Benedict quotes, controversially, a dialogue between a 15th century Orthodox emperor and an "educated Persian." The Orthodox ruler, in this document, criticizes "violent conversion". What interests Benedict, however, is the argument that the emperor used against violent conversion: "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.'" Benedict argues, "the decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature." Violence contradicts both God's nature and reason. God's nature is non-violent; as reason participates in the nature of God, true reason itself is non-violent.

Benedict immediately puts a Christological cast upon this non-violent Reason that reveals the very nature of God. "John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: 'In the beginning was the 'logos'". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with 'logos.' 'Logos' means both reason and word -- a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason." Jesus Christ is not "unreasonable" or "outside of" reason", but reveals, in his very incarnation, the very grain of the universe. Jesus Christ, as the revelation of the God whose nature is Reason, defines the true reason in its nature as love, and therefore, as non-violent.

In his lecture, Benedict extends an argument about the centrality of non-violence, of peace to understand God. Faith opens reason to its true nature as participation in the non-violent God that has revealed God's own self in Jesus Christ. Remember in July, Benedict wrote:

"The Lord has conquered on the cross. He has not conquered with a new empire, with a force that is more powerful than others, capable of destroying them; he has not conquered in a human manner, as we imagine, with an empire stronger than the other. He has conquered with a love capable of going to death.

This is God's new way of conquering: He does not oppose violence with a stronger violence. He opposes violence precisely with the contrary: with love to the end, his cross. This is God's humble way of overcoming: With his love -- and only thus is it possible -- he puts a limit to violence. This is a way of conquering that seems very slow to us, but it is the true way of overcoming evil, of overcoming violence, and we must trust this divine way of overcoming.

To trust means to enter actively in this divine love, to participate in this endeavor of pacification, to be in line with what the Lord says: "Blessed are the peacemakers, the agents of peace, because they are the sons of God." We must take, in the measure of our possibilities, our love to all those who are suffering, knowing that the Judge of the Last Judgment identifies himself with those who suffer."

Benedict therefore extends the argument in the lecture. The revelation of God in Jesus is simultaneously the revelation of the true nature of Reason, the nature of which is seen in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Non-violence is not "irrational," but reveals the very nature of reason. Thus, "not to act 'with 'logos' [i.e., to act violently] is contrary to God's nature." With human reason participating in God who is non-violent as revealed in Jesus, one finds that true reason is Christologically-tinged -- the Word through whom all things were created. Thus, Benedict reminds us that "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 unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV)."

Thus, the paper critiques the violence inherent in the instrumental understanding of reason in modern concepts of reason that are separated from God -- reason, separated from faith, becomes "unreasonable" -- ie, prone to the service of violence. Thus Benedict criticizes "modern reason from within" in a manner that "has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly . . . The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a hisotrical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith."

He thus speaks positively for Islam, as for the church, in response to modernist and post-modernist Western secularity: "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." Western pluralism is in its very roots "non-pluralistic" by its own exclusions. Benedict knows this from his own experience.

Violence is not reason; reason used for the purpose of violence is not reason, for it separates Reason from the nature of God revealed in Reason made flesh, Jesus Christ. Denying God, reason denies humanity.

I have no doubt that Benedict drew from the Christian -- Islamic dialogue to distinguish the Christian concept of God from Islam. Yet it was not out of an intolerance of Islam, nor to invoke Christian or secular violence against Muslims -- his whole lecture repudiates the violent past of the church and the European west against Islam. It is the whole scale rejection of the violence in service of the church that characterized so much of the later middle ages in the crusades and then in the birth of the absolutist and then liberal nation-state and its colonialization agenda. Yet rather than attack Benedict through symbolic violence, Benedict pushes us to reason without violence to deal with the differences of the world, for reason bears the imprint of Jesus Christ, who defeated the violence of the cross through the power of God the Father in the resurrection.

As I was writing this post, ironically the following post came to me from Jeff Blythe, a personal friend and still member of Mid-City. He spent years working with a Christian community of Somalis in Ethiopia (I believe). It illustrates the importance of Benedict's words, and the fact that Christians respond to the violence of the world through martyrdom rather than through the (ir)rationality of violence:

Ali Mustaf Maka’il, 22, was shot and killed in Manabolyo, northern Mogadishu, on September 7, 2006. Ali, college freshman and cloth merchant, accepted Christ as his only Savior 11 months ago.

A gunman loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts shot Mr. Ali in the back after he refused to join a Qur’an chanting crowd in response to the lunar eclipse.

The Union of Islamic Courts confiscated Mr. Ali’s body for 24 hours. The body was later returned in a military truck to his grieving family.

Kindly pray for the family of Mr. Ali as well as his grieving house church.

This is the first known martyrdom the Somali church has faced since the jihadist Islamic Courts took over Mogadishu three months ago.

Blessed are those who lose their lives for the risen Lord,

A. Ali