Pope Benedict XVI Panders to Anti-Islamic Sentiment for the Good of the Universal Church

At a “meeting with the representatives of science” at the University of Regensburg, Germany on Tuesday, 12 September, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, the proclaimed Vicar of Christ and seniormost cleric in the Catholic faith, began his address by reminiscing about his good old days in academia; he went on to lament about a reduction in the importance of theology as an academic discipline. Then there was a rather abrupt and disconcerting segue into the recounting of a conversation between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an unnamed Persian intellectual, a conversation which took place at Ankara and was later transcribed during the Siege of Constantinople (1394-1402), as documented by German professor Theodor Khoury:

In the seventh conversation, edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2,256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion.” According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending into details…he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “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.” … The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable…

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature…for the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

The full text of the Pope’s address is available here (opens in new window).

His Holiness was careful to note that the conversation being referenced was actually set down by the Byzantine emperor, which, he explains, accounts for the somewhat one-sided retelling, including the anonymity of the emperor’s Muslim “interlocutor.” Taken in context, the Pope’s statement is not the blanket condemnation of Islam which is being publicized in the media, and the ways in which it has been publicized may have much to do with the hotly negative reception with which it has been greeted by many Muslims and Islamic organizations. This would be an interesting subject of study.

But, even when the words being spoken are not his own, it can be argued that the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church must bear responsibility for addressing an essentially academic issue of religious transcendence and of the role of reason in theology with such a contentious and politically charged example, especially an example from a partisan source some 600 years distant.

The government of Pakistan has summoned the Vatican ambassador to express regret over the Pope’s remarks. The 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference said it regretted the Pope’s remarks, and Mohammed Mahdi Akef, head of the Muslim Brotherhood, has commented that the Pope’s remarks “do not express a correct understanding of Islam.”

Everything You Wanted to Know About Manuel II Paleologus, But Were Afraid to Ask

Manuel II Paleologus (also spelled Palaeologus or Palaiologos) was the leader of the Christian Byzantine Empire from 1391 until 1425. He became heir apparent to the throne after his older brother tried unsuccessfully to usurp their father’s power. Manuel’s father, John V Paleologus, was later overthrown by others but was restored with Manuel’s help and with the aid of the Republic of Venice. The prince was forced to become an honorary hostage to the Ottoman court of Bayezid I, where he was made to participate in a military campaign which displaced Philadelphia, the Byzantines’ last stronghold in the Turkish mainland.

Manuel II reigned at a time in which the tables had turned on the Byzantine Empire; Ottoman expansionism and dirty internal politics in Byzantium alike had destroyed much of the empire’s territorial and political influence. Manuel II survived and foiled a long and arduous Ottoman siege of Constantinople, from which his own transcription of the conversation cited by the present Pope dates, and he was able to maintain friendly relations with the growing giant. This was accomplished chiefly through servility and was likely little more than a protracted effort to buy time in order to bolster the Byzantine defenses in Constantinople and throughout Greece.

Much of the weakness inherited by Manuel II was the result of the Fourth Crusade, the brainchild of Pope Innocent III. The Fourth Crusade had been declared as an effort to reclaim Egypt and then Palestine for Christianity; but when it was found that far fewer than expected had heeded the Vatican’s call, the frustrated crusaders instead decided to sack Constantinople, then a largely Christian city. The ancient city was looted and many of its treasures were spirited away to Venice. These developments helped pave the way for the expansion of the Serbian Empire, leaving the shrinking and pillaged Byzantine Empire surrounded by somewhat hostile territory. This problem was compounded by the Ottoman unification of Osman I (1258-1326), which made Ottoman Muslims and their territorial ambitions a force to be reckoned with. [As Dirk points out in his comment below, Seljuk Turks had already taken advantage of significant territorial opportunities during the 11th Century, the result of which had been increasing Byzantine reliance on Western military aid.] No longer could Rome and Constantinople bully the Muslim tribes without second thoughts; the sport of crusading would be a little more difficult from now on, at least until the end of the Second World War.

Byzantine leaders turned to Rome, to Paris, and to London for assistance in defense against the Ottomans and others. They were offered assistance if and only if Byzantium would accept Roman Catholicism and political unity with the Western church. How’s that for conversion by force (or would Benedict XVI consider this technique more “reasonable”)? The Byzantine citizenry ultimately refused to accept such terms, and Constantinople, which had stood relatively undisturbed for about a thousand years, fell to Ottoman cannonades in 1453.

The Emperor’s Words In Context

So, when we stand back and examine the 600 year-old “anti-Islamic” comments of Manuel II Paleologus in context, we can see that we are dealing with words spoken by a political leader much of whose career, both on and off the throne, was devoted to supplication for military assistance to the Catholic Church and Catholic nations. When it had become clear that the Byzantine Empire would not be able to maintain its integrity alone in the face of growing territorial threats, Constantinople was willing to put its differences with Rome aside in order to ask for help; Rome wanted souls in exchange, and the deal was never decisively made. By and large, the Byzantines preferred death to forced conversion, be it at the hands of a Muslim empire or a Christian one. Manuel’s comments about violent conversion in the Islamic world, and in the Ottoman in particular, reflect his own experiences as a pawn in the toybox of that regime and they also reflect his need to portray an essentially territorial conflict in religious terms, since it was to a powerful religious body and to its associated political bodies that he was appealing for aid in time of need.

The utilization of religious tensions for political ends is hardly something to which Manuel II Paleologus or Osman I had been strangers any more than is Pope Benedict XVI. The solidification of the Ottoman Empire did indeed pose a threat to Byzantium and to other European territories, but the governments of England and France could not be compelled to invest resources in preemptively combatting this threat unless the conflict could be expressed more or less in purely religious terms. It is not enough to say that the Ottomans were eyeing Constantinople—for political purposes, the inference had to be drawn, whether or not it might have proven true, that it was all of Christendom which, solely for the sake of its own “reasonable” religious beliefs, was the ultimate target of the Ottoman Empire with its “unreasonable” religious beliefs. Thus, in Manuel’s account, it was not merely “Ottomans” who were posing this threat, but “Muslims” in general, by virtue, according to the emperor, of the fundamental aspects of their faith, which alone allowed them to be such warmongering monsters after all. Manuel’s assertion, or the interpretation thereof, that Islam is an unreasonable religion while Christianity keeps in strict accord with the ethical rosiness of Greek philosophy completely ignores the truth that the Christian Crusades were in themselves bloody acts of conquest on religious pretexts, just as Benedict’s evocation of these assertions belies numerous and vast examples of European expansionism upon similar religious pretexts, many of them having taken place in quite recent history and practically all of them with either the direct or implicit approval of the Holy See, whether or not any Pope would in retrospect condemn such policies as “unreasonable.” Every coin has two faces, no matter on which side of the Bosphorous it is minted.

The Role of Religion in the Psychology of “Us” against “Them”

While I do not believe that it was His Holiness’ sincere intention to insult Islam at large, the psychodynamics of the Pope’s choice of the comments of a war-beleaguered Byzantine as an appeal to a greater role for reason in theology and in political harmony in the modern world seems a bit…baited to me. We must remember that Pope Benedict XVI’s tour of Germany, from which his controversial statement comes to us, is essentially a quest for Vatican visibility in an increasingly secularized nation which just happens to be the Pope’s homeland. What better way to generate new converts or to stir up sluggish preexisting ones than to pit terrorism, expressed purely and deceptively in explicit liaison with greater Islam, against the angelic, self-effacing, somber reasonability of Catholicism, which everyone knows is the world’s friendliest faith, right? The Pope may be sincere when he says he is upset with how his remarks have been interpreted. His example of religious generalization and stereotyping from the XIVème Siècle was not meant as an affront to the Muslim word so much as a political rallying point for would-be Catholics in one of the most secular nations in Europe, which is also one of the foremost dissidents of Western motives and methods in the ‘War on Terror.’ His Holiness’ speech was, at its surface, primarily concerned with an argument that Catholic theology has much to offer our troubled times. But his use of this archaic example in a politically terse environment, as well as the greater shape of his discourse, show that this Regensburg address, like so many other papal dicta, was essentially a sales pitch to pricked ears in time of crisis.

I am reminded by all of this of the recently posted conversation between Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, in which they discussed a self-selective tendency in biology and in politics for the ability of a group to positively generalize about itself while negatively generalizing about others. We don’t have to look very far to find a human history awash in this sort of thing, and we see examples of it in everyday life, from ourselves and others. Trivers’ point was that this kind of artful self-deception may have a biological purpose in animal life just as it has its political uses in civilization.

If I identify myself as a Christian and another person as a Muslim, for instance, then, when I am the beneficiary of an act of altruism on the part of my Muslim friend, I am apt to express exactly what event has taken place with which I am pleased, in unambiguous terms: “My friend gave me a great gift,” I might say. But if I become the recipient of an act which I perceive to have been hostile or disrespectful, I am more apt to say: “My Muslim friend did me wrong” as opposed to “my friend stepped on my toe.”

Conversely, if I identify myself as a Christian along with another Christian friend, when this Christian friend does something nice for me, I am likely to say: “My good Christian friend gave me a gift today. He’s such a good Christian.” But if this friend with whom I identify as part of a group should then abuse me in some way, I will not be as quick to identify his lapse of good judgment with his creed, since I myself am a part of that group. (This is all hypothetical—I would first and foremost characterize myself in real life as a dedicated agnostic, a position I have somehow miraculously taken without having become a hopelessly amoral human being in the process. I think.)

Whether you’re talking about conflicts expressed in religious, political, racial, or purely personal terms, there appears to be a biological basis for the propensity of human beings to generalize positively about ourselves in groups and negatively about others in groups. I would argue that human willingness to do so is every bit as generative of religion as a social construction as it is reactive to social and political circumstance.

One can look back to the Old Testament for a number of compelling examples in which Moses’ people were explicitly ordered by God to “cast out” (murder) the inhabitants of a land which they claimed was promised them by God solely on the basis of their own brand of fideism. I, for one, seriously have to wonder how much of this divine authorization of conquest was written in after the fact.

The Pope’s assessment that religious underpinnings for violence are unreasonable is something I feel that few educated people would argue against. I certainly could be mistaken. But, in my view, the reasons for which outcry among Muslims is justified in this instance can be traced in the most fundamental aspects of psychology, of rhetorical evasionary tactics: the Catholic evocation of any historical argument that Islam is an unreasonable faith ought at least to be tempered by explicit recognition of the many heinous and unreasonable atrocities perpetrated by political bodies which have owed their allegiances to the Vatican throughout the centuries. Anything less would be uncivilized.

As long as nationalism and religious conviction remain vehicles for state-sponsored generalizations and anecdotal selectivity of the species which found such a prominent voice in Regensburg this week, I fear there will never be peace in the world. But I am somewhat comforted, and I hope not falsely so, by my observations that I am living in an age in which the people of all faiths and nations seem to be growing more aware of the types of socioeconomic games being played far above their own heads, games in which not even the most sacred beliefs of a people are or have ever been safe from use as tools to divide and to distract.

His Holiness concluded the Regensburg address with the following comments:

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 dialog of cultures.

I am, admittedly, a bit frightened by the Pope’s nonchalance in speaking for the world’s “profoundly religious” cultures as viewing the universality of reason as a threat. I can imagine no instance in a theatre any larger than a single mind in which the “universality of reason” need conflict with one’s religious beliefs. But I can cite many existing examples and can imagine innumerable others in which such a conflict might be imposed on a population at large to suit the aims of the powerful, most particularly in cases in which, outside of the “reasonability” of self-serving generalizations, it would be most unreasonable to conceive the political actions of a relatively small body in terms of the religious beliefs shared among a greater whole.