In the wake of the Pope's Regensburg remarks...

Aspenia

Journal of Aspen Institute

(Image: Aspen Institute Italia)

Over at Chiesa, but drawing upon the journal of the Aspen Institute in Italy, Sandro Magister offers an interesting article, "The Surprising Geopolitics of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope," that describes how the pope "has left his mark on international politics . . . . with Islam."

Magister directs our attention to the pope's Regensburg address, and since I played a small but, I hope, constructive role in the controversy raised by the pope's remarks on Islam and violence, I'd like to quote four passages from this part of Magister's article:

[T]he first action of Benedict XVI that made a worldwide impact was the long and substantial lecture that he gave at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006. He literally shook the world, for both the right reasons on the wrong ones. That lecture explained the new pope's view of the Church and of the West and his plans for them, including relations with Islam.

According to the canons of geopolitical realism, Benedict XVI should never have delivered that lecture in its entirety. He should have had it reviewed and purged beforehand by the diplomatic experts, something that he intentionally declined to do. And a number of people in the Vatican curia criticized him for this.

And yet, two years later, the facts tell a different story. Despite the alarm of the Cassandras, a dialogue emerged between the Catholic Church and Islam that had never existed before Regensburg, and had even seemed impossible. This dialogue is not only intellectual -- represented, for example, by the initiatives following the "letter of the 138 Muslim scholars" -- but also political. The political dimension advanced considerably after the audience at the Vatican on November 6, 2007 -- the first of its kind in history -- between the pope and the king of Saudi Arabia.

Even after Regensburg, one aspect that distinguishes the relationship with the Muslim world inaugurated by Benedict XVI is its apparent imprudence. Pope Ratzinger is not afraid of alternating gestures of openness -- one thinks of his silent prayer in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul -- with actions at odds with diplomatic caution. He had no qualms about granting an audience to Oriana Fallaci, one of the most committed critics of Islam, which she believes to be violent by nature. At the Easter vigil at St. Peter's in 2008, he baptized Magdi Allam, a convert from Islam and a radical critic of his religion of origin. But what is most astonishing is the heart of Benedict XVI's reasoning. The pope is asking Islam to undertake the same kind of demanding self-renewal that the Catholic Church carried out over the span of two centuries, beginning at the time of the Enlightenment.

In case anyone has forgotten, here is what the pope was 'officially' reported to have said in Regensberg concerning Islam and violence, and note the red font showing that he distanced himself from the words that he attributes to the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus (1350-1425):

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "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, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.

Despite the pope's careful words, and in a context within which he also deplored the church's own use of violence in its past, he was harshly criticized immediately after his talk, and Islamist radicals incited Muslims to violent riots in various parts of the world to protest the pope's words.

But as I pointed out at the time, the pope's words were not only careful in the English translation, they were even more careful in the original German, and I provided my own translation:

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with an astonishing brusqueness, for us an astounding brusqueness, bluntly on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "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, after having expressed himself so very forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.

The pope continued to receive much criticism, of course, for the first but erroneous English translation of his words was so widely reported that the later, corrected version went largely unnoticed. Some people must have noticed, however, for my blog entry on this issue received a couple thousand hits within a few minutes after Ramesh Ponnuru linked to it in The National Review Online.

But let me return to Magister's article and quote a passage demonstrating that despite a careful distancing from the Byzantine emperor's words, the pope holds that Islam really does have a problem with violence because it has too radically separated faith from reason in the aftermath of its rejection of the philosopher Averroes (though he didn't explicitly state this in his Regensburg address):

Two thirds of the lecture in Regensburg is dedicated to criticizing the periods in which Christianity dangerously separated itself from its rational foundations [as I also noted]. And the pope is proposing that Islam do the same thing: that it interweave faith and reason, the only way to shelter it from violence. The difficulty of this enterprise -- recognized as arduous but necessary even by leading Muslim thinkers like Mohammed Arkoun -- lies in the fact that in the history of Islamic thought, any fruitful relationship between faith and reason practically ceased with the death of the philosopher Averroes in 1198. After this, Islam has been characterized by the separation between faith and "reasonableness" about which the pope cautioned all, Muslims and Christians, in the most memorable passages of his lecture in Regensburg.

Magister's point is that these things need to be said and that the pope has opened dialogue on this issue by saying them. I think that this is correct. The best response to Islamist threats to free speech is more speech. Personally, I don't like controversy, and I also prefer not to insult anybody, but the perception of insult is subjective, so we have no control over how others might 'feel' in response to what we say. An Iranian student told me a couple of weeks ago that the widespread criticism of Islam by non-Muslims has been good because the clerics in Iran have given up on trying to threaten violence against 'infidel' critics, and even Muslims can now discuss things openly that would have been taboo just a few years ago.

The pope, it seems, has contributed to this new state of affairs.

Regensburg Revisited

Muhammad's Sword

The very object in question...

(Image from Answers.com)

Today's blog entry is more in the nature of a report than an analysis, for the issues are already beyond my ken ... and beyond my allotted time.

One of my readers, Erdal, who knows a great deal about the history of Islam, notified me of an open letter from a number of illustrious Muslim scholars in courteous reply to the Pope's Regensburg speech. Here's what Erdal wrote:

Sorry to intrude on this thread, but the official answer and rebuttal to the Pope's lecture is in. All the eight schools of thought and jurisprudence in Islam are represented, 38 top clerics. This is as close to a definitive, official answer as it will ever get. Actually, this is totally without precedent.

Read it all! They cover all the "hot iron" topics, including a surprising answer to Manuel II Paleologus' question:

"Show me just what Muhammad 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."

It is:

"What the emperor failed to realize -- aside from the fact... that no such command has ever existed in Islam -- is that the Prophet never claimed to be bringing anything fundamentally new.

I bet you didn't see that one coming, huh?

Link to pdf of open letter

Thanks to Erdal for this message and link. No, I didn't see that coming, though I'm familiar with the Muslim position that Muhammad brought nothing new -- the corollary of which is that extant Judaism and extant Christianity are deviations from the original revelations and that Islam is Allah's corrective to those deviations.

Anyway, I've finally had time to read -- and recommend that others read -- the letter, which is a bit long but not overly so (and an easier read than the Pope's Regensburg lecture). I've also checked with the Catholic magazine Chiesa, which often reports on Catholic issues, and it has a number of articles related to the controversy, including one on the open letter from the Muslim scholars and one on the official, definitive version of the Pope's Regensburg address, replete with footnotes.

For those interested, the complete, official texts of the Pope's lecture in both the original German and the English translation can now be read online.

As for the open letter from the Muslim scholars, it is a welcome development. Between the Pope's lecture and this letter, there is still much room for many questions and much discussion. I would like to see a joint Catholic-Muslim study on the issues raised. Protestant and Orthodox scholars could also be included, I suppose. Be that as it may, a lengthy study by experts with the aim of publishing the results could be useful, perhaps even for the Muslim world at large since it might enable respected Muslim scholars to present a unified statement defining the official Islamic position and criticizing the Islamists.

I say "might" because my impression is that Islam's lack of an authoritative office for pronouncing official doctrine on its faith and morals leaves it as chaotic as Protestant Christians, who can never agree on much of anything.

Still ... such a study could provide a lot of useful information and valuable insight.

Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth: A Question on Reason and Violence

Ecce Homo (Behold the Man!)
Antonio Ciseri, 19th Century

Violence: Submitting, not Committing?
(Image from Wikipedia)

I should first clarify that I haven't read this book Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, 2007), which the Pope has authored under his personal name, "Joseph Ratzinger," to emphasize that the work is a personal rather than ecclesial view.

I am reporting only on a review written by Jack Miles for the Catholic magazine Commonweal: A Review of Religion, Politics and Culture. Miles, as some may know already, is the author of God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, neither of which I have read.

To be succinct, I haven't done my homework. Still, one can ask a question, perhaps receive an answer.

Commonweal has been sending me emailed copies of its magazine ever since I firmly defended Pope Benedict XVI during the Regensburg Controversy concerning the Pope's statement about rationality, violence, and Islam. Here is the official, Vatican translation of the offending passage:

In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to some of the experts, this is probably 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 Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "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, after having expressed himself so forcefully, 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", he says, "is not pleased by blood -- and not acting reasonably (συν λόγω) 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...". (Pope Benedict XVI, Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections, paragraph 3)

Interesting, by the way, is the fact that the official Vatican translation still quotes Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos as saying:

"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" (italics mine).

The Pope's German text reads:

"Zeig mir doch, was Mohammed Neues gebracht hat, und da wirst du nur Schlechtes und Inhumanes finden wie dies, daß er vorgeschrieben hat, den Glauben, den er predigte, durch das Schwert zu verbreiten." (Pope Benedict XVI, Glaube, Vernunft und Universität: Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, paragraph 3) (italics mine)

As I had noted during the controversy, the words "Schlechtes und Inhumanes" could better have been translated as "bad and inhumane" instead of "evil and inhuman," and since the latter sounds worse (to my ear), I don't know why the Vatican stayed with that translation -- unless it better reflects the literal Greek words of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos himself (though the Pope didn't quote the Greek).

Anyway, a dispute over translation is not my issue today.

Rather, I wish to remind us of the Pope's Regensburg words on reason and Christianity:

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, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, συν λόγω, 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. (Pope Benedict XVI, Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections, paragraph 5)

In the same Regensburg address, the Pope goes on to defend the Hellenization of Christianity, the Church's intellectual synthesis of Greek philosophical reason and Jewish divine revelation that makes Christianity a reasonable religion and its theology a rational undertaking because it insists that God is intrinsically rational.

Note that this view depends upon philosophical assumption about God's nature being rational.

I therefore wonder what Ratzinger means about a new synthesis between historical and theological exegesis, as Miles explains it, anyway:

Key to this synthesis is his [i.e., Ratzinger's] assertion that events can be meaningful prior to, and even without, human interpretation. When God enters human history, the resulting events are meaningful in and of themselves and therefore deserve to be heard as history, and humbly. They require no completion by anybody's overweening literary creativity, even an evangelist's. To the properly prepared hearer, in short, the events are capable of speaking for themselves, just as they did for the evangelist, but exegetical preparation is indeed the key. The exegete "should not approach the text with a ready-made philosophy, nor in accordance with the dictates of a so-called modern or scientific worldview, which determines in advance what may or may not be." (Jack Miles, "Between Theology & Exegesis," paragraph 8)

Yet, approaching the biblical text with a "ready-made philosophy" is precisely what the Pope seems to have been advocating in his Regensburg lecture, for he interprets the Johannine logos as including -- or perhaps even primarily meaning -- "reason," "rationality" (and not merely "word"). In his Jesus of Nazareth, however, Ratzinger would appear to be exalting the text, revelation, over reason.

If so, then this can present problems, if I may use another quote from Miles:

Jesus of Nazareth generally is content to repeat, again and again, that the Incarnation is an act of ongoing divine revelation. As for what the Incarnation reveals about God's character that the Old Testament did not know, this we are never quite told, nor does this book ever confront the unsettling ways in which God as we encounter him in the Old Testament seems decidedly unlike God incarnate as we encounter him in the New. In the scriptural index to the book that I prepared for my own use, I note not a single quotation from the Book of Joshua, though Jesus was named for the warrior hero of that book. At issue, I submit, is the relative importance, within Christian revelation, of God's incarnation and his renunciation of violence. God might have become a man without renouncing (or suffering) violence. He might have renounced violence without becoming a man. What matters more: the metaphysical wonder or the categorical reversal? (Jack Miles, "Between Theology & Exegesis," paragraph 11)

Without getting into the personal theology of Jack Miles as expounded in his books (for I'd then have to read them), I think that I can nevertheless borrow this thought:

[Why does Ratzinger] note not a single quotation from the Book of Joshua, though Jesus was named for the warrior hero of that book[?]

Is Ratzinger avoiding a difficult issue that he had earlier raised with respect to Islam, the use of violence against unbelievers? The question is a pressing one even for Christians since, as Miles notes, Jesus (Yeshua) was named for Joshua (Yehoshua), the Prince of Peace for the warrior hero.

I think that whether we place primacy upon the text (revelation) or upon theology (reason) makes a great difference in how we understand this problem of violence even within Christianity, and I'd like to know how Joseph Ratzinger -- or Pope Benedict XVI -- treats this issue.

Perhaps the Pope already has, somewhere in his voluminous writings, and I'm depending upon secondhand information from Jack Miles and my own speculative propensities.

A Rational God?

Jürgen Habermas

Pope Benedict XVI

Katholischen Akademie in Bayern, 2004

(Image from Ignatius Press)

Some of what I've recently been dancing around concerns the relation between faith and reason.

This issue gets oblique attention in several posts, e.g., "Koons on 'logical dilemma' vs. 'paradox' (re: grace or works)" "A Gnostic Detour," "Gearing up for Koons...", and perhaps other posts.

I thus grew very interested when I happened across a response to Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address of September 12, 2006 by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, expressed in an article, "Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt: Über Glauben und Wissen und den Defaitismus der modernen Vernunft," a Teutonic mouthful of a title to a piece published on February 10, 2007 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

For those without German language skills but interested in knowing anyway, the German title of Habermas's article translates as "A Consciousness of What is Missing: On Faith and Knowledge and the Defeatism of Modern Reason," and "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" means "New Zurich Newspaper."

In this article, Habermas suggests a rapprochment between secular and religious reason, whereby each takes the other seriously -- though Habermas gives precedence to secular reason because it is available to all, whereas religious reason has an opaque core, a critique of religious reasoning that one might expect from one who has emphasized the openness of interpersonal secular reasoning in his philosophy of communicative action.

The Catholic Cardinal Camillo Ruini has replied to Habermas in a March 2, 2007 address with the provocative title "Reason, science, and the future of civilization" -- which seems also to have served as the theme of a recent Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), a Catholic conference of Italian bishops to which various Catholic intellectuals and scientists were invited.

The highlights of Ruini's address have been translated by Sandro Magister into English for an article in the Espresso's Chiesa, "Habermas Writes to Ratzinger, and Ruini Responds. Allies against the 'Defeatism' of Modern Reason."

For that general theme, the defeatism of modern reason, one can go directly to Magister's translation of Ruini, but I'd like to focus upon a specific point broached by Ruini because it had been on my mind even before my encounter with his discussion. Concerning the concept of the rational God emphasized by Pope Benedict in Regensburg, Ruini states:

Here I am prompted to clarify a question, advanced above all in Catholic circles, on how to reconcile the assertion according to which the phrase "In the beginning was the lógos" is "the definitive word on the Biblical concept of God" with another, used as the title for the encyclical by Benedict XVI "Deus Caritas Est," that God is agápe (1 John 4, 8:16) and that in concrete terms "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (Deus Caritas Est, 1).

Of course, one can and must first of all specify that in God, lógos and agápe, reason/word and love are one and the same, but Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI does not limit himself to this.

For him, the intrinsic link between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry is only half of the issue: the other half is constituted by the radical novelty and the profound difference of biblical revelation with respect to Greek rationality, above all concerning the central theme of religion, which is God.

The God of the Bible, in fact, radically exceeds what the philosophers had thought about Him, not only because He, as the supremely free Creator, is distinct from nature in a much more decisive way than could be conceived by Greek philosophy, but above all because this God is not a reality inaccessible to us, which we cannot encounter and to which it would be useless to turn in prayer, as the philosophers maintained.

On the contrary, the biblical God loves man, and for this reason enters into our history, gives life to an authentic love story with Israel, his people, and then, in Jesus Christ, not only extends this story of love and salvation to all of humanity, but carries it to the extreme, to the point of "turning against himself" in the cross of his own Son, in order to raise man up again and save him, and even to call him to an intimate union of love with Him.

This is the sense in which the biblical God is agápe, a love that gives itself gratuitously, and is also eros, a love that wants to unite man intimately to itself (cf. Deus Caritas Est, 9-15).

Thus biblical faith reconciles these two dimensions of religion that before were separate from each other; that is, the eternal God of whom the philosophers spoke and the need for salvation that man carries within himself and which the pagan religions tried in some way to satisfy.

The God of the Christian faith is, therefore, the God of metaphysics, but is also, at the same time, the God of history, the God who enters into history and into the most intimate relationship with us.

This, according to Joseph Ratzinger, is the only adequate reply to the question of the God of faith and the God of the philosophers.

Ruini's point is that God is a 'person' in whom reason and love are combined in a radically intimate manner, i.e., God is a rational being who loves.

This gets at a point that I've recently been reflecting upon. The evangelical tradition emphasizes a "personal relationship with God," and I've noticed that many of those evangelicals who stress this point seem to understand "personal" as "emotional," and emotional in a very individualistic sense, an intimate friendship that one has in an intensely subjective, private way. Yet, I'm not sure that this view is actually grounded in scripture, regardless of the evangelical emphasis upon basing all beliefs directly on the Bible. My impression, from an admittedly cursory reading on these points, is that the New Testament passages about a relationship with God through Christ are not intensely subjective but are mediated through the Church.

I suspect that evangelicals have slipped in their thinking from affirming that Christians have a relationship with a personal God to believing that Christians have a personal relationship with God. And they misunderstand this as meaning that one has primarily an emotional relationship with God.

Such an emphasis upon emotions downplays God's nature as a rational being.

Otherwise put, evangelicals tend to overemphasize God as agápe (in a very subjective, emotional sense of love) and radically underemphasize God as lógos (which, in any case, they understand more as word than as reason).

Such an 'evangelical' God can often appear rather irrational.

Allah 'Unlimited' by Reason?

Ibn Hazm

Cordoba, Spain

Google Images

I offer today another explanation by James V. Schall of theological voluntarism, which he expressed in an article titled "Regensburg Revisited: The Roots of Islamic Violence" (The Catholic Thing, October 1, 2013):

In its Muslim form, [theological voluntarism] . . . seems to be rooted in al-Ghazali and in Ibn Hazm, to whom Benedict referred. In Islam, the notion that God is limited by anything, even His own decrees or reason, is seen to be an insult to Allah. Allah can do the opposite of what he commands. He can call good evil and evil good. He is under no obligation to reveal truth to man. And if he does, he can change his mind and will the opposite later on. These positions are spelled out carefully in the Regensburg Lecture.

Thus, the philosophic root of violence means that such violence used to convert people is perfectly legitimate if Allah commands it, which he appears to do. To deny this possibility as "irrational" would be itself to blaspheme. We would claim that reason could limit the freedom of Allah to which we are to submit ourselves as the only reality to which we need to pay attention.

A question arises: Do al-Ghazali and in Ibn Hazm speak for Islam itself in their understanding of Allah's nature as arbitrary will?

More on Limits to the Divine Will

Pope Benedict XVI

Open to dialogue...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Concerning yesterday's blog entry on God's will being bound by limits that are grounded in God's nature, I've done a bit more digging about online and found an interesting exchange at the Chiesa website between a Catholic scholar of Medieval philosophy and theology, Alessandro Martinetti, and a learned Muslim theologian Aref Ali Nayed: "The Church and Islam: A Sprig of Dialogue Has Sprouted in Regensburg" (Sandro Magister, Chiesa, October 30, 2006)

On this site, Sandro Magister posts material from both Martinetti and Nayed. Apparently, Nayed maintains a website of his own and had responded to Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Ibn Hazm's supposed 'voluntarism', namely, the view that Allah's will is supremely unlimited -- that He is free to contradict himself if He wishes. Nayed's initial response is not cited in full by Magister, but Martinetti quotes from it in his article:

"Unbridled will or Logos? The God of Islam and the Christian God," Alessandro Martinetti

In this article, Martinetti first quotes Nayed's own words:

Reason as a gift from God can never be above God. That is the whole point of Ibn Hazm; a point that was paraphrased in such a mutilated way by Benedict XVI's learned sources. Ibn Hazm, like the Asharite theologians with whom he often contended, did insist upon God's absolute freedom to act. However, Ibn Hazm did recognize, like most other Muslim theologians that God freely chooses, in His compassion towards His creatures, to self-consistently act reasonably so that we can use our reason to align ourselves with His guidance and directive.

Ibn Hazm, like most other Muslim theologians, did hold that God is not externally-bound by anything, including reason. However, at no point does Ibn Hazm claim that God does not freely self-commit Himself and honors such commitments Such divine free-self-committing is Qur'anically propounded 'kataba rabukum ala nafsihi al-Rahma' (Your Lord has committed Himself to compassion). Reason need not be above God, and externally normative to Him. It can be a grace of God that is normative because of God’s own free commitment to acting consistently with it.

A person who believes the last proposition need not be an irrational or un-reasonable human-being, with an irrational or whimsical God! The contrast between Christianity and Islam on this basis is not only unfair, but also quite questionable.

Granted that the Pontiff is striving to convince a secular university that theology has a place in that reason-based setting. However, this should not go so far as to make God subject to an externally-binding reason. Most major Christian theologians, even the reason-loving [Thomas] Aquinas never put reason above God.

Martinetti then observes:

In Nayed's view, then, saint Thomas "never put reason above God." But not placing reason above God is not the same thing as asserting, as Nayed does, that "God is not externally bound by anything, including reason," and that reason "can be a grace of God that is normative because of God's own free commitment to acting consistently with it."

Saint Thomas would never have subscribed to these assertions; on the contrary, he vigorously opposed them. And together with him, the Catholic magisterium does not agree with them, but disputes them. It thus rejects the depiction of a God who "freely chooses, in his compassion towards his creatures, to act reasonably in consistency with himself so that we can use our reason to align ourselves with His guidance and directives."

If asserting that reason is not normative for God, and that God is consistent with himself only out of a supremely free decision and is not externally bound to reason; if this is the same as asserting -- as it seems to me that Nayed does -- that God could exist and act in disdain of reason if only he wished to do so by an act of supreme and limitless freedom, then it is opportune to clarify that Thomas, and with him the Catholic magisterium, rejects this conviction, glimpsing in this an irrational voluntarism incompatible with right reason and with the Catholic faith, as the pope himself remarks in his "lectio" in Regensburg....

Martinetti's point would seem to be that in the Catholic view, reason is not something external to and higher than God that God must submit to, nor is reason merely a means of relating to humanity that God arbitrarily, and in an utterly unconstrained fashion, chooses to adopt.

Rather, God is rational because He is consistent with His own nature, which is a rational nature.

To Martinetti's point, Nayed responds in a follow-up article:

"Our God and Your God is One," by Aref Ali Nayed

In this, he insists that Aquinas and Ibn Hazm agree on God's unconstrained will:

Aquinas affirms, just as most Muslim theologians do, that God is omnipotent and that His Power and Will are utterly efficacious: "God is bound to nobody but Himself. Hence, when it is said that God can only do what He ought, nothing else is meant by this than that God can do nothing but what is befitting to Himself, and just".

"Although this order of things be restricted to what now exists, the divine power and wisdom are not thus restricted. Whence, although no other order would be suitable and good to the things which now are, yet God can do other things and impose upon them another order".

Nayed's citation of Aquinas here misses the point made by Martinetti. I think that when Nayed says that Islam maintains that 'Allah is bound to nothing but Himself' (if I may slightly paraphrase Nayed's citation of Aquinas), he means that Allah is bound by nothing but His own divine, unconstrained will. This is not what Aquinas means. When Aquinas says that 'God is bound to nothing but Himself' (again, my paraphrase), he means that God is bound by nothing but His own nature, which is rational.

Nayed has thus misunderstood Aquinas and thereby missed Martinetti's point.

The Incomplete Spengler: Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address

A Declining, Non-Western Spengler

(Image Viewable at The Asia Times Online)

It's always bracing to read Spengler.

I don't mean that Spengler (bracing though he may be). I mean the other one, the nom-de-plume of a contributor to Asia Times Online.

This other Spengler is sometimes so bracing -- such as when he suggested inviting the Russian military into Fallujah to handle it as they handled Grozny -- that I have to stop reading him for a few months ... until some mysterious inner compulsion drives me back to see what he's written lately.

I felt that compulsion yesterday ... and found this:

There is no Grace in Islam, no miracle, no expiatory sacrifice, no expression of love for mankind such that each Muslim need not be a sacrifice. On the contrary, the concept of jihad, in which the congregation of Islam is also the army, states that every single Muslim must sacrifice himself personally. Jihad is the precise equivalent of the Lord's Supper in Christianity and the Jewish Sabbath, the defining expression of sacrifice that opens the prospect of eternity to the mortal believer. To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass.

These words come from Spengler's article of September 19th, "Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life," which opens with these similarly bracing words:

Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 address in Regensburg, Germany. It promises to be the Vatican's most controversial utterance in living memory.

Love? Well, to quote Tina Turner, "What's love got to do with it?" The Pope's discourse was about not love but reason!

Okay, there's also love, but that wasn't the Pope's main point in the Regensberg address.

Anyway, Spengler argues for jihad as Islam's sole sacrament, the one sacred action that can assure salvation for an individual Muslim. Spengler of course knows that officially, Islam has no sacraments and that jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam -- though it's sometimes been suggested as a sixth pillar. He's arguing for its status as an unofficial but essential sacrament.

Here's the money quote:

Jihad also is a form of human sacrifice. He who serves Allah so faithfully as to die in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to paradise, there to enjoy virgins or raisins, depending on the translation.

Even when Spengler's being serious, he's being facetious, but when he's being facetious, he's being his most serious. The raisins refers to the pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg's suggestion that the heavenly huri, usually interpreted as wide-eyed virgins awaiting Muslim martyrs in Paradise (Qur'an 44:54, 52:20, 55:72, 56:22), actually refers to white grapes because the word is not Arabic but Syriac. Spengler's joke is thus quite serious.

Joking aside, if Spengler were talking about Islamism -- rather than Islam -- I'd readily agree that Islamist have made a sacrificial death cult out of Islam, placing the act of the self-sacrificing (and murderous) jihadist martyr at the sacramental core of its sacred violence.

Though he's one of the more idiosyncratic voices, Spengler's not the only one talking this way. In "Manual for a 'Raid'" (The New York Review of Books, Volume 49, Number 1, January 17, 2002), Hassan Mneimneh and Kanan Makiya wrote an analysis of a document left behind by the 9/11 hijackers that presented them as having enacted a ritual of sacred violence in their manner of killing 'infidels,' and more recently, Hans G. Kippenberg has written in Numen (Volume 52, Number 1, 2005, pp. 29-58) an article, "'Consider that it is a Raid on the Path of God': The Spiritual Manual of the Attackers of 9/11," analyzing the same document and drawing similar conclusions. Also worth looking at (and not just because it footnotes me) is Ivan Strenski's "Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim 'Human Bombers'" (Terrorism and Political Violence, Volume 15, Number 3, October 2003, pp. 1-34), which interprets suicide bombing as "religious and social ... gifts, martyrdoms and sacrifices" in a reading that draws upon the French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.

But I fear that I'm getting a bit too esoteric now, and rather distant from Mr. Spengler, so I'll stop.

Blumenberg on Curiositas in the Catalog of vices: The Danger of a Voluntarist God

Karl Barth (1886-1968)

Defending a voluntaristic God?

(Not in the Image of God from Wikipedia)

In the concluding paragraph to his chapter titled "Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices," Hans Blumenberg noted that God's status as Ruler of the Cosmos embued Him with a voluntarist character that bore implications in a time of somewhat arbitrary imperial power:

To the surrounding Hellenistic world in the time of the Caesars, the right of the Ruler of the World to arbitrariness vis-à-vis His creation could be made plausible more readily than the much more threatening meaning of the supposed miracles as announcements of the revocation of the existence of the world as whole. But just this concealed radicalness stands behind the disputes over the right of curiositas to guarantee itself the future of nature under laws. Dependability, rational constancy, regularity are characteristics of a concept of nature that does not want to admit the world as a metaphysical episode stretched between beginning and end, between creation and destruction. As the behavioral correlate of this concept of nature, with its insistence on man's intra-worldly possibilities, curiositas is definitively entered by Augustine into the catalog of vices. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 323)

Thus does Blumenberg position Augustine at a crucial turning point in the development of Christian theology's conception of God's character, for Augustine emphasizes God's arbitrary will. In extreme form, this can pose problems, as Pope Benedict XVI noted in his Regensberg address by citing Theodore Khoury on the example of the Muslim scholar Ibn Hazm:

Theodore Khoury . . . observes [that] . . . 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 Hazm 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 practise idolatry. (Pope Benedict XVI, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006)

But the Pope acknowledges that this conception of a totally arbitrary, voluntarist deity was also a danger internal to Christian theology:

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit [of reason] and the Christian spirit [of faith]. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. (Pope Benedict XVI, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections")

Interestingly, the Pope cites the intellectualism of Augustine. Granted, Augustine was a complex thinker, but from Blumenberg's analysis, Augustine himself bore some degree of responsibility for the Nominalist conception of an arbitrary, voluntarist God.

But I think that the Pope is right in noting some things that preclude Christianity from falling completely into a radical voluntarism:

As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which -- as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated -- unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul -- "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1). (Pope Benedict XVI, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections")

The Pope here grounds Christian belief in a rational God on the anthropological-theological concept of a "real analogy" between human beings and God, which in turn is based on the biblical teaching that people are made in the image of God and can therefore trust that the human power of rationality can conceive truths about God. The Pope backs this up by reference to St Paul's thought in Romans 12:1 on God and human worship in harmony with reason, which is even more notable for what the Pope does not explicitly note, that he is also arguing against one influential Protestant tendency in its insistence upon the radical sovereignty of God, a tendency to deny the "real analogy" implied by the biblical teaching of mankind as being "in the image of God." I believe that the Pope is thinking of Karl Barth, who argues in his great commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, that when we stand confronted by God:

[W]e are bound to proclaim the entire absence of every human presupposition. We proclaim that God is free. The Gospel is the glad tidings, precisely because all human conjunctions and adjustments and presuppositions -- however transcendentally conceived of -- are there confronted by the sovereignty of God . . . . [W]e are concerned only with obedience . . . . Obedience means that there is encountered in the known man of this world a vacuum, a place of irruption, where the new [saved] man is able to breathe and move. Obedience is the sense for the specific peculiarity of the Divine and for the Wholly-Other-ness of God, the King, the Monarch, the Despot. (Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated from the sixth edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), page 386)

One has to place this glorification of a God who is wholly other than mankind in the context of its times, for Barth was writing these words within earshot of battles being waged during the First World War, whose terrible toll on Europe destroyed belief in so many things, Christian faith among them, and Barth's theology is merely one step short of the agnosticism that much of his generation stumbled into from that war.

But beyond the specific circumstances of his time, Barth's appeal to a wholly-other God demonstrates that the Islamic option of the radically voluntarist deity remains ever a temptation in the unstable Christian coalition of reason and faith.

Islam's Ethical Ambiguity?

James V. Schall
Homiletic and Pastoral Review

In "The Ambiguity of Islam" (Homiletic and Pastoral Review, November 1, 2009), James V. Schall comments on Islam's ethical ambiguity (and grounds it in theological voluntarism):

Basically, if it could, Islam would convert the world, one way or another, by peace or by war, as precisely the "will" of Allah . . . . [Islam] really has little place for anything else, except when Islam cannot prevent . . . [the] presence [of non-Islamic things] . . . . [Unfortunately, w]e really have no idea what we are up against [with Islam] unless we take a careful look at what is held theologically and what has happened historically in the Muslim world and its understanding of the world outside itself, which it calls the sphere of war. The [theological] voluntarism of Islamic thought enables it, apparently, to justify means of advancement that are by any reasonable or democratic standard immoral. Indeed, as Benedict noted in his "Regensburg Lecture," this voluntarism and its invalidity stands at the intellectual root of Islam's self-understanding.

What does Schall mean by the "ambiguity of Islam? He lets Father Samir Khalil Samir, "an Egyptian Jesuit, an advisor in the Holy See, with roots in Cairo, Beirut and Rome," tell us succinctly:

When some [Muslim] fanatics kill children, women, and men in the name of pure and authentic Islam, or in the name of the Qur'an or of the Muslim tradition, nobody can tell them: 'You are not true and authentic Muslims.' All they can say is: 'Your reading of Islam is not ours.' And this is the ambiguity of Islam, from its beginning to our present day: violence is a part of it, although it is also possible to choose tolerance; tolerance is a part of it, but it is also possible to choose violence. (Samir Khalil Samir, 111 Questions on Islam: Samir Khalil Samir on Islam and the West, page 71)

From the perspective of Schall and Samir, Islam thus appears ethically dualistic, able to justify both violence and nonviolence. Are they right?

Adrian Pabst: Real Debate on Christianity and Islam?

Adrian Pabst

Stirring the pot...

(Image: Dept. of Theol/Relig Stds,

University of Nottingham)

A scholar of religion and politics at the University of Nottingham, Adrian Pabst (who also holds a position as research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies), has written an interesting column for the November 13th edition (2007) of the online International Herald Tribune (IHT):

"Christianity and Islam: We need a real debate, not more dialogue"

A provocative title . . . though not the sort to provoke violence, I hope. Pabst was responding to a Muslim letter to the pope:

Last month, 138 Muslim scholars addressed an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders in which they call for a new dialogue between Christianity and Islam based on sacred texts.

Entitled "A Common Word Between Us and You," the document claims that the shared Muslim and Christian principles of love of the One God and love of the neighbor provide the sort of common ground between the two faiths that is necessary for respect, tolerance and mutual understanding.

The letter was a response to Pope Benedict's remarks about Islam in his talk at Regensberg, Germany about one year ago:

The publication of this letter coincided with the anniversary of a previous open letter in response to the pope's controversial Regensburg address on Sept. 12, 2006, when he appeared to link violence in religion to the absolute transcendence of God in Islam. His point was that according to Muslim teaching, God's will is utterly inscrutable and therefore unknowable to human reason -- with the implication that divine injunctions cannot be fully understood and must be blindly obeyed.

Against this background, the latest initiative by Muslim scholars marks an attempt to move interfaith dialogue away from debates about reason and revelation towards scriptural reading. Christian-Muslim relations, so their argument goes, are best served by engaging in textual interpretations that highlight shared commandments and common beliefs.

Pabst thinks that this suggestion in based on some mistaken assumptions:

But to suggest, as the authors of "A Common Word" do, that Muslims and Christians are united by the same two commandments which are most essential to their respective faith and practice -- love of God and love of the neighbor -- is theologically dubious and politically dangerous.

Theologically, this glosses over elementary differences between the Christian God and the Muslim God. The Christian God is a relational and incarnate God. Moreover, the New Testament and early Christian writings speak of God as a single Godhead with three equally divine persons -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Interesting. Does the New Testament speak so clearly in this way? A generous reading of Pabst's remark would parse his statement to mean that "the New Testament and early Christian writings" taken together -- and "early" taken to include the first several centuries -- "speak of God as a single Godhead with three equally divine persons." Joseph Cyr (of Tucson, Arizona), in a letter to the IHT editor, does not read him quite so generously:

Careful analysis of the New Testament, though, shows that the idea of a triune God does not exist in its pages. In fact, it was not until the fourth century that the doctrine of a Trinity was firmly established as Church dogma . . . . Rather than state, as a matter of fact, that scripture supports a Triune God, Pabst would do well to say that it is a result of tradition and church dogma. That would be a piece of truth to throw into the debate about God and holy writings.

I agree that the New Testament does not refer to a "Triune God" or to a "Trinity," and I wish that Pabst had been more clear (though he doesn't actually use the terms "Triune" or "Trinity"), but I'll continue to read him generously so as not to miss his point, which is:

This is not merely a doctrinal point, but one that has significant political and social implications. The equality of the three divine persons is the basis for equality among mankind -- each and everyone is created in the image and likeness of the triune God.

As a result, Christianity calls for a radically egalitarian society beyond any divisions of race or class. The promise of universal equality and justice that is encapsulated in this conception of God thus provides Christians with a way to question and transform not only the norms of the prevailing political order but also the (frequently perverted) social practices of the Church.

By contrast, the Muslim God is disembodied and absolutely one: there is no god but God, He has no associate. This God is revealed exclusively to Muhammed, the messenger (or prophet), via the archangel Gabriel. As such, the Koran is the literal word of God and the final divine revelation first announced to the Hebrews and later to the Christians.

Again, this account of God has important consequences for politics and social relations. Islam does not simply posit absolute divisions between those who submit to its central creed and those who deny it; it also contains divine injunctions against apostates and unbelievers (though protecting the Jewish and Christian faithful).

Moreover, Islam's radical monotheism tends to fuse the religious and the political sphere: It privileges absolute unitary authority over intermediary institutions and also puts a premium on territorial conquest and control, under the direct rule of God.

These (and other) differences imply that Christians and Muslims do not worship or believe in the same God; in consequence, across the two faiths, love of God and love of the neighbor invariably differ.

This latter statement will certainly generate some debate. Already, a letter to the IHT editor has taken issue with Pabst's remark about Christians and Muslims not worshipping the same God. Bianca Schlesinger, of Tel Aviv, demurs:

Pabst writes "These (and other) differences imply that Christians and Muslims do not worship or believe in the same God." How can they believe in different Gods if there is only one? If there is only one God, as declared by the monotheistic religions, than they all worship the same God; they only conceive of Him differently.

Schlesinger has responded as Pabst might wish, i.e., theologically, and thereby raised a crucial point. Do Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. Schlesinger -- who is, I take it, Jewish -- argues that Muslims do so, based on the theological position that there can be only one God. The argument might need some refining, however, for by a similar intellectual move, I could argue that polytheists also worship the same God as Jews and Christians because there can only be one God, and the polytheists "only conceive of Him differently" -- radically differently, of course, but they nevertheless recognize the divine and treat the divine as an object of reverence. Yet, polytheism and monotheism can only worship the same 'God' at a very general, very abstract level (if at all). As Pabst himself says:

By ignoring these fundamental divergences, the authors of the open letter perpetuate myths about Christians and Muslims praying differently to the same God. Worse, they exhibit a simplistic theology of absolute, unmediated monotheism.

Anyway, go read the entire article and see what you think about Pabst's theological, political, and ethical points.

Robert Reilly on Lafif Lakhdar: Call for Islamic Rationalism

Robert R. Reilly

(Image from American Foreign Policy Council)

In looking for more information about the Tunisian Muslim reformer Lafif Lakhdar, whom I quoted in a post two days ago, I came across some of his remarks on rationality and Islam cited in an interesting interview that Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch conducted with Robert R. Reilly, author of a recently published book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, which dates that intellectual closing to Islam's early rejection of Mu'talizite rationalism and emphasis upon Allah's nature as pure, omnipotent will, limited by nothing, not even by rationality.

Mr. Spencer had asked about the possibilities for reviving the "period of Mu'talizite domination in Islam," which by virtue of its rationalism was"a kind of golden age of philosophical reason, intellectual innovation, and openness" in the Muslim world. Specifically, Mr. Spencer asked if there were any "Islamic thinkers today who are trying to do this," i.e., to revive Muslim rationalism. In response, Mr. Reilly cited Mr. Lakhdar as an example of one such Muslim thinker:

Reformist Tunisian-born thinker Latif (sic. Lafif) Lakhdar calls for a revival of "Mu'atazila and philosophical thought that subjected the holy writings on which the religion is based to interpretation by the human mind." He said "it is absurd to believe the text and deny reality."

Mr. Reilly is quoting from two different articles. The first is from Aluma Dankowitz's summary of Mr. Lakhdar's views in "Tunisian Reformist Thinker: Secularism is Vital for the Future of the Arab and Muslim World" (Memri, May 19, 2005, No. 222):

In addressing the question whether secularism means disconnection from Islam, Lafif Lakhdar explains that it is disconnection from the negative autocracy and theocracy in the Muslim world, but is also a revival of the connection with other elements in Islam -- such as mu'atazila [rationalist] and philosophical thought that subjected the holy writings on which the religion is based to interpretation by the human mind.

The second is from the article by Mr. Lakhdar that I cited a couple of posts ago, "Moving From Salafi to Rationalist Education" (Meria, Volume 9, No. 1, Article 3, March 2005):

Open religious rationalism -- subjecting the religious text to rational investigation and research -- ought to become the core of the aspired religious education in the Arab-Islamic region, since it is absurd to believe the text and deny reality.

Both of these Lakhdar citations appear to be related, given their chronological proximity (Spring 2005) and their mutual emphasis upon rationality applied to religious texts. Mr. Reilly -- in speaking of the 'de-hellenization' (expulsion of reason) that took place in Islam with the rejection of Mu'talizite rationalism -- goes on in the interview to make a point that I have also made:

If reason is illegitimate, how are differences to be adjudicated? Force will decide. The stronger will decide. Why does Islam use violence to affirm its theology? Because it is the theology of power, of the doctrine that "right is rule of the stronger," raised to the level of God. The primacy of the will always seeks success through force.

Benedict XVI told his audience in Regensburg that not only is violence in spreading faith unreasonable and therefore against God, but that a conception of God without reason, or above reason, leads to that very violence. This is the problem in Islam. That which is unreasonable is against God only if God is reason. This is not so in majority Sunni Islamic theology. He is pure will and power, unconstrained even by his own word. Therefore, there are no solid barriers between the statement that God is pure will and power, and the startling declaration of Abdullah Azzam, which Osama quoted in the November 2001 video, released after 9/11, that "Terrorism is an obligation in Allah's religion." This can only be true -- that violence in spreading faith is an obligation -- if, as Benedict XVI said, God is without reason. This is why the problem we are facing is primarily a theological one.

In September 2006, I made much the same point as Mr. Reilly:

The Pope's larger theme lay in his subtle argument that Islam might have a problem with violence because it has a problem in its theology. If God's nature is defined centrally by his radically free will, then believers cannot appeal to reason in their aim to convert nonbelievers but must demand submission to an arbitrary God who cannot be rationally understood. If the force of reason cannot be used in converting nonbelievers, then the force of violence will be.

If Mr. Reilly and I are correct, then this problem at the heart of Islam will be very difficult to rectify, for an appeal to reason can be met by a resort to force, so how does one go about restoring rationality to the irrational?

Let us not give up hope, however, for even Christian theology had to overcome a radically voluntarist conception of God . . . and generally succeeded.

Rémi Brague on Medieval Philosophy's Broad Influence

Rémi Brague Explains

(Image from Universidad de Navarra)

As some will recall, I recently re-read Rémi Brague's masterful Eccentric Culture, which motivated me to blog about it again. In doing so, I discovered a couple of interviews that Brague gave, and I blogged on a question raised in my mind by a passage in the longer interview, the one on The Legend of the Middle Ages.

I went so far as to email Professor Brague and inquire:

Pardon me for contacting you, for you do not know me, but I have a query -- I think a simple one.

I am currently re-reading your book Eccentric Culture and have blogged on it recently (as well as earlier), and I happened to read -- and then blog about -- the interview conducted by Christophe Cervellon and Kristell Trego for the collection of articles in The Legend of the Middle Ages.

In that interview, an editor (I suppose) has introduced the heading "Cosmology as a Postulate." Following this heading is a passage that suggests to me that the editor has misunderstood your point, for you seem to me to be saying that for premodern man, cosmic order was not a postulate but a given.

Have I read you correctly?

Of course, you may have no time for this query, and I will understand and accept if I do not hear from you.

But I did hear from him:

This was a real joy to receive your message. I must be brief: I am in a small community in la France profonde, i.e. in the sticks. Internet is available only in the town-house.

Thank you for your close reading of my stuff. I will have to postpone a real answer till September: I haven't my own books there, let alone their English translations.

Have a nice summer.

From the evidence provided by this email, I'd say that he must be a really nice man, and I now have something to look forward to. But I won't leave you with the merely autobiographical blog entry today (after all, this isn't really my vacation), for I want to share another passage from the longer interview on The Legend of the Middle Ages that left a vivid impression on me because of its implications as to why the West developed as it did:

In medieval Europe, philosophy became a university course of studies and a pursuit that could provide a living. It also supported a mass of untenured, garden-variety "philosophy profs," few of whom have left their names in the manuals, even though we can exhume their courses, which we discover to be full of surprises. But these were the men who made it possible for philosophy to make a profound impact on the minds of the jurists, physicians, and others they taught, hence for it to become a factor in society.

This is significant because philosophy's emphasis upon reason surely played some role in preparing the rational European mind for the scientific revolution but also because it held theologians to rational standard. Christian theology had always required philosophical grounding, but the middle ages institutionalized philosophical study and therefore, as Brague remarks, ensured that philosophy might have a broader influence on society, something that did not occur in Islamic civilization because philosophy was never institutionalized there.

Brague goes on to make the point that "'theology' as a rational exploration of the divine . . . exists only in Christianity," which stands as a considerably strong claim to make, but I'll leave you to read the interview if you want to know precisely why he holds this view. I will add that his point is similar to the point made by Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg lecture, namely, that the central significance of the "Logos" in Christianity was crucial to Christian theology's openness to reason.

I agree with the Pope and Brague on their point about the significance of the "Logos," but I also think that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation raised profound philosophical questions -- concerning, e.g., matter and spirit, temporality and nontemporality, spatiality and nonspatiality, etc. -- that needed to receive answers if Christians were to respond to questions posed by the non-Christian culture in which Christianity grew, especially since Christianity did not begin as a successful political and military power, could not force non-Christians to submit, and thus had to rely solely on persuasion.

Until Constantine, anyway.

Yet More on Limits to the Divine Will

Islam

Bowing to Allah's Arbitrary Will?

(Image from Wikipedia)

By looking around more at the Chiesa website, I found a fuller version of Aref Ali Nayed's views. These occur in the same passage that I quoted from yesterday, but on a different Chiesa webpage, "Two Muslim Scholars Comment on the Papal Lecture in Regensburg" (Sandro Magister, Chiesa, October 4, 2006), where Nayed comments upon a passage from the Pope's Regensberg lecture:

Benedict XVI, being a scholar of medieval theology knows that he can not deny certain facts:

"In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions."

This passage, while serving its author's ultimate goal of undermining the theologies mentioned in it, does at least show that Benedict XVI is somewhat aware that other possible theologies do exist, and that Muslim theologians were not alone in caring about the affirmation of God’s sovereignty against human pretensions to govern Him with human criteria.

Here, Nayed appears to be affirming that the voluntarist views of such Nominalists as Duns Scotus are precisely the same as the Muslim view of Allah, and if that is so, then Islam does hold that Allah can willfully flout that principle of noncontradiction. Nayed then dryly observes of the Pope that, "Unfortunately, he goes on to totally undermine such theologies as not being the true 'faith of the Church'." I can see that this is unfortunate for Nayed's claim that the Christian and Muslim views of the deity are identical, but it's certainly not 'unfortunate' for the Pope's argument.

Nayed's larger article is worth reading (despite its strongly ironic but misplaced jabs at Catholicism for its violent history and its deplorable Eurocentrism) but still doesn't seem to me to directly engage with the Pope's point about reason and the nature of God . . . or Allah.

Shallow Reflections on Deep Faith

Triumph of Faith over Idolatry

Jean-Baptiste Théodon

(French, 1646–1713)

Church of the Gesù

Rome, Italy

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm re-reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, so I have encountered for the second time an aphorism on religious belief:

"Faith, the least exclusive club on earth, has the craftiest doorman." (David Mitchell, "Letters from Zedelghem," Cloud Atlas: A Novel, page 75)

This remarkable, offhand remark is penned by Robert Frobisher, would-be composer -- and son of a sinecured Anglican minister -- as he later records the thoughts first entertained while sitting in a Catholic church in Bruges envying the believers kneeling in prayer . . . and also envying God for being privy to their secrets.

Whatever what Frobisher might mean by "faith" -- and I'll reflect on that in a moment -- the Hebrew terms are "'emeth" (firmness), "'emuwn" (faithfulness), or "'emuwnah" (firmness), etymologically related to the more familiar term "amēn," meaning (according to the Blue Letter Bible):

1) firm

a) metaph. faithful

2) verily, amen

a) at the beginning of a discourse - surely, truly, of a truth

b) at the end - so it is, so be it, may it be fulfilled. It was a custom, which passed over from the synagogues to the Christian assemblies, that when he who had read or discoursed, had offered up solemn prayer to God, the others responded Amen, and thus made the substance of what was uttered their own.

None of these quite captures Frobisher's use of the term "faith," which seems to imply a trustful emotion that runs deep in the believer. Nor does any of these clearly express what I've sometimes been told about the Hebrew understanding of faith, that it means belief expressed in action.

When I was growing up in the church, I understood the word "faith" to designate dependence, a deep trust in God that whispered not even a single doubt . . . but I've long since come to deeply distrust that understanding because I've seen that it often means trusting in some other person's subjective insistence on God's will.

I've gone through a pretzel's tangle of different positions on this faith issue, but I've ultimately come to the conclusion that God wouldn't demand an irrational faith, for the character of God, properly and correctly understood, would have to be -- as Pope Benedict maintains in his Regensburg lecture, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections" -- eminently reasonable:

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. 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, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος [logos]" . . . . God acts, συν λόγω [syn logō], 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. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

One need not be Catholic to appreciate an insistence that God is essentially reasonable. If God's not, we're all in big trouble, for if God's character is not reasonable, then faith itself must be unreasonable, even irrational, never truly engendered by trustworthy persuasion but always imposed with the threat of violence. We see this most explicitly in the faith of religious terrorists, but the threat is more often implicit, especially when obscured through the manipulative cunning of some who would set their own subjective faith up as the objective standard by which to judge everyone else's. Not that I'm thinking of anyone in particular . . .

The Greek term for "faith," incidentally, is pistis, which has the following meanings in the New Testament (borrowed from the Blue Letter Bible):

1) conviction of the truth of anything, belief; in the NT of a conviction or belief respecting man's relationship to God and divine things, generally with the included idea of trust and holy fervour born of faith and joined with it

a) relating to God

1) the conviction that God exists and is the creator and ruler of all things, the provider and bestower of eternal salvation through Christ

b) relating to Christ

1) a strong and welcome conviction or belief that Jesus is the Messiah, through whom we obtain eternal salvation in the kingdom of God

c) the religious beliefs of Christians

d) belief with the predominate idea of trust (or confidence) whether in God or in Christ, springing from faith in the same

2) fidelity, faithfulness

a) the character of one who can be relied on

The correspondence of pistis to the Hebrew terms "'emeth," "'emuwn," and "'emuwnah," as well as to "amēn," is clear, though this Greek term seems to carry a good deal more theological content.

Just to satisfy curiosity, mine anyway, here's the etymology for the English word "faith," borrowed from the Online Etymological Dictionary:

mid-13c., "duty of fulfilling one's trust," from O.Fr. feid, from L. fides "trust, belief," from root of fidere "to trust," from PIE base *bhidh-/*bhoidh- (cf. Gk. pistis; see bid). For sense evolution, see belief. Theological sense is from late 14c.; religions called faiths since c.1300.

All of this is very interesting, I suppose, though I'd need to reflect on it a lot before I'd have anything interesting to write, but why did Frobisher say that faith has the craftiest doorman? We have to read the aphorism in its context:

"Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again." (David Mitchell, "Letters from Zedelghem," Cloud Atlas: A Novel, page 75)

That sounds a bit like disappointment, but perhaps Mr. Frobisher is simply directed to where, deep down, he really wants to find himself, and the doorman's craft thus consists in recognizing this innermost desire, but you'll need to read the larger context, the entire "Letters from Zedelghem" story, to find out for sure.

After all, why trust me?

Paul Berman on Globalizing "The Thought Police"

Blasphemy
The New Republic

Paul Berman, who has previously investigated Islamist ties to fascist thought and totalitarian movements, has a new essay published on Islamism, "The Thought Police" (The New Republic, March 14, 2012), in which he reviews the book Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide, by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea. For the most part, he praises their book and agrees with their analysis that Islamism is winning in the Muslim world -- and also in the non-Muslim world. But for what reason is Islamism winning?

[The reason] is systematic intimidation. The radicals, who are perfectly happy to argue in a conventional manner, are equally happy, should argument fail, to enforce through violence.

They use extreme violence, or at least its threat, to enforce silence not only in Muslim lands, but globally. Berman summarizes the past couple of decades, in which this global force has revealed itself:

The more expansive rethinking [of Islamists in their attempt to impose aspects of sharia on non-Muslims globally] emerged only in the course of the Rushdie affair in 1988–1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini and other leaders judged that corporal retribution for the satanic act of writing and publishing The Satanic Verses should be meted out even to Rushdie's publishing houses, translators, and booksellers in all parts of the world, unto California, which experienced an arson, and Japan, which saw a murder. The Age of the Rushdie Affair, having gotten under way, has not yet come to an end. Marshall and Shea summarize some of its continuing manifestations: the murder of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker, on an Amsterdam street in 2004; the response to a dozen Danish cartoons in 2005 lampooning Islamic terrorism, which generated mass demonstrations, riots, and arson attacks and, all in all, 241 deaths around the world; the repeated attempts to murder the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who drew the most pointed and memorable of the cartoons (the one depicting Muhammad with a bomb tucked into his turban), with would-be assassins arrested as far away as Chicago; the response to Benedict XVI's lecture at Regensburg, Germany, in 2006, which led to the murder of Christians in Iraq and Somalia and to bombings and shootings aimed at Christian centers in Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank.

Berman continues in this vein for several more paragraphs and concludes: "There are far too many of these incidents and unhappy life-stories to dismiss the lot of them as a marginal phenomenon." He then speaks of his pessimism about the Arab Spring, and readers of this blog will know that I share his pessimism, but he expresses it far better than I, so read his article.

On one point of his argument, however, I have some doubts. Relying upon Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, Berman appears to think that Islam's political dimension can be excised from its religious dimension. He cites three liberal Muslim scholars, the late, former president of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid, the late Egyptian scholar of literature Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd, and the Maldivean professor in exile Abdullah Saeed, all three of whom argue that the current Islamist political movements are incompatible with various humanist traditions going back to Islam's medieval Golden Age. There's undoubtedly something to this argument, for there was a Golden Age, though I suspect that its golden shine was gild more than gold and its achievements due less to Islam itself and more due to an incomplete process of Islamization.

Why are the Islamists winning the argument among Muslims despite some 'humanist' traditions? Perhaps because their own traditions are deeper? Perhaps because they can point to an origin in which their religious founder and model for conduct was a man who combined the roles of prophet, general, and king? Perhaps because Islam has an affinity for totalitarian systems and for that reason flirted with the early twentieth-century fascism and now flirts with a left also restrictive of free speech? These are questions that have to be taken seriously even if Islam does have a few more enlightened traditions.