A Faith in the Power of Reason

Christopher Caldwell in the FT has a highly lucid and insightful view as to what Pope Benedict was getting at in his speech on Faith and Reason. After the first two paras linked above, the article is pay-per-view, but some of Caldwell's thinking thereafter [I get the dead-tree version, but not the on-line version] follows:

"It is no secret that the Pope worries about Islam. He has doubted publicly that it can be accommodated in a pluralistic society. He has demoted one of John Paul II's leading advisors on the Islamic world and tempered his support for a program of inter-religious dialogue.... He has embraced the view of Italian moderates and conservatives that the guiding principle of inter-religious dialogue must be reciprocita. That is, he finds it naive to permit the building of a Saudi-funded mosque, Europe's largest, in Rome, while Muslim countries forbid the construction of churches and missions. But Benedict is not among those who sees Islam's resurgence as a function simply of all the money Saudis are throwing around. For him, Islam's strength comes mainly from 'people's conviction that Islam can provide a valid spiritual foundation in their lives."

Caldwell goes on to describe the basis of the Pope's book, Without Roots, which describes Christianity as a whole and how far the present manifestations of Christianity are from the Christian ideals of faith and reason. He describes the present secularized Christianity as "rationality without God." Then he presents the Islamic version of theology as roughly "God without rationality."

"Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, looked at the essential cleavage in the world as being between religion and disbelief. Devout Christians, Muslims and Buddhists had more in common with ech other than with atheists. John Paul sought dialogue with leaders of other faiths, visited mosques and apologized for the Crusades."

Ah yes, the apologies, always key to a turn-the-other-cheek faith like Catholicism, which has reversed gears from the Church of my youth to become just another aggressor/victim on Oprah's couch explaining just what made him/her/it do it, even if it happened hundreds of years ago. Everyone has dark spots in their pasts, Protestants with witch-hunts, Catholics with Inquisitions, Hindus, Buddhists [yes, read about the White Huns] and Muslims all have had their dark pages---the Muslims with forced conversions, including systematic kidnappings to feed the Janissary Corps and slave galleys of the Barbary Coast. But Benedict is a bit more sophisticated than the large-hearted JP II:

"Benedict does not agree. He thinks that, within societies, believers and unbelievers exist in symbiosis. Secular westerners, he implies, have a lot in common with their religious fellows. The Pope refers to the mutual incomprehension between western cattolici or believers and laici or secularists as a schism---'a schism whose gravity we are only now grasping.' It seems Benedict's top priority is to heal it. If rationalism is at the root of Christianity, it seems that hyper-rationalism [secularism] is a problem specific to Christianity. It may even be a form a Christianity, one that overemphasizes what we render to Caesar and underemphasizes what we render to God."

Next Benedict gets close to the center of one of the essential debates of our century. [Eds note: Let me interject for a moment how lax the media has been in this whole news story---one ABC commentator even said on air that reporters couldn't be expected to read the Pope's entire speech! The result is that the media distorts the entire attempt at dialogue into some sort of death-cage wrestling competition. Little or no attempt is made by the MSM to find moderate Muslim clerics to comment on the violent reactions to Benedict's intimations of Islam's intolerance. Instead, like the Danish cartoons which were floating around for months being flogged by extremist clerics before the riots started, the speech is being "conflict-driven" in the words of a liberal media observer [Neal Gabler] and the Pope's long rational discourse is reduced to actions-reactions and effigy burnings. ] The real debate is over identities and heterodox versions of Christianity and other religions:

"The Pope has been criticized for ignoring the way Muslims live their religion as an identity. But that gets things the wrong way round. Benedict seeks to strengthen, not weaken, the identitarian conception of religion. "In the time of Jesus," he writes in Without Roots, "the Jewish Diaspora was filled with 'God-fearers'who reported in varying degrees to the synagogue and who, in different ways, lived the spiritual treasure of the faith of Israel. Only a few of them wished to enter fully into the community of Israel, through circumcision, but for them it was a reference point that indicated the way to life." What Benedict argued at Regensburg for "the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the Biblical understanding of faith in God," he was inviting the non-religious to avail themselves of Rome's inheritance."

Religious America might be more ready to accept the syncretistic sort of buffet-table Christianity implicit in this papal Weltanschauung [had to use that with a German Pope!] which says to secularists and Protestants alike, 'it's a smorgasbord and you're invited to the table. Especially given the assault on Christian values and beliefs by the trio of Hollyweird, academia and the mainstream media, who attack Christianity and despise the military with uneven gusto. [The military is their secret voodoo-curse hatred.] But Benedict, according to Caldwell, is thinking especially of Europe:

"It is not by accident that secular ideologies such as human rights and democratic socialism bear a resemblance to Christian ethics. They have their roots in Christian ethics, after all. Secular intellectuals should be in sympathy with the church, Benedict's thinking goes, even if they are not in communion with it. That is why he has spent so much time in public dialogue with such secular philosophers as the Italian Paolo Flores D'Arcais and the German Jurgen Habermas. That was what the Regensburg talk was about. Rather than convince secular-minded people to join the flock, he seems to be trying to convince them that they are in it already."

For those in and outside the media who "have time to read the Pope's whole speech" and serious thinkers like Caldwell, a bit more is coming to light about the depth of thought and unique perspective of one of the great thinkers of our time, a Pope who wants to focus on Europe first, and then deal with the Barbarians at the Gate.