Pastor John Wright

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September 15, 2006

The Peaceableness of Reason

Earlier this week I read Benedict XVI's lecture at the University of Regensburg. I was deeply impressed. Slowly this lecture filtered into the public media, though in a profoundly distorting manner. Some respondents have publicly stated that Benedict seeks to return to the crusades. The irony of this is that Benedict's lecture has a fundamental commitment to non-violence embedded within it. I'd like to spend some time analyzing this speech for what the lecture has to teach it because it reaches to the intersection of the academy and the church, nature and the supernatural. He adopts historical analysis very parallel to such works as David Burrell, Etionne Gilson, and recent Radical Orthodox thinkers. The response indicates the type of hard distinction between "faith" and "reason" that Benedict seeks to challenge.

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

Posted by johnwright at September 15, 2006 11:59 AM

Comments

Great post. Thank you! I too thought it was a provoking lecture. I continue to be impressed with his intellectual prowess. I'm saddened that most people have come to learn of it through media coverage looking to fan the flames of conflict.

Posted by: Matt Alexander at September 16, 2006 7:32 AM

Dear Dr. Wright,

You might be interested in my response to the Pope's recent remarks on Islam as made in comments to a post on same by Roger Alford at Opinio Juris* (a blog on international law and politics). There I note that the Pope's characterization of the role of reason in relation to God within the Islamic tradition was inaccurate and not at all representative of that typically found within its philosophy and theology. I've pasted there several of my entries from a basic glossary guide for Islam that better describe the part played by reason within the Islamic tradition, a role far more generous than that accorded it within the history of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. What is more, while it was Christians who contributed, through their translation of key texts from Greek into Arabic, to the appropriation of Greek philosophy into Islam, it was in fact Islam that later proved decisive in influencing the role reason would come to play in Catholicism, exemplified most eloquently in the work of Aquinas. For Aquinas was heavily in debt to Islamic philosophy and theology, especially the work of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and it is hard to imagine the 'rational' character of his theology without this influence. While I find the Pope's narration of a reconciliation between Greek logos and Christian faith to be of some interest, his manner of juxtaposing this story with a misleading portrait of the role of reason in the determination of God's will and the understanding of the nature of God in Islamic philosophy and theology was undeniably tendentious and mistaken and did nothing whatsoever to further the ends of genuine interreligious dialogue.
* http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1158186156.shtml

While I think some Muslims may have taken parts of this speech out of context and misunderstood what the Pope was attempting to say, the aforementioned sections of the speech contain claims from which one can properly conclude that there is sufficient reason to be disappointed and disturbed by the Pope's understanding and characterization of fundamental notions and practices within Islam.

Best wishes,
Patrick S. O'Donnell

Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell at September 17, 2006 3:25 PM

Dear Mr. O'Donnell:

Thank you so much for your post, and the reference to your site. I plan to read it more carefully. I know of the fruitful medieval interaction between Ibn-Sina, Maimenodes, and Aquinas through lectures at Notre Dame in the '80s and the scholarship of David Burrell, particularly, his wonderful book, Knowing the Unknowable God. I trust your assessment that the mainline of Islamic thought agrees, rather than disagrees, with Benedict on the relationship between human reason and the Divine Nature.

Yet Benedict XVI does not attribute this position to the mainline of Islamic thought in the lecture, but concentrates on criticizing such a position within the volunteerist tradition in medieval Christianity, particularly as beginning in Duns Scotus. He writes,

"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 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. . . . . 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."

Benedict does refer to one medieval Islamic thinker, Ibn Hazn." From my little knowledge, I think that such a citation is rather non-controversial. But he ascribes this position to a position within Christianity, rather than as characterizing Islam. He criticizes a strand within Christian thought much more harshly than within Islam. This has been completely lost in the controversy. He shows Christian theology as a dialectical process that needs self-criticism.

There are two interesting aspects of this. Recent research has placed the roots of the "modern" (and the Reformation) in medieval volunteerism. Benedicts argument that places the woes of modern reason as separated from God, and thus, not fully reason, is a main thesis of "radical orthodoxy." The Pope is here trying to go behind the modern in order the save the modern from itself, as he himself says. Second, the colonialism of Europe and the bellicosity of the United States and the nation-state of Israel have so heightened sensitivities of the Islamic public, and even their intelligentsia that it has become almost impossible to place Islam and Christianity on the same side against the secularization of the West from an Islamic understanding as Benedict tried to do.

I'm not sure it was wise to quote the Eastern Orthodox (non-Roman Catholic) emperor in this context, especially in retrospect. Whether this was a mistake or meant to test Muslim response by Benedict, I don't know. The response of the Vatican suggests that such a response was not anticipated. But his lecture deserves careful study for what it actually argues for, rather than shifting it into an agenda that is not its own, by approaching it, not through its own words, but through the justified anger at the Western colonial violence of the European liberal-democratic nation-state, itself a product of medieval volunteerism. There are layers of irony here in how the mainstream, conservative press, like the New York Times, is playing out this issue.

I really appreciate your help in teaching me about the history of Islam. I have a colleague who is working on a book of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish interpretations of the Five Books of Moses and other early Jewish writings and traditions. I have much to learn.

Peace,
John Wright

PS Pastor or Doctor works well for me!!

Posted by: John Wright at September 17, 2006 9:55 PM

Pastor Wright,

I appreciate your thoughtful reply to my letter.

There's little I want to contend or quibble with above, apart from the interpretation of what the Pope was saying about Islam in the following passage:

'But 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 Hazn 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 practice idolatry.'

It is the first two sentences that are revealing and troubling, as the Pope proceeds to imply that one might find extreme formulations of the meaning of such 'absolute transcendence,' as in the work of Ibn Hazn, although he no where explicitly states he believes these other propositions necessarily follow from such a conception. My point concerns the claim that for Muslims God is 'absolutely transcendent,' a conception Benedict does attribute to Islam, and not to Christianity, in the above passage. If Benedict did not think this summation from the work of Theodore Khoury was an accurate description of the Muslim conception of God, he should have said so, for he invokes it by way of contrast with the claim that 'Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.' Why invoke Islam here when all he need do is cite the development of theological voluntarism and Lutheran theology as alternative currents which dislodge or diminish the role of Logos? Indeed, he might easily have used Islamic examples to reinforce his points about the compatibility between Logos and faith (or revelation), but he did not do this. Instead, Islam is only a foil for the larger argument and a tendentious one at that.

All the best,
Patrick

Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell at September 17, 2006 11:31 PM

Patrick:

Thank you for your graciousness and instruction. In looking at Benedict's text (which has been edited some on the Vatican web site), Benedict indeed does attribute this teaching on the radical transcendence of God to the mainline of Islamic thinking through accepting as authoritative the work of the French Islamicist R. Arnaldez. I do not know his credentials, but it seems his authority at least needs contested before the Pope accepts his analysis as valid. It would have been much better had the Pope quoted directly from a mainline Islamic source, rather than a secondary source from a Western academic. But since Benedict taught at Muenster, I have wondered if he was trying to acknowledge his own ties to the German academy in using the reference as his starting place.

Such is the need for deep dialogue to take place between persons with different theological convictions so that the place of real differences might emerge. Thanks for your help to understand better the sources of the difference.

Peace,
John

Posted by: John Wright at September 18, 2006 6:07 AM

From the Palmer Edition of the Koran

THE CHAPTER OF REPENTANCE OR IMMUNITY.
(IX. Medînah.)

"Fight those who believe not in God and in the last day, and who forbid not what God and His Apostle have forbidden, and who do not practice

p. 177

the religion of truth from amongst those to whom the Book has been brought, until they pay the tribute by their hands and be as little ones.

[30] The Jews say Ezra is the son of God; and the Christians say that the Messiah is the son of God; that is what they say with their mouths, imitating the sayings of those who misbelieved before.--God fight them! how they lie 1!

They take their doctors and their monks for lords 2 rather than God, and the Messiah the son of Mary; but they are bidden to worship but one God, there is no god but He; celebrated be His praise, from what they join with Him!

They desire to put out the light of God with their mouths, but God will not have it but that we should perfect His light, averse although the misbelievers be!

He it is who sent His Apostle with guidance and the religion of truth, to make it prevail over every other religion, averse although idolaters may be!

O ye who believe! verily, many of the doctors and the monks devour the wealth of men openly, and turn folk from God's way; but those who store up gold and silver and expend it not in God's way,

p. 178

[paragraph continues] --give them glad tidings of grievous woe! [35] On the day when it shall be heated in the fire of hell, and their brows shall be branded therewith, and their sides and their backs!--'This is what ye stored up for yourselves, taste then what ye stored up!"

Posted by: M. Palm at September 18, 2006 10:28 PM