Regensburg revisited

Benedict XVI's address in Germany on faith, rationality and Islam sparked a crisis. A year on, closer analysis of the lecture reveals how the furore was caused, and why there is common ground between Christian and Islamic thinking, particularly on the challenge of relativism in Europe today

It was on 12 September last year that Benedict XVI gave his Regensburg lecture, in which he provoked Muslim fury by quoting the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaeologus, as saying (in the lecture's official English translation): "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 he preached."

The Pope remarked at the time on the "startling brusqueness" of Manuel's statement, "a brusqueness", he said, "that we find unacceptable", but the media pounced on the phrase and gleefully reported that Benedict had denounced the Qur'an as "evil and inhuman".

The next day official protests poured into the Vatican. In many Muslim countries there were violent demonstrations against the Catholic Church. The Pope was burnt in effigy. In Somalia an Italian nun was murdered.

Benedict moved quickly to counter the impression his remarks had made. Immediately after the protests he issued a disclaimer regretting that in the Muslim world the quotation had been taken as an expression of his own opinion. The sentence, he said, "does not express my personal view of the Qur'an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion". He explained that he had quoted Manuel's statement - but without endorsing his polemic - simply to support the argument of his lecture on the relationship between faith and reason.

What went wrong? How did the Pope come to expose himself to such vilification? To answer that we need to look at the genesis of the lecture. At the end of the summer Benedict was preparing for his second journey to his homeland as Pope. A personal highlight was to be a visit to his old university at Regensburg, where he had taught for many years. For his address he decided to revisit the theme of the inaugural lecture he had given at Bonn in 1959 at the debut of his university career. That lecture had been on the relationship between faith and reason.

For the Regensburg address he wanted to explore the conditions under which theology could participate in today's intellectual debates. These conditions are diminished if what we regard as rational is limited to what is mathematically true or empirically falsifiable. Theology should not just be about the history of ideas; it should be able to inquire more broadly into the rationality of faith. It is this inquiry, says Benedict, that can contribute to "that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today".

I am told that while he was writing his lecture, Benedict had on his desk a pile of papers from a seminar on Islam by some of his former students (which he had not been able to attend) together with the volume in the Sources Chrétiennes series that contains Manuel Palaeologus' seventh dialogue. It was these materials that suggested the use of Manuel as an historical example of dialogue between cultures and religions. And because Benedict was going to be speaking to his former colleagues at his old university, he did not think it necessary to send his text to the appropriate Vatican department for review, as had been the practice under John Paul II.

The lecture that was given at Regensburg thus combined arguments in which Benedict has long had academic expertise with historical material which was relatively unfamiliar to him and had not been vetted. The text he was quoting from, in fact, is known only to a handful of Byzantinists. It is an account, written in Greek, of a series of discussions held in Ankara in the winter of 1390-91 between Manuel Palaeologus (shortly before he became emperor) and an unnamed Muslim scholar described as a muderris, or professor of law.

The discussions were held at the request of the professor, who wanted to hear what Manuel had to say on a variety of philosophical and theological topics ranging from the relationship between faith and reason to the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Eucharist. They were conducted at a high intellectual level and later Manuel prepared a written account for his brother, who was governor of the Peloponnese, to lift his spirits by showing him how a Christian could hold his own in debate with an unbeliever.

The seventh dialogue, from which the Pope took his quotation, turns on the question of whether Islam is inherently violent. Manuel, after forcefully stating his opinion that it is, goes on to say that faith born in the soul must be supported by reason; it cannot be propagated by violence and threats. At this point the Pope (led astray perhaps by the over-copious Sources Chrétiennes commentary) contrasts Manuel's view with that of an eleventh-century scholar from Andalusia called Ibn Hazm, who denied that God was bound by human notions of rationality.

Ibn Hazm in fact has no relevance to Manuel's debate. Islamic philosophical theology did not form a monolithic tradition. From the earliest years there was a tension between those who held that God was bound by universal moral law, and could therefore act only with justice and wisdom, and those who held that it was the will of God alone which defined what was right and wrong. Ibn Hazm favoured the latter opinion. Manuel's interlocutor belonged to the opposite tradition. Indeed at the beginning of the discussions he proposed that they should be conducted on purely rational grounds without appealing to Biblical or Qur'anic proof texts.

In the passage from which the Pope takes his quotation, the Muslim professor agrees with Manuel (and with Benedict) on the incompatibility of violence and faith. The reason why Islam had spread so successfully, he claims, was because the Muslim faith was more rational than the Christian. Christian morality, with its requirement that you should love your enemy, made unrealistic demands on the believer. Islam, by contrast, set standards that were actually attainable. In other words, in the competition for believers, Islam was more successful than Christianity because it offered a more practical way of salvation.

The professor was right, but only up to a point. Islam spread initially as a result of the astonishingly rapid Arab conquest of Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia in the early seventh century, but was not imposed on the indigenous populations by force. It was not until after the Crusades that the Middle East was fully Islamicised. And even then, large Christian communities survived, living unmolested under their ecclesiastical leaders as long as they paid the non-Muslim poll tax.

The situation in Anatolia (roughly present-day Turkey) was very different. For a long time the frontier between the Eastern Christian empire and the Muslim world had been stabilised along the Taurus mountains in south-east Anatolia. Then from the end of the eleventh century, Turkish fighters (ghazis) began to press hard on the Byzantines, taking over regions of Anatolia piecemeal until by the end of the fourteenth century the empire was reduced to the city of Constantinople and a few territories in the Balkans and southern Greece.

Three hundred years of almost continuous warfare inflicted immense hardship on the Christian population. Deportations and massacres were not uncommon. Those who survived, demoralised and bereft of civil or ecclesiastical leadership, went over to Islam in large numbers. Conditions for Christians improved only after 1453, when the Ottoman sultans finally established peace and stability in Anatolia and their Christian subjects were once again brought under the ecclesiastical leadership of Constantinople.

Manuel's remarks must be seen in this context. He was not, as it happens, in Ankara of his own volition. His father, John V Palaeologus, had accepted vassalage to the Turks in 1373 as the only practical way of preserving the empire. Manuel had to serve as the sultan's ally when summoned, and in 1390 experienced the bitter humiliation of helping Sultan Bayazid reduce the last free Greek community in western Anatolia, the city of Philadelphia. In the winter of 1390-91 he was a hostage at Bayazid's court, which gave him ample, if unwanted, leisure for his discussions with the professor. His letters written at the time reveal his anguish at the sight of destroyed cities whose original name was not even known to their new masters.

In the circumstances Manuel's remarks about the "inferiority" (a better translation of the Greek word cheiron than "evil") and "inhumanity" of the Qur'an in relation to the Old and New Testaments can hardly be called "startling". Nor is it surprising, in view of the anxieties Benedict had already expressed about Arab terrorism, that these remarks should have attracted his attention.

In July 2005, when Benedict was asked during a visit to northern Italy's Aosta valley whether Islam could be considered a religion of peace, his reply was non-committal. The following month, on his first apostolic visit to Germany, he devoted an entire address to the subject. Speaking in Cologne to a gathering of representatives of Muslim communities, he expressed his confidence that his audience rejected any connection between Islam and terrorism. If a climate of mutual trust could be created, he saw no reason why Christians and Muslims, faced with "the darkness of a new barbarism", should not "act together in the service of fundamental moral values".

The new barbarism the Pope fears is not primarily the barbarism threatened by terrorism. It is the growing moral relativism of postmodern Europe. In the Regensburg lecture he spoke about the importance of the Church's Greek philosophical heritage and deplored the argument that the synthesis between the early Church and Hellenism was an initial inculturation no longer to be considered binding - in other words, that the Church's original expression of faith was a cultural product of its time and could therefore be remodelled to bring it into line with modern ideas.

Islam is equally an heir to the Greek philosophical tradition. Its scholastic theology (kalam) is deeply indebted to Plato and Aristotle and indeed strongly influenced the development of medieval Latin thought. This shared intellectual background, as Manuel's early dialogues suggest, offers the possibility of fruitful dialogue along philosophical lines.

Does this help us specifically with theological dialogue? In his Christmas 2006 address to the Roman Curia, Benedict spoke of "a dialogue to be intensified with Islam". This is now taking place through the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, which, although previously merged with the Pontifical Council for Culture, was restored earlier this year to independent status - an incidental benefit of the Regensburg lecture.

Benedict is aware of the great theological differences between Christianity and Islam, even when similar theological terms are used. He has spoken, for example, of the different ways in which we understand revelation. For Muslims the Qur'an is the unmediated word of God, not simply the message of the Prophet. It "descended" on Muhammad from God and is therefore not susceptible to interpretation in the same way as the Christian Bible. Clarifications of this kind are important for the removal of mutual misunderstanding.

Some Muslims are suspicious of theological dialogue, but there are many, especially in Europe, who see its potential benefits in much the same way as Benedict does. Nobody expects rapid results. In the past theological debate was often conducted in a polemical spirit that simply increased hostility. But when dialogue is approached as a process of understanding our theological differences, it need not divide us. Rather, it may point the way to a shared witness against today's liberal relativism. In furthering such a process Manuel's neglected later dialogues on specifically doctrinal matters could well repay study.