Mr. Salman Akram’s piece about what the Pope said was most enlightening. However, I have some views/observations/questions, about what the Pope said and its paraphrasing by Salman Akram Sahib. I will thus quote certain extracts, and then follow with my views.
EXTRACT.
Having dwelt on the Hellenic tradition that kicks off modern scientific reason, the Pope then proceeded to establish, largely through assertion, that the commitment of Christian theology to reason is entirely consonant with the best of Greek thought.
In any case as the Pope asserted, the Greek spirit that was to leave its imprint on the New Testament [NT] had itself come to maturity as the Old Testament [OT] had developed. This suggests that the Greek spirit had not only enriched the development of the Israelites’ faith, but had also absorbed the Divine inspiration of the OT prior to its impact on the NT. This inspiration was profoundly rational since it challenged the multiplicity of divinities in a manner…”
OBSERVATIONS ETC
The Pope’s main thesis, from what I have been able to understand from the foregoing is that:
- The Greek spirit of reason enriched Judaism.
- In the process this spirit was itself enriched by and absorbed the Divine inspiration from the OT,
- And this enriched Greek spirit, then had a positive influence on the NT.
The proof of this superior Greek reasoning, according to the Pope, lies in the fact that it brought about a change in Judaism, from henotheism to monotheism, and then similarly impacted Christianity.
So, for starters, what he seems to be asserting is that the inspiration behind monotheism is not divine, but lies in superior Greek reasoning. Nothing wrong with that, except that the first part of his premisis i.e the Greek influence on Judaism in its evolution to monotheism, is not all that clear. It is true that from the time of Moses onwards [approx 1200 B.C] till the time of the second Isaiah [approx. 550 B.C] Jewish scriptures emphasise henotheism or monolatry only, and not monotheism. They make the worship of only Yahweh obligatory, but do not deny other gods, whose worship they proscribe with death. It was the second Isaiah, who for the first time defined Yahweh in clear and unambiguously monotheistic terms: “I am Yahweh, unrivalled: there is no other God beside me…apart from me there is nothing.” [Isaiah 45:5-6] But even then, monotheism did not take firm root among the jews, and had to be enforced by the secular power of Artaxerxes the Persian King, through the governors [Erza and Nehemiah] both of them jews, whom he set over the Israelites returning to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity. Artaxerxes had no theological interest in the Jewish worship except that it was his policy that all the people in his empire follow their own religions and religious rules. And since Jewish law allowed the priests to enforce Judaic teaching on the pain of punishment, even if this be death, Erza and Nehemiah could rely on secular force to enforce this.
So, the question here is, whether Isaiah picked up the concept of monotheism from Hellenic sources while in captivity in Babylon, or was the concept picked up elsewhere, which was already very much present in the Jewish consciousness, but not enunciated as clearly as it should have been, which was done by Isaiah.
So where did Isaiah pick up his concept of monotheism?
The probability is that his inspiration came from a non-Greek source. The reasons for this are two. One, that it is difficult to read the Greek philosophers and come away with the feeling that their concept of monotheism was ever the clear, unadulterated, and unambiguous concept that was to be found in later Judaism, and later on in Islam. And two, that in all probability the first one to most precisely define this concept was the Egyptian King Amenhotep iv [Ikhnaton] about 1380-1362 B.C. He announced that there was only one God, invisible and belonging to all nations, at a time when more or less each city had its own deity. This God was Aton, one from among the pantheon of Egyptian gods. Further, the king gave orders that the names of all gods but Aton should be erased, and forbade artists to make images of Aton on the ground that the true god has no form. And remember, this was the time when a considerable number of Hebrews were slaves in Egypt and may have picked up and retained what the king had to say on the subject. Therefore, the Pope’s point of Greek reason influencing the Judaic concept of monotheism may not be correct.
And though his point that Greek thought influenced Christianity may be correct, his assertion that it was because of Greek thought that Christianity found monotheism is probably wrong.
Initially Christianity grew out of Judaism at a time when the concept of monotheism in the latter had become defined to a nicety, and admitted of no ambiguity. But what Greek thought did to Christianity was to veer it away from this pure monotheism of Judaism to the concept of trinity i.e. increased their gods from one to three. Thus, the Pope’s main argument, that it was Greek reason that helped Christianity to find monotheism, is incorrect. Greek reason did quite the opposite. It took Christianity away from monotheism to tritheism; the trinity, which Paul picked up from Hellenic thought, and made it one of the central pillars of Christian dogma.
Thus, if it was the intention of the pope to hold up the Christian acceptance of monotheism, through the influence of Greek reason, his argument is not quite ironclad.
EXTRACT.
The Pope recalls with obvious satisfaction that St Paul’s visions of paths to Asia were barred because of the dream in which he is beckoned to Macedonia.
OBSERVATIONS ETC.
The Pope’s delight at Paul making his way to Macedonia, obviously rests in the Pope’s belief that had Paul headed off in a different direction, the benefits of Greek reason that have so enlightened the Christian Church, would have been lost to it. But there is more to Paul than the Pope would have liked to mention. He was one of the most remarkable and dedicated people in history, who was in fact the founder of Christianity as it has been known for a better part of nearly 2000 years. Born in Tarsus, he a was a Hellenic jew, and so must have had at least a nodding acquaintance with some of the mystery religions then extant in the Greek world, as also with the cult of Mithraism, probably the greatest of the mystery cults of the time, whose very center was Paul’s birthplace .
As Saul [his original name], he was either in the Temple police, or associated with it in some manner, for he showed the utmost zeal in the persecution of the nascent sect of Jewish-Christians, or Nazarenes, as the early Christians were called. He was on the road to Damascus on a mission of choice i.e. persecution of Christians there, when he fell, and had a vision of Jesus saying why he [Saul]was persecuting him. There he changed his name to Paul and became the most zealous acolyte of Jesus, who had been crucified just a little while earlier, and whom Paul had never known. Some have surmised that at that point he did not know much of Jesus’ teachings either.
After conversion, Paul’s consuming anxiety was that Jesus’s second coming was just around the corner, and he therefore had very little time in which to convert as many people as possible to the Jesus sect, so that when the event occurred, as much of humanity as possible, should be saved. And humanity included the gentiles, and converting the gentiles was beset with huge problems e.g. the requirement of circumcision was a major problem, as were the Mosaic dietary laws, and other Judaic rites which were completely unfamiliar to the pagans etc etc.
So, one by one, Paul, on his own authority, started to annul these Judaic laws to make his message more acceptable to the gentiles, till at last he annulled the entire Mosaic code of law; annulling in the process both the Abrahamic and the Sinaitic Covenants, on the grounds that the Jews had broken their covenants with Yahweh so often, that finally Yahweh had destroyed their state and Temple, and scattered them to the four corners of the earth, which itself was proof that God had decided to bring forth a new covenant, and on God’s behalf he [Paul] decided to propagate this new covenant in the shape of the new religion of Christianity, though the name of this system of belief was given to it much later. And it is here that he started to borrow copiously from the many mystery religions, including the concept of the Trinity from the Greeks. This not only helped to fill the gap that was created by the annulment of the Mosaic law, but also had the advantage that most of the gentiles he was preaching to, had some familiarity with one or the other of the doctrines he was propounding. This familiarity made it comparatively easy to convert them.
It would be pertinent to mention here that though Paul annulled the Mosaic law and the old covenants, he did not disassociate his new religion from the divinity of the OT. And there was good reason for this, for it was the predictions contained in the OT, which were cited as proof of Jesus’ ministry on earth. And so, if Jesus was the true Messiah, it was obvious that the scriptures that foretold his ministry must perforce be true and should therefore be retained.
But before going any further, it would be instructive to know what Christ had to say about the Mosaic Law: “..not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the law…the man who infringes even one of the least of these commandments…will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven.” Matt 5:18-19.
In light of the above it would be instructive to examine how positively the influence of Greek reason affected the evolution of Christian thought, doctrines, and dogma. One view of this, quite opposed to the Pope’s, is summed up in the quotations below:
- ” The three-in-one/ one-in-three mystery of Father, Son and Holy Ghost made tritheism official. The subsequent, almost-deification of the Virgin Mary made it quatrotheism.
Finally, cart-loads of saints raised to quarter deification turned Christianity into plain old fashioned polytheism. By the time of the Crusades, it was the most polytheistic religion ever to have existed, with the possible exception of Hinduism.” John Ralston Saul.
- “Christendom has done away with Christianity without being aware of it.” Soren Kierkegaard.
- “If Paganism was conquered by Christianity, it is equally true that Christianity was corrupted by Paganism. The pure Deism of the first Christians was changed by
the Church of Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of the trinity. Many of the Pagan tenets, invented by the Egyptians and idealized by Plato, were retained as being worthy of belief.” Edward Gibbons.
- The Council of Chalcedon [451 A.D] about the nature of Christ: “The Council defined one Christ, perfect God and man, consubstantial with the Father and consubstantial with the man, one soul being in two natures, without division or separation and without confusion or change. The union does not suppress the difference in natures, however, their properties remain untouched, and they are joined together in one person.”
[Is this an absolute gem of clarity and reason, or what!!!! ]
And should any reader want to go to just one source, let him try Gibbons’ Decline and Fall, and read where he deals with the evolution of the early Christian Church, and decide for himself if the same is built on Greek reason, or is totally unreasonable and utterly confusing. And let him also judge for himself if Christianity has any nexus with the monotheism that the Pope puts forward as the great advance in theology attributable to Greek rationalism.
Next, I would like to examine which era was it where this rationalism flourished in the Church, and how do the actions of the holy fathers reflect this rationalism.
EXTRACT.
This makes the Catholic Church, itself entirely reasonable even prior to the Reformation , a necessary partner in the ordering of the modern world.
OBSERVATIONS ETC.
Obviously if ‘enlightenment’ is the ruling spirit of the Church in pre-Reformation days, the conduct of the Pope’ should be most reflective of this, as should be the deliberations of the various Councils of the Church which decided all the prickly issues. I will just make a few observations here but would like to remind the reader that in the period I am covering, the apostolic succession, and the infallibility of the Popes was already an article of faith in the Church.
- The fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 AD made heretics subject to savage punishment including death.
- The Council of Macon 585 AD debated just one point i.e whether women were human or not. [consider that just 30 years hence, Islam was to give women the right of Khula [i.e divorce], property rights, right to retain their religion, etc etc.]
- The Council of Constantinople 680 AD declared an earlier Pope a heretic for his belief that Christ had only one will. It also decreed that a man, rather than the traditional lamb, would henceforth be depicted on the cross.
- The Second Nicean Council 787 AD approved the worship of angelic beings.
- Council of Tours, 1163 AD, condemned the Albigenses who wished to read the bible for themselves; refused to worship images, saints, angels, and Mary; and denied the miraculous power of bells and crosses etc.[consider that well before this time Islam was encouraging all Muslims to educate themselves and read the Quran as often as possible, instead of threatening them with a sentence of death if they did so.]
- The Lateran Council of 1215 AD forbade physicians to undertake medical treatment without assistance/presence of a priest.
- Pope Gregory 1X [1227-1241] was the first to issue orders that witches should be burnt alive at the stake. Even denial of the existence of witchcraft was to be considered heresy! This order remained in force for 500 years till the last witch was burned in 1793. By this time 300,000 of these wretched souls had been burned! And they burnt them because the piety of the Church forbade shedding of blood!!!
On Church horrors whole tomes can be written, but the above should give a fair sampling of the influence of ‘ reason’ on the pre-reformation church. But this portion cannot be considered complete without mentioning that among the top ten greatest crimes against humanity, the Church has the honour to figure directly in the first four. Consider the following:
- The persecution of the Jews, starting from the 4rth century AD to the Holocaust. The
suffering of the Jewish people is absolutely beyond description.
- The Atlantic slave trade, [which must contend with the above for the top crime against humanity], started when the Pope gave a charter to Portugal to set the ball rolling. Four centuries of slaving devastated Africa, from which it has still to recover.
- The Crusades, the cost of which in blood, is impossible to compute.
- And for the sheer sickness of mind, the Inquisition cannot be forgotten.
As far as the personal lives of the Holy Fathers is concerned, the reader is recommended to start reading the lives of Pope Formosus [891-896] without a break, to that of Pope Gregory V [1045-1046]. There will hardly be an instance of piety to relieve the monotony of scandal.
Whether or not the pre-Reformation Church was enlightened or not, is best summed up by James Wasserman: “The Council of Nicaea [325 AD] celebrated the marriage of Church and state, whose child would become the dark ages.”
EXTRACT.
For the Pope, any attempt to spread faith through force is self-evidently unreasonable, which, “…Islam has employed.”
The Pope reminded his audience that even though verse 2:256 of the Quran states, ‘there is no compulsion in religion’, this verse dates to the early period of preaching in Makkah “when the Prophet [pbuh] was powerless and threatened.”
“Being in consonance with God’s nature, Christian theology is incapable of accommodating violence as a means of its own propagation.”
OBSERVATIONS.ETC.
Before proceeding further, let it be said that the Pope is entirely correct in what he has to say about propagation of faith. The question is whether, in fact, Islam allows the spread of faith through the sword, as the Pope alleges. To delve into this question would make my effort too long. Suffice it to say that on this, Karen Armstrong, one of the pre-eminent religious scholars of the day, and one considered most unbiased, considers that Islam disallows this, and nor does it allow a war of aggression. Interested readers can peruse her writings.
The second question that needs to be examined is whether non-violence preached by Christianity is the result of altruism or is it a response to conditions of its own insecurity at the time its scriptures were collected.
And third, if Christianity was motivated through altruism, how does such altruism stand the test of practice and of history.
Let me start with the Quranic verse quoted by the Pope and say that this is a Madni verse when the young Islam was not so threatened or powerless as the Pope would have his audience believe. But this is not the point. What is at issue here is the logic the Pope has applied i.e that the Prophet made a virtue out of necessity; that because he was weak, it was in his interest to come out with a verse that would have gone down to his advantage with his persecutors; and that this verse therefore has no altruistic merit to it since it is purely tactical in nature.
By the same token, can this same logic be applied to the creed of non-violence in Christianity i.e that when its scriptures were written its existence was so fragile and insecure, that it had no other option but to advocate non-violence. Can we apply the same logic to Christian writings that the Pope has seen fit to apply to verse 2:256 of the Quran?
To arrive at a reasonable conclusion to these questions, first we must take a cursory look at the state of Christianity when the New Testament was put together, and two, how it behaved with the opponents of the Church after the conversion of Constantine.
- For the answer to the first question, let us briefly examine the state of security of the nascent Church, during the ministry of Jesus and in the aftermath of his crucifixion. To say that it was very fragile would be an understatement. Unlike the early history of Islam, where some of the most eminent and influential persons were among its first converts, from whom it drew its initial security, no matter how tenuous, no such thing happened with Christianity. All of Christ’s apostles were mere non-entities and even their names would not have been known but for the OT.
James, the half-brother of Jesus, succeeded him in the leadership of the Jewish-Christian community of Jerusalem. The poverty of this community has been remarked upon. There was immediate hostility from the Jews, who, like any other religion, were not prepared to countenance a sect breaking away from the orthodox center, most especially the Sadducees among them. Soon after the crucifixion, the Jews rose in their first revolt against the Romans, in 66 AD, and by 70 AD, were utterly defeated by Titus. The second Jewish commonwealth came to an end, and the temple pulled down. As Jewish sectarians, the Romans had no love lost for Jesus’ sect either, because they couldn’t tell the difference between them, much like good red-neck Americans can’t tell the difference between Afghans and Sikhs
. And if this was not enough, there followed the Jewish uprisings of 115 and 132. In the latter the Jews were finally crushed, and the Jewish-Christians were heard of no more. Right up to about 200 [??] AD, when the New Testament was finally put together, the Christian fear of the Romans was such, that their scripture tends to blame solely the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ, rather gathering the courage to point even a tentative accusatory finger towards Rome and Pontius Pilate. The New Testament asserts that Jesus was charged with blasphemy by the Sanhedrin. For this the Jewish law allowed a sentence of death. And under Roman rule, the Jews were allowed to deal with such religious infractions by their own procedures, without recourse to the secular authorities. Thus, if it was Pilate, in whose hands the fate of Jesus rested, there must have been more than one charge against Jesus. But the NT is silent on this. Why? Is it because the Christians were so insecure that they dared not indict Rome for the crucifixion? This is entirely within the realms of possibility, and very nearly this state of insecurity continued for the Christians till in 313 AD when Constantine issued the edict of tolerance at Milan, before which they continually suffered periods of varying intensity of persecution at the hands of the Romans, often being put in pits with lions; while the jews also persecuted them with undiminished devotion.
It may be noted here that though the Romans get a fairly clean bill of health in the NT, the Jews are the objects of as much violence as it is possible for a pen to spew out. And verbal violence is arrested violence, and it remains arrested merely because operating forces do not allow it to be transferred to the realm of the physical. This certainly cannot be categorized as altruism. And how could the Christians have said nothing about the atrocities they suffered at the hands of the Romans–was this on account of fear or of altruism?
The logical answer seems to be that the Christian creed of non-violence in theory was severely practical [much like Gandhi’s later on] and dictated by the needs of the times. They could heap curses on the Jews and get away with it, and they did this. In case of the Romans, they could not afford to take this risk, and so they desisted from it.
- If non-violence had been the true and voluntary creed of the church without any extraneous compulsion, this would be equally reflected in its dealings with the errant members of its own flock. Indeed, this would be the most eloquent testament to this very admirable motivation.
Before going on to sects within the Christian Church, and how it dealt with them, it would be instructive, to examine how it proceeded to deal with the Jews. I will just refer to the views of three Church fathers here to give the readers a general drift of the thinking of the Church on this issue. St Chrysostom was very clear that the Jews should be extirpated. St Augustine said that they should be allowed to survive, but not to thrive. And this stayed the position of the Church right up to the 20th century, when a pro-German Pope closed his eyes to the Holocaust. Augustine took his position from the need to have the Jews live as witnesses for Christ. But the Jews were made to suffer untold misery both as revenge for deicide, as well as to make their position so miserable that they should be forced to convert, as it is, [or at least was] the belief of the Church, that only when the Jews have converted to Christianity, would the second coming be ushered in!! And then we have the third Church father in the shape of Martin Luther. From someone who was the most instrumental in bringing about the Reformation, and exposing the many terrible practices of the Catholic Church, one would have expected at least some relief for the Jews. But the only comfort they were to get from him was, that though Rome was willing to accept Jewish converts, Luther was not to be assuaged by anything less than Jews being driven out of Christian lands!!
This being the temper of the Church then, is it any wonder that all Church sectarians, be they Arians or Gnostics, or Huguenots, Albigenses, Manicheans, Jansenists, Canthari, Waldenses, Bogomils, Nestorians, Valentinians, Ebionites, or any other, they all met the same fate–their heads at the edge of the sword. This is not a very pretty record for a Church that prides itself on its non-violent credentials.
EXTRACT.
In recalling the conversation between the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II and the nameless Persian interlocutor, the Pope starts by describing the Emperor as erudite. The Pontiff then quotes the Emperor as saying to the Persian that all that was new in Islam was evil and inhuman.
OBSERVATIONS ETC.
The Pope, indeed, has the right to question any aspect of Islam, as of course he has the right to criticize any aspect of it. Thus, having quoted one verse from the Quran, though getting his central fact about it wrong, could he not have gone on to another Quranic verse of his choice, to assert whatever he wanted to? If so, what was the need to go through the circuitous route via the ‘erudite’ Emperor and his conversation with a man of such eminence as a Persian without a name? Could it be that the Pope wanted to call Islam evil and inhuman, and thus had the erudite Manuel speak out for him?
If this is yet another example of a Church salvaged through the agency of reason, it is a very sad example indeed!
Lastly two short comments are needed, which should have been quite apparent to the Pope:
- It is only after the Reformation, when secular authority progressively started to break the shackles of the church that Reason gathered courage enough to show itself, and call in the Age of Reason. Until then the only consistent contribution of the Church to the cause of reason was that it shackled the human mind, and allowed it the luxury of idleness except in the pursuit of intrigue.
- Greek thought reached Europe via the following:
- There was a residue of it that survived the barbarian invasions of Rome.
- At the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, a number of men well-versed in Greek philosophy emigrated west.
- The most important bridge of the transfer of Greek learning to Europe, was via the Moors of Spain. Lastly it needs be said, that among the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy books, none has appealed to human reason more insistently, than has the Quran.
So, the situation seems to be that the Muslims of late do not seem to want to use reason. The Europeans had use for it, and even though they were shackled by the Church, they reversed the shackles to gain freedom of thought, and applied these shackles to the Church to get this freedom…AND THERE THE MATTER RESTS.