Comments Elsewhere

Lindsay,

Benedict doesn’t contradict or take issue with Manuel’s polemic against Islam (at least not in the text he read; the footnotes are supposedly forthcoming), but he does state explicitly that the relationship between Christianity rightly understood and Islam rightly understood is actually not a topic that he intends to address in the lecture.

The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between – as they were called – three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

The idea that Islam demands a faith spread at sword-point, or even a faith that transcends and overwhelms the categories of reason, is not put forward in propia voce at any point, as far as I can tell, and plays no significant role in his argument (which is about faith and reason in Christianity, and mainly takes issue with certain tendencies in modern Christian theology). The quotation from Manuel is scholarly scene-setting for a discussion of the relationship between faith and reason. It’s not uncommon for philosophers and theologians to use quotations, epigrams, stories, myths, etc. as spring-boards for reflection without fully endorsing the content.

For all I know, it may very well be true that Benedict’s views about Islam are false, narrow, ignorant, or any number of other things. It is certainly true that, given his public position as Pope, it was jaw-droppingly impolitic to use this polemic as his spring-board. But I don’t think that it’s charitable to treat the use of the quotation, in context, as straightforward evidence that he believes the contents of it to be true. Maybe he does, but we’d have to look elsewhere for reasons to conclude that.