God's Dachshund, Part III - Crusading for Logos

Benedict’s most publicized pronouncement was not an encyclical at all, but rather a “private” discourse given at the University of Regensburg, in which he was said to have accused the Prophet Mohammad of bringing “only evil”. In fact, he had asserted no such thing. A quote was taken out of context, triggering an explosion of Muslim indignation and an orgy of glee in the western press.

The blooper -- for it was that -- provided the press a double-sundae schadenfreud: the nazi rotweiler had goofed ... got jam on his snout ... plus it all went to show up them Muslims as the fanatical, irrational saber-in-teeth, bomb on belt maniacs they truly are.

This most unfortunate unravelling was in large measure due to the jejune imbecility that infuses the greater part of the western press. But it should not be thought that there were not those that were looking quite acutely to torpedo what Benedict was attempting which was none other than to build a bridge of peace to the islamic world.

Fortunately, where it mattered, the nap of reason did not last long. The bats and mad dogs retired to their dark places and this February, two years later, it was announced that Islamic religious leaders were meeting Vatican officials to arrange an inter-faith conference to take place in late 2008.

Of course the meeting is only the lesser half of the story. Muslims and Christians and even Jews are meeting all the time, only not on the best of terms. It was Benedict’s skilled carpentry that erected the terms of the dialogue.

Typically enough, Benedict’s discourse operated at multiple levels. At the level of signalling his intentions, Benedict proffered the services of Helleno-Christianity as a bridge between the “rationalist” West and the “spirit-driven” Islamic world. At this level, Benedict made clear his proviso that discussion, if it were to talk place at all, could only take place in that arena where faith is tempered by reason and reason guided by faith.

But at a more fundamental level, Benedict gently excoriated the absolutist scientific rationalism of the West as bearing the seed of its very antithesis and itself giving rise to an anti-social subjectivism steeped in isolated and un-moored fantasies that was little different than unthinking religious fanaticism. At this level, what at first reading appeared to set forth an “East-West” dichotomy was in fact an invitation to Muslim religious leaders to join with him in a collaborative theological effort to combat the “disturbing pathologies of religion and reason.”

Building on a Divided Line

Perhaps the best -- if not the only -- way to understand what Benedict constructed one at least needs -- if not a degree in classics -- to return to Plato and his divided line.

In the Republic Socrates sets out Plato’s theory of human understanding in what is known as “Plato’s Divided Line.” The line is a graph of how we humans know things, and the simplest way to explain it is to just draw the line :

..belief .............. . . opinion.................knowledge............... intuition

.....|_____________|_______________|______________|

In Plato’s scheme, the lowest form of human understanding is simply unconsidered, unprovable assent (belief). It is so primitive that it could almost be considered an anti-understanding -- the mind going out and embracing some assertion. This is the kind of understanding advertising aims to induce.

Next up there is opinion, reflection with some information, haphazardly considered, questionably logical and usually driven by emotion or some other self interest. Needless to say, opinions can be right or wrong depending on the luck of the draw. What we call “the Press” is a good example of this low and often spurious form of rationalism.

Following on, there is knowledge, in Plato’s usage, the word for which (mathesis) is related to mathematics. At its purest level, knowledge deals simply with forms of thought; for example abstract logic or geometric theorems. For those who specialize in the martial arts, these are like katas. At a practical level, this mathematical discipline is brought to bear on material subjects and social problems in what we call the natural and human sciences. This, broadly speaking, is what we call rationalism.

Lastly, at the end of the line, is nous which I think is best translated as intuition -- most certainly not in the vulgar sense of “hunch” but rather in the sense of that understanding which illuminates or infuses us when we have been brought to the limits of reasoned human understanding (knowledge). Nous is the inverse of belief. The intuiting mind does not go out and “grab” a thought but rather, stilled by informed doubt, it opens up so as to receive reality in its uncluttered clarity.

The social analogy Socrates used was that of The Cave. Men, he said, was trapped in cave howling and cackling as they looked at shadows and figures on a wall. The task of the philosopher was to drag them away kicking and screaming up the rocky cave entrance, past opinion and through knowledge until coming to the surface men got a glimpse of the way things really are and of the Sun.

Without question Plato’s scheme is as familiar to Benedict as the lines on his palm. Plato’s nous was never intended to be non-mystical and the progression from belief to intuition easily became a matrix for Christian spiritual disciplines originating in sin, progressing through penitence and contemplation and ending in a vision of Dante’s Mystic Rose or some equivalent.

But the very parallelism of the Platonic and Christian lines also allowed for cross-overs. Christian thought has always sought to harmonize and reconcile prayer with science, reason with revelation. At the same time, the need to effect a “reconciliation” presupposed a conflict -- the now familiar conflict between “faith and reason” which Benedict, with impish casualness, said he “found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.”

Accordingly, by way of starting point, Benedict took one half of Plato’s line and divided it in half again.

Reason ........................................................................Revelation

(sub-intuitive rationalism)............................... (meta-rational intuition)

|--------------------->Christian Logos <-----------------------|

In this scheme, “reason” stood for what Benedict called “Cartesian” {fn1} rationalism; that now familiar reductionism in which “only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific” so that nothing not scientific can be considered “rational”.

At the opposite pole of this spectrum was a view of a God who is so transcendent, so beyond human understanding, so utterly out there and beyond, that we dare not “impose” our petty categories of good and evil on him.. We can only submit and do what He tells us to do; and whatever he tells us to do, because He is God, and obedience to His will is very necessity itself.

In other words, what in platonic thought had been a progression from rationalism to intuitive revelation had become an irreconcilable conflict between complete antitheses.

In Benedict’s view “Paul’s vision [to go to Macedonia] was a ‘distillation’ of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.” This rapprochement was itself the result of an historical progression which began with the fundamentally inarticulate revelation of a burning bush, proceeded through the metamorphosis of the judeo-hellenic Septuagint and ended up with a New Testament written in Greek and bearing “the imprint of the Greek spirit.” (Benedict never ceases to astound.) The Church’s doctrine had thus brought about “a profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.

The Blooper

Summarized in this way, Benedict’s discourse, while interesting, was nothing particularly new. After all, the tension and dynamic between “faith and reason” has been in many ways the most salient philosophical and even political issue in the two millennia of Christian Civilization. The Pope’s thoughts on this question were not likely to get a headline from the Times much less any attention at all from the Islamic world.

But, if Benedict were interested in making a diplomatic proposal, he could hardly go stand at the edge of the Bosporus, wave and shout over the waters “Yooo hooo! Wanna talk?” How then to send the signal?

Quite properly and in the best diplomatic traditions, Benedict started out by going in the exact opposite direction.... not to the Bosporus but to Regensburg to address, not strangers and Infidels, but old friends at his alma mater.

So, thus facing North, how best to get the attention of Muslims? Benedict began by saying that, as it so happens, he had been reading about a dialogue which had been written around 1400 by the Byzantine philosopher and emperor Manuel II Paleologus. As it turns out, the dialog was between a Christian and a Muslim and, interestingly enough, the dialog was about reason and faith.

“The dialogue ranged widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an” and the seventh chapter, Benedict noted, dealt with “holy wars” and forcible conversions. Arguing against his “learned Persian” counterpart, the emperor asserted that violence was unreasonable and that “not to act reasonably, ‘with logos’, was contrary to God's nature.” As an Hellenic Christian, the emperor believed that God was Himself essentially Reasonable.

In contrast and quoting secondary authorities, Benedict then noted that under “Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent” and “Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word ... Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.”

At this point, even a mule would figure out that Benedict was proposing the Helleno-Christian Church as a providing a bridge for discussion between the “rationalist West” and what might politely be called “religiously inspired Islam” The signal had been sent.

Unfortunately, in this elaborate scheme of quoting an emperor quoting himself in a semi-fictitious dialogue written 700 years ago, Benedict repeated the now infamous statement. What the emperor had been arguing was that if, contrary to an injunction in the Koran itself prohibiting forcible conversions, Mohammed could later say that God changed His mind and told him to “spread by the sword the faith he preached” then such a “new” message would be “evil and inhuman” (fn 2 )

This quote, while it somewhat fleshed out the story and while it also served as a hint that the Pope was concerned about forcible conversions taking place today in parts of the Muslim world, was not strictly necessary to the diplomatic “signal” being sent. The essential message was that the Church was positioned to bridge cultures based on reason and cultures based on faith.

De la Razón nace el Sueño de la Razón

However, although the recounting of Manuel II’s dialogue might serve as a signal, sending a signal the import of which would be little different from inviting “you loonies” to come talk to “us sensible people” was not apt to provoke a favorable response even without the offending quote.

Indeed such a dichotomy was itself offensive. Although the division between reason and faith exists as a philosophical matter it is historically utterly wrong to characterize the West as “rationalist” and the Islamic world as “inspirational”. To draw such a distinction would reveal a depth of ignorance attainable only by certain US-American tenured professors who, it would seem, have never heard of Avicena (980-1037), the Spanish Islamic philosopher and author of the brilliant Commentaries on Aristotle; or Averroes (1126-1198) another Spanish Islamic philosopher who integrated Islamic traditions with ancient Greek thought and was as much a rationalist as Manuel II or Thomas Aquinas. Benedict is certainly not a US-tenured professor.

The related episodes between the Greek emperor and his supposed Persian counterpart was merely the diplomatic signal within a more in depth discussion of reason and faith.

In this aspect of his discourse Benedict made very clear that, although Christianity had harmonized reason and faith, there were strains within Christianity “which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn 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." In other words, irrationalist faith was not simply a Muslim phenomenon.

At the same time, the putative “rationalism” of the scientific and materialist West itself gave rise to a morbid subjective irrationality. In this connection, Benedict began by noting the obvious double-edged sword of scientific progress, “the positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly ... [but] ... we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities.” But more fundamentally and even more dangerously, if science made no room for anything other than “mathematical and empirical elements” 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’ ... and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective ‘conscience’ becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, ... ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.”

Benedict went on to criticise attempts within Catholicism to “liberate” it from unscientific concepts such Christ's divinity and the triune God by restructuring it into a system of practical moral values. Just as severely, Benedict criticised the Reformation’s attempt to “de-hellenize” Christianity, by purging it of its philosophical moorings. This, he said, ultimately lead to Kant’s cleavage between reason and faith which, as much as irredentist scientific empiricism, consigned faith to the realm of purely idiosyncratic fantasies based on an arbitrarily accepted (belief) Scripture.

Read in its entirety, far from characterizing Islam as “irrational,” Benedict’s discourse levelled a fundamental broadside against Western “rationalism.” Putting it in terms of Plato’s divided line, what Benedict in effect said was that if “mathesis” and reason were “divorced” from “nous” and intuition then “reason” itself could only give birth to its opposite. Western rationalism would then degenerate back into arbitrary, subjective, primitive belief, and thus destroy itself.

Far from simply characterizing Muslims as “fanatics”, Benedict made clear that the rationalist West was just as susceptible to fanaticism. Both world’s had to find coherence in an Hellenic middle ground. And for this reason, he concluded

“Theology rightly belongs ... within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline ... but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.”

"Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. 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."

The Muslim Heartfelt Response.

Once the brouha over the blooper had died down, Muslim clerics around the world got the message. At a diplomatic level, Benedict was offering the good offices of the Church as a bridge between the “West” and the “Islamic World” between the putatively “rationalist” and supposedly “fanatical”. And, offering to do so, on the stated terms that one side had to be open to “faith” and the other to “reason”.

More enticingly, at a religious level, Benedict was telling his Muslim counterparts, that theologians and clerics, as such, had a central mission to save the world from being torn apart by the centripetal forces of pathological subjectivity either in the West or in the Islamic world.

There can be no doubt that the Muslim clerics around the world understood the Pope’s true point. Within the year an extraordinary and heretofore unseen thing happened. On 13 October 2007, the religious leaders of the Islamic world -- which has no central authority such as the Church -- came together to make an unprecedented response in an Open Letter to Pope Benedict and (in descending order) all other Christian ecclesiastical leaders.

Whereas Benedict had stressed the inherent reason with “the Word” (logos), the Muslim response stressed that the Word, in both religions, was Love, a point certainly not lost on the author of Deus Caritas est. In much abridged summary, the response was as follows.

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour.

These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.

A Common Word

Whilst Islam and Christianity are obviously different religions — and whilst there is no minimising some of their formal differences — it is clear that the Two Greatest Commandments are an area of common ground and a link between the Qur’an, the Torah and the New Testament.

Thus the Unity of God, love of Him, and love of the neighbour form a common ground upon which Islam and Christianity (and Judaism) are founded.

And to those who nevertheless relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony.

The Muslim response eschews any interest or effort at seeking some sort of rapprochement at an ideological level. The Response contains many citations as to what love of God and Man entail but virtually no discussion of what are commonly called “theological” points. As such, the Muslim clerics answered Benedict with a heart-based response. Supposing “love” to be no more than an inexplicable but shared subjective attitude does it make any practical difference in terms of our living together in this life?

There is something of stark contrast between the measured Mozartian subtleties of Benedict’s discourse and the Muslims’ monotonic emphasis on the love of God and Man. From a certain perspective the response could be seen as a rejection of any invitation to a philosophical dia-logos. But of course, one did not need to go to the historic effort assembling up Muslim voices into a single response if one were only interested in rejection. There is, it seems to me, a certain anguished urgency in the Islamic answer which fairly clearly cries out for an end to bloodshed and which, when set against the backdrop of the present, asks: If we love God so much as we all say we do, why are we killing one another?

All things considered, Benedict’s “Regensburg Blooper” had yielded good fruits.

“Those who nevertheless relish Conflict and Destruction”

As stated, Benedict’s overtures got little coverage in the Western press, apart from the titillating scandal of his “controversial” remarks supposedly “against” Muslims. This sort of coverage, relegated the Pope’s address to the level of a Danish cartoon. Needless to say it avoided any discussion of the real controversy of his remarks, which inhered in his critique of a self-destructive, world-destructive empirical rationalism devoid of religious underpinnings. But if the Pope’s overture got little coverage, the Muslim response got virtually no play at all. Instead, at virtually the same time, the US-American press was playing up what the zionist/neo-conservatives in Washington were ballyhooing as “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” (22-26 October 2007)

According to its organizers both in Government and secreted about in various pro-Israeli and corporate sponsored think tanks, the purpose of the anti-islamofascist protest was “as simple as it is crucial: to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.” According to David Horowitz, one of the Awarenes Cheerleaders, the protest would be a “national effort …to rally American students to defend their country. In addition, participants will distribute pamphlets on Islamo-Fascism, including “The Islamic Mein Kampf,” “Why Israel is the Victim,” “Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews,”

Fortunately, this patent attempt at incitement fizzled. However, that is small comfort. The very instigation of the “protest,” the concoction of a spurious concept like “islamo-fascism” and the total silence of the US press on Christian-Islamic efforts at peace-making, indicate that there are and remain strong forces within the Western and U.S. establishments that “relish conflict and destruction.”

They would do well to remember Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

©WCG, 2008

Notes

(1) Benedict actually said “Platonic/Cartesian” rationalism; however within this brief summary use of that phrase would be confusing. It is a certainty that Benedict was not and would never confuse Platonism with the rationalism he was criticising. Indeed he quoted the Theataetus to make a point about being and intuition. What he meant and what his audience would have understood was “Platonic mathesis become Cartesian empiricism.”

(2) The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is 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. ... [Which prompted the emperor to say] "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".