"God is Love: God is Rational"

STEPHEN CRITTENDEN: Welcome everyone, to "The Religion Report." But first to the story of the week: the Pope’s speech in Regensburg, and the now-famous quote from an obscure late Byzantine emperor. (Interpreter: He says, and I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and now you’ll find things only evil and inhuman; such as his commands are spread by the sword, the faith he preached.’)Well in a week when a nun has been killed, churches have been attacked, and Pope Benedict has apologised, there are still questions about what he was up to, whether he was poorly advised, or speaking with some sense of the effect his words would produce.Today on the program we’re joined by one of Pope Benedict’s former students, and a member of his annual schulekreis, the circle which gathers each summer at Castelgandolfo, American Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio.This time last year the topic of conversation at Castelgandolfo was Islam, and Father Fessio got himself into trouble when he gave an interview later, in which he revealed that the Pope had said in private that he believed Islam was incapable of being reconciled to the modern world.

Father Fessio also runs Ignatius Press in the United States, and in 1996 he published Salt of the Earth, a book by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as he then was. Here’s a short extract:

Well Father Joseph Fessio, welcome to "The Religion Report." Is there any doubt that in that extract the Pope is saying that Islam is totalitarian and incompatible with a pluralist Western society?

FATHER FESSIO: He’s a man of principles who sees deeply into things, and he recognises that the Qur’an first of all is presented as the unmediated and uncreated word of God which cannot be changed, for which there’s no magisterium to interpret it, and that therefore if you try and see what society will be, if it’s going to be consistent with the Qur’an, then you end up with this principle of political life as you’ve enunciated, as you’ve said. And you cannot have a society based on that principle integrated into Western pluralism which is antithetical to that principle.

What do you think about the Pope’s comments of last week? Do you think he has anything to apologise about?

Well he did apologise for the fact that people reacted the way they did; he was sorry, he regretted that. He also did say that the opinions which he quoted of Paleologos about only evil and inhuman things were the new things that Muhammad brought, he doesn’t subscribe to that position, at least in its entirety. So that was fair enough, but the point is he made it very clear in that lecture, which I think was a defining lecture and perhaps will be one of the great documents of his pontificate, he says the decisive statement is that not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.

God is rational?

God is love, and God is rational. And the challenge to Islam that he’s posing is, ‘Look, is God so transcendent, that he transcends irrationality, or not?’ And I haven’t seen any response which addresses that question. In fact most of the responses are an implicit denial of the freedom of God, of the rationality of God, because the responses have been violence.

Would you say in fact that the Pope has in some senses, successfully demonstrated the problem he was talking about?

Absolutely. Yes.

One other issue that you raised just there that I suspect is important to emphasise, is the academic context in which this speech was made, raising the questions of whether Muslims accept freedom of speech in relation to any issue of importance to Islam.

Well I think there’s no question they don’t. When we say Muslims, we do know that because of the nature of the media, that a small group can make itself heard and make itself feared and become intimidating, and so you get a network of people who if you publish a cartoon in Denmark, or you make a slip perhaps in Regensburg, all of a sudden you get a world-wide network of protest going on, and it’s on the front pages of all the papers. I mean this is a calculated way of addressing the West and intimidating the West through the media. So it doesn’t matter whether it was a university forum, the words were said, that’s all that’s needed. And in fact when the protest took place I doubt that any of the protesters had actually read the Pope’s remarks because they had not been translated into Arabic.

It strikes me also that the image of a conversation between a late Byzantine Emperor and an educated Persian is an image of real inter-religious dialogue, and that’s something that maybe the media has missed, that the Pope is opening up an argument which it’s necessary to have if there’s going to be meaningful inter-religious dialogue as opposed to dialogue which is meaningless or dissembling. So it’s an invitation to a different kind of inter-religious dialogue.

Stephen, I want to tell you, you’re the first journalist or media person I’ve heard make that remark. It’s clear that there’s an irony here. The Emperor was in Constantinople, or in Ankara, during the time of these conversations, at a time when Byzantium was being besieged by the Ottoman Turks, the Islamic force. They were losing territory after territory, and even then, and of course it was only 50 years later that the final victory was won by Islam and Constantinople became Istanbul. But even in the midst of that aggressive attack by a military enemy, here are the Emperor and a learned Persian having a debate, and what do they talk about? The truth claims of Christianity and Islam. And I think the Pope was telling us (and you just said it well) it’s useless to have dialogue on anything else if we’re going to conceal the fundamental associates we’re operating on, the truth claims of our religion. So I do think the Pope is trying to make it clear that we do need dialogue, but we have to have dialogue about what we really believe and come to an understanding in respect of each other, even in our differences, but to pretend that doesn’t exist I mean that’s just delusion.

So you think that with a single short quotation the Pope is raising questions that go to the status of Islam at least from the point of view of the Christian churches. I mean does the Christian church regard Muhammad of Mecca as a Prophet of God?

We cannot regard him as a prophet, and I expect any good Islam to consider me as a Jesuit priest, and as a Catholic, to be both a blasphemer, because I introduced plurality to God, and as an idolater, because I hold that worship is due to a man like us, named Jesus, who completed and fulfilled all prophecy. We must believe, as Christians, that Muhammad is not a prophet, and that therefore whatever comes from Muhammad is either coming from his own imagination or his own reflection, or from borrowings.