A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. -- 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
--(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance)
Which brings us, naturally, to the Pope and his remarks on Islam.
What a dilemma! To be the leader of a 2,000 year-old institution. To be the leader of an institution that regards itself as 'the deposit of faith,' and be obliged to take a fiduciary's care of that deposit. Agree with Emerson if you will, but if it is
your money in the bank, the last thing you want is to find out that your savings account has 50% less than it ought to have because, says your bank manager, "a foolish consistency in bookkeeping is the hobgoblin of little minds." If
your freedom is on the line, the last thing you want is a judge who says "you're going to jail because the law yesterday is not the law today, and the great soul of the judiciary has nothing to do with consistency." If the
liberty of the nation is at stake, the last thing you want is a president who says "before my election I respected the law, but today I do not, and anyone who wants to impeach me merely misunderestimates my greatness." Whatever else he was talking about when he invoked the hobgoblin of consistency, Emerson was not talking about institutions.
Back in the mid-1990s, the Catholic Church undertook one of the great missions of this (or any other) time: Pope John-Paul II undertook to apologize for sins committed in the name of the Church. In fact, apology for the excesses of Catholics was a signal part of John Paul's priorities for the Church. One of his first undertakings was reversal of the excommunication of Galileo, with a reassessment of the errors of the Church in its treatment of the man, and of the mission of science. This was only the beginning of John Paul's reassesments.
In all, the Pope apologized for wrongs done by the Catholic community more than 100 separate times during his papacy. In the 1980s,his apologies included the intolerance and violence of the Inquisition (1982), the wrongful acts of missionaries (1984), the treatment of Africans (1985), and the oppression of native peoples, the destruction of their cultures, and suppression and destruction of whole ways of life (1987). In the 1990s the Pope extended apologies for the Crusades (1995), discrimination against women (1995), actions against non-Catholics throughout history (1995), failures of conscience during the Nazi era (1997), and inadequate spiritual resistance to Nazism (1998).
He lived with a spirit of contrition. In 1994, the Pope's apostolic letter On The Coming of the Third Millennium asked the Church to enter its 2,000th year by purification through the task of remembering the past sins of its members. So the Pope began to prepare the Church for a great examination of conscience that would culminating in a message of apology to be declared on March 17, 2000, the solemn First Sunday of Lent.
But that kind of undertaking was more than just a notion.
Some very tough questions were raised by the prospect of apology. What incidents should be included in the apologies? Should the apologies be limited to specific deeds, or should they encompass the acts of whole eras? Should the apologies be directed solely to God and, if not, to whom should they be directed?
Just exactly who was apologizing? If the Catholic faithful could collectively be guilty of, say, the sin of anti-Semitism, then Jews could collectively be guilty of the murder of Christ, right? Well ... that can't be right. So, was the apology to be an expression of collective Catholic guilt, or should the very notion of collective guilt be repudiated? If repudiated, then what was the Pope doing apologizing at all -- why not hold individuals responsible for individual sin -- and isn't that what individual confession is for? How can the acts and sensibilities of past centuries be meaningfully criticized in present times, through the prism of contemporary understandings?
Theses were pernicious questions. They were raised -- presumably in good faith -- by powerful members of the Magisterium, by influential theologians and scholars, and by many of the laity.
A particularly pernicious question arose in addition to those others. It was this: can The Church sin? Not -- could any particular Pope or Inquisitor sin; not -- could this Crusader or that slaveholder sin, but can The Church ... The Mystical Body of Christ On Earth ... can it sin?
It doesn't really matter whether you believe the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ, or not. What matters is that you take very seriously the fact that a billion people do believe it, and over its 2,000-year history, another billion or so people have believed it. What matters is that this belief has been held ever since Paul first taught it to the church at Corinth. What matters is that the belief has been consistent.
There's that word.
In 1999, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was the Prefect of the Catholic Church's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which meant that he was responsible in a singular way for making sure that -- so to speak -- all the books of account in this Deposit of Faith, added up. As a practical matter, Cardinal Ratzinger was responsible to see that statements issuing from the Vatican trenching on Doctrine were consistent with previous statements of Doctrine.
It may be an imperfect analogy, but look at it this way: when issuing its opinions, the Supreme Court takes great care to observe the precedents set by its previous opinions, and to adhere to the principle of stare decisis, so that new cases are decided consistently with previously decided cases. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith tries to ensure consistency -- over the ages -- in no less a task than communication of Truth itself. Again, it doesn't matter if you believe that such a task is possible or even desirable; what matters is that billions of people have and do.
Whatever you believe, you've got to know that it's a big job. It is, profoundly, a job for a rational man, a man of reason. Because in order to be consistent with doctrine, as with precedents of law, you have to be able carefully to follow the reasoning of the past, and reason through to its consistent application in the present.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Cardinal Ratzinger struggled with the difficult doctrinal issues surrounding the apologies, including very much the question whether the Church, as Church, could sin.
The Vatican's International Theological Commission, under the guidance of Cardinal Ratzinger, drafted a document called Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past. In it, the Commission, consistent with the belief that because Christ cannot sin, then the Church as the mystical Body of Christ cannot sin, clarified that the task of memory undertaken in the Jubilee Year was to be
"an act of courage and humility in recognizing the wrongs done by those who have borne or bear the name of Christian." It is based on the conviction that because of "the bond which unites us to one another in the Mystical Body, all of us, though not personally responsible and without encroaching on the judgment of God, who alone knows every heart, bear the burden of the errors and faults of those who have gone before us."
Please -- try to understand just how momentous an occasion this was. As Memory and Reconciliation acknowledged,
[I]n the entire history of the Church there are no precedents for requests for forgiveness by the Magisterium for past wrongs. Councils and papal decrees applied sanctions, to be sure, to abuses of which clerics and laymen were found guilty, and many pastors sincerely strove to correct them. However, the occasions when ecclesiastical authorities - Pope, Bishops, or Councils - have openly acknowledged the faults or abuses which they themselves were guilty of, have been quite rare.
(Emphasis mine). In fact,
Memory and Reconciliation recounts only one such instance in all of the history of the Church: Pope Paul VI's request for pardon "of God...and of the separated brethren" of the East who may have felt offended "by us" (the Catholic Church) -- and even this request for pardon was not entirely unconditional; Pope Paul declared himself ready, for his part, to pardon the offenses of the Eastern churches against the Catholic Church.
In other words, Cardinal Ratzinger -- famously conservative "German Shepard of the Church" -- brought the Church, for the first time in its entire 2,000 year history, to an unconditional apology for the sins of its Magisterium. He did it without damage to the consistency of the doctrine of the Church. He did it in the face of nearly 2,000 years of denial and self-justification by some of the most powerful men on earth. He did it by reasoning through some of the most contentious issues that any religion can face. It was a stunning -- and a holy -- achievement.
Eighteen months later, Osama bin Laden mounts his appalling attack on civilians. Muslims everywhere -- including members of Al Qaeda -- denounce the attack. The vast majority of Muslims denounce the action because they believe that attacks against the innocent are absolutely irreconcilable with Islam. Al Qaeda members and other radical Islamists object also -- not because the attacks cannot be justified at all, but simply because bin Laden failed to offer his victims the choice of conversion to Islam, which (in their view) was the only way that such killings could legitimately be thought of as part of a holy war, as distinct from plain old mass murder. (This, by the way, is what is so ominous about the recent videotape of Adam Gadahn ("Azzam al Amriki," or "Azzam the American"), who clearly and unequivocably invites America to convert to Islam. In doing so, he has fulfilled the requirement that bin Laden neglected in 2001, and -- to the extent Americans do not choose to convert -- clears the way for a fresh wave of 'justified' attacks.)
So, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, finds himself grappling once again with the problem of violence enacted in the name of religion.
The Pope did not demand an apology from Muslims for the attacks of 9/11. But he wants an engagement of the issue of religious violence that leads to a rejection of it. The dilemma is -- how to engage the issue? It was hard enough to grapple with the issue inside the Church; how, then, to engage the issue with another religion and be consistent with his understanding that God is perfect?
The Pope would never equate Islam with the Catholic Church in perfection. (The theological basis for this is well beyond the scope of this diary, but basically, the idea is that while all religions have a share in the grace and knowledge of God, Catholicism has the most grace and knowledge. Every religion thinks this of itself; Catholics simply say so.) The point is that the Pope has a deep appreciation for the fact that Allah, the God of Mohammed, is the same as the God of Abraham, Moses, and Christ.
More than this, the Pope has a deep appreciation for the fact that the entire culture of Muslims is saturated in faith and devotion to God. In that sense, Muslim society -- Muslim culture -- resembles the Church, or at least -- a church. A community of people that follows God shares in the perfection of God. And this is the heart of the dilemma of the Pope's speech at Regensberg.
Pope Benedict, with his enormous grasp of the history of the Church, went all the way back to the 12th century, to a conversation between a Christian and a Muslim, to raise the issue of violence in the supposed adherence to God. The particular conversation was about the differences between Christianity and Islam, but Pope Benedict was interested in one aspect in particular. In honing in on the part of the conversation dealing with violence, the Pope honed in on the very question with which he, as Cardinal, had previously grappled: can a religion steeped in God act wrongly?
"God", [says the Christian emperor Manuel II Paleologus] "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death..."
The Pope told his audience at Regensberg that "the decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature."
Manuel II spoke from the prejudices of his time and from the limitations of his understanding when, in conversation with his Muslim companion, he said "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". In quoting him, the Pope knew full well that this was a deeply flawed conversation; he characterized Manuel's speech as "startlingly brusque," which is just diplomacy-speak for "incredibly rude." What is crucial to understand is that the Pope chose this conversation not because of Manuel's flawed and bigoted view of Islam, but precisely because --however flawed -- it was a conversation. The Pope chose to comment on an ancient conversation between West and East precisely because the modern West, in his estimation, has lost the ability even to carry on this kind of conversation.
The Cardinal Ratzinger who struggled mightily to help the Catholic Church come to terms with its violent past in 2000, now six years later wants to help the West talk about violence again. And he finds that it is not the Muslims who cannot talk about it, but contemporary Western society that cannot talk about it. Why not? Because contemporary Western society cannot do what Muslim societies are able to do; contemporary Western culture cannot reconcile reason with faith. The Pope's speech at Regensberg was an impassioned plea to the West to recover the union of reason and faith so as to be able to talk to cultures --such as Islam -- that unite reason with faith.
Far from criticizing Muslims, at Regensberg Pope Benedict was aligning himself with them. The money quote from the Pope's remarks at Regensberg is this:
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt ...at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age.... The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. 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.
What is really unfortunate isn't that Pope Benedict reached back to a flawed and bigoted 12th century conversation in order to have a context for speaking about religious violence today. What is unfortunate is that he had to. For centuries, the West refused to talk to Islam at all, because we didn't share the same faith. Now, we've lost even the ability to talk to Islam, and we've lost that ability because we don't share a belief in faith itself -- a belief that is central to Islamic culture. Unless we reclaim the ability to talk about faith without sneering, we will insult Muslims at the very core of their culture, at the very core of their existence. In that state of insult, there can be no peace.
What Pope Benedict is saying, is this: It is the insistence that faith has no part in a modern and rational world, that is the hobgoblin of little minds.
P.S. I edited the diary to provide a link to the entire Regensberg speech. Please ...take the time to read it!