I’ve said before that although I usually disagree with Christopher Hitchens, I think he’s brilliant. And today he’s gone and hit the nail on the head about the Pope/Islam controversy:
After the most perfunctory introduction, Ratzinger goes straight to his choice of quotation, which is taken from 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. This potentate supposedly once engaged in debate—the precise time and place is unknown—with an unnamed Persian. The subject was Christianity and Islam. The Byzantine asks the Persian to “show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” (On the face of it, not a very open-ended inquiry.) But, warming to his own theme, the purple-clad monarch of Constantinople allegedly added that “to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”
Now, you do not have to be a Muslim to think that for the bishop of Rome to cite this is the most perfect hypocrisy. There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and enforced by every kind of violence and cruelty and coercion. To take Islam’s own favorite self-pitying example: It was the Catholic crusaders who sacked and burned Christian Byzantium on their way to Palestine—and that was only after they had methodically set about the Jews, so the Muslim world was actually only the third victim of this barbarity. (Sir Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades is the best source here.) Yet of all the words he could have chosen, to suggest that religion might wish to break its old connection with conquest, intolerance, and subjugation, Ratzinger had to select an example that was designed to remind his hearers of the crudest excesses of the medieval period. His mention of Manuel II was evidently not accidental or anecdotal. He refers to him repeatedly and returns to him again in the closing paragraph, as if to rub it in.
(…)To read the bulk of the speech, however, is to realize that, if he had chanced to be born in Turkey or Syria instead of Germany, the bishop of Rome could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim. He may well distrust Islam because it claims that its own revelation is the absolute and final one, but he describes John, one of the apostles, as having spoken “the final word on the biblical concept of God,” and where Muslims believe that Mohammed went into a trance and took dictation from an archangel, Ratzinger accepts as true the equally preposterous legend that St. Paul was commanded to evangelize for Christ during the course of a vision experienced in a dream. He happens to get Mohammed wrong when he says that the prophet only forbade “compulsion in religion” when Islam was weak. (The relevant sura comes from a period of relatively high confidence.) But he could just as easily have cited the many suras that flatly contradict this apparently benign message. The familiar problem is that, if you question another religion’s “revelation” and dogma too closely, you invite a tu quoque in respect of your own. Which is just what has happened in the present case.
(…)
Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith. He pretends that the word Logos can mean either “the word” or “reason,” which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of “revealed” truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really “offended” the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon—reason—that we possess in these dark times. A fine day’s work, and one that we could well have done without.
Certainly.
Ratzo is hiding behind his “infallibility”.
Of course he won’t apologize. That was no unintentional slur. He meant every word, and he’s not sorry.
I’m not fond of religions that argue by thw sword. Nor of those that argue with the stiletto.
What exactly is brilliant about Christopher Hitchens?
He’s a pathological liar who can’t seem to write an essay without throwing a tantrum, acting out, distorting the views of others, or just outright smearing people. Somehow it has gotten into peoples’ minds that he is a great and witty prose stylist, which doesn’t make sense unless your idea of wit is being a pompous asshole. Currently, he’s loved by young male armchair warriors because they romanticize his obnoxious drunkessness. He says “fuck you,” how un-PC!
Sorry for the rant, no offense Jill.
I agree – I don’t believe him to be brilliant, but I do remember enjoying The Trial of Henry Kissinger, before he became vulgar. (Christopher Hitchens, not Henry Kissinger)
I think that Christopher Hitchens has left his roots when it comes to other liberals and progressives in terms that he does justify military intervention, which most military strikes merely escalate wars such as those in Somalia. Of course, his piece on comparing Islam and Christianity was amazing and a good old rant missing from old Hitchens. If all of you liked that piece of his critique on religion and the Pope, why don’t you check out his piece on Mother Teresa?
Of course, he still is a leftist, but I just can not see how launching two wars is going to prevent any more terrorism. Won’t that make the world more unstable than it already is? Apparently it has.
No, he isn’t. He can only speak infallibly about matters of faith and morals, and he needs the backing of the College of Cardinals.
Hell, why doesn’t he just tell all these Muslim terrorists to “bring it on?” He has armed bodyguards, after all. And their presence doesn’t wane after four or eight years.
Ah. Feels good to be back.
Scorpio:
That only goes when he is speaking ex cathedra. As Frumios B. pointed out, he can only do that when he’s got the backing of the Cardinals, and also that of a lot of senior scholars.
I often like Christopher Hitchens, and I think his vitriol for religion is both incisive and well-deserved. I think the irony of conservative Christian Republicans quoting him at length in support of their views on Iraq is positively delicious.
I do think that he’s a very smart man. I also think that he’s an ill-tempered war hawk.
If there’s something constant about Hitchens, it’s his distaste for organised religion in all its varieties. (He was also refreshingly critical of the legalised-torture bullshit on Hardball.) How he squares this with support for a party that is up to its neck in religionists who make Pope Ratzo look a model of progressive thinking, I’m yet to work out. He appears to think that he’s in the equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, but hasn’t learned Orwell’s lessons from that particular conflict.
I don’t think that he’s smart: I think that he’s quick and knowledgeable and has the kind of easy conversational erudition that often distinguishes British expats from their American brethren. Compared to the lazy non-thinkers at the Corner, for instance, he’s a genius. But his knowledge and his train of thought doesn’t often stand up to tremendous scrutiny. He has no depth.
Oh, and he’s an abject misogynist; I was in the audience for his ‘fat fucking slags’ comment about the Dixie Chicks. It’s the sort of humour that’s drawn from all-male schools and colleges and drinking clubs, and it confirms my suspicion that he’s turning into Kingsley Amis.
That’s to say, Hitchens is a bullshitter. A brilliant bullshitter, but still a bullshitter. Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit could be read as a pen-portrait of Hitch.