The Pope was criticized by many last September for, in a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, citing "a question posed by a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara. 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new,' the emperor asked the Persian, 'and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached'.” What he meant by dredging this quote up was hard to discover, but it apparently had to do with the Pope's feeling that Islam is not part of “the Western rational tradition.”
(The prepared text of the Pope's Regensburg lecture can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited is here.)
I read the Kramer piece, which was generally hostile to Benedict XVI, with much puzzlement. It stemmed, I realized, from my own lack of understanding of the basic issue. The latter, if my shaky comprehension is to be believed, seems to revolve around a claim which the Pope supposedly is making to the effect that interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims will fail. Why? Because reason and rationalism are at the base of Christian understanding, historically, and are not equally fundamental to the Muslim worldview.
“In Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories — even that of rationality," the Pope apparently said at Regensburg.
I find my own personal knowledge base about the place of reason in Islam to be wholly inadequate to judging the Pope's claim, which is accordingly difficult for me to fathom the intent of. I admit to all that right up front.
Mr. Weigel's response to the Kramer article is of some help here, but not a lot. My fault, not his — it's essentially an op-ed piece, not a doctoral dissertation. And it's more about the hasty, error-prone judgmentalism of the secular press toward the Pope than about the basic issues at hand.
Still, I gain some insight when Mr. Weigel writes in rebuttal of
... Ms. Kramer’s bugbear about reason-and-faith. Classical ideas of reason have a privileged place in Christian theology, not because of xenophobia (“Ratzinger is Eurocentric. To him, Europe means Christianity.”) but because the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true is essential in a Church whose Lord taught that the truth is liberating. Doctrine is not excess baggage on the journey of faith. It’s the vehicle that makes the journey possible.
This comes in the wake of Mr. Weigel's umbrage at Ms. Kramer's
... brusque dismissal, without serious examination, of Benedict XVI's suggestion that the first inculturation of Christianity in the world of classical rationality was providential, because it gave early Christians the intellectual tools to turn their evangelical confession of faith (“Jesus is Lord”) into doctrine and creeds ...
"As for the issues put on the global table at Regensburg," Mr. Weigel adds, "does Ms. Kramer really think it a bad thing to challenge irrational forms of faith that command the murder of innocents in the name of God? Is it wrong to suggest that there is danger in the obverse of irrational faith: that trouble is afoot in the West’s loss of faith in reason, which erodes our capacity to defend the universality of human rights and the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of coercion?"
That's admittedly a bit hard for me to parse. I think Mr. Weigel is suggesting that we in the West today court an error which is the polar opposite of Islam's supposed tone-deafness to rational thought, namely, the decay of our capacity to discover and uphold truth when it conflicts with our other, less moderate inclinations.
Why does the Pope find Islam anti-rational? According to Ms. Kramer, "it was at Regensburg's theology department that he [as Joseph Ratzinger] honed his belief that the discourse of Christianity is a fundamentally rational discourse — as the West, grounded in Greek philosophical inquiry, understands reason — and as such not ultimately comprehensible, even for argument’s sake, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition." Benedict XVI apparently deems Islam at base unintelligible because it does not seek to know God's will preeminently through rational inquiry.
Again, I simply have no basis on which to evaluate such a claim of Islam's fundamental irrationality, if that is indeed what the Pope is claiming.
I do understand and sympathize, though, with one of Mr. Weigel's constant themes, "the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true," as he puts it in this article. The knowability of truth, the firmness of it, the impregnability of truth to relativistic thought, the fact that truth and love are synonyms of God — Mr. Weigel talks about these ideas often. "Truth and Love are, if you will, two 'names' for God as Christianity understands God," he says in this interview.
What I'm skeptical about is the ability of reason to know all truth.
The way I see it, reason is a system by which we develop confidence in the truth of propositions derivedfrom a set of original, taken-on-faith suppositions by the application of rules of logic. All the derivable propositions are supposed to form an intelligible, coherent whole. But as I discuss in The Incompleteness of Provability and the other posts in my "Strange Loops" series about Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, there seem inescapably to be truths that we cannot know without standing outside such formal systems of proof.
The mathematician Kurt Gödel was able in 1931 to find a way to prove the incompleteness of provability, using full mathematical rigor, Hofstadter shows. I wonder if the Pope's commitment to rationalism as the high road to truth might not stumble badly over Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.
A homely example of what I mean concerns a TV set I once owned. Back around 1990 I bought an expensive TV that contained what was at the time a novelty: digital picture-enhancement circuitry. After a year of use it started doing odd things. Instead of giving me a normal picture, after it had warmed up fully it would suddenly start showing what looked like a negative color photographic image, except that the result was weirder and more psychedelic even than that.
I knew enough about digital circuitry to know that the fault could well be due to a single signal line "flipping" from 1 to 0, or vice versa — or, possibly, simply "floating" without any definite value whatever. That changed the internal "logic" of the circuitry. Where the picture was originally meant to be one thing, it was now another.
But, given the altered "presupposition" which the faulty signal line now embodied, the TV system was still acting as "rationally" as it had always done. It still produced an intelligible, coherent picture — even if you had to be on LSD to appreciate it. The only way to know something was wrong was to stand outside the system and judge it from afar.
If you accidentally "flip" or nullify any of the (perhaps hidden) presuppositions of a rational system, you can end up, without quite realizing what has happened or how, with a convincing, if false, phantasmagoria.
I think that is the explanation for such less-than-wonderful aspects of the history of Christianity as the Spanish Inquisition and burnings at the stake. The Church was eventually able to stand outside itself and see how wrong such "logical" applications of its own theology were. Thank God.
So the questions I have are these: why does the Pope think the suicide bombings and other evil manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism are categorically different from those Christian sins? Why does he imagine (if indeed he does) that radical Islamism is anything other than a flipped or nullified presupposition in the logical fabric of an otherwise rational belief system? Why does he not believe that patient dialogue with Islam can help it recover its balance, to all our benefit?
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