The pontifex made a speech and it turned into a pontifical riot. In a 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he had taught, Benedict XVI, quoting a Byzantine emperor, opposed the Islamic concept of jihad, “holy struggle.” A recipe for fuss, shortly after ‘9/11’: the new pope, who had been in office for just a year, had insulted Islam.
In some obituaries of the prelate, who is buried today, it was missing that sensational lecture, also in this newspaper. Maybe because those, like NRC at the time judged, besides the “unnecessary provocation” of Muslims, was “a soporific story” with “a high level of abstraction”. And yes, we shouldn’t have that in the newspaper. The advantage of the abstraction, the Comment noted, was that the rest of the sleeping pill was also “no offense to be taken.” Let those believers talk, won’t they?
But did the newspaper understand what he read?
Medievalist Peter Raedts did not think so at the time. He explained in an opinion piece that the remark about jihad was just an aside in an argument about faith and reason. According to Benedict, Greek philosophy and Biblical faith found each other in Catholic metaphysics, which had given Christianity its true form. Unfortunately, the marriage had ended in a confrontational divorce centuries later. The culprit: not Islam, but the Reformation and the work of philosophers like Kant, who, in the wake of science, desecrated reality and made faith an individual matter of conscience. As a descendant of Calvin, I could therefore have felt provoked, not even unnecessarily. And then came the liberal and liberation theologians: relativism trumps.
Raedts already pointed out that the speaker rather passed over Church Fathers who thought otherwise. Yet it remains that you cannot simply dismiss the papal nostalgia for harmony of head and heart as murmuring in an empty church.
On the contrary, the longing for holism has become confetti at every culture-critical party. Papal traditionalism itself has a hardcore political counterpart on the right flank, in the Storm and Drang of reactionary European parties. But also in the middle, the search for a new sense of community and ‘connection’ has become currency. Flies in a more progressive circle ubuntu around you, the African notion that ‘I exist because we exist’, as well as half-reanimated communism or indigenous wisdoms about the connection of everything with, well, everything. Sometimes the realization disappears behind the horizon that the broken, unfinished modern world after the Reformation, including its multiform democracy, also represents a moral value.
With his yearning for wholeness, the Papa was, I say with a Calvinistic grit of his teeth, very up-to-date in his way.
Sjoerd de Jong writes a column here every Thursday.
A version of this article also appeared in the January 5, 2023 newspaper