David Nirenberg: What Benedict really said
[David Nirenberg is a historian and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the author of Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press).]
... It is the rare homily, and certainly the rare academic talk, that triggers firebombs and comparisons to Hitler. So what did the pope actually say? At the center of the storm are a few lines of his remarks, quoted from the "dialogue with a Muslim" that the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus claimed to have had in the winter of 1391-1392:
"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.... God is not pleased by blood.... Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and reason properly, without violence and threats. ... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons, or any other means of threatening a person with death."
Muslim anger has concentrated on the first words of the papal citation, about Muhammad's essential inhumanity. In response to this anger, the papal palace duly announced that His Holiness's respect for Islam as a religion remains undiminished. Vatican spokesmen insisted that the offending line was incidental to the pope's broader message, and that he was not endorsing the medieval emperor's views, but simply quoting a historical text to make a historical point. In his extraordinary expression of regret on September 17, the pope himself adopted this position, declaring that "these were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought." "The true meaning of my address in its totality," Benedict continued, "was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect." Many in the First World will be inclined to accept the pope's clarification. Though few of them will say it openly (except perhaps Silvio Berlusconi), the violence following Benedict's comment will only confirm for them the legitimacy of his portrait of Islam. Hasyim Muzadi, the head of Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, was right to warn his coreligionists that a violent response to Benedict's words would only have the effect of vindicating them.
Still, we need to ask why, if the medieval text is so incidental to Benedict's argument and he does not endorse its meaning, he cited it at all. It was certainly not owing to the text's originality. The emperor's attack on Muhammad as a prophet of violence is among the oldest of Christian complaints (we might even say stereotypes) about Islam and its founder. Already during Islam's early conquests in the seventh century, Christians were suggesting that its spread by the sword was sufficient proof that Muhammad was a false prophet. Of course we cannot blame medieval Christians conquered by Islam for characterizing it as a violent religion, any more than we can blame medieval Muslims for later failing to appreciate the claims of Christian crusaders that their breaking of Muslim heads was an act of love. The history of the alliance of monotheism with physical force is both venerable and ecumenical. The question is, why in our troubled times did Benedict choose to bring the world's attention to the unoriginal words of this Byzantine emperor?
One answer is that Turkey has long been on the pontiff's mind. Readers may recall then-Cardinal Ratzinger's interview with Le Figaro in 2004 in which he commented that Turkey should not be admitted to the European Union "on the grounds that it is a Muslim nation" and historically has always been contrary to Europe. Like Ratzinger, Manuel II Paleologus also worried about keeping the Turks out of Europe. As the antepenultimate emperor of Byzantium and the last effective one (he ruled from 1391 to 1425; Byzantium fell in 1453), he spent his life fighting--sometimes in the Muslim armies, but mostly against them--in the final great effort to keep Constantinople from becoming Istanbul. He traveled across Europe as far as London in a vain attempt to awaken the Latin West to the growing threat to European Christendom in the East. And he wrote letters and treatises (such as his Dialogue With a Muslim) against Islam, rehearsing for his beleaguered subjects all the arguments against the religion of their enemies. For all these reasons, history remembers the emperor Manuel as an exemplary defender of Christian Europe against Islam. In 2003, in fact, there appeared a German translation of Dialogue With a Muslim, and the book's editor states in his preface that the work is being published in order to remind today's readers of the dangers that Turkey poses to the European Union. The pope may have been making a similar point.
The emperor may serve the pope as a historical allegory, but the specific meaning of his words is useful as well. It is true that Manuel's sentence about Muhammad's inhumanity is incidental to Benedict's arguments. It was doubtless included for the simple reason that it opened the portion of the text that Benedict wanted to use. (Fortunately, he did not quote the preceding paragraphs of Manuel's treatise, which present Muhammad's teachings as plagiarisms and perversions of Jewish law.) But the medieval emperor's claim that Islam is not a rational religion--"To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm"--lies at the heart of the pope's lecture, and of his vision of the world. That vision should be a disturbing one, not only for Muslims but for adherents of other religions as well.
In order to understand why, we need to unpack the pope's learned thesis, which will be immediately intelligible to connoisseurs of German academic theology and to almost no one else. (The pope's website promises that footnotes are forthcoming.) Simply put, the theological argument is this: Catholic Christianity is the only successful blend of "Jewish" obedience to God (faith) with Greek philosophy (reason). This marriage of faith and reason, body and spirit, is what Benedict, following a long Christian tradition, calls the "logos," the "word of God."
The pope chose to make his point about the special greatness of his own faith through the negative example of Islam, which he claims has not achieved the necessary synthesis. Like Judaism, Islam in his view has always been too concerned with absolute submission to God's law, neglecting reason. It was to make this point that Benedict invoked his reading of Manuel II Paleologus, which he supplemented with an allusion to the claim by Ibn Hazm (systematically misspelled by the Vatican as Hazn) that an omnipotent God is not bound by reason. Like Manuel, Ibn Hazm (994-1064) is an interesting authority for Benedict to have chosen. He, too, lived through the collapse of his civilization, in his case the Muslim Caliphate of Cordoba. He, too, produced a defense of his faith against its rising foes, though his took the form not of a dialogue but of a massive history of religions, charting the eternal struggle of the godly against the evils of Judaism and Christianity. This view of history, together with his adherence to a Zahiri sect of Islam that emphasized obedience to the literal meaning of the Koran, have led some contemporary commentators to see in Ibn Hazm a precursor to modern Islamism. He thus serves the pope particularly well as an example, but he can scarcely be called representative of medieval Islam. ...
Read entire article at WSJ
... It is the rare homily, and certainly the rare academic talk, that triggers firebombs and comparisons to Hitler. So what did the pope actually say? At the center of the storm are a few lines of his remarks, quoted from the "dialogue with a Muslim" that the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus claimed to have had in the winter of 1391-1392:
"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.... God is not pleased by blood.... Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and reason properly, without violence and threats. ... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons, or any other means of threatening a person with death."
Muslim anger has concentrated on the first words of the papal citation, about Muhammad's essential inhumanity. In response to this anger, the papal palace duly announced that His Holiness's respect for Islam as a religion remains undiminished. Vatican spokesmen insisted that the offending line was incidental to the pope's broader message, and that he was not endorsing the medieval emperor's views, but simply quoting a historical text to make a historical point. In his extraordinary expression of regret on September 17, the pope himself adopted this position, declaring that "these were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought." "The true meaning of my address in its totality," Benedict continued, "was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect." Many in the First World will be inclined to accept the pope's clarification. Though few of them will say it openly (except perhaps Silvio Berlusconi), the violence following Benedict's comment will only confirm for them the legitimacy of his portrait of Islam. Hasyim Muzadi, the head of Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, was right to warn his coreligionists that a violent response to Benedict's words would only have the effect of vindicating them.
Still, we need to ask why, if the medieval text is so incidental to Benedict's argument and he does not endorse its meaning, he cited it at all. It was certainly not owing to the text's originality. The emperor's attack on Muhammad as a prophet of violence is among the oldest of Christian complaints (we might even say stereotypes) about Islam and its founder. Already during Islam's early conquests in the seventh century, Christians were suggesting that its spread by the sword was sufficient proof that Muhammad was a false prophet. Of course we cannot blame medieval Christians conquered by Islam for characterizing it as a violent religion, any more than we can blame medieval Muslims for later failing to appreciate the claims of Christian crusaders that their breaking of Muslim heads was an act of love. The history of the alliance of monotheism with physical force is both venerable and ecumenical. The question is, why in our troubled times did Benedict choose to bring the world's attention to the unoriginal words of this Byzantine emperor?
One answer is that Turkey has long been on the pontiff's mind. Readers may recall then-Cardinal Ratzinger's interview with Le Figaro in 2004 in which he commented that Turkey should not be admitted to the European Union "on the grounds that it is a Muslim nation" and historically has always been contrary to Europe. Like Ratzinger, Manuel II Paleologus also worried about keeping the Turks out of Europe. As the antepenultimate emperor of Byzantium and the last effective one (he ruled from 1391 to 1425; Byzantium fell in 1453), he spent his life fighting--sometimes in the Muslim armies, but mostly against them--in the final great effort to keep Constantinople from becoming Istanbul. He traveled across Europe as far as London in a vain attempt to awaken the Latin West to the growing threat to European Christendom in the East. And he wrote letters and treatises (such as his Dialogue With a Muslim) against Islam, rehearsing for his beleaguered subjects all the arguments against the religion of their enemies. For all these reasons, history remembers the emperor Manuel as an exemplary defender of Christian Europe against Islam. In 2003, in fact, there appeared a German translation of Dialogue With a Muslim, and the book's editor states in his preface that the work is being published in order to remind today's readers of the dangers that Turkey poses to the European Union. The pope may have been making a similar point.
The emperor may serve the pope as a historical allegory, but the specific meaning of his words is useful as well. It is true that Manuel's sentence about Muhammad's inhumanity is incidental to Benedict's arguments. It was doubtless included for the simple reason that it opened the portion of the text that Benedict wanted to use. (Fortunately, he did not quote the preceding paragraphs of Manuel's treatise, which present Muhammad's teachings as plagiarisms and perversions of Jewish law.) But the medieval emperor's claim that Islam is not a rational religion--"To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm"--lies at the heart of the pope's lecture, and of his vision of the world. That vision should be a disturbing one, not only for Muslims but for adherents of other religions as well.
In order to understand why, we need to unpack the pope's learned thesis, which will be immediately intelligible to connoisseurs of German academic theology and to almost no one else. (The pope's website promises that footnotes are forthcoming.) Simply put, the theological argument is this: Catholic Christianity is the only successful blend of "Jewish" obedience to God (faith) with Greek philosophy (reason). This marriage of faith and reason, body and spirit, is what Benedict, following a long Christian tradition, calls the "logos," the "word of God."
The pope chose to make his point about the special greatness of his own faith through the negative example of Islam, which he claims has not achieved the necessary synthesis. Like Judaism, Islam in his view has always been too concerned with absolute submission to God's law, neglecting reason. It was to make this point that Benedict invoked his reading of Manuel II Paleologus, which he supplemented with an allusion to the claim by Ibn Hazm (systematically misspelled by the Vatican as Hazn) that an omnipotent God is not bound by reason. Like Manuel, Ibn Hazm (994-1064) is an interesting authority for Benedict to have chosen. He, too, lived through the collapse of his civilization, in his case the Muslim Caliphate of Cordoba. He, too, produced a defense of his faith against its rising foes, though his took the form not of a dialogue but of a massive history of religions, charting the eternal struggle of the godly against the evils of Judaism and Christianity. This view of history, together with his adherence to a Zahiri sect of Islam that emphasized obedience to the literal meaning of the Koran, have led some contemporary commentators to see in Ibn Hazm a precursor to modern Islamism. He thus serves the pope particularly well as an example, but he can scarcely be called representative of medieval Islam. ...