I’ve read (actually I listened to the CD’s) Professor Thomas F. Madden’s lectures on the history of the crusades and they are really quite good. The professor now looks at the Holy Father’s recent words regarding Islam in the context of history and in the context of the pope’s speech on faith and reason:
Early in the address he referred to an interfaith dialogue between a Persian scholar and the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus which probably took place in 1391. Manuel was the leader of the last Christian state in the East. The descendent of the once mighty Roman Empire, Byzantium had by Manuel’s day been reduced to little more than a few crumbs floating around in the soup of the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire. This was a world in which the forces of Islam were the real superpower, and they knew it. Manuel spent his reign flattering and appeasing the Turks on the one hand and desperately seeking aid from Europeans on the other. In neither case was he very successful. Less than three decades after his death, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II destroyed the Byzantine Empire and made its capital, Constantinople (modern Istanbul), his own.
This is a tough lecture to boil down to one sentence, but if forced I would characterize it as: Theology belongs in the university because only by studying faith with reason will we find solutions to the problems of our time. However, if instead of reading the lecture we simply cut out everything except the words of Manuel II Palaeologus written six centuries ago, then we have a good justification for Pakistan’s parliament to unanimously condemn the pope. If we further pretend that it was Benedict, rather than a long-dead emperor, who expressed these sentiments we have a sound basis for the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah of Lebanon to demand “a personal apology — not through his officials — to Muslims for this false reading (of Islam).” Or we can rage with Syria’s top Sunni Muslim religious authority, Sheik Ahmad Badereddine Hassoun, who replied to the pope, “We have heard about your extremism and hate for Arabs and Muslims. Now that you have dropped the mask from your face we see its ugliness and extremist nature.”
Sandro Magister expresses his view on the controversity reminding us that prior to the pope’s lecture at Regensburg he stated:
“People in Africa and Asia admire, indeed, the scientific and technical prowess of the West, but they are frightened by a form of rationality which totally excludes God from man’s vision, as if this were the highest form of reason, and one to be taught to their cultures too. They do not see the real threat to their identity in the Christian faith, but in the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom and that holds up utility as the supreme criterion for the future of scientific research. Dear friends, this cynicism is not the kind of tolerance and cultural openness that the world’s peoples are looking for and that all of us want! The tolerance which we urgently need includes the fear of God – respect for what others hold sacred. This respect for what others hold sacred demands that we ourselves learn once more the fear of God. But this sense of respect can be reborn in the Western world only if faith in God is reborn, if God become once more present to us and in us. We don’t impose our faith on anyone…”
But then came the lecture in Regensburg, and the interpretation of it made by the leaders of the Muslim world – muftis, preachers, opinionists, government officials, with a propagation and exaggeration of the offensive similar to what was seen a few months ago against the blasphemous cartoons – was the diametrical opposite. The accusations sprang from an outrageous distortion of the theses expounded by Benedict XVI, and sidestepped precisely that exercise of reason invoked by the pope as the proper terrain for a true dialogue among the religions and civilizations.
Let us pray that the pope’s words become a starting point for the secular world to reconsider faith and it’s relationship to reason. Let us hope that Western nations and Islam see reason as the common bond of the major religions and promote this idea as a means of addressing the rising tide of violence in the name of religion. Perhaps Benedict’s words will spark some light of insight to those in the secular world who see faith as contrary to reason.
