This month, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a fascinating discourse on the question of whether Hellenic rationality is essential or incidental to Christian religion. Philosophical and theological subtleties being unable to sustain the interest of our mass media, we have instead been delivered sensationalist reporting of the Pope’s citation of Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, “Show me just what Mohammed 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.”
The purpose of the citation was to show how the emperor’s “brusqueness which leaves us astounded” results from a conviction that God cannot act contrary to His essentially rational nature. The accuracy of the emperor’s assessment of Islam as a whole is immaterial to the Pope’s discourse, which immediately turns to a discussion of Hellenic rationality, not Islamic jihad. If journalists were more sophisticated, they might have faulted the Pope for asserting that Muslims do not require God to behave rationally, but here he is merely following noted Islamist Theodore Khoury and the medieval Muslim theologian Ibn Hazm.
Sooner than admit their own illiteracy, our demagogues have argued that Pope Benedict has been tactless in his choice of citation, if not ignorant and bigoted, as they fall back on kneejerk anticlericalism in place of library research on previous works of Ratzinger. The latter option would have revealed a much more nuanced, respectful approach to Islam than, say, your average journalist’s approach to Catholicism.
In absurd irony, many Muslims have turned to violence in response to the perceived accusation that Islam encourages violence. Mainstream Muslims have demanded an apology since, unlike their Christian counterparts, they are unaccustomed to having their religion publicly ridiculed. However, the tide is turning as even the president of Iran has acknowledged that the Pope’s comment was taken out of context, while our secular press continues to feign outrage on behalf of Muslims.
I would be disappointed if the secular media missed an opportunity to vent its rage against organized religion. Surely enough, the usual checklist is ticked off:
- Failure to believe in secular liberalism or religious indifferentism is a sign of intellectual limitation or intolerance, no matter how erudite the speaker. That’s obvious, isn’t it?
- Christians have been just as violent as Muslims, as evidenced by the Crusades. Tell that to the people of India, who suffered one of the worst genocides in history at the hands of the Muslims. The Crusades, as I have discussed at length, were motivated by a combination of secular and religious causes quite distinct from the rationale of an Islamic jihad, and were not an attempt to convert by the sword. “Conversions by the sword” were statistically insignificant to the spread of Christianity, to the chagrin of secular commentators who would like to insist no reasonable person would freely assent to this religion. In Islam, on the contrary, “conversion by the sword” was no aberration, but an explicit command of the prophet, and a key to the early success of Islam, though it later thrived on its own merits.
- Religion in general causes violence. This takes extraordinary chutzpah, considering that we just emerged from the bloodiest century in human history, filled with atrocities committed by secular and atheistic regimes. There hasn’t been a religious war in the West since the Thirty Years’ War, yet secularist demagogues still invoke the specter of religious warfare to prove the evils of religion. If this anticlerical posture were motivated by courage rather than cowardice, perhaps they would just as forcefully reject the religions of money and the state, which have caused and continue to cause far more bloodshed than any religion of the supernatural.