed at Regensburg.
However, the pontiff's failure to take into account the intellectual diversity within Islam is less of a concern than the fact that, being the German theologian that he was, he gave religious abstractions far more power in the world than they deserved. Is it really possible to prevent the use of violence to further a religion's cause by maintaining a healthy theoretical balance between faith and reason?
Shiites should be the kind of logical people who reject armed jihad, according to Benedict. The Shiite regime that has ruled Iran for the past forty years, a regime that is now content to arm Vladimir Putin, the presumed heir to the Orthodox Byzantine emperors, with thousands of drones to inflict death and destruction on the civilian population of Ukraine, does not, however, support this argument.
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