Religion Within Reason

I would recommend this article only for those with a taste for some of the more intricate arcana of religious debate. Normally, my tolerance here is extremely limited, but the issue here thrust itself into our hearts, minds and/or faces in late 2006. It concerns the address given in Regensburg by Pope Benedict concerning the relative status in modern life of Faith and Reason. Most of his remarks were actually addressed to the West and to what he sees as our overly rigid division between the two which thus weakens both.

However, most of the attention went to his characterisation of Islam, or rather, to his quotation of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus. The point he was making was the different status Reason has in the two religions. He said,

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. 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 practise idolatry.

The Pope was, in fact, calling for dialogue on this, and other issues. Dialogue was not the initial reaction he got. However, later, some more sensible people (138 of them, to be precise) wrote the Pope an open letter called "A Common Word between Us and You", which began a correspondence, which will lead to a meeting this spring between the Pope and a delegation from among the writers of the Muslim open letter.

In any case, the article I am steering towards, "Religion Within Reason" by Mark Gould, discusses both the Pope's position and the response contained in the Muslim open letter. I won't try to summarise it; it's way too complex. However, it's worth the effort in order to understand the gap between a religion that has absorbed the Enlightenment and one that hasn't.

No religion. No babies. No past. No future.

Benedict's speech to the European bishops gathered in Rome has got a lot of coverage. It's curious which aspects of the speech have been highlighted. In most of the English-language media, the big story was his fear of European demographic decline, and the articles then go on to give the figures for the various European states.

There is another side to Benedict's lament for the continent. It is Europe's refusal to acknowledge his Christian heritage as the second pillar of its culture. This was the main story in Corriere della Sera this morning, and Aljazeera didn't miss it either.

If on the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome the governments of the union want to get closer to their citizens, how can they exclude an element as essential to the identity of Europe as Christianity, in which the vast majority of its people continue to identify.

It is no surprise that today's Europe, while it purports to be a community of values, seems to increasingly contest the existence of absolute and universal values.

Does not this unique form of apostasy of itself, even before God, lead it [Europe] to doubt its very identity?

[Obviously trying hard to compensate for the religious ignorance of its English-speaking audience, Aljazeera helpfully adds, "Apostasy is a total desertion of or departure from one's religion."]

Angela Merkel evidently wants references to Christianity in the boomerang EU constitution (coming back to hit you soon). Even the 2005 one was supposed to have a few words, but they were rejected by Jacques Chirac (who would have thought?).

Benedict pulls them in

Sandro Magister has the figures for visits to see the Pope at the Vatican in 2006. The total is 3,222,820. This includes the Wednesday audiences in St Peter's Square, masses and the Sunday Angelus. What's surprising is that attendences are more than double those for John Paul II at his most popular. Benedict may not be a showman, but he's obviously doing something right.

Sandro Magister's blog post and the Vatican site (both in Italian).

Istanbul Rum Patrikhanesi

In the tiny Church of St George in the Patriarchal compound, overlooked by minerets and Turkish soldiers, the Pope and the Patriarch celebrate with the liturgy of St John Chrysostom, "the queen of liturgies", Joshua Treviño calls it, "a Greek epic of its own". Treviño recounts; this is the final paragraph, but it's worth reading it all (if only to find out the meaning of the title of this post).

Bartholomew ascends to the iconostasis and welcomes Benedict in Greek. Benedict, aware of the cameras surrounding him, replies in English. We must, he says, recall Europe to its Christian heritage before it is too late -- and we must do it together. Then they emerge into the cold sunlight of a cold day. They ascend to a balcony overlooking the courtyard where we gather in expectation. They speak briefly. And then, they clasp hands, Pope and Patriarch, smile and raise their arms together. Tears come to my eyes, and I am shocked to see several media personnel crying openly. For an instant, the Church is one. For a shadow of a second, the dreams of Christendom are again real.

Actually, there's one line more. I shied away from copying it, but was not sure why. At first, I thought it rhetorically gauche, and yet given the scene he had painted so skillfully, surely he had earned it? For the atmosphere of threat, of historical and durable threat is strong. How else can you interpret the decline in population of Orthodox Christians in Turkey from "millions to a mere two thousand in Istanbul proper"? And the censorship of proper names that the Turkish authorities do not wish to recognise sending "police personnel to tear down English-language banners with the phrase “Archon Pilgrimage to the Ecumenical Patriarchate” on it". Those bearing passes with the offending phrase "Ecumenical Patriarchate” were not allowed to enter.

Then there's the geographical position; the little church surrounded by mosques, minarets and Muslims inimical to it. Perhaps that is the key. How strange it is to put it like this, but we in Europe have come to see ourselves in the same position, threatened by the same forces and fearing to go down under them in a process as inexorable as that which has occurred in Turkey to the Orthodox and other Christian minorities. Are we victims of our own fears? Or merely waking up to them?

Joshua Treviño's final line is

Under the Turkish guns, the Christians roar.

Benedictine rule

The Pope has several reasons to go to Turkey. One of them puts him in the centre of the most burning issue of the day:

[the] attempt to help spark Islamic theological reform. According to this analysis, the pope's speech in Regensburg on the necessary unity of faith and reason was aimed as much at the secularized West as it was at the Islamic world.

"There's no doubt in my mind, he states it clearly, that Islam can evaluate when a passage of the Koran was written: was one early, was one later, was one in a certain context and one in another," Moynihan said. "Those remarks in the Regensburg speech make very clear that he's inviting Islam to engage in a process of self-evaluation and examination and of exegesis of the Koran, which is extremely difficult, controversial. But in my view, it's absolutely clear that he's inviting them to engage in that." [Robert Moynihan, a medieval historian and editor-in-chief of the magazine Inside the Vatican]

Also worth a read is Joshua Treviño's lament for Hagia Sophia.