Pope Benedict's lecture in Germany was not about holy war. It was about a philosophical/theological proposition: that Christianity is a merger between the religion that emerged from Jesus and Greek philosophy, writes Vincent Browne.
He said: "Biblical faith in the Hellenistic period encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment, evident specially in the wisdom literature [ some of the late books of the Old Testament and some of the New Testament]." He said "a profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion". He spoke of this encounter as "decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity".
He acknowledged that in the late Middle Ages there were "trends" in theology which would "sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit".
"The truly divine God is the God which has revealed himself in logos and as logos has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf." Logos is a term from ancient Greek philosophy, meaning the underlying order of reality, the totality of the "laws of nature".
Continuing, he said: "It is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe . . . This convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can be rightly called Europe."
He went on to cite efforts to "de-Hellenise" Europe. First during the Reformation, when there was an attempt to turn Christianity into a religion based only on scripture, divorced from metaphysics. Then there was the liberal theology of the 19th and 20th centuries, which "liberated" Jesus from Hellenisation and presented him as merely the father of a humanitarian moral message. And finally, and for the Pope, crucially, the emergence of "cultural pluralism".
In essence what Benedict is saying is that Christianity is a European phenomenon and Europe is essentially Christian. The European identity is bound up with the old Greek idea of reason and even in our perception of God reason intrudes. And the convergence of reason and faith is the hallmark of Christianity, unlike the essence of Islam, which excludes reason. Islam suffers from the same defect as those who argued for a position of sola scriptura ("only scripture"), by which he means reliance only on scripture and not on reason as well.
This was how the offensive quotation from the lips of the Byzantine emperor, Manual II Paleologus, is relevant: "Show me just what Muhammad 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 that he preached." Since violence was against reason, it was incompatible with the notion of God. Therefore Islam, he implied, is essentially defective.
The point of his argument seemed to be (at least in part) that the European ethos has no place for a religion that excludes reason: Islam.
In other words the whole lecture, or at least a major thrust of the lecture, was anti-Islam. And it is hardly surprising that this is his view because he has argued against Turkey's inclusion in the European Union on the grounds that its predominant religion is Islam.
One gets a sense of a formidable mind at work on reading the lecture, and also an independent mind. There is substance to Benedict. But there is also an arrogance and an outrageousness. Arrogance goes with the territory of the Papacy but outrageousness is a new or at least a relatively rare phenomenon. There is a calculated indifference to the sensibilities of others, to the demands of respect for others.
Islam in many of its manifestations never sought to bring its religion by the sword. It was culturally and theologically tolerant in ways that Christendom has become only recently and reluctantly.
The Catholic Church is imbued with anti-Islam as it has been anti-Semitic. It was anti-Semitic from its outset because of the sectarianism that arose inside Judaism before Christianity broke free, because of the early Christian agenda to blame the Jews for the murder of Christ. From the 7th century onwards the Catholic Church was ignorantly anti-Islam, depicting Muslims as satanic, lecherous and psychopathic. That depiction allowed the massacre of tens of thousands of Muslims during the Crusades; in one day 30,000 Muslims and Jews were massacred in Jerusalem.
But what is this "reason" at the heart of the European culture? Where was "reason" during the first World War when millions were slaughtered over nothing? Where was "reason" in the subjugations and slaughters of the colonial period? Where was "reason" during the Holocaust?
It wasn't just the quotation from the Byzantine emperor that was unfortunate; it was the thrust or one of the thrusts of the entire lecture. The world is worse off because of the prominence this man has obtained.