On the other hand, he was speaking in a profoundly academic context, and it is unkind to disconnect the quotation from that kind of safe arena.
As an academic, this point doesn't work for me. It should be noted that, on your side, the pontiff opens his lecture by painting a picture of his safe, 1950s academic ivory tower that is warm and rosy with nostalgia, a calm sea of collective striving, "working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects..."
(Just an aside, Hmmm...how many women do you s'pose were on the theological faculties at the University of Bonn back in those halcyon days? How varied do you suspect the backgrounds of all those earnest young 1950s West German theologians were? As someone coming from a working class background, I can't tell you how much the smugness of that opening bothers me.)
But while I kind of recognize that cozy academy from the nostalgic remarks of people like Allan Bloom (whom I respect, although I often radically disagree with) and more right-wing commentators whose views are less defensible, that's not the academy that I am struggling for, and not one that I would defend--not that it would ever have let a plebe like me in.
The Pope's 1950s European University, apparently, was, at least in his memory, one that kept its students and faculty safely from the storms of the life going on outside, one where a rational, trained man--trained by rational trained men--could safely go forward knowing that the basis of his study will be "accepted without question." So he and his cronies could converse with like-minded fellows about "reason" and "God," safely assured that no one outside their walls had anything to teach them about such concepts.
(Which is not to say that everything said outside those walls should have equal intellectual standing. For example, I am largely sympathetic with a basic part of his claim that arguments that don't ground themselves in some form of empiricism and mathematics cannot be taken as "science" simply because they give themselves that name. Other things that he goes on to state in relation to this argument I am more sceptical of.)
And so, how glad he is to be back again in Regensburg, where it is somehow his birthright to be safely insulated from the grubby hoards...Where, rather than, say, quoting from Bartolome de Las Casas, who had plenty to say about violence and conversion; who in fact made essentially the same point as the anti-Islamic emporer quoted so fondly by His Lordship (and, note, Ben XVI doesn't make even a passing acknowledgement of the statement as problematic, which is something that any academic I know worth his/her salt would do), but did it in the context of the Church's sanctioning of genocide in the Americas. (see excerpt below)
Words spoken, claims made in the academic context that I would defend are perhaps those that are and should be open to the most serious critique imaginable. And, frankly, having read them myself, in many ways I don't really think these words really were taken out of context: even had B XVI wanted to use the argument that followed, against conversion by force, there is no real reason to quote at best "neutrally," i.e., without any apology, words that represent such a gross distortion of an important historical figure, Mohammed--particularly at this moment in history--and then to go on to quote this same emporer so favorably on the subject of conversion by force.
That is irresponsible argumentation in a site that is supposed to be devoted, in the Pontiff's own vision, to "rationality," "reason," "genuine enlightenment," and in fact "ethics."
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Here's a key passage from the article I've linked to on de las Casas, that lays out pretty clearly his arguments, which run fairly parallel to the one quoted by the Holy Father, but which take as their target his own church, not someone else's:
Las Casas interrupted his work on History of the Indies to send three letters to the Council of the Indies in Madrid, in order to accuse the encomienda system and the encomenderos of the sin of oppressing the natives. Las Casas was convinced that the only way to convert the Indians was to use peaceful evangelization. He set out his ideas in his work Concerning the Only Way of Drawing All Peoples to the True Religion. In this work, Bartolomé criticizes the view of his opponents, who believe that “it would be quicker and better done if they subjected pagans willy-nilly to Christian political power. Once the pagans were beaten, they could be preached to without trouble.”19 Las Casas totally disagrees with this concept of using war and violence in order to indoctrinate the Indians. Bartolomé firmly believed that this method violated the Indian’s right to life and liberty that they deserved as the sons of God. Furthermore, he does not view peaceful evangelization as merely the best way of preaching the Christian faith, but as the only way to do so.20 Even though this sounds obvious to us to today, we must remember that Las Casas’ views challenged and opposed the general beliefs of his century. In his Carta al Consejo de Indias (Letter to the Council of the Indies), which was written before The Only Way, Las Casas recalls what Christ commanded his successors to do relating to the preaching of the Christian doctrine:
Make the gift of his peace, do good to all, and, with the sweetness of their virtues and good works, give freely of what they had freely received, endeavoring to exert an attraction—as our forebears were attracted to good works by peace and love. 21
Las Casas is recalling Christ’s message in order to set an example of how he thinks evangelization should be. The passage makes it clear that Jesus wanted peaceful and loving evangelization, and Las Casas was determined to achieve this. He later says in The Only Way that Jesus was clear when he taught that humans should be good to all, especially to those individuals in greatest need. After all, the image of a peaceful evangelization is in total unity with our image of God as the “Father of mercies.”22 |
