Media Hysteria

      James Carroll, writer for The Boston Globe is hysterical again.  In his editorial, “Pope Benedict’s Hierarchy of Truth, Faith,” he takes the Pope to task for his many “failings” that surfaced in the now-famous lecture at Regensburg University.  Yes, it seems to me, that only a kind of hysteria on Carroll’s part could cause him to display either such ignorance or deceit as he has done in this article.   

      Here are two examples – and there are others – of Carroll’s abuse of history.  The first is his assertion that “Christianity, beginning with Constantine and continuing through the Crusades up until the Enlightenment, routinely ‘spread by the sword the faith’ it preached.”  Now, what, really, was the Church in the West, centered in Rome, doing in the years between, say, the death of Constantine and the beginning of the Crusades (1095)?  Well, not too long after Emperor Constantine, the Church found herself the sole means of any kind of order in the West due to the waves of invasions of barbaric hordes flooding into the empire from the East.  And I do not think she was in any position to use the sword to persuade the powerful and savage Germans and Huns to minimize their pillaging of Italy and even Rome.  On the contrary, with steady effort she slowly evangelized and civilized them.  With that on-going project hardly done, the West was then faced with the onslaught of Islamic armies pressing in from three directions; meanwhile, from the north came the pagan Vikings, rampaging and looting along the coasts of western Europe.  From the beginning of the Crusades on, we find organized Christendom still fighting for its life against the constant threat of being overwhelmed by Muslim armies, which had threatened the West from the inception of Islam all the way up until the late 17^th century.  Carroll illustrates for us, then, the truth that propaganda – his sweeping generalizations – is so very simple, but history is rather more complex. 

      The second example of Carroll’s distaste for real history and facts is quite a whopper:  in an attempt to contrast Christianity unfavorably with Islam, Carroll asserts, “Islam sponsored rare religious amity among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the very period from which the insulting quote comes” (that is, Pope Benedict’s quotation of the late 14^th century Christian Emperor of Constantinople), this at a time when the Muslims, so dedicated to “amity,” were about to besiege, conquer and loot the imperial city. 

      In this context, one can then answer yet another attempt by Carroll to persuade us of Islamic superiority (something he is, obviously, eager to do, even as he contradictorily condemns the Pope for trying to assert Christian superiority):   
 

More significant, though, for any discussion of reason and faith is the fact that Christian theology's breakthrough embrace of the rational method, typified by St. Thomas Aquinas's appropriation of Aristotle, and summarized by Benedict as ‘this inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry,’ was made possible by such Islamic scholars as Averroes, whose translations of Aristotle rescued that precious tradition for the Latin West. 
 

And Carroll then complains that “Benedict makes no mention of this Islamic provenance of European and Christian culture.”  Provenance?  The impertinent question the Latin Christian might ask at this point is, Would it not have been better and easier for the West to have procured that “precious tradition” recorded in ancient manuscripts from fellow Christians in the East from whose libraries they were stolen by Muslims?  And an even more impertinent questions, implied in Pope Benedict’s discussion of this issue:  What in fact did such a brilliant scholar as Averroes do with that “precious tradition” of Aristotle?  Was he able to do what St. Thomas Aquinas did for the Christian faith and appropriate the wisdom of Aristotle for Islam and construct that synthesis of faith and reason Pope Benedict described as ‘this inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry”? 

      The answer is no.  Averroes, a great scholar no doubt, was not able to do so.  In fact, he chose reason over religious faith and in a real sense excommunicated himself from his own religion.  The Holy Father’s point is that this is a choice that does not need to be made, must not be made.  And the great synthesis built by St. Thomas Aquinas is proof that reason and faith (at least Catholic faith) are truly at home with each other, something the Catholic Church has ever insisted on, most recently reiterated in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et ratio.

      Carroll does seem to approve of what he accurately describes as “Christian theology’s breakthrough embrace of rational method, typified by St. Thomas Aquinas's appropriation of Aristotle, and summarized by Benedict as ‘this inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry’,” but that is only a passing nod, and he quickly resumes berating the Pope for his memory loss:  “Benedict seems to have forgotten that the European rejection of violent coercion in religion came about not through religion but through the secular impulses of the Enlightenment.” 

      Ah, how could we have forgotten the Enlightenment’s role in “the European rejection of violent coercion in religion”?  I am sure the Holy Father is quite aware of this “great achievement,” since he discussed it at length in this very lecture, if Carroll had only read it more carefully.  There the Pope discusses the Enlightenment’s solution as the falsehood it is:  that it is the same choice that Averroes made, for “reason” and against religious faith, all religious faith being irrational.  Thus the very synthesis between faith and reason – so necessary to the well-being of both – is sundered.  If certain major currents of Islamic thought are marked by a rejection of reason in matters of faith, the Enlightenment took the opposite tack. 

      And, as a result, if we are to believe what such propagandists as Carroll would tell us, all we have to do is follow the “secular impulses” of the Enlightenment to end all “violent coercion in religion.”  The formula is simple:  no religion is true by the measurement of reason – religions have no real claims to truth – therefore they are all of equal value (or the lack thereof).  Problem solved... until a Pope comes along and points out the obvious – that this is nothing less than a “dictatorship of relativism.”  It is a dictate from our new masters, the progeny of the Enlightenment, and they will tell us what to believe and not to believe when opinions clash in this new environment of “pluralism.”  Thus the constant insistence of our “elites” in government, education and journalism that the new standard, arbitrarily and contradictorily posited out of nowhere, that the Church (and all religions) must adapt to the requirements of these “secular impulses.” 

      But believers have every reason to distrust their intentions:  they have simply denied any truth value to anything, to every idea and claim that does not agree with their understanding and interpretation of these “secular impulses.”  Their argument, so appealing to the masses, indoctrinated with the assurance that no brain sweat should be spent over all these questions of religion and philosophy, that one just needs to get on with living his or her life on the basis of that great Enlightenment principle of the “primacy of the individual conscience” (the individual conscience, that is, that only has primacy so long as it agrees with the basic tenets of secularism).  Yes, on such a playing field, there is no “violent coercion in religion,” just plain old “violent coercion” of another sort, and, as we shall see, much worse. 

      It is for good reason that historians refer to the “more developed” stages of the rule of Enlightenment in France as “the reign of terror,” where “reason” was “honored” by seating an infamous Parisian prostitute on the altar in the church of Notre Dame and declaring her the “goddess of reason,” while Madame Guillotine chopped off the heads of dissenters, and the Revolutionary army, with its mandate of enlightenment, decided to share its “secular impulses” with the Catholics of the Vendee in France by killing nearly a quarter of a million men, women and children – the first of many modern genocides yet to come.  Yes, with all this “light” now pervading Europe, it is no wonder that things got a little heady and out of control.  This was the occasion for more fruit of the new secular impulses:  Napoleon Bonaparte, who plunged Europe into yet more warfare, going about as he did at the head of the French army to spread “liberty, equality and fraternity.”  The charred ruins, many visible to this day, of numerous churches, monasteries and convents in such places as Spain and Portugal are proof positive of the success of the Enlightenment in stamping out “violent coercion in religion” by very nearly stamping out religion itself in many places. 

      This is what journalists such as Carroll point to as that great turning point in Western history, which should be for us a guiding light.  And that after having lived in the 20^th century, when anti-religious “rationalities,” the new secular impulses of dialectical materialism and national socialism brought us the violent deaths of scores of millions of people, world war and cold war, the death camps, gulags, iron curtains, history’s worst genocides.  And now the West, whose traditional culture – now all but lost – was the fruit of Catholic faith and thought, has reduced reason to the mere servitude of technological advance and to the feeble defense of our decadent ways.  We will soon be able to fly to the other planets and back, and we design and build bombs powerful enough to destroy the whole earth; we can more and more conquer diseases and yet also formulate them into weapons.  But we can no longer compose hardly a piece of music of lasting beauty, or paint, draw or sculpt anything beyond some sordid depiction of our own depravity.  If religion without reason leads to the likes of Islamic terrorism, what are we to say about “reason” severed from faith and religion? 

      Here is the point of the Pope’s Regensburg lecture.  Muslims denounce Western decadence that is a severance of reason from faith; and the West denounces religious violence that is a severance of faith from reason.  To commit any atrocity for religious purposes is to sin against reason as well as against the Source of all reason, God.  The same is true of the violence done in the name of secular impulses, whether it is the violence of unjust war, sick ideologies, or of the new, unthinking tyranny – so typified by Carroll’s Orwellian twisting of facts and history – of Enlightenment modernity. 

      Pope Benedict is calling for a dialogue between the Church and the modern world and among religions, a dialogue that is based on reason open to faith; the alternatives are there for us all to see.  He is not doing this, as Carroll would have us believe, out of a moral smugness that denies any wrongdoing of Christians, but rather from the vantage point of the tradition of the Catholic Church, showing that in her thought life, her theological life, that reason and faith go together.  Whatever the terrible failures of some of its adherents, Catholicism is a religion that appeals to reason, a religion that is coherent and intelligible, that has always in its best and most authoritative philosophical and theological endeavors sought to wed faith and reason – faith seeking understanding – in the enterprise of understanding God’s revelation of himself to us and of the meaning of our lives in this world of God’s creation. 

      I can well understand the hesitancy of many Muslims to respond to this challenge of the Pope’s, for Islam has a history and a theological tradition that are weak in this area.  And I can well understand the fear of the Carrolls out there – and they are afraid – because they know deep down that the searching, revealing light of reason will expose much of the shallowness of modernity’s presumptions and of its “secular impulses.”  Otherwise, its spokesmen would not have to stoop to the low tactics in debate of ad hominem, fanciful revisions of history, and misrepresentations of argument.  Carroll ends his diatribe against the Holy Father accusing His Holiness of a “narcissism of power,” when in fact, the guardians of the secular, with all their precious impulses, are threatened with the loss of their power, if they come to the table of rational dialogue.  They fear reason; in that they are clever.  Best then, to muddle the debate as Carroll has done to his shame.