« Mr. Pope... | Main | A Whapping of Wisdom »
September 15, 2006
Pithy summations:
But the difference between the two conceptions of God is not something that would require you to dig up Manuel II’s dialogue or be familiar with the intricacies of Islamic theology. The crucial difference is that for Christianity, as expressed through the categories of Greek language and Hellenistic philosophy, God is His own Word, which is Reason (Logos), Who is His co-essential Son and eternally One with Him from before the ages, whereas Allah’s word is the eternal Qur’an, which has no obvious or necessary relationship to reason, and which he could nonetheless repudiate at any time if he so chose. Put more dramatically, Christians believe that God gave His own Reason for our sakes that we might become like Him, while Muslims believe that they ought to obey and submit to the will of Allah even if he were to command them to do the most unreasonable things. As the suppression of the Muta’zila shows, this obedience even extends to the diminution of man’s own use of reason in understanding God.
The supreme irony, of course, is that the Pope main point was that a religion which is not in harmony with reason, which believes in a God who can contradict himself in the capricious exercise of Supreme Power, and which rules and converts by means of violence, is a religion that cannot, in the end, either survive or be true. He was speaking there, not simply or even primarily of Islam, but of the post-modern relativistic West which has likewise abandoned both faith and reason. If the Islamists would use their heads, they would see a powerful critique of the Great Satan in the words of the Pope. But when you abandon faith and reason, whether in the East or the West, that sin makes you stupid: stupid enough to print simplistic headlines that inflame Islamists and stupid enough to have hysterics and threaten yet again because your brittle little religion can't hold up to some questions and criticism.
Stupendously Stupid Summation:
In clinging to theology and orthodoxy, the bookish Benedict has shown little regard for media management in getting his message across, unlike the communications-savvy John Paul II. (Via Kathy Shaidle)
Posted by Amy Welborn | Permalink
Comments
Yeah, how DARE a theologian "cling to theology and orthodoxy."
And then compound matters by citing a 600 year-old text in the context of a complex and profound university lecture!
Anyone could see that that's a one-way ticket to PR hell...
Posted by: Cheryl at Sep 15, 2006 4:18:47 PM
and why should we expect the media to be responsible for getting the story right? Benedict needs the 'manage' them? So what do they do?
I know MArk Shea always says the MSM loses 50 IQ points when covering religion. This is one story that is probably over their head even on their best day. It would require admitting they didn't get it and finding someone who did. Then it would require good communication skills.
Posted by: Randy at Sep 15, 2006 4:29:14 PM
Thank God for people who can say what I've been thinking only they say it much better and with far fewer words ;-)
I just want to pick out and emphasize something from Daniel's quote.
Daniel wrote " The crucial difference is that for Christianity, as expressed through the categories of Greek language and Hellenistic philosophy, God is His own Word, which is Reason (Logos), Who is His co-essential Son and eternally One with Him from before the ages, whereas Allah’s word is the eternal Qur’an, which has no obvious or necessary relationship to reason, and which he could nonetheless repudiate at any time if he so chose. "
This could not be more dead on. But to put it into even starker terms
Christians believe in a God who keeps his word no matter what, no matter what cost to him. For instance, we believe in a God who would never abandon the Jews whom he promised to never abandon and who hasnt abandoned them even in additional revealations.
Muslims believe that God is greater than his word and could change it at any time and this would not be wrong because God did it. Muslims believe in a God who promised that the Jews would be his people forever and then got tired of them and changed his mind.
What is the difference mean?
To believe the first is to believe in a universe with a permanent and unchanging moral foundation. Where right and wrong can be tested objectively and where promises made by the Holy One are good forever and can be trusted without reservation.
To believe the second is to believe in a universe of no moral order sustained only by the whim of God in its current condition and in which the moral law could change at any moment. This is a universe without foundation, one that has no standard of morality, one that only has order until that order is overturned. Where objective standards are impossible. Where man's reason is useless to test the worth of any thing and right and wrong are determined only by the latest revealation. Where God's promises are only good until he gets tired of keeping them.
One creation is a founded on a rock. The other founded on shifting shifting sand.
We need to hear more of this sort of profound philosophical examination of the implications of core islamic beliefs and attitudes. Beliefs are not harmless even when the people who believe in them might mean no harm.
Posted by: AnglicanPeggy at Sep 15, 2006 4:57:09 PM
PS
I dont think it is any accident at all that Greek philosophy went basically nowhere in Islam. It was preserved. It was studied. It was added to in kind on the same level of acheivement. But it was not advanced. But in the Christian West it was advanced and advanced dramatically because here it found flesh of its own flesh in the Christian faith. Here it found its native land ruled by its own child.
We should never be ashamed of the Greekness of Christianity as Muslims would have us be. They think we should view it as a corruption. But we should see it as it really is and that is as no accident but part of God's providential plan in sending His Son and raising our faith in the confluence of Rome, Greece and Israel, the three most profound influences on the the world as we know it today.
Christianity picked up some of all of them and over 2000 years has refined their gold in the Light of Christ.
Posted by: AnglicanPeggy at Sep 15, 2006 5:09:23 PM
Another great line from Stupendously Stupid: the Pope's message is "often clouded by high-flown doctrinal language."
I want to say something witty about that but all I can do is gape in awe.
Posted by: Maclin Horton at Sep 15, 2006 5:10:19 PM
May God Bless Benedict and give him success in restoring our awareness of and love for our astonishing heritage. Such a restoration of our foundations, to a sound understanding of who we are and what makes us who we are can save us from being overwhelmed by any of the forces of which Benedict rightly warns will mean disaster both for us and for all the world.
He takes my breath away sometimes because of how well he seems to understand the problem. He seems to have made it his quiet and unassuming mission (bless his heart) to help us to restore that tradition and sense of self to The West. But notice how I said help us? That is because he seems to be trying to give us the tools and to teach us how to ask the right questions so we can all work together and be stronger for it. Truly we have a Pope who is a teacher's teacher.
The great philosophers would be proud.
Posted by: AnglicanPeggy at Sep 15, 2006 5:12:10 PM
The article that has the "stupendously stupid summation" comes to us from AFP, the news agency that gave us the "Pope Enjoys Quiet Time After Slamming Islam" headline.
The article has several gems:
"But at times he [the Pope] seems a prisoner of his former role as prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, and his years as a theology professor at Regensburg University, his message often clouded by high-flown doctrinal language." [In other words, the reporter doesn't understand the things the Pope writes.]
"In a few hours at Regensburg University on Tuesday night, he undid much of the groundwork done in Cologne a year before, and must now use his late-November visit to Turkey and its 70-million Muslim population as a major bridge-building exercise." [The "groundwork" being, in the reporter's mind, placating the Muslim world at any cost (see next quote).]
"Given the diplomatic battle ahead to placate the Muslim world, the pope may wish to still have at his side Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the Vatican's top expert on Islam until Benedict controversially transferred him as papal nuncio to Cairo." [Or better yet, the Pope should bring with him the AFP reporter who can advise him on how to best "placate" the Muslim world.]
"Many Vatican watchers at the time believed it was a blunder to move the respected British archbishop at a time when relations with Islam had assumed such a high profile." [Have unnamed "Vatican watchers" ever been wrong?]
"He also has yet to rebuild ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has accused Rome of proselytism in traditionally-Orthodox areas of eastern Europe." [Ah, proselytism, the ultimate offense against the dictatorship of relativism. But shouldn't we understand why the Pope has "yet" to apologize for Catholics who preached the faith? The list of apologies the Church owes is long indeed.]
"He is said to speak 10 languages, although the Italian press has commented on his German accent, and is an accomplished pianist." [I wonder what was said it the "Italian press" about the Pope's German accent. If it was snide, it probably came from AFP's branch in Italy.]
Posted by: Dan at Sep 15, 2006 5:46:58 PM
A great philosophy professor at Washington U in St. Louis who was teaching Modern Philosphical Thought, and personally knew Wittgenstein and some of the other positivists, expressed a profound nostalgia for the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance in Catholic Italy even though he was an atheist!!! He spent years in Venice trying to transport himself back in time I guess. He rued what had become of the world of thought after the Enlightenment.
Another professor who was Anglican taught a class on the Popes and why the heck the Catholic Church is still around. He told the class in which I was the only Catholic that he had a profound respect for the Catholic Church's constant attempt to reconcile faith and reason - which attempt had been given up by the rest of the Christian world.
Much of the MSM is not understanding what Benedict is saying, but it is having an effect. God speed, Benedict. He is not trying to get rid of the Enlightenment, but the pernicious effects that have flowed from it.
- - - - - --
On a related matter:
On TV, radio and in the papers in St. Louis these days there is the drumbeat for a state constitutional amendment to allow embryonic stem cell research. Over and over it is being said that opponents are against "science" and that "religious" arguments are out of place. It makes the opponents sound like backwoods Ozark yokels. I'm embarassed for former Senator Danforth who has been the spokesperson for the "science" people who can bear no criticism.
Finally, some professors from out of state have entered the fray saying that "ethics" also has a place in deciding whether to go forward with what "science" can do. Rational discourse based on philosophical principles and logic may be waning but it's not dead yet. Yeah!!!
Posted by: Julia at Sep 15, 2006 11:01:38 PM
AnglicanPeggy, you make some great points there!
The one thing I would take exception to is the claim that Muslims went nowhere with Greek philosophy. It just so happens that I've been reading A History of Islamic Philosophy by Majid Fakhry. I am studying folks like Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (a.k.a Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (a.k.a. Averroes), who really did develop their own amazing syntheses and developments of both Platonic and Aristotelian thought (or, in the case of Ibn Rushd, developed an Aristotelian response to Neo-Platonism). Aquinas himself certainly relied on Avicenna and Averroes in developing his own philosophy.
Your remark, AnglicanPeggy is not entirely offbase, for it seems that Islamic philosophy came to a kind of stagnant state... and so did the Greek inspired inquiry into nature that flourished in the Islamic world well before it did in Europe. I haven't put the big picture all together just yet, but it seems that this stagnation happened as a kind of reaction to men like those whom I just mentioned, for they and other Islamic philosophers ended up rejecting key Islamic doctrines, such as the teaching that the world had a beginning, the Resurrection, and probably more.
The most important thinker in this reaction against the misuse of philosophy and in defense of religious tradition was a brilliant guy named Al-ghazali. He defended the possibility of miracles such as the resurrection by arguing that everything is a miracle. For example, when you light a match to burn a wad of cotton, the fire does not cause the cotton to turn black: Allah does. Allah also causes the expectation for this to happen, etc. If God does these everyday things, then hey, the Resurrection is a cinch.
I have read that Al-Ghazali has been very influential, at least among those in the Sunni tradition, which makes up 85% of Islam.
By making every event in the natural world a supernatural one, Al-Ghazali offers strong support for the Resurrection, etc. But it also seems to me that this approach could kill one's curiosity about nature. Hence it seems that after Al-Ghazali we don't see the study of nature that happened in the West. To be more accurate, one philosopher (i.e., Averroes mentioned above) tried to refute Al-Ghazali, but he essentially lost the argument in the eyes of most Islamic readers.
Another thing. Every Islamic philosopher I've read in this book except for the very earliest one's has denied freedom of the will! The author of this book argues that this denial has its roots in the Quran's emphasis on how everything has been preordained or decreed by God.
It seems to me that this denial of free will is at the heart of the rejection of reason discussed by B16 at Regensburg. For if God wills both that the sinner sins and that the sinner be punished, then morality is really nothing other than the arbitrary power of God. No room for human dignity here: just the question, "Do you want to get on the good side of the Omnipotent One? Or do you want to die by the sword?" No need for arguments!
There is plenty more to this book: I recommend it strongly, but please don't put a hold on it if you are part of the University of Maryland System, as I'll have to return my copy :)
It is very illuminating to look at B16's talk at Regensburg in the light of the denial of free will that seems to be part of the Islamic tradition. It seems as though he puts relgious terrorists and post-modern relativists in the same bag... wow! What a strong and courageous point.
Finally, if you read the text, it's quite obvious that B16 could have left out the remark about Islam not having contributed anything except jihad, etc. while still making the point about the use of force being opposed to the use of reason in religious matters. It seems that he's either being very audacious here or careless: I suspect the former is the case.
God bless Benedict and keep him safe...!
Posted by: L White at Sep 15, 2006 11:09:10 PM
L White,
I did not say that nothing happened when Muslims became exposed to Greek philosophy. To put what i meant to communicate into other words, there were no epochal advances. They, like of all God's children, were endowed with a great intelligence and talent for thought. Once taught how to reason in the classical schools, they quite naturally did produce some fine philosophy. But they were ultimately place holders. They preserved the tradition. They produced some good work but they did not exceed their teachers. They did not change the world.
One doesnt have to be great to influence the great. Aquinas was great. Whatever influences he worked with may be important to know as facts of his career but it does not follow that he was dependent on them or that they were also great. The great ones draw from many sources. A great idea can come from an overlooked seed found in more humble sources.
While I am no expert, isnt Averroes not held in nearly as much esteem as he once was? Isnt Aquinas, whatever his flaws may be, still considered a giant of modern thought? What of the other giants that came after him? Over and over, The West produced giants. Some good. Some bad. Regardless these giants are a testament to the fertility of the environment found in its native environment under the influence of Christianity.
Posted by: AnglicanPeggy at Sep 16, 2006 12:10:51 AM
Some further thoughts if anyone is still interested ;-)
My exploration of islam as a serious alternative to Christianity came to an end the day that I finally really understood the implications of belief in an absolutely transcendent God who is above right and wrong and above even his own promises and words.
When God’s greatness and transcendence are the highest theological priority then havoc is made of the theology of God’s goodness and Love. These divine qualities take a back seat to his greatness. They play second fiddle.
To understand just one of the implications of this belief, take the Muslim’s inability to reconcile the Incarnation with their concept of a great God.
To them, a God who sacrifices his divine privilege of transcendence in order to express His utmost love and goodness for his Creation is a God who is less than great and therefore no God at all.
Huh?? See what I mean?
On the other hand Christians believe that God very much proved his infinite greatness because he lowered himself, at a cost to himself, in order to personally demonstrate to the fullest the utmost of his Love for us. We believe in a God that places a greater value on his goodness and love than on his privilege and greatness. This means that his promises to us have not, are not and will not ever be broken by his own choice. He in his goodness has sworn to us and because he is infinitely good he will never choose otherwise. We know this is true not just because the Old Testament says it repeatedly but also because there were living witnesses to God’s act of keeping his word in history where human eyes could see it in the flesh. We believe in a God so great that no action of his willingly undertaken in Love could lessen that greatness. His greatness is bullet proof. He doesn’t have to limit his actions or his love in order to remain great or to remain God.
The alternative offered by islam is a God either limited in power who cannot cross the divide between us and him or else He is limited in Love in that he refuses to give up his vaunted remoteness for us. This truly is no alternative at all. We should not be shy in declaring it.
Posted by: AnglicanPeggy at Sep 16, 2006 12:32:02 AM
L White,
I dont want to be rude and forget to thank you for your kind and intersting comments even if i am not at the moment persuaded. I will keep your recommendation in mind as well. I would like to learn more but I have so much to read as it is already! It make take me a while to get around to it.
Posted by: AnglicanPeggy at Sep 16, 2006 12:35:36 AM
