The Regensburg Lecture (review)

Was it prudent for Pope Benedict XVI to include in his lecture at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, the quotation from a Byzantine emperor challenging his Persian interlocutor in 1391 to show him anything Mohammed brought that was new save "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"? The answer to this question depends on how one defines prudence. The Scripture scholar John L.McKenzie, who died in 1991, said that for many Catholics "prudence has long been, not the virtue by which one discerns the Christian thing to do, but the virtue by which one finds sound reason for evading the Christian thing to do. I have never read of any martyr who, if he or she had the course in Christian prudence which I had in the seminary, could not have evaded martyrdom with a good conscience."¹

The English historian and journalist Paul Johnson, whose radar screen has yet to register prudence, wrote shortly after the lecture was delivered:

. . .The Muslim fundamentalists who came out on the streets foaming at the mouth, shouting and screaming abuse, and who in Africa murdered a harmless and innocent nun, did not read the lecture or have the faintest idea what it was all about. Nor did Western journalist critics who joined in the abuse. In fact, the lecture is a cool, calm,well-documented and penetrating presentation of the case for reason occupying the center of religious life, which argues that its absence, as in Islam, is a fatal weakness. No educated and sensible person who reads it could possibly complain that it is polemical, bigoted, or emotionally hostile to Islam. Indeed, the murder of the poor nun exactly proves the Pope's point about what is wrong with Islam.²

Whether Benedict would be grateful for this robust defense one cannot say. His secretary, Msgr. Georg Gänzwein, said over a year later that the hostile reaction in the Muslim world surprised the pope. "We only heard of the crude reactions after we'd gotten back to Rome." Gänzwein ascribed them to "newspaper reports which took one quote out of context and presented it as the Pope's personal opinion."³ In a footnote to the published version of the lecture, included by Schall in this book, Benedict expresses his "hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that [the disputed quotation] does not express my personal view of the Qur'an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion" (p. 147, n. 3).

Much of Schall's analysis of the lecture will be heavy going for non-philosophers. But the book contains much for which one can only be grateful." Something was said here that no one else had been saying. . . . This lecture is one of the fundamental tractates of our time. It is almost the first that really understands the fuller dimensions of what our time is intellectually about." The pope's defense of reason was courageous, Schall writes, in a day when university lectures "about the truth of Christianity and what it holds, even in Catholic universities, are greeted with claims that they violate 'multiculturalism' or 'toleration' or 'freedom'. . . . As the Pope's first encyclical might be called 'Deus est agape,' so this lecture is 'Deus est logos'" (p. 123).

Without the offending quotation, the lecture "might have quietly disappeared in spite of its penetrating analysis of Western intellectual culture" (p. 23). One is grateful to Schall, finally, for rescuing from oblivion Hilaire Belloc's prediction in 1938 "that should Islam ever again acquire the power, it would continue on its earlier conquests"—words that Schall finds "in retrospect rather prophetic" (p. 74).