MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


Four paragraphs into his article on the Pope, we were still hoping that Christopher Hitchens would suddenly announce that the whole thing was a parody and that of course there's a historical precedent for the Vatican leading Europe against political Islam. It's depressing enough that he seems to have concluded that the most worthy breech to those himself into is on the front lines against the only man doing anything significant to shake the somnambulist Europeans. And you'd think that his careless and frankly awful arguments would make this the most uncomfortable article ever, given the almost universal respect with which his mind is held on the anti-jihadist right. But no. The worst thing about his attack was that it was scarred throughout by a combination of style and tactics that we have never - never - seen Christopher Hitchens use. There are weird stylistic quirks, shady quotations, and unusual fragments. But the most inexplicable thing is the total and complete abandonment of circumspection and caution in his treatment of the Pope's statements - not Benedict XVI's statements about Islam. His statements about Catholicism. Christopher Hitchens - one of the most intellectual men on the planet - thought that it was defensible and appropriate to spend just under a full paragraph flatly contradicting the Pope's expressed views on Catholic dogma. Both the conceit of the effort and the conceit of manner are just outright staggering. But there's a silver lining, and that is that they're useful as a foil for explaining Benedict's views on Catholicism (or at least some of the ones at issue in this controversy). What makes Hitchens so appropriate? Well, he was so incredibly arrogant that he not only took on the Pope's views on Catholicism, but he tried to reverse the Pope using the Pope's own words. So the Pope says "X means Catholicism is A" and Hitchens says "X means Catholicism is not-A". It's disrespect piled on conceit, but at least it's useful. Keep in mind the most basic positions. Benedict: there is an insurmountable theological gap between Catholicism and Islam. Hitchens: there is no relevant theological gap between Catholicism and Islam.

Not so far back, Hitchens vowed to his readers as part of an article that he would never put ellipses in a quote if the editing meant that the quote's context was changed. Presumably, the spirit of this vow also extends to any editing of sentences that causes direct quotes to be taken out of context. That's one of the things that's so depressing about going through this article - the entire argument is built on quotes that are exactly backwards, and they're exactly backwards because the front of back of them have been chopped off. The innocent explanation (or the naive explanation) is that he genuinely didn't get why those parts of the sentences mattered to the context, but we're skeptical. He was rushed is really all we can think about.

Again, remember what's basically at stake. The Pope is trying to demonstrate that Christianity and Islam have fundamentally different approaches to understanding God, and toward that end he makes two distinctions (Islam vs. Catholicism):

(a) self-evident understandings of Scripture vs. interpreted understandings of Scripture

(b) literal readings of Scripture vs. potentially symbolic readings of Scripture

Hitchens in turn has to undermine the Pope's demonstration, and so he has to attack both of these distinctions. Again, the way he does it is by trying to take the very words that the Pope uses to make his argument and turn them against him - in the interest of demonstrating the snarky point that "if [Benedict] had chanced to be born [Muslim, he]... could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim". Also keep in mind that this is about styles of thought more than it is about actual dogma - Hitchens's point is that while Benedict doesn't believe in Islamic dogma, the way he thinks is perfectly compatible with it. We think that this line of reasoning is incorrect and we'll get to why (at length, unfortunately, a little below).
But at least the suggestion itself - that Benedict's distinctions between Catholicism and Islam aren't as robust as he thinks - isn't in any way untoward. The same can't be said for the totally baffling lack of caution in Hitchens's inappropriate 'I guess I put him in his place'-style gloating: "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". Here's what's baffling: there is no way that Hitchens can possibly think that he can win his little game of gotcha with the Pope. There is no way that he thinks that in less than a paragraph, he'll be able to prove that the Bishop of Rome does not actually believe that the Bible is interpreted (i.e. he can't think that he'll demonstrate that the Pope fell into a Protestant heresy and just didn't notice). Keep in mind that this Pope also happens to be one of the greatest theologians in the last half a century - and that just before he was Pope it was his job to stamp out heresy. There's just no way that Hitchens can think that he can make his argument credible, let alone true. So what's he doing flirting with insufferability by crowing about a sound thrashing that he knows he didn't deliver? Is Nasrallah editing Slate columns for style now? It's all just weird and worrisome.

We'll deal with the first distinction first: self-evident readings of Scripture vs. interpreted readings of Scripture. This is the debate that the Pope refers to as sola scriptura, which is more or less that the Bible is not only literal truth (we get to that below), but that it is literal truth that reveals itself as literal truth pretty straightforwardly (this is also the Catholic vs. Protestant divide). The Catholic view is that the Bible only makes sense when you read it against a ton of previous interpretations, scholarships, things we already know, rational deductions, etc. Everything turns out the dual meaning of the word 'logos' in Greek - it means 'word' and 'Reason'. Benedict says that this proves that at the very birth Catholicism, the word of God in the Bible was not just self-evident, but required humans to use Reason to figure it out and interpret it. Hitchens says that the use of logos requires no such thing, but before he even gets to that he plays a little gotcha with the Pope's discussion of the use of logos in John. Two quotes from Hitchens are to the point here. In the first he mangles Benedict's words to make them sound like the opposite of what Benedict said and in the second he makes an irrelevant argument that betrays either deliberate misdirection or fundamental misunderstanding:

... and ...

This is poorly argued and frankly it's a little unseemly. This first quote only gets close to what Hitchens wants it to say because he's gone ahead cropped off the last half of the sentence - the exact part that helps to distinguish logos in its various meanings. The full context for the first Benedict quote under discussion (the "final word" quote) is:

It's obvious that Hitchens is being at a minimum a little deceitful here. Benedict does not mean that John set in stone the nature of what God is - he means exactly and precisely and entirely the opposite. The Pope says that John intentionally (not "by chance") chose a single word (logos) to highlight the dual importance of the text of the Bible (logos as word) and the use of rationality to continually interpret and reinterpret that text (logos as reason). It's not that he gave the "final word" on any one interpretation of God - it's that he gave the "final word" about the fact that you have to keep going back to the Bible again and again to interpret and reinterpret - that there is no "final word" in the sense of one meaning!

At best for Hitchens, all that he's guilty of is humorlessness: 'logos is the final word' is a bit of pun ('word is the final word'), but it's a pun that goes to the heart of what Benedict is trying to convey. 'Logos is the final word' has the pun part, but substituting the other meaning of logos demonstrates exactly the dynamic that's at issue: 'reason is the final word' means there is no final word in this world. And then abstracting, you get a tantalizing him at Benedict's suggestion for a Catholic model of communication: 'word is the final reason'. Benedict was having a little fun and showing off a little at the same time, and Hitchens not only churlishly took him to task on the dogmatic significance of his words, but he did so in a slightly unsavory way.

The second Benedict quote (the "logos... in the Bible" quote) isn't really out of context as much as it's just a really bad argument - but bad in a way that implies that Hitchens is just not taking this argument seriously. Hitchens goes after Benedict in a rather ugly way: "he pretends that the word logos can mean either 'the word' or 'reason', which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible" ("pretends" still not as bad as Cole saying that the Pope "imagines"... but still). Here's what's so very frustrating about this attack - it's the second time where Hitchens is not only rhetorically over the top, but it's the second time in which that excess seems to be a mechanism for covering up the weakness of his article.

There is a very precise way to characterize Hitchens's accusation that the Pope is falsely characterizing logos as both 'word' and 'reason' in the Bible: it is an out and out straw argument. That is definitely and demonstrably not the point that the Pontiff is resting on. It could be somewhere in the presentation, who knows, but certainly it's not central to either the Pope's argument or his speech. The Pope could not be more explicit on how the idea of logos as word and the idea of logos of reason work together - and it's not because both meanings are found "in the Bible." It's just not. That's not the argument. The argument (again, this comes from the section that Hitchens excised) is that in logos John finds "the encounter between the biblical message and Greek thought". Not that both meanings - word/heavenly truth and reason - are found in the Bible. But because one is the kind of logos that is in the Bible (word/heavenly truth) and the other is a cultural, extra-biblical way of reading the bible. This isn't even hard to prove: the Pope tells you exactly why he thinks each meaning is significant. He's explicit: one is the "biblical message" and the other is "Greek thought". It's the Greek way of thinking that helps to understand the biblical message - that that's why logos is the "final word", because it sets the terms of all future debates by telling Catholics how to approach the Bible in the most general sense.

But it gets worse. Now that we kind of know how rationality works to help understand Catholic scripture, let's go back to Hitchens's blanket assertion that 'logos' never means 'reason' in the Bible - because that debate is not closed, and the fact that Hitchens thinks that it is exposes another fundamental problem in his attack on the Pope. Again, we can be precise: this is begging the question. Whether logos means 'reason' in the Bible depends, well, how you approach the Bible. Here's why it's question-begging: the Catholic viewpoint is that (a) you apply reason to the Bible in order to discover the nature of God and (b) what you discover is that God's nature is reason [there's also (c), which is that the reason you discover reason by using reason is because God is reason, but that's a little much and we don't need to discuss that - and real quickly, we should probably also mention in case we get taken to task that 'reason' and 'rationality' are not being used in any rigorous sense, just more as the crudely empiricist/neo-Platonist sensibility that Benedict talked about]. But one more time: Catholics use reason to discover God's nature, and what they discover is God's nature is reason - the application of Catholic exegesis reads 'logos' a different way than Hitchens does. The meaning of the Bible, according to this understanding, moves with how you interpret it. If you read the Bible literally and transcendentally, then yes, Hitchens is right and logos means only heavenly truth But if you read the Bible rationally and metaphorically, then no, Hitchens is wrong and logos not only means both word and rationality but it also means word as rationality and rationality through word and all kinds of fascinating things. The point is that you can argue that Catholics are wrong to interpret the Bible non-literally - but you can't simply assert a meaning of a Biblical passage and pretend that there is no other justification for any other way to read it. This is undergraduate stuff - what's wrong with Chris Hitchens?

Again, to assert that Pope Benedict XVI thinks that John is the "final word" on the nature of God is to assert that the Bishop of Rome is too stupid to know that he's a heretic. To do it by cutting out the part of the sentence that would be used to explain why he's not a heretic is unsporting at best. Then, the second quote not only begs the question of whether interpreting the Bible literally or figuratively is appropriate, but it also makes it pretty hard to even recognize that what's at stake is how to interpret the Bible. This is not the way a public intellectual is supposed to comport himself.

Now for the second distinction (for any of you still following along at home). That distinction, remember, is between a literal interpretation of Scripture(Islam) vs. a potentially symbolic interpretation of Scripture (Catholicism). This one is actually pretty easy to untangle, although it's really hard to avoid thinking that it was a pretty slimy move. At issue is Hitchens claiming that Catholics are just as superstitious (and irrational) as Muslims because they literally believe 'preposterous legends':

But the full context for the St. Paul passage in the Pope's remarks makes this comparison absurd:

In other words, Hitchens says 'Catholics interpret preposterous legends as true just like Muslims' - and then his evidence is an example where the Pope interpreted the legend... symbolically (!!) The Pope very, very explicitly reads the story of Paul as an metaphor for how the biblical stories of the Jews (logos as word) had to be reread through the lens of Greek rationality (logos as reason) to make sense of Christ's revelations (logos):

Benedict has Paul (representing biblical faith) being called to realize the meaning of his mission in Macedonia (representing the Greek way of thinking). There is nothing about the Ride to Damascus that is not metaphorical in this speech, but Hitchens nonetheless implies the exact opposite. In contrast to the Catholic interpretation, the Muslim interpretation of Allah's dictation is of course literal - denying its plausibility is a blasphemy punishable by death. And let's be honest, Benedict probably does really believe that St. Paul actually had a vision on the road to Damascus. But (a) that evidence is certainly not in the speech that Hitchens suggest it's in and (b) that doesn't mean what Hitchens is suggesting - that the Pope believes that the Bible is meant to be taken literally. Again, we think that we would have heard something if the Pope was engaged in open heresy.

And that, ultimately, that's one of the things that's really bothersome. Was Chris Hitchens going to prove that Pope Benedict XVI had become a Protestant without knowing it? No. Was he going to be able to be so over the top that no one would notice? Probably not, although he gets close. Was Hitchens under a different impression for either of these two questions? Doubtful - but that didn't stop him from lacing every use of "Ratzinger" with as much disrespect as he could (he actually used the same trick for years by referring to Prime Minster Sharon as Gen. Sharon).

This is a disaster - this jihadist outburst may be one of the last dramatic chances that the West has to confront militant Islam before the world spirals totally out of control. And now one of the most eloquent defenders of civilization is engaging in sophomoric argumentation tricks instead of paying attention. The only thing that we can think of is that trying to adhere to the anti-desist insistence that 'it's not any particular kind of religion, it's religion in general' is so traumatic and so damaging to sound reasoning that it literally burns away parts of the brain just to make a space for itself. We're still holding out hope that tomorrow we'll wake up and Hitchens will have posted an article crowing that he's written a better anti-Benedict article than anyone else could have, and that it was still an absurdly bad article.

Hitch. Listen: we know you don't think that religion is a very good thing - and we recognize the irony of what we're about to say – but this is no time to stand on principle. Not to try to revive rhetoric that's become self-caricaturing, but you're either on the side of the people who want to look up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or you're not doing anything to stop the people who want to blow it up. There have been far more odious strategic alliances made under the compulsion of necessity than siding with and defending a bookish, withdrawn, and intellectual Bishop in Rome. The luxury of wishing a pox on everyone's house has long since been something that the West simply can't afford for you to indulge in. All's forgiven. Isn't about time you came home?

Previous: They Called Europe 'Christendom' For a Reason --- The Imbecility of Interfaith Dialogue --- Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication --- Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God --- So Catholic That He Actually Thinks Catholicism Is True --- On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)