For such a seminal event in the history of ideas, very few photos are available online from the lecture itself, and researching the photos online simply gave me back the few photos I have managed to get over the years and have used in the past 12 years. Not one of which even provides the name of the University
Rector who hosted the lecture (seated to the right of B16). The impassive man to his left is, of course, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, then serving out his last days as Secretary of State. After the German visit, Cardinal Bertone took over as Secretary of State on September 15.
Few in the media and the blogosphere appear to have remembered the anniversary of the Regensburg lecture on Sept. 12. (I can understand why even Mons Georg Gaenswein made no reference to it in his Sept. 11 presentation of Rod Dreher's THE BENEDICT OPTION, despite using the 9/11 terrrorist attack as his metaphor for the present crisis facing the Church. Because the larger question was quaerere Deum, a search which, of course, ultimately involves faith and reason working together. But when he spoke of mass migrations as 'a reality that will go on forever', he chose instead to point out that this is a consciousness Pope Francis has sought to instill in the minds of the faithful.)
The following blogpost brings up Regensburg to underscore the substance of Fr Schall'S latest book, ON ISLAM, which I am ashamed to say I had been meaning to post about, but it somehow kept being pushed to the background by all the abuse-focused stories... Indeed, I myself am a few days late this year to mark the anniversary of the Regensburg lecture, so this post must do for now.
12 years after Regensburg:
Why we should learn about Islam
By Dr. Jared Staudt
On September 12, 2006, almost five years to the day from 9/11, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a watershed lecture at the University of Regensburg.
He argued that Islam and the modern West hold a significant tenant in common: a voluntarism that puts will above reason. For classic Islamic thinkers this meant that Allah was not bound by any restraints of reason, including the principle of non-contradiction, and for modern philosophers it led to a division between faith and reason and eventually to relativism.
Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the Church has called consistently for dialogue with Islam (see the Council’s declaration, Nostra Aetate).
Fr. James Schall, in his recent book
On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018 (Ignatius, 2018) notes the difficultly of such dialogue, building upon the claims of Benedict’s address at Regensburg and the clash of cultures that has been unfolding since 9/11.
Schall notes two fundamental difficulties that impede effective dialogue.
- First, the Church has never released an authoritative statement on the theological claims of Islam, even though they arose in close conjunction to Christianity and Judaism, and
- Second, Westerners tend to interpret Islam through their own lens of reason, freedom, and rights rather than by entering into Islam’s own self-understanding.
Dialogue is about conversation centered on sharing ideas in hope of fostering greater cooperation. Schall points out the difficulty of such a conversation with Muslim leaders given the fact that
- We do not share a common revelation — Muslims reject the Trinity and the divinity of Christ — and,
- Unlike the Church, there is no central authority in Islam.
- Even more crucially, it is difficult to find common ground in the natural law.
Major strands of the Islamic theological tradition eschew the philosophical study of nature by attributing the causality of all things to the direct will of Allah (which led some Islamic philosophes to posit the double truth theory). Therefore, it is hard to establish a philosophical bridge of common terms to address basic issues such as human rights.
The most basic human right according to the Church is religious freedom, but Schall convincingly argues that full religious freedom does not exist in many Islamic countries, which only tolerate Christians to different degrees, under the constant threat of persecution.
These incompatible concepts of religious freedom reveal even deeper divisions, such as two radically different understandings of common words such as martyrdom.
- The Christian view of martyrdom acknowledges those who die by suffering violence from others who seek to restrict their faith. - Some Muslims would honor terrorists and suicide bombers as martyrs, because they died seeking to spread Islam.
Fr. Schall reflects on the absurdity of having to make the argument against the claim that murder is holy. He also notes that we cannot stop suicide bombers without engaging the theology that motivates their action.
Rather than responding to such attacks with Western-inspired platitudes, Schall encourages us to scrutinize the views of these radical groups. We cannot evaluate their claim that they follow the Koran and the life of Mohammed faithfully if we are ignorant of the Islamic tradition.
Schall also speaks at length of the amazing expansion of Islam following the death of Mohammed in 632 AD. The original Christian heartland of Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain were quickly overrun, with conquest of Christian Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and Southeastern Europe following.
Although many Christian lands were converted through conquest, Schall, following Belloc, speaks of Islamic lands as nearly inconvertible by Christians. Although these lands have proved quite impervious to missionary efforts, I should note my own experience of friends and acquaintances who have quietly converted to Catholicism from Islam, though at the risk of their own life.
Furthermore, I have been following a growing occurrence of Muslims have dreams of Jesus and Mary, which have led them to learn more about the Christian faith.
Schall also encourages us to learn more about Islam and highly recommends Fr. Samir Khalil Samir’s
111 Questions on Islam. Fr. Samir is an Egyptian Jesuit and expert in the Islamic tradition.
Islam is in the news frequently and many conflicting claims are made about it. Increasing our religious literacy will help us to make sense of the news for ourselves and prepare us for dialogue, both with Muslims and confused Westerners.
The desire to understand Islam in the West began in earnest with the request of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, for the first translation of the Koran into Latin, completed in 1143. Aquinas also wrote his
Summa Contra Gentiles to help his fellow friars to enter dialogue on the Christian faith with Muslims. Schall encourages us through study and honesty to move beyond the platitudes that dominate responses to terrorism.
Many Catholic thinkers and leaders are afraid to address the challenges of dialogue with Islam, for fear of offending others or even inciting additional violence (as occurred after the Regensburg Lecture, for instance).
However, Schall’s collected reflections should inspire us to seek the truth in our dialogue and to assess honestly the threat of Islamic terrorism throughout the world. I have been learning about Islam for over 20 years and found fresh ideas in the book.
Schall demonstrates the philosophical, political, and theological precision needed not only in learning more about Islam, but also for assessing the Church in our own society.
Dialogue also requires a proper understanding of one’s own tradition. Christians need to return to a stronger relationship of faith and reason in order to purify the stagnancy of the Church and society.
Staudt works in the Office of Evangelization and Family Life Ministries of the Archdiocese of Denver. He earned his BA and MA in Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN and his PhD in Systematic Theology from Ave Maria University in Florida.
Samuel Gregg reviewed Fr. Schall's book in a timely manner when it came out last August:
James V. Schall dissects
the West via Islam
by SAMUEL GREGG
aUGUST 6, 2018
In the wake of the furor which followed Benedict XVI’s September 2006 Regensburg address, perhaps the best book-length analysis of what will surely go down as one of the 21st century’s most important speeches was authored by the former Georgetown professor of political philosophy, Father James V. Schall SJ.
In contrast to the superficial coverage by those Western commentators who plainly resented Benedict’s naming of the elephant in the room (i.e., that contemporary Muslim terrorism may owe something to Islam’s conception of God), Schall’s examination of the Regensburg address placed it in the wider context of a set of religious and philosophical challenges that many Westerners still can’t bring themselves to address.
Over the past sixteen years, Schall has written numerous articles on this more general topic, the most important of which have been gathered together in his latest book,
On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018. In one sense, the title is somewhat misleading. For
this is really a book about the West and how its inability to think (let alone speak) clearly about the primary causes of Muslim terrorism reflects some significant intellectual pathologies presently plaguing Western intellectual life.
As the text’s subtitle indicates, these essays proceed chronologically. They begin with a 2003 article about Hilaire Belloc’s views about Islam, and end with a 2018 piece in which Schall presents some reflections about the Koran itself. Between these two essays are sandwiched 24 articles in which Schall explores questions ranging from how the physicist-priest, the late Stanley Jaki, regarded the natural sciences’ place in Islam, to how the secular mind grapples with Muslim terrorism.
Many of these essays were occasioned by specific acts of jihadist terrorism. These make for very depressing reading.
They highlight not only a firm consistency of purpose on the part of Muslim terrorists, but also the equally unswerving failure by many Western secular and religious intellectuals to acknowledge Muslim terrorism’s religious roots.
To that extent, Schall’s primary critique is less directed at Islam —which he treats in a scrupulously fair manner by taking the Koran and the long-standing dominant schools of Islamic theology to mean what they say — than it is at
those Westerners who prefer to bury their heads in the proverbial sand rather than violate any number of politically-correct pieties.
Schall details how, i
n terrorist incident after terrorist incident, the perpetrators understood themselves to be acting in ways entirely consistent with Muslim theology, history, and practice. That suggests there are no solutions to Muslim terrorism which don’t put theological issues at the forefront of the discussion.
Schall emphasizes that this is a subject in which a return to first principles and some fundamental theological questions cannot be avoided. There are few signs, however, of a willingness in either the Muslim or Western worlds to go down this path.
The core problem, according to Schall, is the “voluntarist metaphysics” which informs the choices made by Muslim terrorists. In general terms, theological voluntarism is the idea that God’s essence is some form of will (voluntas) whose decisions cannot be explained in terms of reason. A voluntarist thus believes, Schall writes, that
“What is behind all reality is a will that can always be otherwise. It is not bound to any one truth.”
This means that God isn’t limited by any distinction between good or evil. What’s evil one day (such as cutting the throat of an 85 year-old priest, Jacques Hamel, as he celebrated Mass in his parish in July 2016) might be good the next day. As a consequence, Schall states,
“We affirm that evil should not be done. But sometimes it should be done. In that case, evil becomes good.” Such thinking also makes any conception of natural law impossible.
The most basic principle of sound reasoning, Schall reminds his readers, is that
“A thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same way in the same circumstances.”
Reason, in short, cannot contradict reason, human or divine — unless, of course, the essence of God is pure Will, in which case divine and human reason are inherently unstable, if not polite fictions. And if that’s that’s true, then God himself cannot be a Being who embodies Divine Reason.
It was on these theological foundations, Schall argues, that those Muslim scholars of the school which came to dominate Sunni Islam —the Ash’arites — reconciled evident inconsistencies in the book which they believe Allah himself wrote to manifest his mind. In Schall’s view,
The solution that such thinkers came up with, when spelled out, was remarkable. They did not deny that contradictions existed. They said that Allah could will one thing in Tuesday and its opposite on Wednesday. The latest affirmation is always the binding one, but it can change tomorrow.
[That sounds, almost comically, like Jorge Bergoglio's Peron-like self-contradictions!]
All this is predicated upon a voluntarist view of God and an associated denial of any connection between divine or human reason and the Koran. That permitted the Ash’arite school to claim that
Allah could, if he wished, let the wicked enter paradise and punish the virtuous.
Theological voluntarism is by no means an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. You can find traces of it in, for instance, the thought of the medieval Catholic theologian Duns Scotus.
Voluntarist tendencies also lie just beneath the surface of claims such as that tweeted in 2017 by one of Schall’s fellow Jesuits who happens to be a Vatican consultor when he asserted, as Schall recalls, that
“two plus two equals four in science, but in theology the sum could equal five.”
The only way that a Christian could hold such a position would be to assume
-
that God doesn’t really embody the Divine Reason that Christians call Logos (despite this being affirmed in the very first verse of the Greek version of the Gospel of John);
-
that all truth is not in fact one (meaning that the search for coherence is pointless); and
-
that God can in fact will truth and untruth at the same time (which implies that God is a liar).
Nor, as Schall demonstrates, is voluntarism only a religious and theological problem. It’s the default position of most Western secular philosophers. The thorough-going positivist, for example, ultimately maintains that whatever the state wills is the law. What reason tells us to be just is essentially irrelevant. Hence, the same positivist has difficulty explaining why a law that, say, allows some people to commit outrages against others is, as a matter of reason, unjust.
Likewise those who deny the idea of natural law — again, the vast majority of Western secularists and more than a few Christian moral theologians — don’t believe that humans are bound by any truths written into our reason itself.
They will say that we must follow axioms like “maximize utility,” “be nice to others,” or “uphold respect-tolerance-diversity.” But the nature of these maxims is such that they can be used to justify one course of action, and its complete opposite an hour later. What’s useful yesterday, for instance, may not be so useful tomorrow.
So do whatever seems useful to you at any given moment! In such a world, nothing is stable. Everything and everyone is subject to a type of “presentism” which is happy to cast aside traditions, institutions, constitutions, and any other incubator of wisdom and hard-won knowledge of unchanging truth that might get in the way of what’s perceived to be important right now.
It’s also the case that in a secular voluntarist understanding of the world, humans are viewed as subject only to their own will — not reason and truth. It follows that we can no longer reason together about what is the right course of action. Instead we end up deferring to whoever can muster the strongest collective will, whether it’s through tame democratic majorities or the barrel of a gun. In either case, it is might that makes what is right.
Western religious and secular thinkers who adhere consciously or otherwise to these views are woefully ill-equipped to deal with one very salient fact: that, as Schall comments, the Koran
in the eyes of many Muslims, means just what it says. It is a religion that continually seeks, whether it be gradually or quickly, to conquer the world for Allah by whatever means are at hand in a given century or a given place.
Refusal to acknowledge these facts helps to account for the insistence of many of the same Westerners that, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, Muslim terrorism is essentially caused by economic poverty. This assertion certainly fits their penchant for materialist explanations for everything under the sun. But it also exemplifies how they literally cannot see what is happening in front of them.
Thus, Schall observes, when Muslim terrorists
frankly explain what they are doing — namely, following what it says in their book — they are ignored because, while the explanation fits with the terrorists’ understanding of reality, it does not fit with what most people in the West insist on holding.
Such mindsets are of no assistance to those millions of Muslims who have no desire to hurt anyone, who want to live in harmony with their non-Muslim neighbors, and who have been murdered in the thousands by Muslim terrorists.
Nor are these Western outlooks likely to encourage those believing Muslims perhaps willing to re-engage the question of reason’s relationship to revelation in Islam.
Equally unhelpful is the type of interfaith “dialogue” that declines to consider what Schall describes as those “basic theological and philosophical questions that simply will not go away until they are resolved in truth.”
However we proceed, Schall is clear on two points.
First, pious Muslims who want to stop the violence must address head-on the question of the voluntarism driving the violence of some of their fellow-Muslims and the related issue of voluntarism’s place in Islamic theology. No doubt, that’s a difficult discussion.
Among other things, it would involve reopening long-settled theological disputes and require presently-forbidden analysis of the Koran and its sources to be undertaken by believing Muslims in the Islamic world. Yet unless those central topics are addressed by Muslims, everything else is mere tinkering at the edges.
But, Schall adds, something analogous needs to happen in the West.
Many Western Christians and secularists have to face up to the blindness generated by their own implicitly voluntarist conceptions of God and/or man. Failure to do so will only render them ever more ineffectual when it comes to understanding why intelligent and devout young men, some of whom have wives and children that they love, are willing to immolate themselves — and, in some instances, their wives and children — in order to slaughter others.
As a Christian, James Schall is a man of hope. Hope, however, is very different from wishful thinking. That’s why Schall can conclude by saying that
“any prospect seems lacking of a coherent facing of the overall moral, political, and religious problems that the existence of Islam causes in the world, both to itself and to others.”
Yes, those believing Muslims who want to head-off the violence of their co-religionists have formidable, perhaps impossible, obstacles to overcome.
But the greater challenge may in fact be for the West: a civilization that, as a consequence of its ongoing revolt against both logos and the Logos, has rendered itself intellectually helpless and morally impotent against a fierce, relentless and ruthless enemy bent upon securing its submission.
Today it takes courage to say such things. Father Schall is a courageous man. We are all in his debt.
As a footnote to this post, let me reprint the initial New York Times report of the Regensburg lecture by its then Vaticanista, Ian Fisher, who would soon change the tone and weight of his reporting about the lecture to open Muslim-baiting at the expense of Benedict XVI... One must appreciate, however, the choice of the photograph used to illustrate the story.
Pope says West is divorced from faith,
adding a blunt footnote on jihad
By IAN FISHER
SEPT. 13, 2006
Pope Benedict distributing communion Tuesday to some of the 250,000 people who attended the Mass he celebrated in Regensburg, Germany.
REGENSBURG, Germany, Sept. 12 — Pope Benedict XVI weighed in Tuesday on the delicate issue of rapport between Islam and the West:
He said that violence, embodied in the Muslim idea of jihad, or holy war, is contrary to reason and God’s plan, while the West was so beholden to reason that Islam could not understand it.
Nonetheless, in a complex treatise delivered at the university here where he once taught, he suggested reason as a common ground for a “genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”
In all, the speech seemed to reflect the Vatican’s struggle over how to confront Islam and terrorism, as the 79-year-old pope pursues what is often considered a more provocative, hard-nosed and skeptical approach to Islam than his predecessor, John Paul II.
As such, it distilled many of Benedict’s longstanding concerns, about the crisis of faith among Christians and about Islam and its relationship to violence.
And he used language open to interpretations that could inflame Muslims, at a time of high tension among religions and three months before he makes a trip to Turkey.
He began his speech, which ran over half an hour, by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, in a conversation with a “learned Persian” on Christianity and Islam — “and the truth of both.”
“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 the sword by the faith he preached,” the pope quoted the emperor, in a speech to 1,500 students and faculty.
He went on to say that violent conversion to Islam was contrary to reason and thus “contrary to God’s nature.”
But the section on Islam made up just three paragraphs of the speech, and he devoted the rest to a long examination of how Western science and philosophy had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the secularization of European society that is at the heart of Benedict’s worries.
This, he said, has closed off the West from a full understanding of reality, making it also impossible to talk with cultures for whom faith is fundamental.
“The world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion from the divine, from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions,” he said.
“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.”
Several experts on the Catholic Church and Islam agreed that
the speech — in which Benedict made clear he was quoting other sources on Islam — did not appear to be a major statement on, or condemnation of, Islam. The chief concern, they said, was the West’s exclusion of religion from the realm of reason.
Still, they said that the strong words he used in describing Islam, even that of the 14th century, ran the risk of offense.
Renzo Guolo, a professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Padua, who often writes about the church and Islam, said he was struck by the suggestion of Islam as distant from reason.
“This is maybe the strongest criticism because he doesn’t speak of fundamentalist Islam but of Islam generally,” he said, “Not all Islam, thank God, is fundamentalist.”
The Rev. Daniel A. Madigan, rector of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, said the central point was that “if we are really going into a serious dialogue with Muslims we need to take faith seriously.” But, he said of the quote from the emperor, “You clearly take a risk using an example like that.”
Marco Politi, the Vatican expert for the Italian newspaper
La Repubblica, said that
“the text reveals his deep mistrust regarding the aggressive side of Islam.” [And pray, who outside Islam does not distrust the aggressive side of Islam???? Does Politi himself not distrust it?]
“Certainly he closes the door to an idea which was very dear to John Paul II — the idea that Christians, Jews and Muslims have the same God and have to pray together to the same God,” he said.
[Did John Paul II mean that literally? Certainly the Christian God - which is a Triune God - is neither the Jews' Yahweh nor the Muslims' Allah, who do not have a Son nor a Holy Spirit. The most we can say is that all three monotheistic religions believe in 'a God' who is the Supreme Being, to which each faith then gives specific attributes.]
The speech was a central moment in Benedict’s six-day trip home to visit Bavaria, where he grew up, became a priest, a prominent theologian and, finally, a cardinal.
Earlier in the day, at an outdoor Mass here attended by some 250,000 people, he expressed similar concerns as in the speech, urging believers to stand up against the “hatred and fanaticism” that he said were tarnishing the image of God.
Again, this critique seemed aimed as much at secular Western society as at any other threat.
“Today, when we have learned to recognize the pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God’s image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe,” the pope said.
“Only this can free us from being afraid of God — which is ultimately at the root of modern atheism,” he said. “Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life.”
The speech at the university was the only significant secular event in a schedule packed with Masses, evening prayers and other religious occasions aimed at Catholics in Germany, where regular Mass attendance has fallen to under 15 percent.
That low number is connected directly to many of Benedict’s long-expressed concerns about Islam. He often urges people not to forget the Christian roots of a Europe with fewer practicing Christians and more Muslim immigrants, over four million here in Germany alone.
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the chief Vatican spokesman, said that Benedict’s comments were not meant as any statement on Islam, but only as a small example, at the beginning of four tightly packed pages of text, of his argument of the dangers of the separation of reason and religion.
“I believe that everyone understands, even inside Islam, there are many different positions, and there are many positions that aren’t violent,” Father Lombardi said. “Here, certainly, the pope doesn’t want to give a lesson, let’s say, an interpretation of Islam, as violent.
“He is saying, in the case of a violent interpretation of religion, we are in a contradiction with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” he said.
In the weeks after John Paul’s death in April 2005, Islam and how to confront terrorism seemed key issues in the selection of a new pope. As a candidate, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who took the name Benedict after his election, embodied the more skeptical school inside the Vatican.
Unlike John Paul, Cardinal Ratzinger did not approve of joint prayers with Muslims and was skeptical of the value of inter-religious dialogue, with a faith of many shadings and few representative leaders to speak with.
In 2004, he caused a stir by opposing membership in the European Union for Turkey, saying that it “always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast with Europe.” He has not repeated this opinion since he became pope, and he is scheduled to visit there in November.
Once he became pope, Benedict’s new approach was apparent quickly:
In his first trip outside Italy, he met with Muslim leaders in Cologne, Germany, and politely but clearly told them they had the responsibility to teach their children against terrorism, which he called “the darkness of a new barbarism.” He said Catholics and Muslims had the obligation to meet and to overcome differences.
At the end of that summer, he devoted an annual weekend of study with former graduate students to Islam. In that meeting, and since,
he has reportedly expressed skepticism about Islam’s openness to change, given its view of the Koran as the unchangeable word of God.
Correction: Sept. 15, 2006
Because of a transcription error, an article on Wednesday about a speech by Pope Benedict XVI in Germany, in which he addressed the concept of Muslim holy war, rendered incorrectly a phrase from a quotation by a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus. The correct quotation reads, “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.” — not “to spread the sword by the faith he preached.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/09/2018 02:52]